II. The Macedonian Question

In the heart of the Balkan peninsula, stretching from Lake Orchrida, which washes the Albanian frontiers, to Drima on the Aegean Sea; from Salonika to Mount Shar north of Skoplje, lies Macedonia, a beautiful country nearly three times as large as Belgium and inhabited by two and a half million people who possess the same language, the same culture, and with few exceptions, the same religion. Of this people, seventy per cent, are pure Bulgars.

Behind this country lie twenty centuries of tumultious and tragic history, Rome, the Barbarians, the Crusades, Venice, the Ottoman, Alexander and the Empire of the Old World. On of the most powerful efforts for liberty of the Turks; always crushed, always regenerated, up to the victory of the Balkan Allies in 1912. A first dsitribution of Macedonian lands between Belgrade and Athens after the first Bulgar defeat in 1913. A second in 1918 after the World War and the second Bulgar defeat.

Today, a heavier servitude than the old one rests upon Macedonia, because the new master are stronger than the Turks, and more violent, and Europe, this time, supports and approves them. Five to six hundred thousand Macedonians (an entire people) have sought refuge in Bulgaria since the annexation of their country by Greece and Serbia.

Those who were able to leave have left, since the peace of July 1913, and since the Armistice of October 1918, rather than suffer foreign domination. All the intellectuals, all the teachers, all those whom their antecedents or their relations rendered undesirable or suspect, have been expelled since the installation of the conquerors. Thousands more, before the frontiers closed, fled and abandoned all their property, often leaving behind them all or a part of their family.

Of the same blood, the same language, the same traditions as the Bulgars, they have been received by them as brothers.

Finally, the Greek authorities expelled thousands of Macedonian families en bloc after the disaster of Smyrna, in order to install the Hellenic population of Asia Minor on their lands and in their homes, which they had confiscated without indemnity. The outcasts of Macedonia were shepherded by the Bulgarian Government, with the aid of the League of Nations, towards Bourgas, on the Black Sea and towards Dobroudja.

There they transformed what was before only broken stones and swamps into a flourishing country. Nothing distinguishes these Bulgars of Macedonia from the Bulgars of Bulgaria in the midst of whom they live. They are neighbours in the same villages, a number of them have won high social positions, some have become ministers, even Presidents of the Bulgarian Council.

Yet all have remained Macedonian. They look incessantly towards their beloved Fatherland, towards the obscure hamlets, the little white-and-rose cities of the frontier. There they were born and there most of them lived for so long that, if the barriers were removed tomorrow, every one of them would return to his native land.

"But your fields, the lands which the Government of Sofia have given to you and which your children and you have worked for fifteen years," I asked a Macedonian labourer near Belica, "would you abandon them?"

"My lands?" he replied. "They are over yonder in Macedonia. They are waiting for me. I hope to live long enough to return and sit on the stone bench which my father had placed under the apricot-trees before the door. He, also, is waiting for me."

Five hundred thousand Macedonians in Bulgaria, where they are at home, where they have married, where they have nothing to fear from anyone, still think and speak as this old peasant of Belica.

Fifteen hundred thousand Macedonians, in the annexed land under Greek or Serbian domination, live and have their children in the hope of this return, and in the expectation of it.

What a tremendous pressure is here! What a colossal weight of desire waiting only for the right moment to take shape in action.

Soon after the annexation, attempts were made to "Hellenise" or "Serbianise" the Macedonians who remained in their country, and when they attempted their first gestures of revolt, they had the breath knocked out of them by the crushing violence of their new masters. The gendarmes, the prison, the certainty that they had no chance of help from anyone, has taught them in the past fifteen years to walk straight along the road indicated to them. They have become docile, respectful, obedient. They have learned to smile through their tears.

I have seen them, and the memory of the decay into which these free men have fallen makes my blood boil still.

The Macedonians in Bulgaria are waiting also. But they are free, and for fifteen years they have pursued an obstinate dream that they will liberate their lost brothers. All the resources they have are consecrated to this task. There is not one among them, wherever the hazard of exile has placed him, who does not belong to a society, an association, a group of some sort destined to keep up among its members, and especially among the youth, the sentiment of national solidarity and the cult of a native land momentarily lost.

These organisations have their form in associations of Macedonian women;student associations; organisations for the assistance of old people, orphans, sick; associations for propaganda abroad; all form a network that lets nothing pass between its meshes.

Not a Macedonian in Bulgaria! Not a Macedonian in foreign countries! That is the national slogan. And the apex of this organization is a handful of men working in broad daylight with legal methods and means; the Macedonian National Committee, which commands its energies, centralises its resources, and directs its activities.

In the shadow, beside the National Committee, but absolutely distinct from it, absolutely foreign to its work and actions, is another group of men, directed by other chiefsm the ORIM. We shall meet with it again.

The Macedonian question has existed for half a century. The desire for Macedinian liberty has become a burning obsession. This determination for liberty cost the Turks their possessions in Europe. Initial cause of the two Balkan wars, it was in order to liberate Macedonia that Bulgaria prepared the coalition in 1912, and it was in order to seize her fro the victtorious Bulgars that the Serbs and the Greeks, in turn, joined against her in 1913. Macedonia was indirectly, but certainly, at the origin of the World War. A hot spot, Indeed!