Macedonian State-National Concepts and ... - Makedonika

Russia, and came to Macedonia as far as the Pijanec region. But the Adrianople
truce and the preliminary San Stefano peace treaty halted the armed offensive of
the Macedonian military formations because the liberation of the whole of Macedonia
was envisaged. And when in Berlin Macedonia was once again returned to
Turkey, this resulted in the strongest and most important Macedonian insurrection
in the 19th century, incorporating the concept of liberation from Ottoman domination,
establishment of a Macedonian state, and also unification with its neighbours.
Emulating the Austro-Hungarian Act of 1876 and relying on the decisions
of the Conference of Constantinople in early 1877, the Macedonians demanded
“a Macedonian kingdom”, based on the concept of a dual monarchy with Bulgaria.
When this attempt, too, failed (due to the strong reactions in both Bulgaria and
Serbia), the Macedonians founded the significant Macedonian League with an
impressive armed force and worked out the first Constitution for the State
Organization of Macedonia (1880). With coordinated efforts a National Assembly
of Macedonia was convened in southern Macedonia, headed by commanders
from the Kresna Uprising, and the first Provisional Government of Macedonia
was formed, whose acts were sent and made known to European diplomacy and
the wider public.
From this point onwards an increasing number of proposals were put forward
for a Balkan federation (confederation) with Macedonia as one of its equal
members. Paul Argyriades, a Macedonian living in France, worked out the ideas
for such a unification (1885), and Leonidas Voulgaris and Vasil Simov founded
the Eastern (or Balkan) Confederation Society in Athens (1887). In the Bulgarian
town of Gabrovo, Spiro GulapÌev from Lerin published his book An Essay on the
Ethnography of Macedonia (1887), where he elaborated the idea of a Balkan
federation as the single condition without which there “will be no free Macedonia”.
2.
After the Congress of Berlin (1878) Macedonia remained the only Slavic land
entirely within the boundaries of Turkey, but Article 23 of the Treaty left some
hope for the autonomy of the Macedonians. This was the principal stipulation
involving international guarantees for the liberation idea in the ensuing period up
to the Treaty of Bucharest (1913), and even after the start of the First World War,
when the aforementioned treaty was proclaimed invalid. Hence the Secret Macedonian-Adrianople
Revolutionary Organization (TMORO) invoked Article 23
from the moment of its foundation (1893). A decade later it started the Ilinden
Uprising (1903) by the same token, demanding, above all, autonomy, and elaborating
it in different variations and combinations. We must emphasize that during
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