Continuity vs. radical break: national homogenization campaigns in the Greek-Bulgarian borderlands before and after the Balkan Wars

Abstract

ABSTRACTScholarly interpretations of the Balkan Wars and World War I frequently present these two conflicts as a radical break that unleashed new policies of national homogenization on an unprecedented scale. Instead, this article seeks to establish important lines of continuity between the nineteenth century and the interwar period by examining how Bulgarian and Greek national activists and officials treated nationally ambiguous individuals in their (aspired) territories. First, the article explores the dynamics of the religious controversy between the (Greek) Patriarchate and the (Bulgarian) Exarchate in the long nineteenth century to show that Bulgarian and Greek activists constantly struggled to determine who their supporters were in the Ottoman borderlands of Macedonia and Thrace. From the 1830s to the establishment of the Exarchate in 1870 to the Macedonian conflict in the early 1900s, the ambiguity of people’s religious and national identities made it impossible to clearly distinguish who was a ‘Greek’ and who was a ‘Bulgarian’. Next, the article studies Greek and Bulgarian minority policies in the 1920s and 1930s, tracing lines of continuity with the prewar period. The two administrations used various criteria of national classification—language, religion or ethnicity—to sort out their Muslim minorities (Turks and Pomaks) in ways that would benefit the dominant national community of Bulgarians or Greeks. But the frustration of officials who wanted to divide up their populations into discreet nationalities was most evident in their policies vis-à-vis the Slavic speakers of Macedonia in the 1930s, who were subjected to elaborate classification schemes that tried to fit their idiosyncratic identities in the ‘correct’ national group. Altogether, the continued presence of people with flexible identities who defied the straightforward efforts of the national administrations to homogenize their territories remained the hallmarks of the entire period from 1870 to 1945.