[1] The name of Macedonia was revived on the Balkans during the early 19th century as result of the Western Europe-derived obsession with Ancient Greece.
[4] "Macedonians" as an umbrella term covered Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians, Albanians, Serbs, etc.
As written originally during 1920s, the bylaws' concept of "Macedonians" had only geographic and not ethnographic meaning, and was equally valid for all ethnic groups in Macedonia.
[9] At that time, this designation was used also to describe the Slavic speakers in Ottoman Macedonia, but not as a separate ethnic group, because this population was defined then mostly as Bulgarians,[12] while their association with Bulgaria was universally accepted.
[17][18] Ultimately the designation Macedonian, changed its status in 1944, and went from being predominantly a regional, ethnographic denomination, to a national one within the framework of Democratic Federal Macedonia.
A postcard containing the motto "
Macedonia for the Macedonians
" with a demographic map of the region, issued by the Union of Macedonian Students in Vienna during the 1920s. According to the map, the ethnic composition of the population included Bulgarians, Bulgarian Muslims (
Pomaks
), Greeks, Albanians, Serbs, Turks,
Gagauzes
and "Vlachs" (
Aromanians
and
Megleno-Romanians
).
Peoples and languages map of the Balkan Peninsula before the wars 1912–18, in German (Historical Old Map Collection from 1924). Macedonian Slavs in Western Macedonia are depicted as separate ethnicity, while in Eastern part, as Bulgarians. After
Bulgaria lost World War I
, when it controlled most of Macedonia, the expansionist ideas of the Serb
Jovan Cvijić
, incl. on the distinctiveness of the Slavic Macedonians, became the point of reference for
most Balkan ethnographic maps
.
[
10
]
[
11
]
The first page of
Orohydrography of Macedonia
by
Vasil Kanchov
(1911). According to him, the
local Bulgarians
and Aromanians who lived in the area called themselves Macedonians, and the surrounding nations also called them so. He also added that the Turks, Albanians and Greeks don't call themselves Macedonians.
