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14 | loyal unto death chapter one Terminal Loyalties and Unruly Archives: On Thinking Past the Nation “Why not Macedonia for Macedonians, as well as Bulgaria for Bulgarians and Servia for Servians?” (Gladstone 1897). This simple-seeming question, first posed by a former British prime minister with considerable knowledge of the Balkans, still remains controversial today. In its original formulation, it represented a continuation of Gladstone’s long advocacy for the rights of diverse Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1850s, he was welcomed by the Greek population of the Ionian islands as a champion of their interests; in the 1870s, he deplored Ottoman atrocities in Bulgaria; and in the 1890s, he denounced the empire’s treatment of Armenians. Yet whereas Greeks, Bulgarians , and Armenians—along with a number of other former Ottoman subject peoples in the Middle East—are now firmly identified with their own territorial nation-states, the precise status of Macedonians and their relationship with Macedonia has remained a source of contention. Over the years, Gladstone’s question has consistently been amended to include a definite article and turned into a slogan—Macedonia for the Macedonians —that continues to underpin scholarly research on the region’s history and culture (Rossos 2008; Čepreganov 2008). But there is irony in this legacy. For by the time Gladstone posed his question on Macedonia—at a moment when Greece was preparing to go to war against Turkey on behalf of fellow Christians in Crete—he had already come to recognize that liberation from Ottoman rule was not a cure to all the region’s ills. Indeed, he prefaced the question by stating that “next to the Ottoman Government nothing can be more deplorable and blameworthy than jealousies between Greek and Slav, and plans by the States already existing for appropriating other territory” and followed it with the prediction that unless these peoples stood together in common defense, they would assuredly be “devoured by others.” In some sense, then, Gladstone already provided one answer to his question . There would be no Macedonia for Macedonians, because existing, ambitious states would jockey for control of the Ottoman territory of Macedonia terminal loyalties and unruly archives | 15 and usurp any aspirations its inhabitants might have. That was how history played out in 1912, when Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria (as well as the tiny state of Montenegro) declared war on the Ottoman Empire and carved up the six vilayets, or provinces, that spanned the peninsula from the Sea of Marmara to the Adriatic coast of modern Albania. Gladstone’s caveats also foretold how quarrels would undo the allies. Bulgaria, which had gained the smallest slice of territoryfromthefirstroundoffighting,thenlaunchedaself-destructiveattack against its former allies, sparking the Second Balkan War. When the lines of demarcation were drawn, the territory on which the mro had aspired to create an autonomous Macedonia was divided along national frontiers that, apart from revision during each World War, have endured until today. The Legacy of Ilinden: Methodological Nationalism The defeat of the uprising in 1903 brought an end to the fragile unity of the organization. It also served as ground zero for a set of acrimonious debates about nation and national identity in the region, which took on renewed significance after the establishment of a Macedonian republic within the framework of federal Yugoslavia in 1944. Since that date, historians in Bulgaria, Greece, and the Republic of Macedonia (both before and after its declaration of sovereignty in 1991) have produced a substantial scholarship centered on the status of the uprising and the identity of those who took part. Notwithstanding dialogue and disagreement over historical theory and methodology within each national tradition, three dominant narratives have emerged, drawing on distinct bodies of archival material, to make sense of the question that the facts of the buildup to Ilinden, and the uprising itself, generate.1 The most straightforward accounts are those produced by successive generations of Bulgarian historians, who can draw on both state archives and those of Macedonian organizations, many of which had their headquarters in Sofia. They link Ilinden, in the Monastir region, with the Preobraženie Uprising, in the vilayet of Adrianople, that began sixteen days later on August 19, 1903. Both, in this narrative, were aided by “progressive” forces in Bulgaria and led by Bulgarian military personnel who also provided the key leadership for the organization.2 The Christian inhabitants of Macedonia who joined the uprising were motivated by shared Bulgarian ethnonational consciousness, which they also expressed by adherence to the...

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