1903. O Τζ. Φ. Άμποτ για τους Σλάβους στη Μακεδονία. Επισολή στην εφημερίδα Manchester Guardian. «Βουλγαρική ιδέα η απόσπαση της Μακεδονίας με σκοπό την ένταξη στη Βουλγαρία»

Γράφει ο Σωκράτης Πουλής

Ο Τζ. Φ. Άμποτ ήταν απεσταλμένος του Πανεπιστημίου του Καίμπριτζ και ταξίδεψε στην υπό οθωμανική κυριαρχία Μακεδονία, με σκοπό τη συλλογή λαογραφικού υλικού.

Παρακάτω βλέπετε μια επιστολή του προς τον αρχισυντάκτη της αγγλικής εφημερίδας
Manchester Guardian.

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Manchester Guardian, 15 Jan. 1903

A ‘Macedonian’ Nation does not exist

THE MACEDONIAN QUESTION

To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian.

Sir,—I thank you sincerely for the appreciative com­ments in your leading article of the 9th inst. Will you permit me to state that my main object in speaking out on this question was not to propound a policy, but to emphasise facts—facts which, though abundantly testified to by the correspondents of our leading news­papers as well as by the representatives of Reuters and other agencies in the Near East, are habitually ignored by the champions of the so-railed Macedonian “nation”‘?

Such a nation does not exist, save in the manifestoes of the Macedonian Committee. What does exist in Macedonia is a Slavonic population in the north, a mixture of Slavs and Greeks in the middle, pure Greeks in the south, and Mahometans sprinkled everywhere. Moreover, the Slavs of Northern and Central Macedonia are homo­geneous neither in blood nor in sentiment.

They are partly Bulgarian and partly Servian, but they them­selves do not always know which is which. In the days before 1885 it was Russians policy to call them all Bulgarians; after the breach between the Principality and the Empire it became Russia’s policy to call them all Servians. Lastly, there is also a comparatively smail proportion of Wallachs in the province, who however, are indissolubly hound up with the Greeks and for all political purposes are to be regarded as Greeks.

Now this holch-polch is labelled a “NATION” by the apostles of the BULGARIAN IDEA, who wish to absorb the rival races and, under the cover of the misleading name “Macedonian,- really to create a Bulgarian State destined sooner or later to join the Principality.

This is the long and the short of the Macedonian question as a purely political problem and apart from administrative misrule and all tho concomitant evils—separable from a land governed by the ” Unspeakable ” I neither defend nor denounce programmes, policies, solutions, and the rest of the nostrums which go to make up the bulky volume of Macedonian political pharmacopoeia. I simply desire to establish historic truth, a thing which in these matters is exposed to at least as grave a peril as the “Macedonian nation” itself.

-I am, &c..

G. F. Abbott

Emmanuel College, Cambridge, January 12.