GERKOMANIA

Macedonia was partitioned after the Balkan Wars in 1913

among Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Albania. Bulgaria took the Pirin part of the country and renamed the Macedonians into "Bulgarians", and since had engaged in a politics of oppression. But the Bulgarian government had attempted to falsify the history of Macedonia and present the Macedonians as "Bulgarians", even long before it conquered Pirin Macedonia. After the partition of Macedonia in 1913, the Macedonians of Pirin became a minority, within the new Bulgarian borders. The results of the 1946 Bulgarian census concerning the Macedonian population were never made public by the Bulgarian authorities. However, Yugoslav sources claim that 252,908 people declared themselves as Macedonians in that census. The Bulgarian census of 1956 recorded 187,789 Macedonians, over 95% of whom lived in the Pirin region of Macedonia. For some "strange" reason, however, just after less than a decade, in the 1965 census the number of Macedonians dropped to only 8750 and in the district of Blagoevgrad which previously had the highest percentage of Macedonians it was less than 1%. This is also the time of a number of political trials of people accused of activity based on Macedonian nationalism. As example, in 1964 four people from Blagoevgrad were reportedly tried for writing "We are Macedonians" and "Long live the Macedonian nation" on a restaurant wall.