TESTIMONIALS
Kraste Misirkov (1874 -1926), proclaimed as the most important personality of the 20th century for the Republic of Macedonia:
[The Ilinden Uprising] has been ill-founded from the very beginning: it does not relate to Macedonia as a whole, it is fragmentary and has a Bulgarian flavour. Its leaders consist only of Macedonian Slavs identifying as Bulgarians ...
It was, and still is, an affair of the Exarchists who glorify themselves as ‘Bulgarians’; it is therefore a Bulgarian manoeuvre aiming to resolve the Macedonian question in Bulgaria’s favour; it is intended to create a Bulgarian Macedonia. (On Macedonian Matters, 1903)
If good fortune had left Simeon and Samuel to reign for a long time, under the authority of the Bulgarian state ... and let these Bulgarian Tsars unite the Southern Slavs politically and culturally ...
The lands populated by Bulgarian people were a cradle of Slavonic Enlightment in the old times; Serbian and Russian people drew spiritual nourishment from here for centuries. The Bulgarian nation has been of great cultural and historical service to the Slavonic World ... (Macedono-Adrianopolitan Review, Issue 34 -35, 1907)
Whether we call ourselves Bulgarians or Macedonians, we always identify as a distinct and unified people with Bulgarian national awareness, completely different from Serbs. (20 July Newspaper, May 11, 1924)
Ljubčo Georgievski, Prime Minister of the Republic of Macedonia (1998 -2002):
It is nothing new to mention the fact that Gotse Delchev, Dame Gruev, Gyorche Petrov and Pere Toshev – do I have to list all of them – were teachers with the Bulgarian Exarchate in Macedonia ... [Gotse] returned to Macedonia as a Bulgarian Exarchist teacher, incidentally teaching children Bulgarian as their mother tongue.
Wherever they wrote about their mother tongue, or about the reforms of this language, Parthenius of Zograf, Kiril Peychinovich, Theodosius of Sinai, the Miladinov Brothers, Grigor Parlichev, Kuzman Shapkarev and Marko Tsepenkov (and how many more?!) always referred to it as the Bulgarian language. (Pulse Weekly, June 7 and 14, 1995)
