I was recently in Chisinau, the capital of the Republic of Moldova, to participate in a literary congress of the Academy of Sciences in this friendly country. I met with many writers, journalists, intellectuals. I was convinced, not for the first time, of their immense, boundless love for their homeland - mother Romania. They were happy, they were happy that they spoke the language of the great national poet-romantic Mihai Eminescu fluently, that they wrote in it / and in its purest form! / that they felt like true Romanians. Despite the fact that for a long time they were forcibly Russified and even harassed both as part of the Russian Empire and as a Soviet republic, that they were instilled that they were a separate people, non-Romanian!, with a separate language / “Slavic with a large number of Latin words! ” – this was the absurd statement of their enslaver Stalin, who sent those who disagreed with him to camps in Siberia!/. And I immediately thought of our “brothers beyond the Vardar”, of how for nearly eight decades they have been constantly slandering us, how they deny their roots, their true history, everything Bulgarian, how they call us “Tatars”, “barbarians”, “fascists”, “occupiers”. And when they need it, they are ready to use us and ask for Bulgarian passports /over 150 thousand already have them, among them there are 200 mafia members!/, and so they most shamelessly use their hated Bulgaria for the sake of the EU!..
How brazenly they claim that they had nothing to do with Bulgaria and its history, that they were an ancient and noble people, hardly the most ancient, since... Creation. From Adam and Eve! And the Bulgarians were Tatars from Asia. And just how they turned Skopje into a kitschy Disneyland with countless fake monuments, horsemen, colonnades, triumphal arches and fountains, as an expression of their "ancient greatness"! And even when you get close to them, they look like sets from an old theater, not real buildings. And just how mercilessly, with pleasure, they destroy the old Bulgarian monuments and graves. How they erase the Bulgarian inscriptions on temples and fortresses, how they appropriate the great Bulgarians born in this area. They even took it for granted that they translated the classic Dimitar Talev into the Macedonian dialect! Although this does not prevent them from continuing to ask for Bulgarian passports and study in our country, from accepting help from the "barbarian" state. And they have received such in the past and today. Even the National Theater in Skopje was created with Bulgarian help, we helped them years ago and after the great earthquake in 1963…
Recently, due to political negotiations, the tension between Skopje and Sofia has intensified. BAS issued an official statement on the occasion of the “ Charter for the Macedonian Language” of the Academy in Macedonia. And in short it sounds like this: “The official language in North Macedonia is a regional norm of the Bulgarian language.” That is, a dialectal form. According to experts from the Institute of Bulgarian Language at BAS, the thesis about the dialectal diversity of the “Macedonian language“ (with over “50 dialects, which make up the western dialect, the southeastern dialect, as well as the group of northern dialects) is “ completely incorrect and replaces the objective fact that these dialects are a natural continuation of the dialects of the Bulgarian language in the southwest“.
Our scientists are categorical that: “the dialects of the continuous dialectal territory of the Bulgarian language cover the historical and geographical areas of Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia. Data from the history of the language categorically show that in these places there has never been a compact population different from the Bulgarian, nor a language different from the Bulgarian“.
This can be seen quite clearly in the Bulgarian Academic Dialect Atlas. According to it, the peculiarities of the Macedonian dialects are found in both Western and Eastern Bulgarian dialects – and they have nothing to do with the geographical area of Macedonia.” Yes, Macedonia, as children know, is simply a geographical area, as are the other Bulgarian regions or provinces: Dobrudja, Moesia, Thrace.
And the purely Bulgarian character of our Cyrillic-Methodician language was categorically proven scientifically in the first half of the 19th century, when the foundations of Slavic linguistics as a science were laid in Europe. That is why in the history of linguistics in the world there is no scholar who has used such a made-up term as "Old Macedonian" instead of Old Bulgarian. We know that Bulgaria gave writing and culture to a number of Slavic and non-Slavic peoples. Today, the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet / it is time to proudly call it the "Bulgarian alphabet", and not "Slavic" because the Russians also call it "Russian"?!/ is used in 13 countries of Europe and Asia. That is why the great Russian scholar-Slavist academician Dmitry Likhachev called Bulgaria the "Empire of the Spirit". And one more thing: nearly 40 percent of the lexical / vocabulary / fund of the modern Russian language is based on our, Old Bulgarian language. But Moscow still does not recognize this. It calls it “Old Slavonic” or even ”Russian”! But that is another topic... According to the Russians, Cyril and Methodius created the alphabet on the order of Peter the Great / in the 18th century?! / in Russia and Russia, not Bulgaria, gave it to the world!
So the claims of MANU / Skopje Academy/ about some “premiership are simply ridiculous, comical! The so-called “Macedonian alphabet”, which is actually Bulgarian /with two or three letter changes/, which dates back to the middle of the last century, simply has nothing to do with the natural emergence and development of literary languages in Europe.
Thus, on August 2, 1944, at the end of the war, in the monastery of St. Prohor Pcinski in southern Serbia, by a political decree from Tito, the president-dictator of the artificially created with the help of Stalin SFRY – Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to which the leader Joseph Vissarionovich “gifted” /with the consent of his followers, the Soviet citizens Dimitrov and Kolarov!/ this ancestral Bulgarian land, the “Macedonian alphabet” was created and the “Macedonian literary language” was established. And the change is insignificant. Several Bulgarian letters are replaced with Serbian ones, the "Ю" is thrown out as a native Bulgarian, they start calling us in Serbian, so rude and ugly, "Bulgarians" and even "Tatars", and the country from which they came - contemptuously "Bulgaria".
But the fact that we are talking without an interpreter eloquently proves that we are talking about a dialect, not a separate language.
Here is what one of the members of this commission, Georgi Kiselinov, said: The literary language is created by writers and journalists, and philologists only have the right to establish the forms of the language. But today, if we want to borrow a dialect of our language as a literary language, we do not have time to wait for this language to be invented. We are faced with the question of having our own, non-Bulgarian literary language, and we do not have time and cannot wait for poets, writers and journalists to invent this language“ .
Thus begins its journey an artificially created language, which is still underdeveloped, and an artificial alphabet, in fact, a slight recoding of the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet, with an insignificant change of only a few letters. And so for eight decades this part of Bulgaria has been forcibly alienated from the motherland, becoming almost its enemy. Under the rule of Belgrade and Moscow, which in fact created this artificial state, nationality and language. Something that history refutes. There is so much evidence and documents, and from foreign, European historians over the centuries, that the region of Macedonia is simply part of the Bulgarian lands, that such a state, nationality and language simply never existed. Only one province of Moesia, Thrace, Dobrudja and one dialect, such as Shopski. The rest is funny and ridiculous, invented by order of Serbia and Russia, who have always wanted to harm Bulgaria and tear it apart, even now, in the 21st century. Sounds absurd, right?!
Yes, Skopje is desperately searching for its identity, since it is an artificially created nation, with an artificial language, without its own history. That is why it is trying to steal from the history of Greece and Bulgaria. And invents ridiculous nonsense. It is even shameful and absurd that educated people, even scientists, writers, journalists, who know very well the truth about their origin, about their Bulgarian roots, twist their souls and speak and write such nonsense. They constantly blaspheme – Bulgaria for decades, and they want support, European passports and full recognition!
And hopefully finally our politicians, /as their Greek colleagues did/ will manage to calm these ridiculous claims of Skopje, to calm the impudence of Skopje!/ to take a firmer nationally responsible position, protecting Bulgarian interests.
P. P. In this regard, I would ask some of our publishers and translators who publish works by authors from this region, why do they write “translation from Macedonian”, since such a language officially does not exist?