The history of migration in modern Macedonia starts in the early XX century. When
the national consciousness of Balkan peoples began to crystallize during the 19th
century, European powers found that drawing international frontiers along strategic
or economic lines could not easily be reconciled with ethnic considerations. After
1870 Macedonia1
had been an arena for political and cultural contention between
Balkan states that regarded it as their promised land. All three nationalisms, the
Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian, denied the existence of a separate Macedonian
identity and claimed Macedonia and the Macedonians as their own for their national
states. All three developed complex justifications and rationalizations of their
respective claims, which were based on a confusing array of irreconcilably
contradictory historic, linguistic, cultural, ethnographic, and other arguments with
accompanying statistics.2
Macedonians supported the activities of the clandestine
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). In 1903 IMRO staged the
Ilinden uprising liberating few towns and villages. The Ottoman suppression of the uprising led to a number of civilian casualties. Killings, rapes, and burning of Christian
villages were perpetrated by the Ottoman army and irregulars. As Duncan Perry notes,
“Brutality was a hallmark” of the Illinden uprising. Calculations from his archival
research indicates that 4,694 Christian noncombatants were killed, 201 villages were
burned, 3,122 women and girls were raped by Ottoman soldiers, 12,440 homes were
damaged or destroyed, and approximately 70,000 people were left homeless. This was
the first wave of migrations in modern times in Macedonia.3
Most of the migrants that
went abroad emigrated to Sofia, although some went as far as the USA. Three years
after the Illinden uprising there was little improvement for villagers, conditions were
still so poor that in just one day in March 1906, 600 migrants from Macedonia left for
the United States. Chances for work in the booming metropolises of the United States
and Canada seemed more real, and within months of the Illinden uprising the slow
trickle of emigration abroad became a stream.