Constructing national identity in Ottoman Macedonia

If "borderlands are inhabited territories located on the margins of a power center, or between power centers, with power understood in the civilizational as well as the politico-economic sense," as the introduction to this book asserts, then Macedonia is a borderland par excellence. Present-day Macedonia is a territory partitioned by four power centers: the eponymous country, which became an independent political entity only recently; Greece, which claims to hold the historical "copyright" to the name Macedonia; Bulgaria, the principal contender to Greek claims at the turn of the twentieth century, which now contains the territory known as Pirin Macedonia; and Albania, perhaps more because of its historical and demographic association with Macedonia than its possession of the (Macedonian) territory of Mala Prespa and Golo Brodo that flanks the western shores of the Prespa and Ohrid lakes. Macedonia has also been "continually in movement," its borders shifting with each attempt to define it, and its inhabitants continually displaced and uprooted with each attempt to claim it as part of one nation-state or the other.