Each invoked ethnicity and history and all conjured up the
apparition of the defunct Treaty of San Stefano. Serbia colluded
with the Habsburgs: Bosnia to the latter in return for a free hand
in Macedonia to the former. The wily Austro-Hungarians regarded the
Serbs as cannon fodder in the attrition war against the Russians and
the Turks. In 1885, Bulgaria was at last united - north and formerly
Turk-occupied south - under the Kremlin's pressure. The Turks
switched sides and allied with the Serbs against the spectre of a
Great Bulgaria. Again, the battleground was Macedonia and its
Bulgarian-leaning (and to many, pure Bulgarian) inhabitants. Further
confusion awaited. In 1897, following the Crete uprising against the
Ottoman rule and in favour of Greek enosis (unification), Turkey (to
prevent Bulgaria from joining its Greek enemy) encouraged King
Ferdinand to help the Serbs fight the Greeks. Thus, the Balkanian
kaleidoscope of loyalties, alliances and everlasting friendship was
tilted more savagely than ever before by the paranoia and the whims
of nationalism gone berserk.
In this world of self reflecting looking glasses, in this bedlam of
geopolitics, in this seamless and fluid universe, devoid of any
certainty but the certainty of void, an anomie inside an abnormality
- a Macedonian self identity, tentative and merely cultural at
first, began to emerge.
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