The "Shopi Nation", or how a Bulgarian ethnographic group becomes a Serbian "diagnosis"

In mid-January this year, eight Bulgarian cultural and educational associations from Bosilegrad, Tsaribrod, Zvontsi, Vranje, Pirot and Niš sent an open letter to the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, the Ombudsman, Zoran Pasalic, the Delegation of the Council of Europe, the Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Embassies of the EU Member States, the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway in Belgrade. Representatives of the Bulgarian minority strongly condemned speculation that the national identity of Bulgarians in Serbia is being questioned by an "invented Shopi nation" that "creates an artificial ethnic border with their compatriots in the motherland".

"Considerable efforts have been made by propagandists and researchers to present the Shopi as something different from the Bulgarians - different from the Serbs, too, of course, but closer to them, explains Assoc. Prof. Angel Dzhonev of the Institute for Historical Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. This concept is more often used as an auxiliary tool for the Greater Serbian idea, essentially as a makeshift explanation, in layman's terms. A similar makeshift explanation is used in relation to Macedonian-Bulgarians with the advent of Macedonism."

According to Zdenka Todorova, a human rights activist and writer from Tsaribrod, speculation about the so-called "Shopi nation" was revived in Serbia during the wars over the legacy of Yugoslavia, led by Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević. (The Shops are an ethnographic group living in western Bulgaria, eastern Serbia and northeastern North Macedonia with Bulgarian, Serbian or Macedonian national identities - editor's note).

The Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Tsaribrod

"For me, the most surprising thing - I was working as a journalist in Nis at the time - was when they sent a team from the Serbian National Radio and Television (RTS) who spent three days in Tsaribrod looking for the Shopi. That was the beginning of the campaign. "Of course, they couldn't find any citizen of Tsaribrod who would talk to them and identify himself as a Shop.

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Then they went to the cemetery in Tsaribrod, which is very old. The crew walked among the graves looking for the Shopi. They stood next to the tombstones of deceased Bulgarians and said: "Here, in these old graveyards, Serbs, Bulgarians and Shops rest in peace." And that's when the Shopska ideology was unleashed.

The writer also said that Skopje's attempts to find authentic representatives of the "Shopi nation" near the Bulgarian-Serbian border never stopped. In 2023, another RTS team went to Sofia to shoot a film about the Shopi. They managed to interview an intoxicated man from the town of Elin Pelin, who said - "I am Bulgarian and I am also a Shop".

With great indignation, Zdenka Todorova recalls the unveiling of the Vasil Levski monument in Tsaribrod in 2014, when the Serbian host, Prime Minister Ivica Dacic, said to his guest, Bulgarian Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski: "We don't know what kind of people live here and what language they speak - Bulgarian, Serbian or Shopski."

"We've missed out on 35 years," notes our compatriot from Tsaribrod. "It should be known that we, the Bulgarians from the Western Outlands, opposed this ideology and are the only heroes in this whole situation. We resisted this pressure, this overwhelming influence, so that the so-called Shopski Dictionary would not be imposed on us. If the Shopski Dictionary had been published in 1996, what would have happened?

The Croats in Vojvodina were split into the Croatian national minority and the Bunjevci. And the Bunjevci are an ethnographic group - part of the Croatian nation. That was the intention for us as well. And if the Shops are ever recognized as a people, the cause will be lost. We did not allow that to happen," Zdenka Todorova told Radio Bulgaria.

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A Bulgarian community with medieval roots still lives in present-day Serbia, researchers from the Institute for Historical Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences reminded in a recent statement.

"The concept of a "Shopi nation" is being used as a tool in the fight against the Bulgarian ethnic minority in Serbia and the Bulgarian state. It is necessary for Belgrade as a transitional phase to accelerate the assimilation of Bulgarians domestically, while on the foreign policy front it serves to create a so-called "Serbian" minority in Bulgaria through the "Shopi" identity. Belgrade has a history of such practices," the document says. The statement, supported by nearly 40 academic representatives, opposes the speculations in Serbia that challenge the national identity of Bulgarians living there.

Assoc. Prof. Angel Dzhonev, who also signed the statement, highlights the fact that during the last census in Serbia in 2022, the authorities did not include " Shop" as an option for respondents' self-identification. However, they experimented with the idea in a discreet way:

"In the last census, a similar method was tried under the category 'other'. A few dozen people apparently identified themselves as such. I should note here that the number of Bulgarians has been reduced to an increasingly symbolic figure - around 13,000 people. In the Bulgarian municipalities of Tsaribrod and Bosilegrad, which are essentially all Bulgarian, the numbers have been adjusted to create parity between those who identify as Bulgarian and those who identify as Serbian.

Administrative reorganisation was also used to divide the Bulgarian population in Serbia. Villages inhabited by Bulgarians from the municipalities of Tsaribrod and Bosilegrad were reassigned to the municipalities of Surdulica, Babušnica and Pirot, preventing the local population from exercising their legal minority rights, the BAS researcher points out.

He calls on Bulgarian society and the state to adopt a consistent, rather than ad hoc or campaign-driven, policy to defend the rights of Bulgarians in Serbia, and to use Serbia's EU accession negotiations to address these issues.

"Silence is not an option. The true conditions, which are far from favourable, must be brought to light. The Bulgarian minority is facing extremely difficult economic and cultural circumstances," says Assoc. Prof. Dzhonev in an interview with Radio Bulgaria.

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The "Shopi Nation", or how a Bulgarian ethnographic group becomes a Serbian "diagnosis"

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