Only recently have we begun to clarify these muddy waters by revealing the Demosthenean corpus for what it is: oratory designed to sway public opinio… - Eugene N. Borza

By 1875, however, the first tracts appeared favoring a Macedonian nationality and language separate from standard Bulgarian, and the conflict had been transformed from an anti-Hellenization movement into a Bulgarian-Macedonian confrontation.

Thus, six years before the First Balkan War in which the region of Macedonia was detached from the Ottoman Empire by Serb, Greek, and Bulgarian armies, the reality of Macedonia/Macedonian already existed among Macedonian immigrants in central Pennsylvania.

The Macedonians are a newly emergent people in search of a past to help legitimize their precarious present as they attempt to establish their singular identity in a Slavic world dominated historically by Serbs and Bulgarians. One need understand only a single geopolitical fact: As one measures conflicting Serb and Bulgarian claims over the past nine centuries, they intersect in Macedonia. Macedonia is where the historical Serb thrust to the south and the historical thrust to the west meet. This is not to say that present Serb and Bulgarian ambitions, where the past has precedence over the present and future.