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COUNTING BODIES, SHAPING SOULS: THE 1903 CENSUS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN OTTOMAN MACEDONIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2006

İpek K. Yosmaoğlu
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Abstract

[It was a] mistaken belief that if 10,000 did so it would be recognized as an official religion. —A British statistical spokesman on the more than 390,000 people who listed their religion as “Jedi” on 2001 census forms

The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions.

—Benedict Anderson

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ARTICLES
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , February 2006, pp. 55 - 77
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

“I certainly should never expect Turkey to survive unless she consented to become statistical like the rest of Europe,” Dr. William Far, the “father-in-law of the English census,”1

J. Athelstane Baines, “The Census of the Empire, 1911,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 77 (1914): 381.

declared during a meeting of the Statistical Society in London in 1877.2

As quoted in E. G. Ravenstein, “The Population of Russia and Turkey,” Journal of the Statistical Society 40 (September 1877): 466. In another article, Ravenstein voiced this complaint himself, saying, “Some statistical information on the populations of that part of Eastern Europe which is now devastated by the Turkish hordes will prove acceptable at the present time. It is scarcely necessary to state that no regular census of the population has ever been taken”: idem, “Distribution of the Population in the Part of Europe Overrun by Turks,” Geographical Magazine (London), October 1876, 259–61.

His statement reflects the prevailing opinion among Western European scholars, one that was expressed time and again at meetings of geographical societies or in prestigious journals of geography: the Ottoman Empire's inability to procure detailed statistics of its population was both an indication and a cause of its backwardness, a deficiency that boded ill for its future. Even though modern census surveys were relatively recent innovations in Europe, and despite the fact that the Ottoman Empire had possessed a flawed but still quite serviceable census system since the 1830s, the backwardness argument remained a common one.3

The same argument also served as a convenient and almost formulaic prologue to works that presented alternative data compiled by the authors themselves and added another layer of persuasiveness to the numbers published. After a source was quoted once and was in turn quoted by another author, a third party could comfortably declare the numbers “reliable,” apparently without bothering to trace back the chain of transmission. For instance, Bianconi's “highly esteemed” figures published in 1877 relied largely on those provided by the “Stanford map,” supplemented by a few British consular reports and the author's own observations from the time that he worked in the region as an engineer for the French railroad company that built the Istanbul–Selânik line: see F. Bianconi, Ethnographie et statistique de la Turquie d'Europe et de la Grèce (Paris: A. Lassailly, 1877), 22–26; Edward Stanford [I. Gennadius], Ethnological Map of European Turkey and Greece with Introductory Remarks on the Distribution of Races in the Illyrian Peninsula and Statistical Tables of Population (London, 1877), 16. The so-called Stanford tables (actually published by I. Gennadius) were again “estimates,” but the author attributed them to the most reliable “authority” on the issue. This “reliable and objective” source was Henri Mathieu's La Turquie et ses différents peuples. Mathieu himself had stated in the original work that, although he had made every effort to approach the “truth,” he still did not pretend to be giving exact figures: Henri Mathieu, La Turquie et ses différents peuples (Paris, ca. 1857), 44.

The Ottoman state's attempts to gather and record information about its population have attracted a considerable amount of scholarly attention from social and economic historians of the empire.4

Ömer Lütfi Barkan pioneered the field of demographic studies in Ottoman historiography. His works include “Türkiye'de İmparatorluk devirlerinin büyük nüfus ve arazi tahrirleri,” İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 1–2 (1940): 1–40; “Tarihi demografi araştirmalari ve Osmanli tarihi, Türkiyat Mecmuası 10 (1953): 1–26; and “Essai sur les données statistiques des registres de recensement dans l'Empire Ottoman aux XVème et XVIème siècles,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1957): 9–36. For a detailed bibliography of Ottoman population studies, see Daniel Panzac, La Population de l'Empire Ottoman (Aix-en-Provence: Travaux et Documents de l'IREMAM, 1993).

Sources of demographic data for the 15th century through 19th century range from information revealed by tahrir registers and salnâmes (Ottoman state almanacs) to the results of more targeted surveys such as the population counts of the empire after the 1830s, which have been deemed fairly reliable, if imperfect, estimates of Ottoman population.5

For the 19th century, Kemal Karpat and Stanford Shaw's works have been influential: see Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), and “Ottoman Population Records and the Census of 1881/1882–1893,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 9 (1978): 237–74; Stanford Shaw, “The Ottoman Census System and Population 1831–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 9 (1978): 325–38. Justin McCarthy has also contributed significantly to the field. A compilation of his articles can be found in Justin McCarthy, Population History of the Middle East and the Balkans (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2002); see also idem, Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1983). Tahrir registers were kept for fiscal purposes and not as population registers. More specifically, they listed taxable revenue sources assigned to timar holders, and their reliability as a source for demographical information should not be overestimated: see Heath Lowry, “The Ottoman Tahrir Defterleri as a Source for Social and Economic History: Pitfalls and Limitations,” in idem, Studies in Defterology (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1992), 3–18.

Figures such as the value of exports and imports from major ports, the population of cities, or the population density of the empire by region were provided by the salnâmes and were even published in consular reports and in various compilations by European scholars.6

Enver Ziya Karal has called a detailed population count from 1831 “the first census” of the Ottoman Empire: see Enver Ziya Karal, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda ilk Nüfus Sayımı (Ankara: İstatistik Umum Müdürlüğü, 1943). It is generally inferred that another count must have been taken in 1844 that formed the basis of the well-known Ubicini statistics in A. Ubicini, Lettres sur la Turquie (Paris: J. Doumaine, 1853 [1851]), but McCarthy notes that no record of this enumeration has been found so far: Justin McCarthy, “Factors in the Analysis of the Population of Anatolia, 1800–1878,” in idem, Population History, 87. Karpat also notes that a very detailed census of the Tuna Vilayeti was taken in 1866: Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 25. In addition to these, the salnâmes, or yearbooks of the provinces, provided information on the population. The first comprehensive count, which included the entire population (as opposed to the tax and conscription base, i.e., male adults), was taken during Abdülhamid II's reign, and the results were presented to the sultan in 1893. Between these population counts, demographic changes (concerning males) were surveyed through entries into separate registers called yoklama and vukuat defterleri: McCarthy, Population History,86. Finally, the census of 1903 was carried out in 1905–07. For a detailed list of contemporary European sources, see Karpat, Ottoman Population. Ottoman sources were routinely disregarded by most European scholars, who claimed they were not reliable. In Ravenstein's words, “The data collected by the local authorities and occasionally published in the Salmanes [sic], or official almanacs of the vilayets, are not deserving of much confidence.” In the same article, Ravenstein provided his own population statistics of the Ottoman Empire. One of the most important conclusions he drew was “…the Turk is not only outnumbered in the greater portion of his empire, but is also intellectually the inferior of many of the races over whom he rules”: Ravenstein, “Population of Russia and Turkey,” 433–35.

The “reliability” of sheer aggregates, however, was not the only concern of 19th-century critiques of Ottoman census practices. Having discovered the Volksmuseum of Europe in the Ottoman Balkans,7

Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 63.

equipped with the newest techniques in geography, and gripped by the irresistible allure of ethnography, what the statisticians in London or Berlin wanted captured, enumerated, and mapped were the different “races” of the Ottoman Empire.8

A list of such ethnographic maps compiled during the 19th century can be found in H. R. Wilkinson, Maps and Politics: A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia (Liverpool: University Press, 1951).

The Ottoman statistical sources were not of much help in this quest, since they did not classify the population into national or “racial” groups, as they were also called back then. Ottoman imperial government felt no pressing need for such a classification because their information was gathered mainly for the purposes of estimating potential tax revenue and the number of soldiers to be recruited, for which wealth and religion—and not ethnicity—were the only two relevant categories.

What happened in a region of the Ottoman Empire coveted equally (and not coincidentally so) by both neighboring nation states and ethnographers when the Ottoman state attempted a modern survey of its population comprises the present subject matter. The region is Macedonia, more specifically the three provinces (vilâyets) of Salonica, Kosovo, and Monastir (Selânik, Kosova, and Manastir).9

The definition of Macedonia is a problematic topic. Suffice it to say that from the collapse of the ancient kingdom to the reinvention of Macedonia in the 19th century, the term acquired meanings that varied enormously not only on a geographical scale but also on a conceptual scale.

The population survey, or the “census of 1903,”10

Perhaps a more appropriate title would be the “census of 1903–07,” since the regulations concerning a new population count were issued in 1903, but the count was not completed until 1907. The choice of the word “census” itself deserves an explanation here. McCarthy has argued that the term is inappropriate because it was not a survey taken on a given day throughout the empire and therefore not a “census” in the strictly modern sense: McCarthy, Population History,118, 136. Nevertheless, I have chosen to follow the established practice of calling the Ottoman population counts of 1831, 1881/82–93, and 1903–07 “censuses” not only for the sake of convenience but also to distinguish them from earlier attempts and routine upgrades of registers.

was carried out amid conditions of violent conflict during the years 1905–1906. This article focuses on the practical concerns of the “counters” and the “counted,” or the experience of the counted on the ground, if you will, and serves three main purposes. The first is to shed light on an aspect of population counts in the Ottoman Empire that has largely been neglected, namely, the process itself and its effects on identity formation.11

For statistical data on Macedonian population, refer to Daniel Panzac, “La Population de la Macédoine au XIXe siècle,” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 66 (1992): 113–29; Cem Behar, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nun ve Türkiye'nin Nüfusu, 1500–1927 (Ankara: State Institute of Statistics, 1996).

The second is to situate the Ottoman census practice within a broader conceptual framework of imperial and colonial censuses and to explain its role in the displacement of traditional markers of collective identity and the delineation of ethnic boundaries. The third is to form a contribution to the debate on the history of nationhood in Macedonia. The historiography of Macedonia is dominated by too many works that conflate history with lore, and partisanship with scholarship, in their attempts to credit one nationalist movement over another.12

A representative (but certainly not exhaustive) sampling includes Christ Anastasoff, The Tragic Peninsula (St. Louis: Blackwell Wielandy, 1938); Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897–1913 (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1966); Hristo Andonov-Poljanski, Gotse Delchev (Skopje: Kultura, 1972); Mercia MacDermott, Freedom or Death: The Life of Gotse Delchev (London: Journeyman Press, 1978).

Despite the appearance of a number of recent works attempting to sort out this confusion, the field remains surprisingly understudied with regard to the historical continuities and discontinuities of nationhood, especially considering how fertile a research agenda this problematic provides.13

For an analysis of the internal political and economic factors in the development of the “Macedonian question,” see Fikret Adanir, Die Makedonische Frage: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1908 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979); Vasilis Gounaris, Steam over Macedonia: Socio-Economic Change and the Railway Factor (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1993). The emergence of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization is covered in Duncan Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Revolutionary Movements, 1893–1903 (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988). Different perspectives on Macedonian identity in historical and political contexts can be found in James Pettifer, ed., The New Macedonian Question (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); Victor Roudometof, ed., The Macedonian Question (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 2000).

As far as identity politics is concerned, the most important recent contributions have come from social anthropologists. Yet, however fascinating and relevant for students of the region, this strand of scholarship relies on methods that are entirely different from those of historians; it also has more bearing on the present issue of “Macedonian identity.”14

Loring Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Anastasia Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Transitions to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jane K. Cowan, ed., Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Keith Brown, The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

This article aims to add another layer to the context that both anthropologists and historians need to reconstruct if we are to understand the transition of Macedonian peasants from imperial subjects to national citizens.

The census of 1903 was an exceptional force of popular mobilization in Macedonia at the turn of the 20th century because it managed to directly involve (almost) every member of a largely illiterate and rural population in a process that they otherwise would have stayed indifferent to: the process of nationalization. For the same reason, looking at the implementation of the census in the countryside gives us a glimpse into the meaning of nationalist movements not as defined by the elite who spearheaded them but by the people who were swept into the movement by the “trickle down” effects of nationalist ideology. I also maintain that while there were significant particularities of the Ottoman census that distinguished it from similar exercises in colonial and imperial contexts in terms of implementation and conceptualization, the parallels are also worth considering for understanding the impetus to count and the delineation of new attitudes in state–society relations.

CENSUS AND IDENTITY: THE BASICS

The term “census” has attracted great interest lately from scholars in different disciplines who work on identity construction. This is hardly surprising given the increasing numbers of people who are transplanted across countries and continents, reinforcing the prominence of “identity politics” in contemporary political rhetoric. The census is the ultimate tool at the modern state's disposal to classify and enumerate, or simply to know, its population. In other words, the census brings meaning and order to what is an amorphous, indistinguishable mass, rendering it, in James Scott's words, “legible” to the state.15

James Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 2–3.

Conversely, the census is an opportunity for the people being counted to define themselves and make that definition count. The origin of the census, however, is not necessarily located in the tradition of liberal politics and citizenship rights. Many scholars have theorized on the emergence of census practices from the colonial/subject viewpoint. As a result, much of the theoretical literature on the census tends to coalesce in two groups: studies of contemporary population counts and studies of colonial census practices in the past.

Bernard Cohn's classic work on British colonial administration in India and its classificatory practices was an inspiration for many scholars to further analyze these practices and their role in redefining caste differences as the principal reference for social differentiation and in the reification of collective identities and their subsequent relationship to one another.16

Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in idem, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1984]).

Another monumental work, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, popularized the subject and broadened its appeal with a chapter titled, “Census, Map, Museum,” published in the revised edition of the work. Anderson called these three things “institutions of power” that “profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion.”17

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 164.

These institutions were the channels through which we could locate the genesis and dissemination of nationalist ideology in the colonized world because it was through their deployment that the colonial state had engendered the discursive realm where that ideology would later flourish.

In articulating the “colonial imagination,” Anderson drew a distinction between earlier attributions of group identity and the practice, after the 1850s, of not only actively constructing these identities but enumerating them according to “a maze of grids which had no immediate financial and military purpose.”18

Ibid., 169.

In his influential 1993 essay, written under the direct influence of Anderson, Arjun Appadurai diagnosed a similar distinction for what he named the “colonial body count” in the Indian context: “Enumeration of various things was certainly part of the Mughal state imaginaire as was the acknowledgement of group identities, but not the enumeration of group identities.”19

Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 329; emphasis in the original.

Anderson's and Appadurai's conclusions embody a general consensus in the scholarship that colonial population counts represented a clear break from earlier surveys, which were never concerned with the entire population, only with those who mattered for fiscal or military purposes. The preexistence of locally formulated identity categories did not mitigate this break because they did not inform the new taxonomies as much as the colonizers' imagination did. Moreover, the very introduction of those taxonomies, and more importantly, their quantification, undermined the relevance of preexisting norms.

In a recent volume on census and identity formation, David Kertzer and Dominique Arel underline the disjuncture between the categories imposed on a local population by colonial administrators and the locals' self-perceptions. In fact, they consider this to be the distinguishing mark of the colonial census: “the formulation of categories in the colonies was unilaterally done by the ruling officials, while European categories of cultural nationality and language were already being negotiated, to some extent, with social groups.”20

David Kertzer and Dominique Arel, “Censuses, Identity Formation, and the Struggle for Political Power,” in Census and Identity, ed. David Kertzer and Dominique Arel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10.

The distinction may seem too clear-cut, however, and it is not without its detractors.21

The literature on the role of colonial censuses in reifying caste structures in India has generally accepted the assumption that this process was defined solely by colonial administrators and their (mis)perceptions of the system. For a review of the literature and a critique of this approach, see Norbert Peabody, “Cents, Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2001): 819–50.

Kertzer and Arel assume at a certain level that the colonial census was a one-sided process and do not entertain the possibility that the imposition of power from one side must have generated a reaction from the other. Norbert Peabody and Sumit Guha, among others, have critiqued this view of the colonial census as an isolated and pure exercise of colonial power and have documented different aspects of the negotiation that did go on in colonial contexts, especially during earlier stages of census design, including the mediation of the locals or in their attempts to make the population more intelligible to colonial administrators.22

Ibid.; Sumit Guha, “The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600–1990,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 148–67.

The distinction expressed by Kertzer and Arel is still a point that needs consideration, however, not only because of its sheer importance as a widely held opinion but also because colonial census categories began to be designed with more attention to “ethnographical data.” Guha himself stresses the enormous popularity ethnography came to enjoy at the turn of the 20th century as a branch of “human sciences,” the mastering of which was a requirement for the effective government of alien races.23

Guha, “Politics of Identity,” 159.

Ethnography's growing prestige brought about an increasing reliance on “racial” categories, however defined by Western ethnographers, as opposed to the earlier principles that took into account, at least theoretically, preexisting markers such as religion.24

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 164.

After this point, the authority, determined by the “objective rules” of ethnography, was in the hands of colonial administrators, which significantly reduced the space for negotiation and more clearly separated the ruler from the ruled.

Where does the Ottoman Empire fit in all of this, and to what extent can we analyze the census experience of a dynastic empire that ceased to exist at the end of World War I? It is tempting to argue that the Ottoman census of 1903 in Macedonia could be seen as an incident of (re)colonization, the imperial center taking stock of its subjects. After all, recent exceptions notwithstanding, the bulk of extant historiography on the “rise of nationalism” in the Balkans views the Ottoman period as one of alien rule and a rupture, much like the rupture of colonialism, that makes parallels between the Ottoman and British census practices apropos. According to this view, the census was a population count carried out by alien bureaucrats according to criteria the population did not have much agency in generating, which was true to a certain extent, but due to reasons that are completely different than what the national-lineage histories would have us believe, as we will see later. It seems, then, that a more proper rationale for drawing comparisons between colonial census categories and the Ottoman experience is not located so much in the source and nature of power but in the impetus for quantification, which in both cases was ushered in by modernity. By this I do not mean a modernity that was sourced from Europe by definition, but a modernity defined by indigenous exigencies.

Studies on Ottoman census practices have thus far concentrated more on the numbers recorded in registers after these population counts, on their accuracy and comparative advantages over contemporaneous European sources on Ottoman demography.25

See, for instance, Halil İnalcik's remarks in his review of Kemal Karpat, “Ottoman Population: Demographic and Social Characteristics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 21 (1989): 424. Justin McCarthy has been extremely vocal in emphasizing the reliability of Ottoman population statistics and has argued that their shortcomings were comparable to those of modern censuses in the developing world: see McCarthy, Population History.

Census registers have been valued mostly as a source for Ottoman social history only to the extent that they help shed light on the society's structural composition, be it vocational, ethnic, or religious. In other words, the assumption that censuses reflect a social reality has remained current, and not much attention has been paid to the role that the census could potentially play in the construction of the reality that it purportedly represented. This is partly because of a general tendency in the field to take at face value the thesis that the nation states that emerged out of the Ottoman Empire consisted of peoples previously caught in a time warp as millets immobilized but otherwise untouched and pure until their “national awakening” in the 19th century.26

Religion and national churches were accorded a special place in the preservation of national identity. See, for instance, James Clarke, “Father Paisii and Bulgarian History,” in Teachers of History,ed. H. S. Hughes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954), 258–83; George Arnakis, “The Role of Religion in the Development of Balkan Nationalism,” in The Balkans in Transition, ed. Charles and Barbara Jelavich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Peter F. Sugar, Nationalism and Religion in the Balkans since the 19th Century (Seattle: University of Washington, 1996). Two chapter titles, “The Long Turkish Night” and “The Nineteenth Century Awakening” in Stoyan Pribichevich's Macedonia: Its People and History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982), are classic examples of the “pure and congealed identity” assumption that has remained largely unquestioned to the present day in Balkan historiography, despite the appearance since the 1970s of a plethora of scholarship that is critical of “primordial” approaches to nationhood. In this regard, it is also interesting to note that a cornerstone of this tradition, L. S. Stavrianos' The Balkans since 1453, which was originally published in 1958, was republished in 2000 as an “unsurpassed” text: L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

Another reason is that the reification of collective identities through what seems like a routine statistical exercise of the bureaucracy is a concept more readily demonstrated in contemporary population counts, and it is only (relatively) recently that we have come to realize the significance of this phenomenon for identity construction. The examples we will see later demonstrate the force with which a census can pull a society apart under particular circumstances and will help us understand an untold chapter in the story of Christian Ottoman peasants' transformation into nationals.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Maurice Gandolph, a journalist who traveled in Ottoman Macedonia in September–December 1903, the period following the Ilinden Uprising, remarked in his book on the subject that Macedonia was a “field of illusions.”27

Maurice Gandolph, La Crise Macédonienne, enquête dans les vilayets insurgé (Paris: Librairie Acadèmique Didier, 1904), 1.

Gandolph's questionable professionalism notwithstanding (it was rumored that he completed the journey on Sultan Abdülhamid II's payroll), his analogy is one that has stood the test of time. Macedonia has been, and still is, a place more imagined than visited, existing not only as a geographical region of southeastern Europe but also as a synonym for heterogeneity, the mixing of the unmixable, a maze or a puzzle, and a homeland for a large and fragmented diaspora. Contemporary Macedonia is split by the borders of four states: the eponymous republic; Greece, which claims it holds the historical “copyright” to the name Macedonia and hence rejects its northern neighbor's bid; Bulgaria, which possesses only the territory known as Pirin Macedonia despite having been the most ambitious contender at the turn of the 20th century; and finally a sliver of territory in Albania known as Mala Prespa and Golo Brodo, flanking the western shores of the Prespa and Ohrid lakes.

Just as Macedonia as a geographical region was invented by European geographers and ethnographers in the 19th century, the “Macedonian Question” was a creation of European diplomacy after the Treaty of San Stefano of 1878. The San Stefano Treaty was drawn up at the Russo–Ottoman war, which concluded with a humiliating defeat for the Ottomans.28

The “Macedonian Question” was a term of 19th-Century European diplomacy. It was resurrected in the 1990s as the “New Macedonian Question” in reference to the tensions following the independence of the Republic of Macedonia.

The treaty carved out an autonomous Bulgarian principality that appeared to answer every Bulgarian nationalist's prayers and included most of Macedonia from the Gulf of Orfano to Western Thrace. However, this proved to be but a fleeting dream. Less than three months had passed when a new treaty was drafted in Berlin that seriously truncated Bulgaria and restored the European balance of power. Bulgaria was now limited to the principality south of the Danube and Eastern Rumelia, and the Ottoman Empire was reassigned most of the territory it had lost in the last war on the condition of carrying out European-sanctioned reforms in the region. After Greece acquired Thessaly in 1881 as part of a frontier settlement brokered by the European powers, and the Bulgarian principality declared its union with Eastern Rumelia in 1885, the Ottoman Empire in southeastern Europe was surrounded by three states with competing claims on its territory. As the rivalry intensified, the name “Macedonia” started to appear more and more not only in the popular press, but also on maps and in statistics published in Europe in place of less interesting titles such as “southeastern Europe.”29

See Wilkinson, Maps and Politics.

This political rivalry was shadowed by an ecclesiastical one that had its roots in the schism within the (Greek-dominated) Ecumenical Patriarchate and played a crucial role in the consolidation of communal boundaries. The schism occurred in 1872, two years after the establishment in Istanbul of the Exarchate, a semi-autonomous Bulgarian church, which had been guaranteed by a firman—a right long fought for by influential lay members of the Bulgarian community and clergy members frustrated with what they saw as uncontested Greek domination in the church structure. The firman did not originally guarantee complete autonomy to the Exarchate. It was granted fifteen dioceses, almost all of which were in Danubian Bulgaria. There was a clause in the text, however, that would have long-term effects concerning the course of events in Macedonia. The clause stated that after a plebiscite, if two-thirds or more of the population of a given district voted in favor of it, the Exarchate could establish a diocese in that district. This would form the basis of the “scramble for dioceses” a couple of decades later; once it became clear that membership in the Exarchate could potentially be used as the basis for political claims in the region.30

Bulgarian diplomacy and the maintenance of good relations with the Sublime Porte, especially during the Stamboulov regime, played an important role in the approval of new bishoprics in Macedonia. The first two Exarchist dioceses in Macedonia to obtain berats were those of Skopje (Üsküb) and Ohrid in 1890, followed by Nevrekop and Veles (Köprülü) in 1894, and Monastir (Bitola), Usturumca (Stroumnitza), and Dibra in 1898.

It is unlikely that the drafting officials who opened the flood gates could have predicted that their more humble provincial successors would be trying to offset the consequences of this fateful clause by pushing the peasants back under the roof of the Patriarchate.

Another turning point in the development of the Macedonian conflict was the establishment of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) in 1893 in Salonica and that of a similar organization called the Supreme Committee or the External Organization (Vŭrkhovists) in Sofia in 1895.31

I use the acronym IMRO because it is the commonly accepted practice (in addition to VMRO), but I must note that the organization included “Adrianople” in its title at this point and officially became IMRO after World War I. A compromise solution is to use the term “Internal Organization” instead of an acronym.

Although the aim of both organizations, at least in principle, was Macedonian autonomy, the Sofia-based committee's agenda also supported the eventual annexation of the region into Bulgaria. There were factions within the Internal Organization that were sympathetic to this view, but the two organizations did not necessarily act in unison. In fact, even though they temporarily merged under the leadership of Boris Sarafov in 1899, the two camps continued to pursue different agendas. The Internal Organization did not support the two uprising attempts by the Supremists in 1895 and 1902. Both attempts ended in failure, which posed a great setback to the Internal Organization's secret activities in the region and exposed the locals to reprisals and increased scrutiny by the Ottomans.32

The first incident was a series of incursions by armed bands into Ottoman territory, and the second was an uprising in Gorna Djumaya (Cuma-i Bâlâ): see Perry, Politics of Terror, 110–18.

Despite the setbacks, and even though the Internal Organization had not reached a consensus on the readiness of the local chapters and the population, in the spring of 1903 preparations were made for a general revolt that would hopefully cause great loss to the Ottoman military, if not defeat it, and possibly prompt an intervention by the Great Powers. The uprising broke out on 2 August, the day of Saint Elijah, or Ilinden.

Monastir was the province, or vilâyet, in which the uprising was centered, and it greatly suffered in the aftermath. The insurrection was entirely suppressed by September, and hundreds of villages were left devastated after the guerrillas pulled out and the Ottoman army and irregulars exacted the toll from the local population.33

H. N. Brailsford provided a detailed, if pro-Bulgarian, account of the aftermath of the uprising in Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future (London: Methuen, ca. 1905).

The peasants' plight did garner some sympathy in Europe for the Macedonian cause, but contrary to the expectations of the committee, the European powers did not intervene on behalf of the population, let alone demand autonomy for Macedonia. When the uprising took place, Austria–Hungary and Russia were already actively involved in formulating a reform program for Macedonia. With the collaboration and approval of the Sublime Porte, they had introduced a program in February 1903, which was meant to supplement the Ottoman administration's own reform measures for the provinces of Rumeli undertaken in 1902. The Ilinden insurrection cast doubt on the effectiveness of these reform attempts. Nevertheless, Russia and Austria–Hungary took the initiative once again to draft another program. The Mürzteg Program, as it was called, upheld the principle of reform within the status quo. The Sublime Porte considered the program to be direct meddling in its affairs yet had no choice but to accept it, which it officially did in November 1903.

According to the agreement, Austria–Hungary and Russia were to appoint two special “civil agents” who would supervise the implementation of the program and assist Hüseyin Hilmi Paşa, who had been appointed Inspector General for the Province of Rumeli, established in 1902 as a superior administrative division directly under the Sublime Porte. Italy was entrusted with appointing the general who would oversee the reorganization of the gendarmerie, which was central to the entire program. Britain and France were also going to assign forces to assist with the reforms. Each of the Great Powers was subsequently assigned a district for which it would be in charge. The provinces of Kosovo and Monastir were to be supervised by Austria–Hungary and Italy, respectively, whereas districts or sancaks of the province of Salonica were doled out among Britain, France, and Russia, which respectively took over Drama, Serres, and Salonica. The reorganization of the gendarmerie was the primary focus of the program, followed by judiciary and financial reform. However, lack of adequate funds and constant bickering among the powers beleaguered the program from the beginning, and the reforms did little to alleviate the living conditions in the region—if not worsen them through proposals such as “administrative reorganization according to national principles.”34

For Austria's role in the reform program and an account of the financial problems encountered in implementation, see Steven W. Sowards, Austria's Policy of Macedonian Reform (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1989). Another unintended outcome of the program's implementation was its confirmation of the Muslim population's fears that the region was not going to stay within the Ottoman Empire for long. This fear motivated them to take up arms and join the bands coordinated by the Committee of Progress and Union after 1907: see Şükrü Hanioǧlu, Preparation for a Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 233.

In 1904 the first Greek incursions into Macedonia started as a response to Bulgarian paramilitary activity. The original plans were conceived and organized by officers in the Greek army, and the first armed bands that infiltrated the region consisted mostly of Cretan volunteers. Later, the effort was coordinated locally by Greek consuls, specifically, Lambros Koromilas in Salonica, who assisted in supplying weapons, facilitated recruitment activities, and protected the interests of the Patriarchate through methods that were not always approved by the Patriarchate itself.35

This is an oversimplified version of how the Greek propaganda effort developed in Macedonia, aimed only at providing the reader with a general idea about the warring parties. I must note that the consuls, band leaders, teachers, and priests did not act in unison, as agents of the same organization, which they were not. Tensions occurred not only between representatives of the Patriarchate and the Hellenic Kingdom, but also within these groups.

The Ottoman Empire's control over the region was precarious, and its neighbors were aware that the key to eventual political supremacy was the local population. The struggle to earn their loyalty, through whatever means it took, determined the course of events. The conditions in certain areas were such that even the routine practices of everyday life such as going to the marketplace, attending a wedding, or even performing religious rites made the peasants vulnerable to attacks by warring factions in the area. Undertaking a population count that referenced “denominational affiliation,” as we will see shortly, only aggravated these conditions.

COMMON HAZARDS OF THE CENSUS

On the evening of 20 August 1905, a shepherd named Taşo Petre was grazing his sheep on a hill outside of his village, Negorçe (Negortzi), in eastern Macedonia when he was approached by four men he did not recognize.36

All the names quoted from Ottoman documents are transliterations of Ottoman Turkish, which are corrupted forms of Slavic and Greek proper names. Proper names quoted from documents written in the Latin alphabet are cited exactly as in the original.

The men, all of whom were armed, ran away after one of them handed the shepherd a letter written in Bulgarian addressed to the inhabitants of Negorçe. A day later, the police had reported the incident to the prefecture (kaymakamlık), which had the letter translated and sent to the General Inspectorate of Rumeli. The letter, written by a certain Vlad Vasil, apparently one of the local guerrilla leaders, read as follows:

I greet you all. The census clerks who will be coming to your village will give you new identification cards (nüfus tezkereleri), and ask you which denomination you belong to. Tell them “we are not Rum; we are Bulgars” and that you are of Bulgar denomination because you speak Bulgarian.37

An explanation is required concerning the use of the terms Rum, Bulgar, and Bulgarian throughout this paper. Faced with the difficulty of devising a terminology that would serve the main function of translation without enforcing a preconceived notion of ethnic identity, I opted to use the Ottoman terms Rum and Bulgar whenever I directly referenced a source and avoided the anachronistic Greek and Bulgarian. Throughout the text, Bulgar refers to an Exarchist—and almost exclusively Slavic-speaking—subject of the Ottoman Empire. “Bulgarian” is used only to refer either to the Slavic dialect spoken in the principality and Eastern Macedonia or to a national of Bulgaria. I am aware of the problems associated with calling this language Bulgarian, but again I find this to be less cumbersome than Macedo-Slavic and less ideologically charged than Macedonian. Greek likewise refers to nationals of the Hellenic Kingdom or to the language.

And don't be afraid of anyone. You will answer, “we want Bulgar identification cards.” Villagers, look, open up your beautiful eyes. Don't have yourselves registered Rum, because then no good will come to your children, your goods, and your animals, you will [have to] go up the mountains. Until today we somehow forgave your mistakes, but you could lose your well-being. Know that it is thanks to me that you have stayed alive…Don't imagine that you will stay in Negortzi, escape to Gevgili and be saved. There was a man like you in Cuma-i Bâlâ, a Rum, he escaped to America; we also have men over there; they killed him, keep that in mind.38

Kaymakamlik of Gevgili to Rumeli Vilayeti, Başbakanlik Devlet Arşivleri, Osmanli Arşivi, Rumeli Müfettişliği Selânik Evrâki (henceforth TFR.I.SL) 81/8053, 8 Ağustos 1321/21 August 1905.

Although some of the subtleties may have been lost in the awkward translation into Turkish (and further into English), the message of the letter was clear enough: declare yourselves Bulgars or die. The threat, a typical incident for the region at the time, also makes it clear that as far as the inhabitants of Macedonia were concerned, this census was no ordinary population count. Establishing demographic supremacy—through whatever means that it might take—had become part of the struggle for Macedonia, and the competition would have a horrible impact on the people claimed by both sides.

When the central administration dispatched census clerks, or nüfus memurları, to the Macedonian countryside in the spring of 1905, the struggle for Macedonia had already entered its most violent phase. Like its predecessor from 1881/82 to 1893, the new census questionnaire was to register the population according to membership in a given religious denomination such as Exarchist or Patriarchist, that is, followers of the Exarchate or the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Unfortunately, this seemingly straightforward principle proved to be a recipe for disaster. In November 1905, the British consul in Salonica was reporting to his superior:

[T]he Italian adjoint, Colonel Albera told me that it was his belief that the acuteness of the struggle between Greeks and Bulgarians was largely due to the senseless manner in which the census operations were being conducted. Nothing could have been more untimely than the attempt to revise the ethnological statistics of Macedonia during the present crisis, as both parties were anxious to establish the preponderance of their own element, and equally unscrupulous as to the means they employed to that end.”39

Graves to O'Connor, 18 November 1905, British Public Records Office, Foreign Office (henceforth FO), 195/2208.

What the consul failed to explain is how the local population came to understand the census as “ethnological statistics,” and why the reaction was so strong. The violent propaganda tactics of the guerrilla bands were surely effective in this regard, but if the census itself was the trigger for the tensions, why had the earlier census not caused similar problems? The key issue here was the popularization of the idea that collective consciousness, once identified and quantified, could serve as the legitimizing principle for territorial claims. Given the active role the European powers played in reaffirming this principle, it is difficult to understand the incredulousness of the consuls at the way in which the census polarized the population. The point was not lost on Hüseyin Hilmi Paşa, who countered the criticisms by pointing out that the decision for a general census had been made long before the Mürzteg Reform Program came into existence. The Reform Program carried a clause stipulating the reorganization of the region according to ethnic lines in the future, and according to Hilmi Paşa it was this clause, and not the census itself, that had exacerbated the situation in the provinces.40

Başbakanlik Devlet Arşivleri, Osmanli Arşivi, Rumeli Müfettişliği Arzuhaller (henceforth TFR.I.A.) 24/2387, 21 Mayis 1321/3 June 1905. The clause stated, “As soon as the pacification of the country is effected, the modification of the boundaries of the administrative units should be demanded from the Ottoman Government, with a view to the more regular grouping of the nationalities”: as quoted in Anastasoff, Tragic Peninsula, 119.

The pressure exerted by propaganda groups was not the local population's only grievance. Certain Ottoman officials, who viewed the above clause and the European presence in the region as the first steps toward annexation into a Greater Bulgaria, took it upon themselves to protect the interests of the Patriarchate. Complaints of abuses inflicted by Ottoman soldiers in Exarchist villages were frequently reported to Hüseyin Hilmi Paşa and to military and civil representatives of European powers. One such letter of complaint, forwarded by Colonel Vérand, the commander of the French gendarmerie stationed in Serres, to the French chargé d'affairs in Istanbul suggested that the abuses took place with the full awareness of high-ranking provincial officials. According to the letter, one of the census commissions headed by a certain “Silamsiz [sic] Ali Paşa” was demonstrating “a lot of zeal” in registering the villages they were assigned as Bulgars. The commission had told villagers they would be chased off their farms, and it threatened one of the communal leaders that his farm would be burned down unless everyone in the village registered as Rum. Costandine Tantcheff of Yeni-Mahale, who apparently was encouraging the villagers to take up Bulgar identity cards (nüfus tezkeresi), had been taken by gendarmes to the subgovernor (mutasarrif) of Serres, who, “after expressing his dissatisfaction, told him: ‘you know that Bulgars are malicious people, and yet you teach the villagers to call themselves Bulgars.’” Tantcheff was then informed that he would have to live in another village if he insisted on calling himself a Bulgar. The villagers, terrorized and threatened as they were, still refused to take up their identity cards (nüfus tezkereleri) as Rum, and they were deprived of the documents. The same Ali Paşa had also told the inhabitants of Kakaraska that “the government assigns the tezkere it desires.”41

Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (henceforth MAE) Constantinople, vol. 147, série E (Macédoine), 27 July 1905.

The letter continues to recount similar incidents from other villages, noting that the census commissions sent to the villages always had a representative from the Patriarchist community but never from its Bulgarian counterpart and were accompanied by soldiers who beat up villagers who refused to register as Rum.41 According to the allegations in another letter, submitted anonymously to an ambassador in Constantinople, some census commission members even resorted to outright torture. The letter reported an incident from the village of Zihni, where every head of a family was summoned by Lieutenant (Mülâzim) Hüseyin Efendi, rounded up in a pigsty, and forced to “crawl on bare knees on stones for three hours.”42

The same report mentions that Mülazim Hüseyin committed similar violence in Eğri Dere and Gorentzi.

Village notables were tortured further by soldiers who “sat on their heads and clubbed them.” They were then forced to take oaths that they would register as Rum because, they were told, they would “otherwise be killed.” The next morning, the Mülâzim “brought them in front of the head of the census commission, where the unfortunates had the courage to declare ‘given that the census is done by blows of sticks, we can register not only as Rums, but gypsies as well, if that will please the commission.’” The angry official registered them as neither.43

MAE Constantinople, vol. 147, série E (Macédoine), 7 September 1905.

Despite such assertions, it is impossible to document a systematic policy directed from the Imperial Center to inflate the number of Patriarchists in Macedonia.44

After stating that Colonel Vérand would ask for the resignation of the mentioned Mülazim, the report continues, “but this resignation would serve nothing, since it is Constantinople where the orders to transform the Bulgars into Greeks by all means possible come from”: ibid.

There is enough extant evidence, however, to suggest at least a bias in favor of the Patriarchists.45

It was a common notion among the French mission that Hüseyin Hilmi Paşa was also partial to the Patriarchists and would do anything within his power to increase their numbers. However, the Greek consulate was disturbed by what it perceived to be a “Bulgarian bias” among most of the French gendarmerie: MAE Turquie, Gendarmerie Internationale, vol. 415, 4 August 1904.

For instance, a communiqué sent by the Inspectorate to the prefecture of Vodine on 28 September 1904 reveals that, months before the commencement of the census process, provincial administrators were called on to be on the defense against the “Bulgar evil-doers,” who, it was understood, “had the idea of bringing Bulgars to the majority in the latest census.”46

TFR.I.SL 53/5221, 15 Eylül 1320/28 September 1904.

Months later, an encrypted message from the Inspectorate to the Porte stated the necessity of minimizing the problems related to the census and urged explicitly that officials should prevent “the registry of the Christian population's majority that have long been members of the Patriarchate among Bulgars.”47

Inspectorate to the Sadâret and Baş Kitâbet, TFR.I.SL 24/2387, 21 Mayis 1321/3 June 1905. Another common complaint about the partiality of Ottoman officials was that they always visited villages accompanied by Rums but never by Bulgars: see MAE, Constantinople, vol. 147, Série E (Macédoine), 27 July 1905.

It may be difficult to comprehend the Ottoman establishment's support of the Patriarchate if we look at it through the lens of nationalist teleology, but at the time this was a rational choice for both parties involved48

While the administration facilitated the Patriarchate's agenda, armed Greek bands were aided by local Muslims, and many of them had “Turkish” members: see Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, 222.

: the Patriarchate constituted “the lesser of two evils,” and the Sublime Porte wished to reestablish the authority of an imperial institution. This attitude would start to change gradually as the activities of “action-minded” priests in the Patriarchate drowned out the dissenting voices of their more traditionalist colleagues and as diverging tendencies within Greece and the Patriarchate coalesced and clashed with their Young Turk counterparts in Macedonia.

TAKING THE NATION OUT OF DENOMINATION

Fights over who would be called what on the census register had begun before the census itself. It seems that the Ottoman administration had entertained the idea of dropping the denomination or millet question altogether in favor of proceeding with the three benignly general categories of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian.49

Graves to O'Connor, 18 November 1905, FO 195/2208.

This idea was abandoned after Hüseyin Hilmi Paşa pointed out that, because the military exemption tax (bedel-i askeriyye) was paid separately by each millet, based on the total number of men eligible for military service, it could not be collected effectively under such a classification.50

TFR.I.A 24/2392, 10 June 1905. Stanford J. Shaw, “The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Tax Reforms and Revenue System,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975): 456.

It is not clear, however, whether this was really the reason for the inspector's insistence on registering denominational affiliation. The 1881/82–93 (henceforth 1893) census included denominational affiliations, but the principal register (esas defter) of 1893 contained only one entry for the Greek Orthodox population, which, although more specific than a general religious category such as “Christian,” was not as specific as denominational affiliation. That distinction—for tax purposes—was made in separate registers called Bulgar and Rum defterleri, where the Greek Orthodox population was recorded as Exarchist or Patriarchist. It seems that in the case of the 1903 census, the central state's desire to obtain an accurate count of its population, vertically ordered, and to preserve a common census policy across the empire overrode concerns about the problems that might arise from this distinction in a politically volatile area. A compromise solution was attempted whereby denominational affiliation would be recorded in the main census register while only religious affiliation would be denoted on the identity cards handed to individuals. However, this was also ineffective in quelling attacks by propaganda groups, who knew all too well that it was the denominational aggregates that mattered in the end.51

Monahan to O'Connor, 5 January 1906, FO 195/2232, Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population,162–63.

Perhaps more problematic was the administration's continuously confused efforts at “rectifying” terminology, which neither confirmed traditional markers of identity nor devised new ones that would comfortably accommodate the sensitivities of the population. After the official recognition of the Vlachs as a millet that would be acknowledged in the census register in 1905, the term millet no longer corresponded strictly to denominational affiliation. This raised questions about the naming of other ethnically differentiated members of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.52

Vlachs spoke a Romance language and constituted a separate sociolinguistic group, despite being followers of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. During this period, Romania emerged as their patron-state, claiming kinship based on language and with an eye toward establishing a base in an area that would soon be partitioned among Balkan nation states. For a history of the Vlachs, see T. J. Winnifrith, The Vlachs: The History of a Balkan People (London: Duckworth, 1987). The reaction of local administrators ranged from confusion to hostility toward Vlachs who wanted to—and had the right to—be recorded as “Vlach,” and it seems that despite the assurances of the government to Romanian officials, the ruling was not put into effect uniformly throughout the region: Graves to O'Connor, 5 February 1906, FO 195/2232.

For instance, when some villagers petitioned the Inspectorate to be registered as belonging to the Serbian denomination, or “Sirb mezhebi,” the administrator of their subprefecture felt the need to elaborate, in his response to the Inspectorate's inquiry, that “Serbness is not a denomination but a nationality (Sirblik bir mezheb olmayub milliyet bulunduğuna).” Therefore, he argued, any demands to change census records on this basis should be rejected.53

Doyran Kaymakami to the Inspectorate, TFR.I.SL 80/7938, 29 Temmuz 1321/10 August 1905. Milliyet

(nationality)—confusingly derived from the word millet—was an entirely new term, somehow recognized but not completely understood by the Ottoman bureaucracy. Even though this particular administrator noted the distinction between mezheb and milliyet and recognized only the relevance of the former for census categories, there were many cases where local officials were faced with even more perplexing choices, especially concerning the registry of people who identified themselves as Albanian, Serb, or Greek, categories that did not necessarily correspond to one specific denomination. Another concept, “cinsiyet,” which more or less corresponded to race (in its nonbiological, turn of the century meaning) or national affiliation in this context, was thrown into the mix in order to differentiate such people.54

Millet and milliyet still refer to concepts akin to their turn-of-the-century meaning in modern Turkish, but cinsiyet has changed meaning to denote gender. Apparently, “ginsiyya,” a term that still refers to nationality in Egyptian Arabic, was used as a category in the Egyptian census of 1848: Ghislaine Alleaume and Phillipe Fargues, “La Naissance d'une statistique d'état: Le recensement de 1848 en Egypte,” Histoire et Mesure 13 (1998): 165. Even though we do not have a well-documented study of the relationship between Egyptian and Ottoman census practices, my speculation is that the Egyptian census could be where the term originated. Kenneth Cuno and Michael Reimer argue that “Egyptian census-taking up to the British occupation, while directed from Cairo, was nevertheless part of the overall Ottoman effort to enumerate the empire's population, rather than a separate undertaking,” suggesting that it was quite likely for bureaucrats on either side to be aware of the terminology used by the other: see Kenneth M. Cuno and Michael J. Reimer, “The Census Registers of Nineteenth-Century Egypt: A New Source for Social Historians,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24 (1997): 197.

This perpetually shifting terminology reflected the problems of a new order that ran short of words with which to express the nuances of preexisting norms of social organization. In an attempt to impose a certain degree of control on the chaos that prevailed, Inspector General Hüseyin Hilmi Paşa issued general guidelines that would be followed in the registration of the Christian population in the Macedonian provinces. He first decreed that August 1903, that is, the date of the Ilinden Uprising, be legally instituted as a cutoff date for official recognition of conversions to and from the Patriarchate. Conversions after this date would be declared void in order to minimize the incentives the bands would have in coercing the population during the census. Four general principles would be followed by the census clerks with regard to disputable cases.

  • Those who were followers of the Exarchate or the Patriarchate before August 1903 should be registered according to their old church affiliation.
  • Those who claim to be Rum or Serb now, even though they have been followers of the Exarchate for a long time, should be registered as “Orthodox, member of the Exarchate” (Eksarhhaneye mensub Ortodoks) until their nationalities (cinsiyetleri) are determined after the disturbances are over.
  • Those Christians who have long been followers of the Patriarchate and who clearly will insist on having their nationalities as well as their denominations spelled out (mezhebleriyle beraber cinsiyetlerinin dahi tasrihini mussirren iddia edecekleri derkâr olan) such as Serbs, Vlachs, and Albanians who reside in vilâyets of Monastir and Kosovo should be registered as “Serb, Vlach or Albanian, member of the Patriarchate.”
  • Those who are followers of the Patriarchate and claim to be Serb, Vlach, Albanian, and Bulgarian although their nationalities are disputable (mes'ele-yi cinsiyetleri taht-ı itiraz ve ihtilafda kalacaklar) should be registered, as in the second clause, “Orthodox, member of the Patriarchate.”55

    TFR.I.A. 24/2387, 3 June 1905.

These guidelines did little in practice to solve the problems. In fact, they aggravated them by adding more variables and jargon to an already muddled system of classification. One of the direct effects was to increase the already high volume of correspondence generated by lower level provincial officials, who sought the approval of their superiors in situations that might constitute exceptions or that failed to fit any category. It was only a couple of days after these regulations were communicated to all of the departments that the subgovernor of Serres asked for approval from the inspector general to register “Bulgars who are attached to the Patriarchate as ‘Bulgar, member of the Patriarchate’ (Rum Patrikhanesine mensub Bulgar),” given that “according to the general orders, Albanians, Bosnians etc. attached to the Greek Patriarchate will be registered as ‘Albanian or Bosnian, member of the Greek Patriarchate.’”56

Siroz Mutasarrifi to the Inspectorate, TFR.I.SL 74/7367, 26 Mayis 1321/8 June 1905.

The subgovernor's inquiry is interesting for two reasons. First, it highlights the Inspectorate's careful omission of the word “Bulgar” from the final registers in favor of the more ambiguous “Orthodox member of the Exarchate,” reinforcing the perception that the Patriarchists enjoyed a privileged position vis-à-vis their Exarchist brethren, especially given that the subgovernor's request to acknowledge the Bulgar cinsiyeti (albeit with a qualifier) in the register seems not to have been granted. Second, it illustrates a common problem faced by local administrators in following regulations sent from the center. Their decisions, as in the case of the subgovernor of Serres, were often at odds with their superiors, mostly because of the contradictory imperatives to take the initiative in settling a dispute and to ensure that the decision would comply with the central administration's vague guidelines. Another example in this regard is the prefect of Doyran, who did not find it appropriate to follow the entries in the 1893 register for three villages under his jurisdiction but still forwarded the matter to the Inspectorate, seeking approval for the course of action.57

Doyran Kaymakamliği to the Inspectorate, TFR.I.SL 74/7301, 21 Mayis 1321/3 June 1905. I have not been able to locate the Inspectorate's verdict on the issue, but if decisions in other similar cases are taken into account, I can infer that the prefect's decision was not approved.

The first of the villages was Valandova (Valandovo in the district of Stroumnitza), which consisted of twenty households that had been “claiming to be Bulgars for the last five years,” even though the 1893 register cited them as Rum. “In order to prevent the complaints and hardships that will probably emerge,” the prefect found it appropriate to register them as Exarchists. The other two cases concerned Fourka and Vladya (Vladaia). Apparently, the residents of Fourka had somehow been registered in the Bulgar defteri during the past census, even though they had been attached to the Patriarchate for a long time, a mistake they petitioned to have corrected on 28 March 1901. On 30 August 1904, they petitioned again, this time to change their denomination to the Exarchate; they also demanded a Bulgarian teacher on the grounds that their children did not speak Greek. This petition, however, was not accepted. The prefect expected that they would complain and try to be registered as Bulgars, but his decision, pending approval, was to refuse the request since they had been “Rum by origin and for generations.” The case of Vladya, in contrast, was the complete opposite. The residents of this village had been registered in the Rum defteri, but since a majority of them had been “Bulgars for the last ten years and their church and school belonged to the Bulgars,” the prefect's counsel was to register them among Exarchists with regard to the old register.

The criteria used by the prefect to justify his decisions, namely, that of “church and school belonging to one community and not the other,” underscore another complication with the census process. In fact, the proprietorship of churches and schools was itself an often disputed issue among communities. Therefore, a community's use of the church and school building was subject to the same problems as the original question. In other words, the prefect's logic, however well intentioned, confused the basis of the problem with its solution and did not address the fundamental problem of recording the villagers' so-called true identity, which, according to the Inspectorate, was to be found in the 1893 register, at least until further notice. The process seemed completely to exclude the wishes of the counted. It did not mean, however, that they were incapable of finding ways to resist.

RESISTING THE COUNT

In 1903 the personal identity card (nüfus tezkeresi) was made a requirement for the completion of any official transaction. Identity cards were to be issued for every individual in conjunction with the census survey; as such, they were one of the state's major instruments for coaxing or coercing the peasants to participate in the count.58

Cem Behar, “Qui Compte? ‘Recensement’ et statistiques démographiques dans L'Empire ottoman, du XVIe au XXe siècle,” Histoire et Mesure 13 (1998): 142–43.

The requirement was a novel concept in state surveillance59

The mürur tezkeresi was another document that contained similar information, but it was only required for travel. In other words, it was an internal passport. Keith Brown notes that travelers in the Ottoman Empire found this an annoyance and they were not aware that “they were experiencing a part of the future” in a country they considered primitive: Brown, The Past in Question,65.

but remained ineffective against a sizable segment of the population. Even though the government was adamant about completing the census, many villagers slowed the process down by simply refusing to obtain their tezkeres.60

Monahan to O'Connor, 5 January 1906, FO; MAE, Constantinople, vol. 147, série E, 7 October 1905, 27 July 1905.

In Negovan, a village in the district of Langaza, for instance, the peasants were called in for an interview by the authorities to settle the dispute about their denomination. They did not respond to the summons, however, and as a result no tezkeres were assigned. According to the correspondence between the prefecture of Langaza and its administrative superior, the province of Salonica, the inhabitants of Negovan had converted twice: they were originally Rum, then they had converted to the Exarchate “under threats from the brigands,” and finally they had converted back to the Patriarchate. According to the tax and census bureaus, they were still listed in the Bulgar register, and the province demanded that this be corrected.61

Selânik Valisi to Langaza Kaymakamliği, Rumeli Müfettişliği Müteferrik Evrak (hereafter, TFR.I.M) 11/1088-1, 9 Şubat 1319/22 February 1906.

This order was evidently carried out, and the village was transferred to the Rum register. The issue, however, was not resolved here. The Exarchist archbishop of Salonica sent a petition requesting the transfer of their records back to the Bulgar register. The general census administrator took the petition seriously enough to advise the census bureau of Langaza to carry out an inquiry. The commission was to inspect military tax exemption records and find out whether the community had employed Bulgarian priests and teachers to determine the “proper” denomination of Negovan residents.62

Nüfus Nâziri to Langaza Nüfus Müdürlüğü, TFR.I.M. 11/1088-1, 25 February 1906.

The village notables, the community leader, and the priest had presumably been called in to settle this last issue, but they had not presented themselves even two weeks after they were called in. As a result, the matter remained unresolved.63

Selânik Vilayeti to Langaza Kaymakamliği, TFR.I.M 11/1088-1, 11 March 1906.

It is not clear from the correspondence of the local Ottoman authorities why the village elders failed to attend the interview. The exchange, back and forth, of conflicting petitions suggests a certain hesitation among the inhabitants to register one way or the other. This incident is also remarkable in that it was the Exarchist archbishop of Salonica who requested a transfer of records, not the villagers themselves, as was the normal procedure. The villagers' unwillingness to come forth under these circumstances strongly implies that they had been threatened by either or both of the parties of propagandists in the area, who employed equally brutal methods to enforce their rules.

Another case that testifies to the kind of objections the peasants raised against the census process occurred in Kavakli, today's Leukon, a village located just outside of Serres.64

The entire collection of correspondence concerning this village is located in the file TFR.I.SL 74/7395.

The inhabitants complained to the Inspectorate in a telegram dated 31 May 1905 that despite their objections they had been registered as Exarchists, and returned their tezkeres. This telegram, coupled with Greek Consul Koromilas's personal intervention, apparently precipitated a full investigation of the village's church and ethnic affiliation, which, it seems, could not simply be determined by asking the villagers which church they attended. Even the telegram itself reveals why Kavakli was a controversial case. Most of the names signed under the petition stating they had been “Rum since old times” and that would “remain so until eternity” were Slavic rather than Greek versions of popular Orthodox Christian names—Yovan Yorgi, Mitye Renya, Sotir Atanas, Simyo Yuvan (sic).65

Kavakli residents to the Inspectorate, TFR.I.SL 74/7395, 18 Mayis 1321/31 May 1905.

It is also interesting to note that the village was cited in two ethnographic maps published by Bulgarians in 1901 and 1905 as Exarchist and Patriarchist, respectively, while another pro–Bulgarian author, Dimitar Mishev, listed it as a “Hellenizing Bulgarian Patriarchist” village with a population of 328.66

Anonymous, “Cartes ethnographiques des vilayets Salonique, Cossovo, Monastir” (Sofia, 1901); anonymous, “Carte des écoles chrétiennes de la Macédoine” (Paris, 1905); D. M. Brancoff [Dimitar Mishev], La Macédoine et sa population chrétienne (Paris, 1905), 198.

Kavakli, it seems, preserved its “ethnic ambiguity” even in the eyes of the propagandists.

A long correspondence between the Inspectorate General, the Province of Salonica, and the Department of Serres reveals that the dispute arose partly because of the guidelines issued earlier by the Inspectorate itself. It turned out that Kavakli residents had never petitioned to join the Exarchate; instead, the census commission had simply copied the previous register of 1893, which cited the village as Exarchist.67

Selânik Vilayeti to the Inspectorate, TFR.I.SL 74/7395, 19 Mayis 1321/1 June 1905.

The local governor's explanation was that the inhabitants of Kavakli were speaking Bulgarian during the visit of the last census commission, and therefore, “according to the orders of the Ministry of the Interior, part of them had been given Bulgar, and later ‘Christian and Orthodox’ tezkeres. Besides, since the principal register does not contain millet affiliation, and the inhabitants obviously spoke in Bulgarian, they were written down in the register called Bulgar sicili, [and later] they were registered as Bulgars in compliance with the order that former records would not be changed.”68

Ibid., 22 Mayis 1321/3 June 1905.

There is no doubt that the inhabitants of Kavakli were Slavic-speaking. Even Greek Consul Koromilas, in his letter to Hüseyin Hilmi Paşa, did not dispute this. What he disputed was whether the language spoken could be considered sufficient indication of a village's ethnic affiliation. His sentiments were not based on an attachment to the principle of “self-determination,” however. In fact, Koromilas would hardly have advocated the distribution of tezkeres based solely on the choices of peasants in Macedonia. His point of view was better encapsulated in his words, “As for the language spoken [in the village], I am amazed that the commission has the right to state it without the inhabitants' consent. I admit that this census is complicated since we must not conform to the statements of the inhabitants except up to a certain extent.”69

Greek Consul General Koromilas to Inspector General Hilmi Paşa, TFR.I.SL 74/7395, 19 Mayis 1321/1 June 1905; emphasis mine.

We can draw a number of conclusions from the case of Kavakli. First, it demonstrates once again the ambivalence those in the region possessed toward ethnic affiliation—not only the villagers themselves, but also the Ottoman local administrators and even the Greek consul. Second, as the consul's words revealed, the people's own perceptions of their identity, even when explicitly stated, were often considered irrelevant. The consul and the local administrators, even though they were well aware of the dubious definitions in the census questionnaire, were less interested in questioning the usefulness under such conditions of such a census than they were in neutralizing those very same conditions to obtain what they considered to be the “appropriate” results. The governor, in seeking the inspector general's approval, argued that the principle of preserving the old records had to be applied consistently to all cases for the sake of preventing other villagers from demanding changes in census records for similar reasons. Therefore, Kavakli's residents should tolerate Bulgar tezkeres for the time being, even if they were justified in their claims.70

Selânik Vilayeti to the Inspectorate, TFR.I.SL 74/7395, 22 Mayis 1321/4 June 1905.

Hüseyin Hilmi Paşa, in contrast, advised that the village be registered as “Patriarchist,” despite apparent concerns about “inconsistency.”

It is also very revealing that the peasants, who had apparently been paying their military tax as Exarchists, did not object to their status until 1905, when they were to receive their new tezkeres. This could be either because they were not aware of the previous situation or, if they were, because they did not care to object. Both possibilities underscore the sheer novelty of the issue for the party it affected most.

Finally, the fact that the Kavakli inhabitants—who claimed that they were Rum and would “remain so for eternity”—actually conversed with one another in a Slavic idiom demonstrates the complexity and resilience of traditional and, in this case, religious loyalties. Another telling example of such resilience occurred in the village of Zervi. Census authorities suspected that the inhabitants of Zervi were Exarchists even though they were registered as Patriarchists in the 1893 register. An inquiry commission was dispatched to the village to resolve the issue. The response Zervi residents gave them was the snappish protest, “We are neither Rum nor Bulgar, we are Christians.”71

Vodine Kaymakamliği to the Inspectorate, TFR.I.SL 87/8623, 13 Teşrinievvel 1321/26 October 1905.

The term “Rum,” which denoted a religious affiliation in the past, namely (Greek) Orthodox Christian, no longer meant the same thing. Nevertheless, some still wanted to hold on to that religious identity.

CONCLUSION

The response of the peasants of Zervi to the Ottoman census commission should not come as a surprise. When modernizing states came in contact with rural communities and attempted to integrate them into new sociopolitical structures, they often found out that these communities did not give up their long-established references for social differentiation on demand. Religious identity was one of the strongest such anchors. Two decades later, in 1924, when the Soviet state enlisted the help of an army of ethnographers to classify and enumerate the nations, or narodnosti, of the Soviet Union, even the highly centralized and organized structure of the census and the number of analytical tools at the disposal of the census takers did not help. Much to the dismay of ethnographers, provincial and religious identities in Europe and Asia, respectively, continued to be understood as “nationality” by peasants.72

Francine Hirsch, “The Soviet Union as Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937 and 1939 Censuses,” Slavic Review 56 (1997): 259.

It took another two decades of Soviet social engineering to consolidate those peasants into nations inhabiting geographically delimited territories.

This is not to privilege religion as a “pure” marker of identity as opposed to an “alien grid” imposed on the population. We must keep in mind that religion was also used to inform “racial” enumeration categories, and more importantly, that religion itself was a marker produced socially and deployed in dynamic forms. Nor do I suggest that peasant communities inhabited a magically peaceful world of undifferentiated and coherent units before they were nationalized. Just as caste was “not a figment of the British political imagination,”73

Appadurai, Number in the Colonial Imagination,319.

religious and linguistic differences in Macedonia were not invented by the Ottoman administration or the European patron states. But their politicization was. In order to be able to see the ways in which those differences were socially articulated before and after the onset of the process of nationalization, we first need to divest that process from its assumed teleology. From this perspective, it is useful to remember that the two conflicting communities described here had been living side by side until recently, baptizing their children in the same churches, sending their children to the same schools, and burying their dead in the same cemeteries. Even the church schism did not erase these practices overnight; there were countless instances in which the denominations took turns using a church building or held mass together.74

TFR.I. SL 67/6606; see also Brailsford, Macedonia, 72.

Boundaries and divisions occupied a much smaller place in the communities' collective memory until normalization and enumeration linked those same divisions with the politics of representation. In other words, sectarian division within the Orthodox church, which had been a very narrowly defined difference, was transformed into a general principle on which the society was divided and represented—not only locally but also in the eyes of an international audience.

The unyielding, rigid classificatory practices of the modern state, such as the census, were a galvanizing force in creating national identity in the imperial and colonial contexts I have mentioned here (and ironically facilitated their own destruction). However, there are limits to the parallels we can draw between these contexts. Most obvious is the fact that many of the peculiarities of the colonial census can be gleaned not from what it counted in the colonies but how that count contrasted with its metropolitan counterpart. One important feature that distinguishes the dynastic empires in this regard is the singular relationship the state had already established and kept in place with its subjects through its bureaucracy. Even though there were variations in local practices, these were not of the nature that separated colonial and metropolitan administration principles.

When we look at the implementation of the 1903 census, for instance, we clearly see that the census takers did not start with a tabula rasa on which they could sketch a system of classification that they had conjured up based on an ethnographical study of local customs. Instead, they had to work within an organic system that preceded the modern notions and categories of collective identity—a “system” that included gendarmes torturing villagers to make them accept their identity cards, local administrators relentlessly reporting protests to their superiors (some of whom did not know whether “Serb” was a religious or a national category), and peasants who kept insisting that they were simply Christians. The census takers, as unwelcome and alien as they may have been in the villages they visited, represented an authority with which the population was accustomed to communicating. This culture of negotiation was especially significant in terms of getting the voices of the peasants heard. It was expressed through protests, petitions, and, failing that, outright refusal to participate, suggesting that the census was not simply a top-down operation and that the population itself significantly affected the way it was implemented.

Another distinguishing element of the Ottoman census of 1903 was the tension generated by the inherent contradiction between a new practice, which presumably relied on information at the level of the individual, and the preexisting relationship between the peasants and the state, which defined the peasants solely in terms of their communities. Even though the peasants were given individual identity cards, the choices they made in accepting those cards were not individual ones. It is remarkable that most petitions were signed by representatives of an entire village and processed by the administration under the name of the village, not under the names of the individuals. We should also recall that disputes concerning allegiance to the Patriarchate and the Exarchate required lengthy investigations into the community's church attendance by the census commission instead of a simple question addressed to the individuals during the census. The inhabitants' own statements were not to be taken at face value, and this was a point on which the Greek consul and Ottoman administrators agreed, albeit for different reasons.

Beshara Doumani's analysis of a population count in Nablus in the mid-19th century helps us see the census functioning as a domain staked out between the center and the periphery.75

Beshara Doumani, “The Political Economy of Population Counts in Ottoman Palestine: Nablus, circa 1850,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 26 (1994).

The negotiations that went on between the state and the local notables in Palestine may seem reminiscent of the negotiations we saw in early 20th-century Macedonia, but in fact there was a significant difference, which Doumani hints at in his final remark, “By the end of the [19th] century all individuals regardless of sex and age would become the basic unit of counting, further facilitating the integration of the local population into new administrative, cultural, and legal categories aimed at undermining local affiliation and creating loyal Ottoman ‘citizens.’”76

Ibid., 14.

The difference, in other words, concerned the politics of counting, which was no longer concentrated within an elite domain but diffused across a much wider segment of society.

The degree of the state's success in carrying out its ideological objective of creating “loyal Ottoman citizens” through modern population counts is another matter. According to Cem Behar, the vocabulary of the last two censuses of the Ottoman Empire went even further than erasing local affiliations: it sought to substitute national identity with an Ottoman one.77

Behar, “Qui Compte?” 143.

The way in which the classificatory logic of the census was imposed on the population in Macedonia suggests that there was indeed a concern with placing people in categories designated by the state, but the same agenda, as we saw, did not always trickle down to the lower echelons of provincial administration. In any case, under the circumstances that prevailed in Macedonia—and in other regions of the empire—the executors of the 1903 census had neither the means nor the will to inject a sense of “Ottomanness” in the society. I would argue in fact that it was more effective in the “minoritization” of confessional categories in the empire than their Ottomanization.78

I use the term “minoritization” to underline the contradiction and tension inherent in the modernizing state's efforts to classify the population. An action that is presumably meant to assimilate a group essentially creates a minority out of a confessional community by objectivizing membership and compounding the sense of distinctiveness and subjugation.

It is obvious that, when political incentives are involved, a census can never be a purely statistical exercise. A less obvious fact, but equally important, is that no census is without a political motive. However, the assumption remains that it is possible to separate those incentives from the census process by introducing categories that can be “objectively” determined—and this assumption was a widely accepted principle among European ethnographers and geographers at the turn of 20th century. These “objective” categories, however, engendered a different set of problems in practice. Take, for instance, the censuses of the Hapsburg Empire between 1880 and 1910, whose scientific sophistication and efficient implementation, unlike the condemned efforts of the Ottoman Empire, were not disputed by any self-respecting statistician in Europe. Because of a question concerning language, nationality became an issue in the census questionnaire of the Hapsburg Empire.79

It must be noted that Adolf Ficker, who was in charge of the surveys, did not agree that nationality could be equated with language alone, or even that it had a place in the census questionnaire at all: see Z. A. B. Zeman, “Four Austrian Censuses and Their Political Consequences,” in The Last Years of Austria–Hungary, ed. Mark Cornwall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990), 31.

Language was understood simply as the medium of daily communication in the Austrian half of the empire, whereas the Hungarian half defined it as “mother tongue,” apparently with no clear consensus on what “mother tongue” meant and where, despite the officials' vehement assertions to the contrary, the language question was inextricably linked with nationality in the minds of the national elites.80

Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

Any bilingual person can testify that language is an ideologically charged subject, and there were thousands of bilingual speakers in the Hapsburg Empire. It is striking that the Austrian census commission did not consider bilingualism as an available option, despite the fact that it might have resolved a good deal of controversy over the question.81

According to King, the “homogenizing zeal of Europe's nation-states” was largely to blame in the officials' insistence on one language. “[B]y allowing only one language per person, state demographers provided to ethnic nationhood a boost that was as great as unintentional”: ibid., 59.

Appadurai writes that “number, by its nature, flattens idiosyncrasies and creates boundaries around…homogenous bodies.…[S]tatistics are to bodies and social types what maps are to territories: they flatten and enclose.”82

Appadurai, Number in the Colonial Imagination, 319.

Not more than one language, one religion, or any other marker—however defined—can be associated with an individual if a register is to serve the classificatory purpose for which it is designed: the translation of complex social relations into raw data that could be organized in columns and aggregates. In other words, fluidity of, and overlap in, social identity has no place in census registers (nor maps based on those registers, which complete the “flattening and enclosing” of a population), despite testimonials of resistance to rigid classification such as those that were buried among lengthy notes and explanations scribbled on the margins of endless bureaucratic exchanges.

David Kertzer and Dominique Arel emphasize an extremely important function of the census, namely, that it “does much more than simply reflect social reality; rather, it plays a key role in the construction of that reality.”83

Kertzer and Arel, “Censuses, Identity Formation.” 2.

In the examples cited earlier, it is easy to see that a one to one correspondence between census categories and the “social reality” of the groups they purportedly represent is difficult to achieve. What is not equally self-evident, and what Kertzer and Arel mean when they speak of the “construction of that reality,” is that the introduction of those categories is a mechanism through which the social groups and the collective identities that would fill in those columns are created. Their social reality does not precede the entries in the census registry. Conversely, those very categories name, and thereby bring into existence, what we perceive as social reality. The two mutually shape and reinforce one another. We must note, however, that the experience of the Ottoman census of 1903 in Macedonia demonstrates that this mechanism worked through more than the power of naming. The census, by deepening and reifying vertical divisions within the population, contributed to a general consciousness of being one thing and not the other, and the violence that accompanied that consciousness turned a piece of paper, the identity card, into the difference between life and death.

Author's note: This article has benefited from the generous help of many. I am grateful to Professors Şükrü Hanioǧlu, Peter Brown, Charis Exertzoglou, and Rifa

at Abou-El-Haj for their comments and ongoing support; Leyla Aker and Peter Turner for their careful editing; Dimitar Bechev for his criticism and meticulous attention to detail; and Kerem Öktem and Adam Becker for their helpful suggestions with the title. I am also indebted to the anonymous referees who read the article for IJMES.