Tassos Kostopoulos compares Stamatiou's distrust towards Karev's self-presentation with the profession of a "purely Macedonian consciousness" of the Bulgarian Army colonel Anastas Yankov during his short passage through Greece on his way back from Macedonia to Bulgaria in December 1902, after the failed Gorna Dzhumaya Uprising, which, contrary to Karev's, was received cordially by Greek nationalists and taken at face value even by the most Slavophobe Greek newspapers. See Tassos Kostopoulos, Faire la police dans un pays etranger, pp. 5-6, n. 21.. Per Tchavdar Marinov the manifesto issued by Anastas Yankov during the Gorna Dzhumaya Uprising promulgated only a specific “local Macedonian” patriotism, a phenomenon that was described at the beginning of the twentieth century by foreign observers such as Henry Noel Brailsford and Allen Upward. They likewise noted the legend that Alexander the Great and Aristotle were “Bulgarians.” Obviously, by the late Ottoman period, the ancient glory of the region was exploited for self-legitimation by groups with different loyalties—Greek as well as Bulgarian. At that time the anarchist Pavel Shatev described the first vestiges of the process of an ethno-national differentiation between Bulgarian and Macedonian, while some people he met felt “only Bulgarians”, but others despite being Bulgarians "by nationality", felt themselves Macedonians above all. It was generating a new identity that, during that period, was still not necessarily exclusive vis-à-vis Greek or Bulgarian national belonging. Marinov claims that people as Yankov, although Bulgarians by national identification and Macedonian supranationalist by political conviction, began to promote rarely the prognostics of some different ethnicity, which after the First World War were transformed into definitive Macedonian nationalism. For more see: Tchavdar Marinov, "Famous Macedonia, the Land of Alexander: Macedonian Identity at the Crossroads of Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian Nationalism", In: Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume One, pp: 293–294; 304.
After 1945, in ex-Serbian Macedonia, the authorities rehabilitated the idea of a separate Macedonian language, identity and consciousness, sponsoring the creation of a separate Macedonian Church. At the same time, official history rehabilitated only certain VMRO-era revolutionaries, like Goce Delcev, Nikola Karev and Dame Gruev, who they deemed deserving because they were not associated with the idea of union of Macedonia with Bulgaria. Meanwhile, most emphasis was placed on celebrating the joint Yugoslav history of the World War II Communist struggle. Other VMRO figures, like Todor Aleksandrov or Ivan Mihajlov remained blacklisted owing to their strong pro-Bulgarian stands. Historians today agree that the truth was not so black-and-white. Per Prof. Todor Cepreganov: Almost all Macedonian revolutionaries from that era at some point of their life took pro-Bulgarian stands or pronounced themselves as Bulgarians – this is not disputed. See: Sinisa Jakov Marusic, New Statue Awakens Past Quarrels in Macedonia, in Balkan Transitional Justice - BIRN, July 13, 2012.
books.google.com
Two Krusevo natives were centrally involved in the action. Nikola Karev, from the community known as Bulgars, was the local representative to the central committee of the organization and was the military commander of the insurgent forces... Fieldwork Dilemmas: Anthropologists in Postsocialist States, Hermine G. De Soto, Nora Dudwick, Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2000, ISBN978-0-299-16374-7, p. 37.
denesen.mk
Последното интервју на Мише Карев: Колишевски и Страхил Гигов сакале да ги прогласат Гоце, Даме и Никола за Бугари! 02.08.2018 Денешен весник.
