site.btaBulgarian Scholars Debunk Serbian Claims on Alleged Existence of Shopi Nation

At a BTA-hosted news conference on Tuesday, Bulgarian scholars debunked what they called Serbian "manipulations" about the existence of a separate Shopi language. The scholars refuted Serbian media claims challenging the national identity of Bulgarians in the Western Outlands (Bosilegrad and Tsaribrod regions).

The 1919 Treaty of Neuilly forced Bulgaria to cede the towns of Bosilegrad and Tsaribrod and their adjacent villages with their predominantly ethnic Bulgarian population to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Since then, the area has been known in Bulgaria as 'the Western Outlands'. Present-day Serbian state law recognizes Bulgarians as a national minority.

"At this point, Serbian scholars define the Shopi language as neither Bulgarian nor Serbian - a hermaphrodite in a way," Prof. Ana Kocheva of the Bulgarian Language Institute with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences told Tuesday's news conference.

"This practice of 'creating' new languages - God forbid new nations, in the Balkans, of which w are all too familiar, starts exactly like this - when a nature is unclear, it is intermediate", Kocheva said. "However, such practice eventually finds another ethnonym, another linguistic labelling, which has nothing to do with its genetic derivation, i.e. with Bulgarian. In other words, I mean to say that it is no wonder that one day we will end up not only with a Shopi language and a Shopi nation, but that this language will be almost Serbian." The professor sees a probable link of Serbia's "pseudoscientific claims" to the ongoing massive protests in that country and seek to deflect attention to an external enemy.

Prof. Dr Lucia Antonova-Vasileva, Director of the Bulgarian Language Institute, said that the Shopi have their ethnographic features but the inhabitants cannot be clearly differentiated in ethnographic and linguistic terms. "I feel sorry for the Bulgarian minority in Serbia because instead of becoming a bridge of good-neighbourliness between the two countries it is becoming a hostage of Serbian political interests in the region," said Prof.  Georgi Nikolov, Director of the Macedonian Scientific Institute. 

In an open letter to Serbian state officials, eight ethnic Bulgarian associations in Serbia recently condemned the newly resurged "Shopi ethnicity" narrative in that country. A key bone of contention is the support provided by the National Council of the Bulgarian National Minority, the Municipality of Bosilegrad, and the Hristo Botev National Library in Bosilegrad for A Book about Bosilegrad – Notes from the Past by Ivan Mitic, where the author claims that the local Bulgarian population is not Bulgarian but belongs to a separate Shopi nation. The letter accuses the National Council of funding a publication that undermines Bulgarian history and identity, violating its constitutional duty to protect minority rights.

The Shopi are a distinct Bulgarian ethnographic group living between Pirot (Southeastern Serbia) to the west and Ihtiman (Southwestern Bulgaria) to the east. The largest Shopi urban centre is the capital of Bulgaria, Sofia. In 1878 the local population, led by the Voivode Simo Sokolov, organized an uprising aimed at uprooting Ottoman rule in Tran, Tsaribrod, Bosilegrad, Radomir, etc. and fending off Serbian claims to the region, thus keeping it in the fledgling Bulgarian Principality.