The Kruševo Manifesto is a presumable manifesto published by the Forest Staff of the Krushevo Revolutionary Region during the 1903 Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising. It was calling upon the Muslim population to join forces with the republican government in the struggle against tyranny, and to attain democratic form of statehood. It urged that the uprising was against the Sultanate, and was not religiously or ethnically based. The original document did not survive, and its historical authenticity is disputed.We, the people: politics of national peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, Diana Mishkova, Central European University Press, 2009, , p. 127.Fieldwork dilemmas: anthropologists in postsocialist states, Hermine G. De Soto, Nora Dudwick, Publisher University of Wisconsin press, 2000, p. 27.The past in question: modern Macedonia and the uncertainties of nation, Keith Brown, Princeton University Press, 2003, , p. 230.
The manifesto is cited by modern Macedonian historiography as a historical example of the use of a separate Macedonian language during the uprising,Stephen E. Palmer, Jr. and Robert R. King, Yugoslav Communism and the Macedonian Question (New York: Archon Books, 1971), p. 156. In fact, Macedonian historiography refers to a text published in 1923 by Nikola Kirov in Sofia, in his native dialect, as part of a play called "Ilinden". In the play, he attributed his cousin Nikola Karev the creation of the Manifesto.Myths and boundaries in south-eastern Europe, Author Pål Kolstø, Publisher Hurst & Co., 2005, p. 284. On the other hand, Macedonian historians object to Kirov's classification of then Krusevo's Slavic population as 'Bulgarian'.Keith Brown, The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation, Princeton University Press, 2003, , p. 81. At the turn of the 20th century, there were only a few researchers who claimed that a separate Macedonian language and ethnicity existed.Dennis P. Hupchick states that "the obviously plagiarized historical argument of the Macedonian nationalists for a separate Macedonian ethnicity could be supported only by linguistic reality, and that worked against them until the 1940s. Until a modern Macedonian literary language was mandated by the communist-led partisan movement from Macedonia in 1944, most outside observers and linguists agreed with the Bulgarians in considering the vernacular spoken by the Macedonian Slavs as a western dialect of Bulgarian". Dennis P. Hupchick, Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995, p. 143.
References
External links
The Macedonian and English translations of the Manifesto