Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
For the most part agree with that, BUT.
My main point is the assumption that there was no defined black and white opinion. Answers in one Village would be different to the one you get in the next down the road.
I can give a one consensus there was no regional consensus. In many households you could get differing view regarding what people thought there Ethnic bias was let alone village and regional opinions.
And preferences one year in the same household could differ radicaly the next. Getting your otherwise Greek son a free education at the Local Buglarian paid for Othodox School. "Yes of course he is Bulgarian. "
People forget that allot of the Blood after hundreds of years of Ottoman rule was rather mixed.
Too quote the Wiki "Nationality in early 20th century Macedonia was a matter of political convictions and financial benefits, of what was considered politically correct at the specific time and of which armed guerrilla group happened to visit the respondent's home last. The process of Hellenization at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century affected only a limited stratum of the population, the Bulgarian Revival in the middle of the 19th century was too short to form a solid Bulgarian consciousness, the financial benefits given by the Serbian propaganda were too tempting to be declined. It was not a rare occurrence for whole villages to switch their nationality from Greek to Bulgarian and then to Serbian within a few years or to be Bulgarian in the presence of a Bulgarian commercial agent and Serbian in the presence of a Serbian consul. On several occasions peasants were reported to have answered in the affirmative when asked if they were Bulgarians and again in the affirmative when asked if they were Serbs. Though this certainly cannot be valid for the whole population, many Russian and Western diplomats and travelers defined Macedonians as lacking a "proper" national consciousness."
Then again what is the political conviction of the household if a Ottoman
Government Official was asking the question what is your Ethnicity,
Yes, that's very much the case. There is a definitely a distinction between Greek and Slav, but among the Slavs, the modern division of Serbo-Croatioan, Macedonian, and Bulgarian don't have much meaning in the earlier period. There was a general spectrum of Serbo-Croatian fading into Bulgarian as you moved east. Nish is a good example. I challenge you to find out if it was Bulgarian or Serb before 1877. It was about a third Muslim, and nobody really knows what else.
Christian identity was incredibly complicated, with everyone subject to the Ecumenical Patriarchate until the creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in the 1870s - but attitudes could be different from village to village, and even within villages.
An Ottoman official wouldn't ask a household for its ethnicity, but if he did, he'd get a blank stare. The only real identity anyone would have had was sectarian: "I'm a Christian" or "I'm a Muslim". Nationalism and ethnic identity politics were anathema to the Ottomans, who just didn't classify people that way.