Shopi or Šopi () is a regional term, used by a group of people in the Balkans. The areas traditionally inhabited by the Shopi or Šopi is called Shopluk or Šopluk (), a mesoregion.Klaus Roth, Ulf Brunnbauer, Region, Regional Identity and Regionalism in Southeastern Europe, Volume 1 (2010), p. 19, LIT Verlag Münster Most of the region is located in Western Bulgaria, with smaller parts in Eastern Serbia and Eastern North Macedonia, where the borders of the three countries meet.Places to exchange cultural patterns, p. 4
The majority of the Shopi (those in Bulgaria, as well in the Bulgarian territories annexed by Serbia in 1919) identify as Bulgarians, those in the pre-1919 territory of Serbia—as Serbs and those in North Macedonia—as ethnic Macedonians.
The boundaries of the Shopluk in Bulgaria are a matter of debate, with the narrowest definition confining them only to the immediate surroundings of the City of Sofia, i.e., the Sofia Valley. The boundaries that are most commonly used overlap with the Bulgarian folklore and ethnographic regions and incorporate Central Western Bulgaria and the Bulgarian-populated areas in Serbia.Bulgarian folklore regions It is only rarely that the Shopluk is meant to include Northwestern Bulgaria, which is the widest definition (and the one used here).
Name According to Institute for Balkan Studies, the Shopluk was the mountainous area on the borders of Serbia, Bulgaria and North Macedonia, of which boundaries are quite vague, in Serbia the term has always denoted highlanders.Balcanica, 2006 (37):111-124, The establishment of Serbian local government in the counties of Niš, Vranje, Toplica and Pirot subsequent to the Serbo-Turkish wars of 1876-1878, Shopluk was used by Bulgarians to refer to the borderlands of Bulgaria, the inhabitants were called Shopi. In Bulgaria, the Shopi designation is currently attributed to villagers around Sofia.Karen Ann Peters, Macedonian folk song in a Bulgarian urban context: songs and singing in Blagoevgrad, Southwest Bulgaria (2002), "shopluk" Google books link, Madison According to some Shopluk studies dating back to the early 20th century, the name Shopi comes from the staff that local people, mostly pastoralists, used as their main tool. Even today in Bulgaria, one of the names of a nice wooden stick is .
Shopluk area
Western Bulgaria (White Shopluk) Sofia City Province (villages around Sofia, capital of Bulgaria) Sofia Province (part of the Small Shopluk) Pernik Province (part of the Small Shopluk) Kyustendil Province (part of the Small Shopluk) occasionally also the western parts of the Blagoevgrad Province as Black Shopluk occasionally also the Montana Province occasionally also the Vidin Province occasionally also the Vratsa Province Southeastern Serbia Krajište regionBulletin of the Ethnographical Institute, Volume 41, 1992 p. 140 Vlasina region the municipalities of Pirot, Dimitrovgrad and Babušnica Northeastern North Macedonia the eastern part of the Northeastern statistical region (the municipalities of Kratovo, Kriva Palanka, Rankovce, Staro Nagoričane the eastern part of the Eastern statistical region (the municipalities of Berovo, Pehčevo, Delčevo, Makedonska Kamenica, Probištip, Kočani, Vinica) the Novo Selo Municipality and several highland villages in the Radoviš Municipality
Classification
In Bulgaria, the Shopi started gaining visibility as a "group" in the course of the 19th-century waves of migration of poor workers from the Shopluk villages to Sofia.Places to exchange cultural patterns, p. 1
Bulgarian scholars classify Shopi as a subgroup of the Bulgarian ethnos. As with every ethnographic group, the Bulgarian Academy notes, the Shopi in Bulgaria consider themselves the true and most pure of the Bulgarians, just as the mountaineers around Turnovo claim their land as true Bulgaria from time immemorial, etc.
In the 19th century, the Shopluk area was one of the centres of Bulgarian National Revival. As such, the enture region was made part of the Bulgarian Exarchate upon its establishment in 1870.
In 1875, during the tug-of-war regarding the basis of codificatin of modern Bulgarian, scholar Yosif Kovachev from Štip in Eastern Macedonia proposed that the "Middle Bulgarian" or "Shop dialect" of Kyustendil (in southwestern Bulgaria) and Pijanec (in eastern North Macedonia) be used as a basis for the Bulgarian literary language as a compromise and middle ground between what he himself referred to as the "Northern Bulgarian" or Balkan dialect and the "Southern Bulgarian" or "Macedonian" dialect.Newspaper clipping Retrieved 30 March 2023Tchavdar Marinov. In Defense of the Native Tongue: The Standardization of the Macedonian Language and the Bulgarian-Macedonian Linguistic Controversies. in Entangled Histories of the Balkans – Volume One. p. 443
According to the Czech Slavist Konstantin Jireček, the Shopi differed a lot from other Bulgarians in language and habits, and were generally regarded as a simple folk. He linked their name and origin to the Thracian tribe of Sapaeans.
The American Association for South Slavic Studies has noted that the Shopi are recognized as a distinct sub-group in Bulgaria.
The rural inhabitants near Sofia have popularly been claimed by a number of different authors to be descendants of the Pechenegs. The Oxford historian C. A. Macartney studied the Shopi during the 1920s and reported that they were despised by the other inhabitants of Bulgaria for their stupidity and bestiality, and dreaded for their savagery. It is, however, unclear to what extent Macartney's own personal, clearly negative, opinion of the Shopi seeps into this description.
European travellers and ethnographers before 1878 Stephan Gerlach, a German Protestant theologian travelling back to Central Europe from Constantinople in 1578, described the following Bulgarian towns and villages along the way: "Vedreno" (Vetren); "Ihtimon" (Ihtiman), with mixed population of Turks and Bulgarians; Kazidzham (Kazichene), a Bulgarian village; Sofia, a big city populated by Bulgarians, Greeks, Turks, Jews and Ragusans; Dragomanlii (Dragoman), a small, purely Bulgarian village; Dimitrovgrad, a Bulgarian village; Pirot, mostly Turkish with a minority of Bulgarians; Kuruçeşme (Bela Palanka), a purely Bulgarian village, and, finally, Nissa (Niš), where only few Christians lived, and most of them Serbs—"because this is where Bulgaria ends and Serbia begins".
Another German, Wolf Andreas von Steinach, on his way home from Constantinople in 1583, placed the boundary between Bulgarian and Serbs just west of Niš. The same thing was done in the 1621 journal of yet another traveller, French diplomat Louis Deshayes, Baron de Courmemin, who emphasised that the boundary had been shown to him "by locals".
In the 1590s, Austrian apothecary Hans Seidel wrote about hundreds of chopped-off heads of Bulgarian villagers rolling along the road from Sofia to Niš. In 1664, Englishman John Burberry was baffled by several Bulgarian women in Bela Palanka who threw pieces of butter with salt in front of his company (probably wishing them a safe journey). In 1673, another Austrian traveller, Hans Hönze, described Pirot as the "main city of all of Bulgaria". A decade or so later, Italian military specialist in Austrian service Luigi Ferdinando Marsili described Dragoman, Kalotina and Dimitrovgrad as "Bulgarian villages".
Other travellers who put the ethnographic boundary between Serbs and Bulgarians at Niš include German George Christoff Von Neitzschitz, in 1631; Austrian diplomat Paul Taffner, as part of an embassy to the Sublime Porte, in 1665; German diplomat Gerard Cornelius Von Don Driesch, sent on a mission to Constantinople on the orders of Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1723; Armenian geographer Hugas Injejian in 1789, etc. etc. Several maps at the end of the 1700s also place the border between Serbia and Bulgaria around Niš, sometimes west and sometimes east of it.
When traveling across Bulgaria in 1841, French scholar Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui described the population of the Sanjak of Niš and the Sanjak of Sofia as Bulgarian.Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, „Voyage en Bulgarie pendant l'année 1841“ (Жером-Адолф Бланки. Пътуване из България през 1841 година. Прев. от френски Ел. Райчева, предг. Ив. Илчев. София: Колибри, 2005, 219 с. .) The author further designated the population of Niš as Bulgarian and the Niš rebellion (1841) as a Bulgarian uprising. During his travels across European Turkey, French geologist Ami Boué also placed the boundary between Serbs and Bulgarians just north of Niš and identified the towns of Niš, Pirot, Leskovac, Bela Palanka, Dimitrovgrad, Dupnitsa, Blagoevgrad, Radomir, Sofia and Etropole as Bulgarian.
With the launch of the Tanzimat reforms and the tentative opening of the Ottoman Empire to Europe in 1839, the Balkans attracted a large number of European ethnographers, linguists, and geographers, who wanted to study the population of European Turkey. A total of eleven primary ethnic maps of the Balkans were produced between 1842 and 1877: by Slovak philologist Pavel Jozef Šafárik in 1842, Ami Boué in 1847, French ethnographer Guillaume Lejean in 1861, English travel writers Georgina Muir Mackenzie and Paulina Irby in 1867, Russian ethnographer Mikhail Mirkovich in 1867, Czech folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben in 1868, German cartographer August Heinrich Petermann in 1869, renowned German geographer Heinrich Kiepert in 1876, British mapmaker Edward Stanford, French railway engineer Bianconi and Austrian diplomat Karl Sax, all three in 1877.
With the exception of Bianconi and Stanford's maps that portrayed all of Thrace, Macedonia and southern Albania as ethnically Greek and are generally described as having a pro-Greek bias, all other nine maps establish the Serbo-Bulgarian ethnic boundary along the Timok, then just north of Niš and finally along the Šar Mountains, thus defining the entire Shopluk as Bulgarian.
Of interest is also the retroactive study of Bulgaria's population in the 1860s by Russian philologist and dialectologist Afanasiy Selischev, which concluded that the valleys extending from Niš through Pirot and Sofia to the Gate of Trajan near Ihtiman, i.e., the central Shopluk featured the largest concentration of Bulgarians in the Ottoman Empire. In recognition of this and as a result of the active participation of the Shopluk in the Bulgarian Church struggle (the first rebellion against a Greek bishop took place in Vratsa in 1828), the entire Shopluk as well as the Pomoravlje were included in the territory of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870 and in the Bulgarian autonomous vilayets proposed at the 1876–77 Constantinople Conference.Other of the evidences, again both foreign and native, follow from 1870 on after the creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate; after the decisions of an [sic] European conference in Constantinople (Dec. 1876 — Jan. 1877) for creating two autonomous Bulgarian provinces from the line Timok—Nish—Gnilane—Debar—Kostur, toward the east to the Black sea below Lozengrad; For more see: Johann Georg von Hahn, Bulgarians in Southwest Morava, reissued by Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan (1917) Al. Paskaleff & Co. publishers, Sofia, pp. 26-27.
Modern ethnographic accounts