Mystery Macedonian Grave Sparks Intrigue in Bulgaria

After the Macedonian authorities found a mass grave last week near the village of Zajas, believed to date from the Second Balkan War in 1913, various reports have appeared in Bulgarian media claiming that the remains discovered belong to ethnic Bulgarians who rioted against the Serbs at the time.

Experts however have dismissed the information as untrue, although they have confirmed that many ethnic Bulgarians were victims of the Serbian army during the two Balkan wars in 1912-13.

"Macedonia has been a battlefield in two wars and two uprisings. There was a Bulgarian-Albanian uprising against the Serbs in September-October 2013 and probably these victims [the human remains in the mass grave] are from this period," professor Svetlozar Eldarov from the Institute of Balkan Studies to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences told BIRN.

"We have enough Bulgarian victims in Macedonia, but we cannot pretend that those found in Zajas were Bulgarians," he added, explaining that the village has always been populated by еthnic Albanians.

Suggestions that the mass grave contained the remains of Bulgarians murdered by Serbian soldiers, was first reported by the Bulgarian news agency BGNES on October 14 and quickly spread through several media.

BGNES quoted the now-defunct Bulgarian newspaper Mir, published by the former Bulgarian People's Party between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th.

Between December 21 and December 23, 1913, Mir reported that hundreds of "Serbian villanies" had been committed against "Bulgarians and Mohammedans".

On December 21, it wrote about a massacre in the village of Sop in Western Macedonia when "a Serbian raid closed 200 Mohammedans in the mosque, filled it with hay and burned...