The Macedonian Question ? 
After the foundation, in 1870, of an independent Bulgarian church known as the Exarchate, open rivalry broke out between Greece and Bulgaria over which of the two was to dominate Macedonia. In reality, this rivalry focused on the question of the national consciousness among the Slav-speaking masses inhabiting the central zone of Macedonia. According to consular reports of the time, this zone lay between the Kastoria-Ptolemaida-Yannitsa-Zichni Serron line in the south and the Ochrid-PrilepStrumnitsa-Meleniko-Nevrokop line in the north.
After the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, which proved a disaster for Greece, the Bulgarians managed to win over a considerable proportion of the Slav-speaking inhabitants of Macedonia. Thus it came about that on the feastday (20 July) of the Prophet Elijah in 1903 there was a Bulgarian rising, known as the Iliden rising, which the Turkish army soon bloodly suppressed. This rising led also to the destruction of numerous Greek communities and towns in Western and Northern Macedonia, including that of Krusovo. The rising, however, made plain the danger that Macedonia might be lost for ever, which stimulated a general moblisation on the part of the Greeks. So it came about, in 1904, that the armed'Macedonian Struggle' began, lasting until 1908. During this period, units made up of volunteers from the free Greek state, from Crete and from other as yet unredeemed areas poured into Macedonia in solidarity with the local Greek Macedonian fighters.
Together, they managed to check the spread of Bulgarian infiltration and to maintain the predominantly Greek character of the central and southern parts of Macedonia. It should not be overlooked that in many areas the volunteer units were made up principally of Slav-and Vlach-speaking guerrillas, fighting on the side of the Greek cause. Their devotion to the Greek national cause led the Bulgarians to call them 'Graikomans', that is, fanatical Greeks.
When the Greco-Bulgarian rivalry was at its height, various sets of statistics claiming to show the ethnological composition of Macedonia were published. The numerical data presented varied wildly, since the statistics were based on different criteria and were intended to serve the national aspirations of their authors. The Bulgarians usually took the language spoken as their criterion, while the Greeks relied on the national consciousness of the specific population or its ecclesiastical affilition to the Ecumenical Patriarchate or the Bulgarian Exarchate. Perhaps closer to reality was the Turkish census conducted by Hilmi Pasha in 1904, which showed the numbers of Greeks and Bulgarians as follows:
| Greeks | Bulgarians | |
| Vilayet of Thessaloniki | 373,227 | 207,317 |
| Vilayet of Monastir | 261,283 | 178,412 |
| 634,510 | 385,729 | |
The armed Macedonian Struggle was cut short by the Young Turk revolution of July 1908, which overthrew the absolutist regime of the Sultan. The Young Turks issued a general amnesty and promised equality of civil rights for all the nationalities. In those circumstances, the armed conflict between Greeks and Bulgarians and Bulgarians and Serbs came to an end.
For the Greeks, the four years of fighting, which had begun in the most adverse conditions, eventually proved highly successful. Greek superiority in the south had been consolidated and there was now a powerful Greek presence in the disputed central zone. The morale of the indigenous population had burgeoned, and the Greeks of Macedonia were now in a position, alone, to withstand foreign designs upon their territory. The Macedonian Struggle had made it more than clear to the European Powers that the Greeks of Macedonia were to be the most important factor in moulding the future of this Ottoman province.
This success must be attributed to the fact that the struggle attracted Greeks from the free State, from Crete and from the other still unredeemed areas, who fought side by side with the Greek Macedonians. In other words, the Macedonian Struggle involved the whole of the Greek nation in a way that only the Revolution of Greece, in 1821 and the Cretan risings of the 19th century had done.
The second factor in the success noted above should be sought in the point made by British historian Douglas Dakin naniely, that the Greeks were fighting in an area in which the population was well-disposed and even related to them, with a profound devotion to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek idea even if not always speaking the language.
