“On the Macedonian Matters”, the legendary work of Krste Petkov Misirkov, which highlights the uniqueness of the Macedonian language, was published on this day, December 25, in Sofia, 1903. In the same year, days after its publication, the Bulgarian authorities ordered the book to be burned, and fortunately, a few copies have been preserved.
The book explores the peculiarities of the Macedonian language and the need to codify it according to the central idiom as equally distant from the neighboring Slavic languages, scientific and theoretical views are given on which Blazhe Koneski will later continue the work until the final codification of the language.
The work on 120 pages and in five chapters gives views of the current situation in Macedonia from that difficult period after the Ilinden Uprising and gives the idea of unification of all the territories where the Macedonian people live, talks about its cultural and national identity. Misirkov exposes the Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek propaganda that were active in Macedonia at that time.
Misirkov sets the Macedonian orthography on a phonetic basis, with small concessions on etymology, and in the lexicon he proposes to include elements from all Macedonian languages.
