Macedonians of Bulgaria  Location: South-west of Bulgaria in the
Pirin region Population: 250,000 (est.) % of population: 2.75%
Religion: Eastern Orthodox Christian Language: Macedonian,
Bulgarian  The Macedonians (a Slavic people, not to be confused
with the subjects of Phillip of Macedón in antiquity) live in
the south-western regions of Bulgaria. Successive censuses have
given conflicting figures for the numbers of Macedonians in
Bulgaria. The results of the 1946 Bulgarian census concerning
the Macedonian population were never made public by the
Bulgarian authorities. However, Yugoslav sources claim that
252,908 people declared themselves as Macedonians in that
census. The census of 1956 recorded 187,789 Macedonians, over
95% of whom lived in the Pirin region where they made up 63.8%
of the population. However, in the 1965 census the number of
people declaring themselves as Macedonian had dropped to only
8,750 and in the district of Blagoevgrad which previously had
the highest percentage of Macedonians the