300,000 in the GTA, 100,000 in Toronto, in the year 2009.
ONE OF THE LARGEST GROUPS of non-British settlers to arrive in Canada at the turn of the century was comprised of villagers from the Balkan Mountains, then part of the Turkish Empire. These people and their descendants call themselves Macedonians, and have their own churches, community organizations, and businesses – mainly in Metropolitan Toronto and the southern Ontario region. The first Macedonians who came to Toronto were, in modern terms, “economic migrants for political reasons.” The early ones, who hailed primarily from the provinces of Kostur (Castoria) and Lerin (Florina), once important vilayets of the Turkish Ottoman Empire but today portions of northern Greece, were driven by a search for a better quality political and socio-economic life and by the varying degrees of expulsion, or sense of expulsion, political and socio-economic. They formed pockets of linguistic and cultural otherness in the city, living an almost completely isolated existence in a distinct set of neighbourhoods centred around their church, stores, and boarding houses. They moved with little awareness of the city around them since the needs of their families in the old country and political events in the homeland were more important to them than developments in Toronto and Canada. A greater interest in Canada took root only after Macedonians began to think less like sojourners and more like settlers. This transition was often accompanied by a move from industrial labour to individual entrepreneurial activities. Official statistics and population indices are not helpful in determining the size of the community in Canada because Macedonians fell under the general headings of the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Serbia (or Yugoslavia), and Bulgaria. Few Macedonians entered this country before the turn of the century. Sources from within the community tallied the presence of 1,090 Macedonians in Toronto by the year 1910. Thirty years later, readers of various Macedonian almanacs were informed that there were upwards of 1,200 families in the city. The mass departure of Macedonians from Aegean Macedonia continued in the after math of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War (1946-49). The 1950s witnessed the arrival of about 2,000 Macedonian refugee children to Canada. Significant exodus from Vardar Macedonia (now the Republic of Macedonia), or from towns and cities, began in the post-Depression years and gained momentum in the postwar period. The most recent Canadian census (1996), which provides for self-declaration of ethnic origin, records 30,915 Macedonians in Canada, the sum total of individuals making single or multiple group responses; 24,340 of these people lived in the Toronto census metropolitan area. Small clusters of Macedonians could also be found elsewhere in Ontario in Cambridge, Guelph, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Markham, Mississauga, Newmarket, Niagara Falls, St. Catharines, Thornhill, Thorold, and Windsor. Community spokes persons believe there are actually 100,000-150,000 Macedonians in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and the outlying regions, creating the largest Macedonian settlement outside the Balkans. At the turn of the century, Macedonians arriving in Toronto went to Cabbagetown in the city’s east end because of the many industrial work opportunities to be found there. Settlements in West Toronto Junction and the area of Niagara and Wellington Streets were established later as the west end became the site of Toronto’s meat-packing industry and new job opportunities opened up. Initially, Macedonians lived in substandard rough cast or frame boarding houses. Rooms in many of these dwellings were insufficiently lighted and badly ventilated. Over crowding was also a problem. Four and five room houses were known to have accommodated as many as 20 residents at a time. And yet, a complex order emerged in most establishments with house rules and codes about residents’ responsibilities. In many boarding-houses, tenants often cooked and did other household chores on a rotating basis. By 1940, however, Macedonians had begun the trek away from the old neighbourhoods. Confidence, experience, and ambition put small entrepreneurs and restaurateurs in the fore front of movement from the original settlement areas. The growth and development of housing projects such as Regent Park, coupled with an explosion of commercial and industrial developments, also served to push out most of those who had remained in the area. The community’s first and second generations in turn were being drawn by opportunity and acculturation to the suburbs and to neighbouring cities as much as they were leaving because of Toronto’s industrial expansion and declining neighbourhoods. With their skills, brawn, and biceps, the Macedonian immigrant work force would help to ensure the industrial take off of the city of Toronto. Macedonians, unlike Chinese, Italians, and Jews, were mainly factory hands and labourers in the city’s abattoirs and meat-processing plants, sheet-metal industries, iron and steel foundries, and leather and fur-processing companies. Casual work on the intercity and street railways opened up for them as well. Armed with pick and shovel, they could be found working on the various street-railway projects in the city. Railway work also drew Macedonians out into the Canadian bush to perform a variety of tasks. They laboured in such regions as Hearst and Copper Cliff in northern Ontario clearing tracts of land for the railway or for mine spurs. Industrial employment opportunities in sugar-processing plants and knitting mills brought Macedonians into southern and western Ontario as well. Able bodied men also performed dangerous and demanding work constructing a new Welland Canal. Macedonians’ ascent into the merchant class gained momentum after 1920. Many men soon realized that it would be not only more profitable to operate their own business than to toil as labourers but also physically safer. At first, the world of enterprise was the preserve of the community’s steamship agents and bankers. Below the bankers were those who filled the community’s entrepreneurial ranks: restaurateurs, shoe shine parlour operators, butchers, and grocers. From the humble diner to the elegant dining room, Macedonians would come to distinguish themselves as restaurateurs and would dominate the trade in Toronto during the 1950s and 1960s. Macedonian women were also ready to work when they came to Toronto. Many became boarding house keepers. Young brides cooked meals, washed clothes, scrubbed floors, and tended to a host of other family and tenant needs. By collecting board and rent money and minimizing household expenses, these women helped to build their family’s income. Wives of store keepers assisted their husbands at work. At first, Macedonian women found it difficult to deal with strangers or to assist in the business without fully comprehending the English language or business practice, but, over time, many seemed to take the place of their husbands as the chief proprietors of small businesses, freeing the men for other enterprises. Macedonian entrepreneurs and their descendants eventually used their strength in the food service industry as a springboard into a variety of larger and more sophisticated ventures. In general, most Macedonians were content to expand and solidify their position within the middle class as accountants, contractors, computer consultants, florists, machine shop operators and industrial manufacturers, printers, importers, travel agents, and jewellers. The community remained under-represented in the professions until the third generation. Postwar immigrants from northern Greece and the Republic of Macedonia added to the group’s professional ranks. Today, Macedonians also figure prominently in the professional fields of law, medicine, science and technology, education, sports and recreation, and the arts and entertainment industry. Participation in Toronto’s civic life and the Canadian community at large failed to interest the group at first. Macedonians were content to remain on the periphery of the Canadian way of life. They created such flexible institutions as boarding houses, coffee houses, and mutual benefit and burial societies to tend to their needs. The boarding house and the coffee house quickly emerged as informal centres of community life. They became all important repositories of job information and workplace strategies. As Christians and adherents of the Eastern Orthodox faith, Macedonians also founded a number of churches – often divided along Bulgarian and Macedonian Orthodox spiritual jurisdictions – in Toronto and neighbouring cities. They looked to the church to tend to their spiritual needs and recreated its traditional role as a bulwark of national identity serving to focus their political and communal actions and their loyalties. Administered by elected executive committees, all churches organized or supported – as they still do today – various educational, athletic, and cultural programs. They became centres of heritage language instruction. They hosted teas, dances, and entertainment evenings and mounted elaborate celebrations of the major religious holidays, including Easter and those held in honour of patron saints. The need for newcomers to provide for themselves what we would now call social insurance and worker compensation was met by establishing mutual aid and benevolent societies on the basis of village or place of origin. Such organizations operating in Toronto obliged their working members to assist needy comrades in finding a job. In times of illness, the societies encouraged members to seek professional medical help and to submit to hospital care if necessary. The societies themselves were prepared to assume the cost of transporting a sick member back to the homeland if that was his wish. The member was obliged, once he was sufficiently recovered and suitably employed, to reimburse his particular benevolent organization fully for the expenses incurred on his behalf. When members’ working conditions and incomes became the responsibility of the government, insurance companies and labour unions, mutual benefit societies and brotherhoods evolved into social clubs, playing a role as centres of immigrant culture. The increased emphasis on encouraging “Macedonian-ness” in the Balkans and in North America formed part of the tactic of organizational survival. Updating the purposes of societies and extending membership to women also helped the ethnocommunity stay together. A number of business and professional organizations, student and youth groups have been established. The community has also created and continues to support a number of newspapers, radio and television programs, folk dance groups, sporting organizations, and historical and literary societies. Leadership in these and other Macedonian institutions comes from among entrepreneurs, the working class, youth, and women. The community continues to respond as individuals, as families, or collectively to the opportunities and challenges that shape group life in Canada.
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Here is the nonseriousness of the Macedonian people, aka when the guy set his house on fire, 50 people stood outside watching it burn making jokes.
ILjo Thunder, se nadevas nekoj the go procita ova?
Thunder from down under isprintajgo iljo na list i ko ke odish vo WC ke si citash the ne ti e dosadno
)ILjo haha.. dobra idea
. i onaka u posledno vreme ne se naogja nekoja dobra 'literatura' za u WC http://archives.vmacedonia.com/2427.htm
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Iljo: Thunder, do you expect anyone to read this?
Thunder: Print it so this way when you go to the washroom you have something to read so it doesn't get boring.
Iljo: HHAHA good idea, because recently there hasn't been any good literature to read when I go to the washroom.
