This book of Kosta Tzamushanov`s continues and supplements two of his earlier works. One of them was published under the same title by the Regional Museum in Blagoevgrad, and the other one, Newly Discovered Serbian Evidence of the Bulgarian Nationality in Macedonia, was printed in the journal Izvestiya, issue 42,1986.
The author`s purpose in producing an enlarged manuscript is to show the bulk and variety of Serbian and Croatian evidence of the presence of Slavs of the Bulgarian group, settling in Macedonia as early as the seventh century, who later were to become an integral part of the Bulgarian nationality. This is an incontrovertible historical fact that has repeatedly appeared in diverse sources. What is especially valuable here is Tzamushanov`s selecting Serbian and Croatian sources in order to demonstrate that, from the times of the Duklyan Chronicles up to present, the thesis of Macedonian population`s national identity has been emphatically demonstrated by numerous South Slavic authors.
The text is ordered chronologically and follows Macedonia`s historical fortunes from the beginning of the seventh century onwards. The first issue to be discussed concerns the two major groups of Slavs, the Bulgarians and the Serbo-Croatians, who settled in the Balkans during the sixth and the seventh centuries. As it becomes abundantly evident from these sources, during that period, certain tribes of the Bulgarian group settled in Macedonia. Those tribes were completely identical in their language and customs with the Slavic tribes in the other areas where later the Bulgarian state was to be established and where the Bulgarian nation was formed, namely in Moesia and in Thrace.
