page_title: Shopi
section_title: Classification
hierarchical_section_title: Shopi / Classification
caption_attribution_description: Български: Етнографска карта на Османската империя на Ами Буе от 1847 г. English: Ethnographical map of the Balkans by Ami Boué, 1847
context_page_description: Shopi or Šopi is a regional term, used by a group of people in the Balkans, self-identifying as Bulgarians, Macedonians and Serbs. The areas traditionally inhabited by the Shopi or Šopi is called Shopluk or Šopluk, a mesoregion, roughly where Bulgaria, Serbia and North Macedonia meet. In 2011 census in Serbia they are registered as separate ethnicity and 142 persons declared themselves as belonging to this ethnicity.
context_section_description: Most of the area traditionally inhabited by the Shopi is in Bulgaria. The majority of the Shopi (those in Bulgaria, as well the territories which were part of Bulgaria before 1919) identify themselves as Bulgarians, while those in the pre-1919 territory of Serbia - as Serbians and those in North Macedonia - as Macedonians.
  The noting of Shopi as a "group" began in the 19th-century migrational waves of poor workers from the so-called Shopluk, poor areas (villages) beyond Sofia.
  The Bulgarian scholars put Shopi as a subgroup of the Bulgarian ethnos.  As with every ethnographic group, the Bulgarian Academy notes, the Shopi in Bulgaria consider themselves the true and most pure of the Bulgarians, just as the mountaineers around Turnovo claim their land as true Bulgaria from time immemorial, etc.
  Many Yugoslav and Serbian scholars put the Šopi (also known as Šopovi) as a subgroup of the Serbian ethnos, claiming that the group is closer to Serbs than Bulgarians culturally and linguistically, calling it a Serbian population in a foreign (Bulgarian) area, at the Serbo-Bulgarian border. The nationalist Serbian ethnographer Jovan Cvijić, presented  in 1919 at the Peace Conference in Paris a study in which he had divided the Shopluk into three groups: Serbs, mixed population, and a group closer to Bulgarians. He also claimed that the Serbian tradition of Slava was celebrated in the region, this according to him being an important cultural marker.
  According to A. Belitch and T. Georgevitch (1919), the Shopi were a mixed Serbo-Bulgarian people in Western Bulgaria of Serbian origin. This Serbian ethnographical group, according to them, inhabited a region east of the border as far as the line Bregovo-Kula-Belogradchik-Iskrets, thence towards Radomir and to the east of Kyustendil; to the east of that limit the Serbian population, blended with the Bulgarian element, reached the Iskar banks and the line which linked it to Ihtiman.
  The French Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, when traveling across Bulgaria in 1841, describes the population of the Sanjak of Niš as Bulgarians. Felix Philipp Kanitz recalled that in 1872 (during Ottoman rule), the inhabitants had a Bulgarian national conscience. By the end of the 19th century (when the area was in Serbia), the residents of Pirot were divided on the issue, many in the older generation having a fondness for Bulgarians. Also, in the 19th century the Shopi area was one of the centres of Bulgarian National Revival. It was ceded to the Bulgarian Exarchate.
  According to the Czech Jireček the Shopi differed very much from the other Bulgarians in language and habits, and were regarded as a simple folk. He connected their name to the Thracian tribe of Sapsei.
  The American Association for South Slavic Studies noted that the Shopi were recognized as a distinct sub-group in Bulgaria.
  The rural inhabitants near Sofia were popularly claimed to be descendants of the Pechenegs. The Oxford historian C. A. Macartney studied these Shopi during the 1920s and reported that they were despised by the other inhabitants of Bulgaria for their stupidity and bestiality, and dreaded for their savagery.
caption: Early ethnographic map of the Balkans from Austrian geologist Ami Boue (1847). The whole Shopi area is shown as Bulgarian populated.
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