Population census will take place in Albania in October and ethnic Bulgarians living in the country will also participate. Whether Bulgarians in Albania would be able to freely declare their ethnicity, and whether this would be correctly reflected by administrative documents is a question with an answer depending mostly on Bulgarian diplomacy.

For three years now, Bulgarians in Albania have officially had the status of a national minority. However, there are fears among observers that data may be replaced during the census.

"We encountered a similar problem during the pilot census in February this year,”Assoc. Prof. Spas Tashev from the Institute for Population and Human Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences says. "At that time, the members of the commissions were influenced by Skopje and only one Bulgarian was registered in the area of Mala Prespa, provided that many people told us they had officially declared they are Bulgarians."

Bulgarian Vice President Iliana Yotova also sees a risk of replacing the real results. "There is a serious risk that people who identify themselves as Bulgarians will not be officially registered as such," she said at a meeting of the Council for Work with Bulgarians Abroad. According to her, on the eve of the census, aggressive lobbying by North Macedonia is seen among residents of Golo Bardo, Mala Prespa and Korçë, in order for them to be registered as Macedonians.

And this is not the first time this has happened. After the census in 2011, a team of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, studying the migration attitudes of Bulgarian communities, talked to people who  declared themselves as Bulgarians in the questionnaires. "But if we take the official data, we will see that in Albania there was not a single ethnic Bulgarian during this period," Assoc. Prof. Spas Tashev said, giving an example with the region of Mala Prespa, where a recognized Macedonian minority has existed since 1944 and where with the help of the local authorities under the influence of Skopje, members of the census commission changed data in registration cards.

Bulgarians have inhabited Albania since the time of the First Bulgarian Empire (681-1018), and today they live in 33 settlements. At the end of the First World War, when the country was divided into the Albanian Republic of Korçë under the rule of France, and Central and Northern Albania under the rule of Austria-Hungary, a census was conducted and then a significant presence was established - nearly 9 thousand people identified as Bulgarians. In the census of 1942 when Albania was under Italian occupation and its extended administrative borders included Kosovo and western Macedonia, 70 thousand people declared their Bulgarian identity.

"According to statistics, the number of people in Albania today who speak Bulgarian as their mother tongue is about 50,000," Assoc. Prof. Spas Tashev added. “But this does not mean that all of them will declare themselves as Bulgarians. The outcome of the census will depend on both Bulgarian policy and the attitude of North Macedonia towards this population, which, in order to contact Bulgaria, must pass through its territory."

It is very important that Bulgarian diplomacy called on the Albanian authorities to exercise strict control so that North Macedonia, as a third country, could not interfere in the results of the census, because there are such attempts at the moment, the scientists points out.

"If we talk about common issues in the Balkans, assimilation processes are at the first place,” Assoc. Prof. Spas Tashev says. “In North Macedonia, where we have the largest number of people of Bulgarian origin, we also have the most advanced assimilation process. In Serbia, the situation is also not good and the number of Bulgarians in the Western Outlands may fall below 10,000 at the upcoming census, although in 1946 there were more than 60,000 Bulgarians living there. Assimilation processes against the Bulgarian population in the Balkans are least pronounced in Albania, where Bulgarian language, self-consciousness, culture was preserved and passed on for generations in the community. I think that it is not too late and we will be able to offer educational initiatives that would be useful to the already dispersed Bulgarian community living among foreign language population."

English: Alexander Markov