The study "Niko Zupanič and Macedonia in 1903" by Victor Gaber, MA, presents a review of the subject of Macedonia and the Macedonians at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by the Slovenian anthropologist and ethnographer Niko Zupanič (1876-1961). It was a historical period that followed immediately after the decisions of the Berlin Congress of 1878, which verified the political independence of a number of Balkan peoples, but not the Slovenian and Macedonian peoples. The author of the study offers an objectified approach to the treatment of the Macedonian question by Zupanić, which he did in the original work "Macedonia and the Turkish Problem" (published under the pseudonym K. Gersin "Macedonian und das Turkische Problem" (Kratz, Helf & Co. , Wien, 1903), published in Vienna in March 1903.
For him, Zupanić made anthropological and ethnographic analyses, where he saw the future of Macedonia, as well as other countries from the Balkans, in a united South Slavic state. As a trained scientist, he did not fail to mention the appetites of the neighbouring elites in the already formed small Balkan states and recorded their expectations for the division of the Macedonian territory. Among other things, for researchers and readers, this work is significant because it presents Zupanić's analysis of the ethnocultural substrate of the Macedonian population at the very beginning of the 20th century. For him, he uses the term "Macedonian Slavs" or "Slavs", in addition to the use of the term "Shopo-Macedonians", when referring to the linguistic (dialectal) characteristics of the Macedonian population.
The State Archives supported the publication of this study, which concludes a scientific research project of Victor Gaber, MA, which finally sheds light on the undiscovered conditions and events that influenced the young Zupanič to devote himself to the development process of the Macedonian national feeling.