Goce Delcev

Georgi Nikolov Delchev (; ; 4 February 1872 – 4 May 1903), known as Gotse Delchev or Goce Delčev (''Гоце Делчев''),Originally spelled in older Bulgarian orthography as ''Гоце Дѣлчевъ''. - Гоце Дѣлчевъ. Биография. П.К. Яворовъ, 1904. was a prominent Macedonian Bulgarian revolutionary (komitadji) and one of the most important leaders of what is commonly known as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), active in the Ottoman-ruled Macedonia and Adrianople regions, as well as in Bulgaria, at the turn of the 20th century. Delchev was IMRO's foreign representative in Sofia, the capital of the Principality of Bulgaria. As such, he was also a member of the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee (SMAC), participating in the work of its governing body. He was killed in a skirmish with an Ottoman unit on the eve of the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie uprising.

Born into a Bulgarian family in Kilkis, then in the Salonika vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, in his youth he was inspired by the ideals of earlier Bulgarian revolutionaries such as Vasil Levski and Hristo Botev, who envisioned the creation of a Bulgarian republic of ethnic and religious equality, as part of an imagined Balkan Federation. Delchev completed his secondary education in the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki and entered the Military School of His Princely Highness in Sofia, but at the final stage of his study, he was dismissed from it as an alleged socialist. Then he returned to Ottoman Macedonia and worked as a Bulgarian teacher, and immediately became an activist of the newly-found revolutionary movement in 1894.

Although considering himself to be an inheritor of the Bulgarian revolutionary traditions, he opted for Macedonian autonomy. Also for him, like for many Macedonian Bulgarians, originating from an area with mixed population, the idea of being 'Macedonian' acquired the importance of a certain native loyalty, that constructed a specific spirit of "local patriotism" and "multi-ethnic regionalism". He maintained the slogan promoted by William Ewart Gladstone, "Macedonia for the Macedonians", including all different nationalities inhabiting the area. Delchev was also an adherent of incipient socialism. His political agenda became the establishment through revolution of an autonomous Macedono-Adrianople supranational state into the framework of the Ottoman Empire, as a prelude to its incorporation within a future Balkan Federation. Despite having been educated in the spirit of Bulgarian nationalism, he revised the Organization's statute, where the membership was allowed only for Bulgarians. In this way he emphasized the importance of cooperation among all ethnic groups in the territories concerned in order to obtain political autonomy.

Delchev is considered a national hero in Bulgaria and North Macedonia. Because his autonomist ideas have stimulated the subsequent development of Macedonian nationalism, in the latter it is claimed he was an ethnic Macedonian revolutionary. Thus, Delchev's legacy has been disputed between both countries. Nevertheless, some researchers think that behind IMRO's idea of autonomy a reserve plan for eventual incorporation into Bulgaria was hidden. Per some of his contemporaries and Bulgarian academic sources, Delchev supported Macedonia's incorporation into Bulgaria as another option too. Other researchers find the identity of Delchev and other IMRO figures to be open to different interpretations.

Life

Early life

He was born to a large family on 4 February 1872 (23 January according to the Julian calendar) in Kılkış (Kukush), then in the Ottoman Empire (today in Greece), to Nikola and Sultana. He was christened as Georgi. By the mid-19th century, Kılkış was populated predominantly with Macedonian Bulgarians and became one of the centers of the Bulgarian national revival. During the 1860s and 1870s it was under the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Uniate Church, but after 1884 most of its population gradually joined the Bulgarian Exarchate. As a student, Delchev studied first at the Bulgarian Uniate primary school and then at the Bulgarian Exarchate junior high school. He also read widely in the town's chitalishte (community cultural center), where he was impressed with revolutionary books, and was especially imbued with thoughts of the liberation of Bulgaria. In 1888 his family sent him to the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki, where he organized and led a secret revolutionary brotherhood. Delchev also distributed revolutionary literature, which he acquired from the school's graduates who studied in Bulgaria. Bulgarian students graduating from high school were faced with few career prospects and Delchev decided to follow the path of his former schoolmate Boris Sarafov, entering the military school in Sofia in 1891. He became disappointed with life in Bulgaria, especially the commercialized life of the society in Sofia and with the authoritarian politics of the prime minister Stefan Stambolov, accused of being a dictator.

Delchev spent his leaves from school in the company of emigrants from the Macedonian region, most of them belonged to the Young Macedonian Literary Society. One of his friends was Vasil Glavinov, a future leader of the Macedonian-Adrianople Social Democratic Group, a faction of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers Party. Through Glavinov and his comrades, he came into contact with different people, who offered a new form of social struggle. In June 1892, Delchev and the journalist Kosta Shahov, a chairman of the Young Macedonian Literary Society, met in Sofia with the bookseller from Thessaloniki, Ivan Hadzhinikolov. Hadzhinikolov disclosed at this meeting his plans to create a revolutionary organization in Ottoman Macedonia. They discussed together its basic principles and agreed fully on all scores. Delchev explained that he had no intention of remaining an officer and promised after graduating from the Military School, he would return to Macedonia to join the organization. In September 1894, only a month before graduation, he was expelled for his socialist sympathies. He was given the possibility to enter the Army again by re-applying for a commission, but he refused. Afterwards he returned to Macedonia to become a teacher and set up secret committees, based on Vasil Levski's example. At that time, the revolutionary organization commonly known as Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) was in its early stages of development, forming its committees around the Bulgarian Exarchate schools. Although, Delchev despised the Exarchate policy in Macedonia.

Teacher and revolutionary

In Ottoman Thessaloniki, IMRO was founded in 1893, by a small band of anti-Ottoman Macedono-Bulgarian revolutionaries, including Hadzhinikolov. The earliest known statute of the Organization calls it ''Bulgarian Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Committees'' (BMARC). It was decided at a meeting in Resen in August 1894 to preferably recruit teachers from the Bulgarian schools as committee members. In 1894, Delchev became a teacher in an Exarchate school in Štip, where he met another teacher, Dame Gruev, who was also a leader of the newly established local committee of the IMRO. Gruev told him about the existence of the Organization. Delchev impressed Gruev with his honesty and joined the Organization immediately, gradually becoming one of its main leaders. After this, Gruev concentrated his attention on Štip, while Delchev attempted to win over the surrounding villages. It is unknown how many active members the Organization had from 1893 to 1897. In a letter from 1895, Delchev explained that the liberation of Macedonia as a state lies in an internal uprising, that a systematic agitation was conducted in order for the population to be ready in the near future, otherwise the result of a premature uprising would be tragic. Despite his and Gruev's efforts, the number of members grew slowly. Delchev travelled during the vacations throughout Macedonia and established and organized committees in villages and cities. In this period, he adopted Ahil (Archilles) as his ''nom de guerre''. Delchev also established contacts with some of the leaders of the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee (SMAC). Its official declaration was a struggle for the autonomy of the Macedonian and Adrianople regions. However, as a rule, most of SMAC's leaders were officers with stronger connections with the governments, waging terrorist struggle against the Ottomans in the hope of provoking a war and thus Bulgarian annexation of both areas. In late 1895 he arrived in Bulgaria's capital Sofia from the name of the "''Bulgarian Central Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Committee''" to prevent any foreign interference in its work. In 1896, he advocated for the establishment of a secret revolutionary network, that would prepare the population for an armed uprising against the Ottoman rule, based on Levski's example. After spending the next school year (1895/1896) as a teacher in the town of Bansko, in May 1896 he was arrested by the Ottoman authorities as a person suspected of revolutionary activity and spent about a month in jail. Delchev participated in the Thessaloniki Congress of the IMRO in 1896. The Central Committee was placed in Thessaloniki. He, along with Petrov, wrote the new organization's statute, which divided Macedonia and Adrianople areas into seven regions, each with a regional structure and secret police, following the Internal Revolutionary Organization's example."Спомени на Гьорчо Петров", поредица Материяли за историята на македонското освободително движение, книга VIII, София, 1927, глава VII, (in English: "Memoirs of Gyorcho Petrov", series Materials about history of the Macedonian revolutionary movement, book VIII, Sofia, 1927, chapter VII).
Afterwards, Delchev gave his resignation as a teacher and in the same year, he moved back to Bulgaria.

Revolutionary activity as part of the leadership of the Organization

From 1896 to 1902, he was a representative of the Foreign Committee of the IMRO in Sofia. Gyorche Petrov

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