Yane Sandanski

Yane Ivanov Sandanski (, ; Originally spelled in older Bulgarian orthography as (Yane Ivanov Sandanski); 18 May 1872 – 22 April 1915) was a Macedonian Bulgarian revolutionary and leader of the left-wing of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organisation (IMARO).

In his youth Sandanski was involved in the anti-Ottoman struggle, joining initially the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee (SMAC), but later switched to IMARO. As an activist of the Liberal Party (Radoslavists), he became the head of the local prison in Dupnitsa. After the Ilinden uprising, Sandanski became the leader of the Serres revolutionary district. He supported the idea of a Balkan Federation, and Macedonia as an autonomous state within its framework, as an ultimate solution of the national problems in the area. During the Second Constitutional Era he became an Ottoman politician, collaborating with the Young Turks and founding the Bulgarian People's Federative Party. Sandanski took up arms on the side of Bulgaria during the Balkan Wars (1912–13). Afterwards, he became involved in Bulgarian public life again but was assassinated by the rivalling IMARO right-wing faction activists.

He is recognised as a national hero in both Bulgaria and North Macedonia, but his identity is also disputed between both countries. While People's Republic of Bulgaria honoured him, after the fall of communism he has been described by Bulgarian nationalist historians as a betrayer of the Bulgarian national interests and collaborator with the Turks. On the contrary, in North Macedonia, the positive connotation of him, created in the times of Communist Yugoslavia is still alive, and he has been portrayed there as a fighter against the "Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia" and the "Turkish yoke."

Life

Early life and activity

Sandanski was born on 18 May 1872 in the village of Vlahi near Kresna, then in the Ottoman Empire, now in Bulgaria. He was the third and last child of Ivan and Milka, after Todor and Sofia. His father Ivan participated in the Kresna-Razlog Uprising as a standard-bearer in a rebel detachment. In 1879, after the suppression of the uprising, his family moved to Dupnitsa, in the recently established Principality of Bulgaria, where Sandanski received his elementary education. He had to drop out of school after completing two years of post-elementary education due to poverty and became the apprentice of a shoemaker. From 1892 to 1894 he was subject to compulsory military service in the Bulgarian army, as part of the Thirteenth Regiment which was stationed in Kyustendil, and he was demobilized with the rank of corporal. He joined initially the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee (SMAC) in 1895 during the Committee's cheta action into the Pomaks-inhabited regions of the Western Rhodopes. In 1897 in Dupnitsa, a new detachment of the Supreme Committee was formed, under the leadership of Krastyo Zahariev, where Sandanski joined too. After the detachment entered Pirin Mountains, it encountered Ottoman troops. In one of the battles Sandanski was wounded and his detachment returned him to Bulgaria for treatment. Sandanski operated as an activist of Radoslavov's wing of the Liberal Party and shortly after it came to power in February 1899, he was appointed head of the Dupnitsa prison. He switched to the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO) in 1901. He built the organisation's network of committees in the districts of Serres and Gorna Dzhumaya. Due to the organisation's bad financial situation, he had to ponder different ways to earn money. He settled on kidnapping an American Protestant missionary for ransom. On 3 September 1901, a Protestant missionary named Ellen Stone along with her companions set out on horseback across the mountainous hinterlands of Macedonia and were ambushed by his detachment led by him and his friend Hristo Chernopeev. She was kidnapped along with her Bulgarian companion Katerina Tsilka. It resulted in the Miss Stone Affair - America's first modern hostage crisis. SMAC attempted to acquire both women but the attempt was foiled by Sandanski. The affair ended after the organisation received the ransom money (which was used to purchase weapons) and the women were released.

Activity in IMARO

In 1902, Sandanski persuaded the Vlachs in the sanjak of Serres from Melnik, mostly shepherds, to join his Serres committee, in exchange for his protection against soldiers and detachments. He came to be known as the "Tsar of Pirin." Sandanski was opposed to the Ilinden uprising, considering it premature, although he did participate in the military actions in the regions of Serres and Pirin Macedonia. The failure of the Ilinden uprising resulted in the split of the IMRO into a left-wing (federalist) faction in the Serres, Strumica and Salonica districts and a right-wing (centralist) faction in the Bitola and Skopje districts. Sandanski's faction was called the Serres group or Sandanists. Bulgaria was clearly treated as foreign hostile force by the group, Sandanski condemned what he called " Bulgarian imperialism." According to him Macedonians had to emancipate themselves as "self-determinig people." The left-wing faction advocated the creation of a Balkan Federation (including Macedonia) with equality for all subjects and nationalities, as well as favouring the decentralisation of IMRO. The right-wing faction of IMRO aimed for the unification of Macedonia with Bulgaria and advocated for centralisation to counter the incursions of Serb and Greek bands into Macedonia. Per Bulgarian historian and former IMARO member Hristo Silyanov, Sandanski's faction sentenced the right-wing leader Boris Sarafov to death in 1904. Sandanski created observation posts in his district order to watch for Turkish detachments, and the peasants were forced to warn or be killed. He also organised military training for all able men. Several people in his district were executed as collaborators. French consul Guillois described Sandanski as "a ferocious man, bloodthirsty...who enjoys an absolute authority over all Bulgarian villages to the northeast of Salonika." Sandanski justified the executions in an open letter to him and argued that the organisation had the right to ignore the law of the land and to punish as it saw fit.

In 1905, the Rila Congress of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation adopted the main ideas of the left-wing faction led by Sandanski. The organisation changed its name to IMARO (Internal Macedono-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Organisation) and allowed membership for people from European Turkey independently of sex, religion, nationality and conviction. At the end of the congress, Sandanski confronted Sarafov, accusing him of having accepted money from the Serbs, having facilitated the transit of Serbian detachments into Macedonia and organising his own armed groups in order to weaken the organisation and take the leadership. In turn, Sarafov accused him of being a traitor due to his refusal to participate in the battles of the Ilinden uprising. However, the congress ended with the delegates deciding not to examine the cases of the leaders who could have violated the rules in order to preserve the organisation's unity. In 1906, his faction controlled Serres and Strumica and for geographical reasons, it rarely fought against Serbs or Greeks but often against Ottoman troops. Mihail Daev, who was a member of his committee, sent a letter to the right-wing faction in September 1907, where he asserted that as long as Sandanski was alive, there was no question of uniting the organisation again. The letter was discovered by Todor Panitsa, an associate of Sandanski and on 10 October, the Serres committee sentenced Boris Sarafov, Ivan Garvanov and Mihail Daev to death. Panitsa assassinated Sarafov and Garvanov in the same year. After their assassination, Bulgarian authorities issued an arrest warrant against Sandanski. The Kyustendil congress of the right-wing faction of IMARO in 1908, sentenced him to death, which led to a final disintegration of the organisation.

Collaboration with the Young Turks

Sandanski and his faction decided to work with the Young Turks in 1907. During the first days of Young Turk Revolution, the collaboration of the Macedonian leftists with the Ottoman activists was stated in a special ''Manifesto to all the nationalities of the Empire''. Sandanski called his compatriots to discard the "propaganda" of official Bulgaria in order to live together in a peaceful way with the Turkish people. The manifesto was authored by Bulgarian socialist Pavel Deliradev but signed by Sandanski. The loyalty to the Empire declared by Sandanski deliberately blurred the distinction between Macedonian and Ottoman political agenda. Among the Ottoman public, Sandanski was known as "King of the Mountains" and "Sandan Pasha". After the revolution, Sandanski and Chernopeev worked towards creating a left-wing political party called People's Federative Party, whose headquarters were in Thessaloniki (Salonica). This federalist project was supposed to include different ethnic sections in itself, but this idea failed and the only section that was created was the faction of Sandanski, called ''Bulgarian section''. In this way its activists only "revived" their Bulgarian national identification, as Sandanski's faction advocated the particular interests of the "Bulgarian nationality" in the Empire. In 12 April 1909, a counter-revolution took place in Istanbul and conservative Muslim forces were able to gain control. The Young Turks gathered their forces in Salonica and marched upon the capital. A detachment of 1,200 IMARO revolutionaries took part under the command of him, Todor Panitsa, and Hristo Chernopeev. The capital was captured by the Young Turks. Abdul Hamid II was deposed from the throne.

Through his good relations with the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), Sandanski contributed to the appointment of local administrators and the affairs of school education. At the beginning of 1910, however Chernopeev, who was the leader of the leftist group in Strumica, left politics and moved to Sofia. There, he founded a new illegal organization, the Bulgarian National Macedonian Adrianople Revolutionary Organization. Chernopeev also invited him to join him, however Sandanski ignored his invitation. The Bulgarian press launched a propaganda campaign against Sandanski. Sandanski was accused of betraying the Bulgarians in Macedonia, since he did not launch an armed resistance against the Ottoman government. The socialist groups in Bulgaria also criticised Sandanski as a collaborator of the Turks. Despite the pressure and critiques, Sandanski continued with his legitimate political activity. The CUP also wanted to carry out the disarmament of the population in the region dominated by Sandanski. Sandanski rejected the attempt, resulting in tension between him and the CUP. In the process of negotiations, Sandanski ensured the CUP that in his region he was responsible for all illegal actions and that it was unnecessary to disarm the population. The CUP accepted his proposition and halted the disarmament of the Christian population in the area. The rivaling faction's activists of IMARO organised several unsuccessful assassination attempts against Sandanski at that time. They came closest to achieving their goal in Thessaloniki, where Tane Nikolov managed to kill two of his comrades and heavily wounded Sandanski.

Balkan Wars and aftermath

Sandanski was at the service of the Bulgarian army during the Balkan Wars. During the First Balkan War, the area that Sandanski controlled was occupied by Bulgarian forces. Sandanski helped the occupying armies with his guerillas. The Macedonian Bulgarian detachments burned Muslim villages and massacred Muslims and within his region, they were treated in the same manner. The Muslim men and women of the village Petrovo were burnt to death and only the children were left alive. Per MacDermott, Sandanski was not aware about the incident. He usually tried to prevent such massacres on the Muslims. When he learned about this massacre in Petrovo, he gave the children of killed Muslims to the Bulgarian villagers. Sandanski had a unit under his control which fought together with the Bulgarians, but under independent command. It was located at the right flank of the Seventh Rila Division, numbered 2,000 men and was also the unit that captured Melnik. Later, Sandanski and his comrades were included in the Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Volunteer Corps and were active in the Adrianople region. In June 1913, the Bulgarian government sent a delegation headed by Sandanski to Albania for negotiations with the provisional Albanian government for joint action in the event of a war with Serbia and Greece. He gave an interview for the Italian newspaper "''Il Secolo''" in Tirana, where he said that he came to an agreement with the Albanians and that revolutionary activity would be renewed.

After the wars, most of Macedonia was ceded to Greece and Serbia, while Pirin Macedonia was ceded to Bulgaria and Sandanski resettled in the Kingdom. On July 1914, the Bulgarian assembly pardoned him for all offences. In the same year, Macedonian nationalist Dimitrija Čupovski under the pseudonym Strezo wrote that Sandanski was a Bulgarian agent, bodyguard of the Bulgarian prince Ferdinand and an ordinary criminal. He and his IMARO-wing officially supported at that time the Russophiles from the Democratic Party. However, the idea to join the anti-Serbian Central Powers, who fought against Russia, prevailed in Bulgaria, as well as among the rightists in the IMARO. Sandanski attempted to change this course and conspired to assassinate Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand I. He proposed that Bulgaria be proclaimed as a republic and the foreign policy of the country to be changed. Sandanski sought support among the opposition parties, which were on the side of the Entente, but they refused to participate in the conspiracy, and it failed. As a result, he was assassinated near the Rozhen Monastery on 22 April 1915 while travelling from Melnik to Nevrokop, by local right-wing IMARO faction activists. He was buried at the monastery. His famous words "To live means to struggle, the slave for freedom and the free man for perfection" are written on his grave.

Views

As the leader of the left-wing (federalist) faction, he supported the autonomy of Macedonia. He supported the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, hoping that it would bring equality to all peoples in the Ottoman Empire and autonomy for Macedonia. Sandanski criticised the politics of both Serbia and Bulgaria and accused them of being more interested in the enlargement of their states than in the freedom of the people in Macedonia. During the lack of the resistance against Ottoman authorities, the internationalist ideas of Bulgarian socialist activists influenced Sandanski's agenda: what was seen as national interests had to be subdued to the pan-Ottoman ones in order to achieve a "supra-national union" of all the nationalities within a reformed Empire. After the Young Turk Revolution, he publicly disowned Bulgarian nationalism. As chairman of the newly established People's Federative Party, he demanded democratisation of the political system, administrative autonomy for the provinces, abolition of national, religious, and social privileges, separation of religious from state affairs, secular education in state schools, and universal conscription. On that basis, the CUP had reached an understanding with his wing. He saw the solution of the Macedonian Question through the creation of a Balkan Federation, which would include Macedonia and Adrianople. Afterwards, he became disappointed with the Turkish nationalist policy of the new government. Despite rejecting religion, he was deeply superstitious and remained as such throughout his life. He had never rejected the Bulgarian Exarchate as an institution, or denied that it had a role to play in the life of the Macedonian Bulgarians. Per a member of his cheta Atanas Yanev, Sandanski was saddened by internecine struggles. According to Pavel Deliradev who was one of his closest associates, Sandanski agitated for a fight against the Turkish absolutism and Greater Bulgaria chauvinism and for a free, one, and independent Macedonia in brotherly relations with all free Balkan people.

Legacy

During World War II, the Macedonian Partisans named units after him and other figures, with whom the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and its regional leaders identified themselves with. A partisan detachment, part of the Bulgarian resistance movement during World War II, was named after him on 1 May 1943. In People's Republic of Bulgaria, the regime appreciated Sandanski because of his socialist ideas and honoured him by renaming the town Sveti Vrach to Sandanski, in 1949. Due to indications of a socialist inclination, he was among the left-wing IMRO figures glorified by Yugoslav Macedonian historians. In November 1968, the historical institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences confronted the Yugoslav Macedonian attempt to claim him as an ethnic Macedonian with a monograph. A statue of him was placed in the entrance of Melnik in 1972, where he has been seen as a national hero. In 1981, Bulgarian communist politician Lyudmila Zhivkova listed him and Delchev as among the "national heroes who fought for the freedom of the Bulgarian nation." English historian Mercia MacDermott published a biographical book called ''For Freedom and Perfection: The Life of Yane Sandansky'' in 1988. Per Diane Waller, he is a controversial figure and MacDermott admitted that she had a "real battle" over him. MacDermott has described him as a Bulgarian revolutionary and whose wing, under the influence of socialist ideas, tried to solve the Macedonian Question by uniting all the Balkan peoples. After the fall of communism, nationalist Bulgarian historians have depicted him as a traitor to the Bulgarians, a collaborator of the Turks (seen as Bulgarian enemies) and a robber who was only motivated by money. VMRO-Union of Macedonian Associations' president described Sandanski as an extremely controversial Bulgarian revolutionary, whose separatist асtivitу however produced as a whole Macedonian nationalism. Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov placed a wreath on his monument in Melnik together with his Macedonian counterpart Branko Crvenkovski in March 2008. Parvanov, who is a professional historian, claimеd that earlier he was critical to Sandanski's activities, but from the distance of time, he thinks that Sandanski cannot be reproached for having a self-consciousness different from the Bulgarian one.

The identity of Sandanski has been disputed between Bulgaria and North Macedonia. According to the Turkish professor of history Mehmet Hacısalihoğlu, who is interested in nation-building in the late Ottoman Empire, it is very difficult to find a definitive answer to some questions regarding Sandanski's biography. Hacısalihoğlu suggested answering the question "Was Sandanski a betrayer of national Bulgarian interests in Macedonia?" positively but also pointed out that the region under his influence was not subject much to the oppressive measures of the CUP government due to his good relations with the CUP. He supported an autonomous Macedonia because it would permit him to expand his role as a political leader. However, this does not mean, he regarded the Bulgarian Macedonian population as a separate Macedonian nation.

In North Macedonia, Sandanski is considered a national hero. Macedonian historian Ivan Katardžiev argued that the political separatism of Sandanski represented a form of early Macedonian nationalism, asserting that at that time it was only a political phenomenon, without ethnic character. His name is mentioned in the national anthem of North Macedonia, ''Denes nad Makedonija'' (Today over Macedonia). A monument commemorating him was placed in Skopje as part of the Skopje 2014 project. The Macedonian historiography has emphasised the particularity of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation's left-wing and Macedonian historians refer to his actions in an attempt to demonstrate the existence of Macedonian nationalism or at least ''proto-nationalism'' within a part of the local revolutionary movement at his time. They also depict him as a fighter against the "Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia" and the "Turkish yoke". Sandanski's grave has been a place for commemoration and gatherings by Macedonian nationalists from Bulgaria and North Macedonia. In response, Bulgarian nationalists set up a second gravestone next to the original, inscribing an alleged statement by Sandanski in a Bulgarian patriotic tone. Sandanski Point on the E coast of Ioannes Paulus II Peninsula, Livingston Island, Antarctica, was named after him by the Bulgarian Antarctic Expedition.

References

Further reading

Memoirs of Yane Sandanski
(original edition in Bulgarian)
* Hristo Konstantinov
(Old Man Yane Sandanski Figure and Deed)
(Biography, 1939)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sandanski, Yane
1872 births
1915 deaths
People from Kresna
Members of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization
Bulgarian revolutionaries
Balkan federalists
Bulgarian people of the Balkan Wars
Macedonian Bulgarians
Assassinated Bulgarian people
People murdered in Bulgaria
Deaths by firearm in Bulgaria
Revolutionaries from the Ottoman Empire
People assassinated in the 20th century