Gotse Delchev

Georgi Nikolov Delchev, known as Gotse Delchev or Goce Delčev, was a prominent Macedonian Bulgarian revolutionary and one of the most important leaders of what is commonly known as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. He was 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 for a period, 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 Millet affiliated family in Kukush, 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 for holding socialist literature. Then he returned to Ottoman Macedonia and worked as a Bulgarian Exarchate schoolteacher, 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. For him, like for many Slavic Macedonian prominent intellectuals, 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 autonomy for Macedonia and Adrianople regions into the framework of the Ottoman Empire, which in the case of Macedonia would lead to her full independence and inclusion within a future Balkan Federation. Despite having been educated in the spirit of Bulgarian nationalism, he was an opponent of the incorporation of Macedonia inside Bulgaria. Furthermore, he revised the Organization's first statute, where the membership was allowed only for Bulgarians, in order for it to depart from the exclusively Bulgarian nature, and IMRO begun to acquire a more separatist stance. In this way he emphasized the importance of cooperation among all ethnic groups in the territories concerned in order to obtain full political autonomy.
Delchev is considered a national hero in Bulgaria and North Macedonia. In the latter it is claimed he was an ethnic Macedonian revolutionary. Thus, his legacy has been disputed between both countries. Delchev's autonomist ideas have stimulated the subsequent development of Macedonian nationalism. Nevertheless, for part of the members of IMRO behind the idea of autonomy a reserve plan for eventual annexation by Bulgaria was hidden. Per some of his contemporaries, closely associated with him, 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 Bulgarian family on 4 February 1872 in Kılkış, then in the Ottoman Empire, to Nikola and Sultana. He was christened as Georgi. During the 1860s and 1870s, Kukush 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, 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 socialists and Macedonian-born emigrants, 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 Ivan Hadzhinikolov, a bookseller from Thessaloniki. 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 and revolutionary ideas. 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 Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization was in its early stages of development, forming its committees around the Bulgarian Exarchate schools in order to exploit the extensive school system.

Teacher and revolutionary

In Ottoman Salonika, 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. It was decided at a meeting in Resen in August 1894 to preferably recruit teachers from the Bulgarian schools as committee members. Although Delchev despised the Exarchate policy in Macedonia, in 1894 he became a teacher in an Exarchate school in Štip. There he met another teacher, Dame Gruev, who was also among the founders of IMRO and a leader of the newly established local committee. 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. Delchev 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. They shared common views with Gruev that the liberation had to be achieved internally by a Macedonian organization without any foreign intervention. Therefore, 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. Despite his and Gruev's efforts, the number of members grew slowly. In a letter from 1895, Delchev explained that the liberation of Macedonia as a state lies in an internal uprising for which 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. Delchev travelled during the vacations throughout Macedonia and established and organized committees in villages and cities. In this period, he adopted Ahil as his nom de guerre. Furthermore, he organized secret border crossing points towards Bulgaria near Kyustendil for easier infiltration of revolutionary propaganda literature.
Delchev also established contacts with some of the leaders of the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee. 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 strong connections with the Bulgarian governments and prince Ferdinand, 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 February 1896, he met SMAC's new leader Danail Nikolaev, their conversation was turbulent and short. Namely, Nikolaev asserted that the only way to freedom was with trained Bulgarian soldiers and clandestine aid and finance of the Bulgarian government. Moreover, he considered Delchev a brash youngster and deemed unreal and absurd the idea of peasant uprising by revolutionary impulsion of the Macedonian Slavs. SMAC wanted IMRO to be subordinated to them, and Bulgarian army officers to dominate their activity, while IMRO wanted to remain independent of Bulgarian governmental control. After spending the 1895/1896 school year 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 Salonika. He, along with Gyorche 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. Afterwards, Delchev gave his resignation as a teacher and in the same year, he moved back to Bulgaria.