Vančo Prke
Vančo Prke-Sermen was a Macedonian communist and partisan fighter during World War II. He is recognized as a People’s Hero of Yugoslavia for his contributions during the war.
Life
Prke was born in 1921 in the village of Sermenin, near Gevgelija, in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Raised in poverty by a widowed mother, he was sent to live with another family in Štip, where he completed his secondary education. In 1939, he enrolled at the Technical Faculty in Belgrade. While studying, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1940 and worked as a translator of Russian literature for the publishing house “Nolit.”Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, Prke moved to Bulgarian occupation zone of Yugoslavia and became actively involved in organizing resistance efforts in the Štip region. By 1943, he was a member of the Regional Committee of Communists in Macedonia and served as the political commissar of the Bitola-Prespa partisan detachment. Later that year, he was appointed political commissar of the newly formed Plachkovica partisan detachment.