He was a member of the clandestine Macedonian revolutionary organization (VMRO), acting as one of the famous members of its military wing. He is alleged to be the perpetrator of some of the most controversial assassinations of the corrupt and oppressive Ottoman government officials at the turn of the century in Macedonia. At that point the Ottomans ruled over Macedonia for more than 500 years and the Macedonian revolutionaries dared to dream and struggle for an Independent Macedonia, under the slogan “Macedonia for the Macedonians”. His wife Evra was one of the most famous seamstresses and ironically the most competent midwife in the region. Her medical services were in high demand by the most powerful Turkish landlords (Beys and Aghas – Ottoman feudal titles resembling the barons and dukes in Christian Europe). So, in other words, my family members were responsible for life and death of the Ottoman landlords in Macedonia.   

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The last story about them is again connected to my grandpa’s defiance. He was well over 90 years old when during the Second World War the Bulgarian fascists occupiers tried to change his surname and to count him as a Bulgarian by ethnicity. He was badly beaten, but he still refused to be anything else but a Macedonian. Quite a grandpa!

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Global History

• “Macedonian for the Macedonian” (1897) – the slogan of the Macedonian revolutionaries was taken from a speech delivered in the house of commons by the British prime minister William Gladstone in 1897.   

• The long struggle for Macedonian national freedom (at least since the 19th Century to the present day) – Macedonian revolutionaries belonging to VMRO did not manage to create an independent Macedonian state, but my great-great-great grandparents, Atanas and Evra, lived long enough to witness the birth of modern Macedonia in 1944, created during the anti-fascist struggle for the liberation of Macedonia in WWII.