Gjorche Petrov

Gjorche Petrov ( _bg. Гьорче Петров; _mk. Ѓорче Петров), born Georgi Petrov Nikolov (1864/1865 - June 28 1921), was one of the leaders of the Macedonian-Adrianople revolutionary movement (IMARO, BMARC before 1902).

Biography

Born in Prilep, Ottoman empire (present-day Republic of Macedonia), he studied at the secondary school for boys in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Then he worked as a teacher in various towns of Macedonia. He took part in the revolutionary campaign in Macedonia as well as in the Thessaloniki Congress of the Bulgarian Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Committees (BMARC) in 1896. [cite book
last =Aleksieva
first =Margarita
title =Some Great Bulgarians
publisher =Sofia Press
date =1972
pages =p. 157] [cite book
last =Ashton
first =Oswald
coauthors =Wentworth Dilke, Margaret S. Dilke
title =Recollections of the National Liberation Struggles in Macedonia
publisher =Mosaic Publicationss
date =1984
pages =p. 13] He was among the authors of the organization's new charter and rules, which he co-wrote with Gotse Delchev. [cite book
last =Detrez
first =Raymond
title =Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria
publisher =Scarecrow Press
date =1997
pages =p. 106
isbn =0810831775 ]

Gjorche Petrov was the representative of the Foreign Committee of the BMARC/IMARO in Sofia in 1897-1901. He did not approve of the ultimately outbreak of the Uprising on Ilinden, 2 August 1903, but he participated leading a squad [Gjorche Petrov's memoirs page 167-8] . After the unsuccessful uprising Petrov continued his participation in IMARO.

Petrov was again included in the Emigrant representation in Sofia in 1905-1908. After the Young Turks Revolution of 1908, Petrov together with writer Anton Strashimirov edited the "Kulturno Edinstvo" magazine ("Cultural Unity"), published in Thessaloniki (Solun) Fact|date=March 2008.

He was President of the Regular Regional Committee in Bitola for some time during the First World War, after IMARO had disbanded, and afterwards became mayor of Drama. At the end of the war he was one of the initiators of the formation of a Provisional Government by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization] (IMRO), and this government set the task of defending the positions of the Bulgarians in Macedonia at the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920). He was also Chief of the Refugees Settlement Agency of the Ministry of Imternal Affairs. [Василев, Васил. Правителството на БЗНС, ВМРО и българо-югославските отношения, София 1991, с.77]

He kept close ties with Aleksandar Dimitrov and some other prominent Agrarian leaders, thus incurring IMRO leaders' hatred upon himself. He was eventually killed by them in June 1921 in Sofia.

To honor his name a suburb of Skopje was named Gjorče Petrov, or usually shortly referred only as Gjorče. The suburb is one of the ten municipalities of Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia.

Ethnicity

As with many other IMARO leaders of the time, he is considered nowadays an ethnic Bulgarian in Bulgaria and an ethnic Macedonian in the Republic of Macedonia. However in his his memoirs, Gjorche Petrov calls himself both Macedonian [Gjorche Petrov's memoirs, page 6 "Ние, ученицитѣ „македончета”, бѣхме по-гюрултаджии." (We, pupils "the macedonians", were louder.)] and Bulgarian [Gjorche Petrov's memoirs page 91] "Щомъ разбраха, че съмъ българинъ и пр." (After they found out I was Bulgarian, etc.)] . In his book about the geography of Macedonia (Материали по изучаванието на Македония, София 1896) Gjorche Petrov describes the Slavic people in Macedonia as Bulgarian and considers the term "Macedonians" as regional belonging. His opinion was that Bulgarians constitute the bulk or more than a half of the population. [Материали по изучаванието на Македония, София 1896, p. 442, 475, 706, 711-713, 724, 728, 730-731 etc] The Bulgariannes of Petrov are recognized by several Macedonian historians like academician Ivan Katardzhiev, [http://www.manu.edu.mk/departments.htm director of the Historical Sciences section] in the Department of Social Sciences in the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the director of the Macedonian State archive Ph.D. Zoran Todorovski. [Katardzhiev defines all Macedonian revolutionaries from the period before 1930-ies as "Bulgarians" and asserts that separatism of some Macedonian revolutionaties toward official Bulgarian policy was only political phenomenon without ethnic character (an interview for [http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:weMLf7i05d4J:www.forum.com.mk/Arhiva/Forum37/megaintervju/otpecati.htm+%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8+%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0+%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%B2+%D0%B1%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD+%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BA&hl=bg&ct=clnk&cd=20&gl=bg "Forum" magazine] , in Macedonian] ). Todorovski asserts that "All of them declared themselves as Bulgarians..." and "I can point hunderts of documents, where he declared himself as Bulgarian" about Petrov. (an interview for Tribune. [http://www.tribune.eu.com/articles/79.html www.tribune.eu.com] , June 27, 2005, in Macedonian.).]

Quotes

External links

* [http://promacedonia.org/en/ban/ls1.html#40 G. Petrov, Materials on the Study of Macedonia, Sofia, 1896, pp. 724-725, 731; the original is in Bulgarian - Information on the ethnic composition of the population in Macedonia, 1896]

References