📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 17 October
There is no English Wikipedia page for Anton Arnaudov (Антон Арнаудов, an-TON ar-NAH-oo-dov), and Bulgarian Wikipedia gives him a single short paragraph. It still holds a whole career: a schoolteacher who helped run revolutionary committees in two cities, an arrest in wartime and exile in Asia Minor. He died in Sofia on this day in 1948.
What happened on this day
Arnaudov was born on 6 January 1866 in Edirne (Одрин, Odrin in Bulgarian, Adrianople in older English), then part of the Ottoman Empire. He studied at the religious school in his home city and taught there from 1894 to 1897. In 1895 he joined the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organisation, known by its Bulgarian initials VMORO, brought in by Hristo Kotsev, and the same year he was elected secretary of the Edirne district committee. In 1897 he became head Bulgarian teacher in Gyumyurdzhina (today Komotini, in northern Greece), stayed until 1904, and organised a revolutionary committee in the town and in some Bulgarian villages around it.
From 1904 to 1913 he taught in Edirne again. He was arrested during the Balkan War in 1912 and sent into exile in Izmit, a city in north-western Turkey about 100 km east of Istanbul. In 1915 he moved to Sofia, where he joined the Thracian Organization, and he died there on 17 October 1948, aged 82. The page gives no month for the arrest, no reason beyond the war and nothing about the exile, so I will not guess.
The world he worked in
The organisation that grew into VMORO was founded in Thessaloniki in 1893. In 1895 it decided to extend its network to the rest of Thrace under Ottoman rule, and Dame Gruev gave Kotsev, a teacher at the Bulgarian boys' school in Edirne, the job of building it. The first revolutionary circle was founded that September at the boys' gymnasium named after Dr Petar Beron. The district covered the Ottoman province of Adrianople, from the Black Sea to the river Mesta. Edirne itself was mixed: English Wikipedia's figures for around 1905 give roughly 80,000 people, among them 30,000 Turks, 22,000 Greeks, 12,000 Jews and 10,000 Bulgarians. Gyumyurdzhina, called Gümülcine in Turkish, is now a Greek city of about 67,000 people (2011 census).
Why this matters for British expats
English Wikipedia puts Edirne only 20 km from the Bulgarian border, and Bulgarians still call it Odrin, so the name can surface in conversation with neighbours. The Ottomans' second capital until Constantinople took over in 1453, it was captured by Bulgarian troops in the spring of 1913, and the Ottomans took it back in the Second Balkan War. The Union of Thracian Societies in Bulgaria, which Bulgarian Wikipedia describes as a national body of Thracian refugees and their descendants, begins its history with the same 1890s movement. Shumen has a footnote in that war too: when a Turkish squadron shelled Varna on 6 to 8 October 1912, the Bulgarian command moved heavy artillery from Shumen to the coast. I can find no connection to Arnaudov, but it puts this city in the same conflict.
Sources and further reading
The life comes from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Anton Arnaudov, which has no English counterpart, and the revolutionary district from Bulgarian Wikipedia's page on the Adrianople district. The city details come from English Wikipedia's Edirne and the Bulgarian pages on Komotini, the Thracian societies and the Balkan War.