📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Monday 28 September
In October 1944, a former guerrilla courier turned newspaper editor made a suggestion that still irritates two countries: that the bones of Gotse Delchev should be handed over to the new Macedonian republic being assembled inside Yugoslavia. Stefan Avramov, who made it, died on this date in 1953.
What happened on this day
He was born in Chirpan in 1884 into a craftsman's family, finished the gymnasium there and became a teacher. In 1902 he was placed in a school in the Veles region through the good offices of Peyo Yavorov and Gotse Delchev himself, which is roughly the equivalent of being found your first job by two of the faces on the banknotes.
He joined the revolutionary organisation as a courier, and in 1903 fought in the Ilinden uprising in the band of Georgi Sugarev. He was wounded in a skirmish at the village of Krapa in July 1905. He was secretary of the Bitola district congress in 1906 and withdrew to Bulgaria at the end of 1907.
Then his life turns. After meeting Dimitar Blagoev and Georgi Kirkov he moved into socialist politics, joined the party in 1908, and spent the twenties in and out of custody: arrested in September 1923 with other prominent communists, the target of an assassination attempt by an IMRO gunman during the Gorna Dzhumaya events of 1924, tried over the party's military organisation and released. He wrote throughout, and the third volume of his Heroic Times was confiscated on publication in 1943.
The Delchev proposal came in October 1944, and he pressed Delchev's sisters directly to agree to it. Two years later, on 7 October 1946, with the Bulgarian government's approval, the remains went from Sofia to Skopje, where they were placed in a sarcophagus in the yard of the Sveti Spas church. They are still there. Avramov chaired the Ilinden organisation from 1945 until it was shut down at the end of 1948, ran the state press distributor until 1951, and died in Sofia in 1953.
Why this matters for British expats
This is the single most useful piece of Bulgarian political background a newcomer can hold, and almost no British arrival has it. Delchev is claimed by both Bulgarian and Macedonian national histories, his bones lie in Skopje, and the argument over who he was is not academic: it has shaped Bulgarian policy towards North Macedonia into the present decade, including at European level.
You do not need a position on it. You do need to know it exists, because it surfaces in ordinary conversation without warning, and the safest response is interest rather than an opinion formed in the last thirty seconds. If you want the longer version of why we think this history is worth the effort, it is on our about page.
The smaller lesson is Avramov himself. Bulgarians of his generation moved between teaching, armed struggle, journalism, prison and party administration in a single lifetime, and the tidy British categories of career simply do not apply.
Worth a look if you haven't already: the Shumen guide on Shumen.UK.
Sources and further reading
Avramov's life, the Ilinden years and his own books are set out in the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Stefan Avramov; there is no English entry at all. The 1946 transfer of the remains and its circumstances come from Wikipedia's article on Gotse Delchev.