📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 9 October
Most British people can tell you about Sarajevo in 1914. Far fewer can tell you about Marseille on 9 October 1934, when a Bulgarian gunman shot a king in a French street. His name was Vlado Chernozemski, and he died that same evening.
What happened on this day
Vlado Chernozemski was born Velichko Dimitrov Kerin in 1897 in the village of Kamenitsa, now the largest quarter of Velingrad (VE-lin-grad), the Rhodope spa town. He served with the engineers in the First World War, earned his living as a driver and watchmaker, and in 1922 joined IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Among the people he later killed for it, English Wikipedia names the communist MP Dimo Hadzhidimov, in 1924, and the IMRO member Naum Tomalevski. A court gave him life in 1931, an amnesty freed him in 1932, and he then slipped out of Bulgaria and became an instructor in Ustaše camps in Italy and Hungary.
On 9 October 1934, a Tuesday, King Alexander I of Yugoslavia arrived in Marseille on a state visit to France, on a weekday he had reportedly avoided for public duties since three relatives died on Tuesdays. His car crawled along at 8 km/h. Chernozemski stepped out of the crowd with a pistol hidden in a bouquet, leapt onto the running board and opened fire. The king, the car's chauffeur and the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, all died; a ballistics report kept secret until 1974 found that Barthou was hit by a bullet of the calibre French police used. Chernozemski was struck with a sabre, shot and beaten by the crowd, and died in custody around 8 pm. The investigators were left with a dead man they could not name: his passport said "Peter Kelemen", and the newspaper Politika reported on 11 October that nobody of that name existed. The Bulgarian legation gave the French his real identity on 15 October. A newsreel cameraman only metres away filmed the build-up and the aftermath, though not the shots, which makes it one of the first assassinations caught on film.
Why this matters for British expats
A name like this needs careful handling. English Wikipedia says that in Bulgaria he is regarded as a hero, while North Macedonia's official historiography treats him as a controversial Bulgarian, so his nationality is live politics, not pub-quiz trivia. Streets in Blagoevgrad and Velingrad carry his name, and a memorial plate went up in Velingrad in October 2005, which is worth knowing if you take the waters there. I looked for a Shumen link and the pages I read do not offer one. Britain's part is the awkward bit: English Wikipedia records that London and Paris told Belgrade in private that Mussolini must not be blamed, and that Sir John Simon, the foreign secretary, said at Northampton on 19 October 1934 that he was convinced by Mussolini's denial of involvement.
Sources and further reading
The biography comes from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Vlado Chernozemski and the English entry, and the attack and its aftermath from Bulgarian Wikipedia's Marseille assassination page and English Wikipedia's article on Alexander I of Yugoslavia. The Velingrad details come from its Bulgarian Wikipedia page.