📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 2 July
A quiet one today, and an honest admission to open with: most Brits here, and plenty of Bulgarians, will never have heard of Asen Cholakov. He was one of thousands of young men swept into the Macedonian struggle of the early twentieth century, and he died for it on this day in 1924, at about twenty-six.
Who Asen Cholakov was
Cholakov was born in 1898. Even that comes with a shrug: the records give either Pavlovo or Dupnitsa, the kind of small uncertainty that tells you how thin the paper trail is for the foot soldiers of this period. He joined the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, the VMRO, and on the second of July 1924, though some sources say the second of August, he was killed in a clash with a Serbian patrol near the village of Smolari. That is very nearly the whole of what survives of him: a name, a cause, and a date the historians cannot quite agree on.
The bigger picture
What makes a near-anonymous death worth a line is the machine he died inside. The VMRO was the revolutionary organisation that had fought, since the 1890s, over Macedonia: first against Ottoman rule, then, after the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 carved the region up, against the Serbian and Greek states that ended up governing much of it. By the 1920s it was running armed bands, cheti, back and forth across the new borders, and the Yugoslav authorities hunted them through exactly the kind of frontier skirmish that killed Cholakov.
Why this matters for British expats
You do not need to take a side in a century-old quarrel to find this useful. The Macedonian question still runs through Bulgarian street names, war memorials and politics, and the letters VMRO even survive as the name of a modern Bulgarian political party. Realising that a plaque you walk past, or an acronym in a news headline, points back to men like Cholakov is a small piece of the country's wiring, the sort of thing that turns a place you live in into a place you actually understand.
There's more on this kind of thing over at Shumen.UK homepage.
Sources and further reading
The little that is known about Asen Cholakov here is drawn from his Bulgarian Wikipedia entry, which runs to just a few lines. It is a fair reminder that history keeps fuller records of generals than of the men who did the actual fighting.