📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Sunday 28 June
Today's birthday belongs to a man whose life is a small map of one of the Balkans' most tangled questions. Nikola Kirov Traykov, known by the nickname Mayski, was born on this day in 1880 in Kruševo, a mountain town then inside the Ottoman Empire and today in North Macedonia. He was a teacher, a revolutionary and a writer, and which nation he belongs to is something Bulgaria and its neighbour have argued about for a very long time.
Who Nikola Kirov was
Kirov got his schooling at the Bulgarian Men's High School in Bitola, from which he was expelled in 1898, and then at its counterpart in Thessaloniki, graduating in 1902. It was there that he joined the IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, the secret network that fought Ottoman rule in the region.
That path led him to the defining episode of his generation. During the Ilinden uprising of 1903 he was in his home town of Kruševo, where the rebels declared the short-lived Kruševo Republic, one of the most romantic and tragic episodes in the region's history, and Kirov took part in both its declaration and its doomed defence. Afterwards he headed the Kruševo revolutionary committee. He went on teaching in the schools of the Bulgarian Exarchate, in Embore, then Debar, and as director of the Bulgarian school in Resen in 1911-1912.
When the Second Balkan War redrew the map, Kirov moved with his family to Bulgaria, graduated from Sofia University, and kept up his work in the Macedonian emigre organisations. In 1923 he published a novel, Ilinden, dramatising the uprising and attributing authorship of the Kruševo Manifesto to his literary hero, the revolutionary Nikola Karev. The book is also a small landmark for another reason: it was among the first literary works written in his native Prilep-Bitola dialect, years before there was a standardised Macedonian language at all.
The man two countries claim
That last detail is where the story stops being a simple biography. Was Kirov a Bulgarian writer or a Macedonian one? Bulgarian sources describe him plainly as a Bulgarian teacher and revolutionary; the wider record calls him a Macedonian Bulgarian; North Macedonia honours figures of the Ilinden generation as its own national founders. The same man, the same uprising, the same manifesto, claimed by two national stories that do not agree on the basic vocabulary.
This is not a dusty quarrel. The argument over who owns the IMRO, Ilinden and the writers and fighters of that era is the living core of the Macedonian Question, the dispute over history and identity that has repeatedly soured relations between Sofia and Skopje and tangled North Macedonia's path towards the European Union. Kirov, writing in a dialect before anyone had agreed what to call it, sits exactly on the fault line.
Why this matters for British expats
If you follow Bulgarian news for any length of time, the row with North Macedonia will surface, and it can look baffling from the outside: two friendly, closely related neighbours falling out bitterly over events from the 1900s. A figure like Kirov is the key to it. The disagreement is not really about him as a person; it is about whether a shared past can belong to two separate presents. Knowing that turns an opaque diplomatic spat into something you can actually follow.
It is also a quiet lesson in reading the country generously. The history here is genuinely shared, genuinely contested, and held with real feeling on both sides of the border. Kirov spent his life on the awkward seam of it, and a hundred years on, the seam has not closed.
File alongside this in your expat mental map: the Shumen.UK health guide.