VMRO Founder's Remains Transferred from Italy to Bulgaria

Dr. Hristo Tatarchev will be buried in Bulgaria 58 years after his death in Turin, Italy. Photo by Wikipedia

The remains of Dr. Hristo Tatarchev, one of the founders of VMRO, the revolutionary organization of Macedonian Bulgarians, are to be buried in Sofia.

On October 23, 1893, in Thessaloniki, Tatarchev, together with five other men, founded the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (VMORO), a revolutionary network that in the decades before 1945 became the most powerful non-state political actor in the Balkans, with a decisive role in Bulgarian politics until the 1930s.

The VMORO (renamed VMRO after World War I) was initially formed to liberate the Bulgarians in Thrace and Macedonia, whose lands remained in the Ottoman Turkish Empire after the Berlin Treaty of July 1878.

Subsequently, after the failure of the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising of 1903, the VMORO decided, for reasons having to do with great power politics, to seek only autonomy for the Macedonia and Thrace provinces, i.e. the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. After the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, most of these territories were conquered by Bulgaria's neighbors Serbia and Greece, which led VMRO to stage a guerrilla war and terrorist activities against them.

Hristo Tatarchev (born 1869 in Resen, today's Macedonia) was the first chair of the VMORO. During the wars of 1912-1918, he was a doctor in the Bulgarian army.

In 1920, internal dissent in VMRO forced him into exile in Turin, Italy, where he lived until his death in 1952. In 1941, he lived briefly in his native Resen during the period when Macedonia was made part of Bulgaria (1941-1944).

In December 2009, his remains were brought from Turin to Bulgaria by VMRO-BND, a contemporary national political party claiming descent from the VMORO (not to be confused with the VMRO-DPMNE, the ruling party in today's Macedonia – which also claims descent from the same organization).

Tatarchev's Bulgarian funeral will take place on October 23, 2010, exactly 117 years since the founding of the VMORO, the VMRO party announced.

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