Dimitar Vlahov

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Dimitar Vlahov
Member of the Ottoman Parliament
In office
Fall 1908 – January 1910 (when he resigns from the Federative Party)
Personal details
Born8 November 1878
SFR Yugoslavia (now Serbia)
Political partyPeople's Federative Party (Bulgarian Section)

Dimitar Vlahov (Bulgarian: Димитър Влахов; Macedonian: Димитар Влахов; 8 November 1878 – 7 April 1953) was a politician from the region of Macedonia and member of the left wing of the Macedonian-Adrianople revolutionary movement (also known as Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO)). As with many other IMRO members of the time, historians from North Macedonia consider him an ethnic Macedonian and in Bulgaria he is considered a Bulgarian. According to Dimitar Bechev, Vlahov declared himself until the early 1930s as a Bulgarian and afterwards as an ethnic Macedonian.[1]

Life

He was born in Kılkış (Bulgarian/Macedonian

IMRO. During this period, he was arrested by the Ottoman authorities. In 1905, Vlahov was released and went back to Bulgaria where he worked as a teacher in Kazanlak. In 1908, after the Young Turks revolution he began working in the Bulgarian secondary school in Thessaloniki
again.

In the following years, Vlahov was politically active as a deputy in the

IMRO (United) in Vienna. He also became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party. At the end of the 1920s he worked in France, Germany and Austria
as a Comintern publicist. During this period he was pursued by IMRO and several failed assassination attempts were organized against him.

In 1932 members of IMRO (United), put for the first time the issue of the recognition of a separate

Yugoslavia with Socialist Republic of Macedonia, where he worked in high state and political positions. In November 1943, Vlahov participated in the Second Session of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia and was elected in the presidium representing Aegean Macedonia.[4] In November 1944 he returned to the newly liberated Skopje and became a member of the Communist Party of Macedonia
.

Metodija Andonov-Čento (second from left), Víctor Manuel Villaseñor, United Nations Representative (center), Dimitar Vlahov (second from right) and others, in Bitola, February 1946

On 26 November, at the First Conference of the National Liberation Front of Macedonia, he was elected its president, and at the Second Session of Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM) in December he was elected a member of the Presidium of ASNOM. At the Third Session of ASNOM in April 1945 he became a member of the Presidium of the National Assembly of Macedonia.

Post-war, Vlahov argued that Macedonians had "all the elements" that make a nation. In his 1950 book Macedonia-Comments of the History of the Macedonian People, he claimed that modern Macedonians came from a fusion of Slavs with the ancient Macedonians, that Samuel of Bulgaria's empire was a Macedonian state, and that Cyril and Methodius were Macedonians' gift to Slavism, among other assertions.[5]

Per

Lazar Kolishevski. Vlahov was dismissed, because he communicated much better in Bulgarian than in Macedonian and had little political support in SR Macedonia, among other reasons.[10] He died in Belgrade
in 1953.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Произходът на македонската нация - Стенограма от заседание на Македонския Научен Институт в София през 1947 г.
  2. ^ Мемоари на Димитър Влахов. Скопје, 1970, стр. 356.
  3. ^ Alexis Heraclides (2021). The Macedonian Question And The Macedonians. Taylor & Francis. p. 91.
  4. ^ Alexis Heraclides (2021). The Macedonian Question And The Macedonians. Taylor & Francis. pp. 171–172.
  5. ^ Академик Катарџиев, Иван. Верувам во националниот имунитет на македонецот, интервју за списание "Форум", 22 jули 2000, број 329.
  6. ^ As the historian Ivan Katardziev pointed out many years ago, even the veterans of the left-wing IMRO (United) in the second half of the 1940s "remained only at the level of political and not national separatism." In this sense, we can say that today's definition of Macedonian national identity necessarily went through Yugoslav socialization and overt anti-Bulgarianism, and this certainly also goes through a historical narrative from Yugoslav times, which seriously ignores historical facts. Not by chance, speaking of personalities like Dimitar Vlahov or Pavel Shatev, Katardziev adds: "They practically felt like Bulgarians. For more: "Стефан Дечев: Две държава, две истории, много „истини“ и една клета наука - трета част. Marginalia, 15.06.2018.
  7. ^ In conclusion, Gotse and IMRO were "children of the Exarchate", and the later ethnic Macedonia was mostly the creation of an young generation brought up from the end of the 20s of the 20th century in Belgrade or Zagreb, who had a different sensibility. The old IMRO people were not like that. It is not by chance that the distinguished historian Ivan Katardziev in an interview from the late 90s said that even one Dimitar Vlahov until the end of his life could not feel what it means to be an ethnic Macedonian, he remained with the old political Macedonianism of Gotse Delchev and Yane Sandanski, who is a very Bulgarian phenomenon. For more: Стефан Дечев: Дори македонските тълкувания за езика от Средновековието и 19 в. да са тенденциозни, защо да е невъзможно да се признае съществуването на стандартен македонски книжовен език? Marginalia, 17.12.2019.
  8. , p. 188.
  9. , p. 238.

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