ILINDEN-PREOBRAZHENIE UPRISING

The 'Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising' or simply the 'Ilinden Uprising' of August 1903 (, Ilindensko-Preobrazhensko vastanie, , Ilindensko vostanie) was an organized revolt against the Ottoman Empire prepared and carried out by the Secret Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organisation (''see IMRO for more information on the name, origins and goals of that organisation'').
The uprising took place in the Bitola vilayet and the northeastern part of Adrianople vilayet — parts of the regions of Macedonia and Thrace. The rebellion in the Bitola vilayet was proclaimed on 2 August (Gregorian Calendar, which corresponds to 20 July of the Julian Calendar) 1903, St. Elias' Day, the celebration of the ascension of the Prophet Elijah to Heaven (''Илинден, Ilinden'' in Bulgarian/Macedonian. The Adrianople vilayet joined the uprising on 19 August 1903, the Transfiguration (''Преображение, Preobrazhenie'' in Bulgarian).
The rebellion in Macedonia affected most of the central and southwestern parts of the Bitola Vilayet receiving the support of the local Bulgarian peasants, Grecomans and Vlach population of the region. Provisional governments were established in three localities, all of them Vlach towns or villages, viz Krushevo, (near Prilep), Neveska, near Florina and Klisura near Kastoria. In Krushevo the insurgents proclaimed the so called ''Krushevo Republic'' under the presidency of the school teacher Nikola Karev, which was overrun after just ten days, on 12 August.

The Ilinden Uprising as seen by the English daily ''The Times'', Aug. 8, 1903. The term "Bulgarian force" is used to describe the rebels

On 19 August, a closely related uprising in the Adrianople vilayet led to the liberation of a large area in the Strandzha Mountains near the Black Sea coast, and to the creation of a provisional government in Vassiliko, the so called ''Strandzha Republic'', which lasted about twenty days before being put down by the Turks.
By the time the rebellion had started, many of its most promising potential leaders, including Gotse Delchev, had already been killed in skirmishes with the Ottomans, and the effort was quashed within a couple of months. The survivors managed to maintain a guerilla campaign against the Turks for the next few years, but its greater effect was that it persuaded the European powers to attempt to convince the Ottoman sultan that he must take a more conciliatory note toward his Christian subjects in Europe.

Contents

Prelude to uprising

The Ilinden uprising in Macedonia

The Preobrazhenie uprising in Thrace

Aftermath

Subsequent history

See also

Sources

References

Prelude to uprising

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Turkish Ottoman empire was crumbling, and the lands they had held in Eastern Europe for over 500 years were passing to new rulers. Macedonia was a region of indefinite boundaries, adjacent to the recently independent Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian states, but itself still under the control of the Ottoman Turks. Each of the neighbouring states based claims to Macedonia on various historical and racial grounds. But the population was highly mixed, and the competing historical claims were based on various empires in the distant past., first published in 1931, by H. Holt & Co.
The competition for control took place largely by means of propaganda campaigns, aimed at winning over the local population, and took place largely through the churches and schools. Various groups of merenaries were also supported, by the local population and by the three competing governments. The most effective group was the Internal Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Organization (IMARO), founded in Thessaloniki in 1893. The group had a number of name changes prior to and subsequent to the uprising. It was predominantly Bulgarian and supported an idea for autonomous Macedonia and Adrianople regions within Ottoman state with a motto of "Macedonia for the Macedonians". It rapidly began to be infiltrated by members of ''Macedonian Supreme Committee'', a group formed in 1894 in Sofia, Bulgaria. This group was called the ''Supremists'', and advocated annexation of the region by Bulgaria. Volume 8 of the 11 volume series ''A History of East Central Europe''.
The two groups had different strategies. IMRO as originally conceived sought to prepare a carefully planned planned uprising in the future, but the Supremacists preferred immediate raids and guerilla operations to foster disorder and a precipitate interventions., first printed in 1922.^[3] One of the founding leaders of IMRO was Gotse Delchev was a strong advocate for proceeding slowly, but the Supremacists urged a major uprising to take place in the summer of 1903. Delchev himself was killed by the Turks in May of 1903, and the Supremacist's plan went ahead. The day chosen was August 2 (July 20 in the old Julian calendar), the feast day of St. Elias (Elijah). This holy day was known as ''Ilinden''.

The Ilinden uprising in Macedonia

A map of the Ilinden and Preobrazhenie uprisings in the regions of Macedonia and Thrace.

Rebels in the rising of 1903.

The dates and details here are from an account by the anachist author Georgi Khadziev, translated by Will Firth. An excerpt from the book ''"National Liberation and Libertarian Federalism"'' (Natsionalnoto osvobozhdeniye i bezvlastniyat federalizum), translated by Will Firth.

★ On 11 July, a congress at ''Petrova Niva'' near Malko Tarnovo set the date of 23 July for the uprising, then deferred it a bit more to 2 August. The Thrace region, around the Ardianople vilayet was not ready, and negotiated for a later uprising in that region.

★ On 28 July, the message was sent out the the revolutionary movements, though the secret was kept until the last moment.

★ The uprising began on the night of August 2, and and involved large regions in around Bitola, around the south-west of what is now the Republic of Macedonia and some of the north of Greece.

★ On the night of August 2 and early morning of August 3, the town of Krushevo was attacked and captured by 800 rebels.

★ After three days of fighting and a seige from August 5, the town of Smilevo was captured by the rebels.

★ The town on Klisura, near modern day Kastoria in Greece, was taken by insurgents about August 5.

★ On August 4 and 5, Turkish troops made an unsuccessful attempt to retake Krushevo.

★ On August 4, under leadership of Nikola Karev, a local administration was set up, now called the ''Krushevo republic''.

★ On August 12, a large Ottoman force recaptured and burned Krushevo. It had been held by the insurgents for just ten days.

★ On August 14, bands near Skopje attacked and derailed a military train.

★ In Razlog the population joined in the uprising. This was further east, in Pirin Macedonia in present-day Bulgaria.

★ Klisura was finally recaptured by the Ottomans on August 27.

★ Other regions involved included Ohrid, Lerin (now Florina in Greece), and Kicevo. In the Thessaloniki region, operations were much more limited and without much local involvement, due in part to disagreements between the factions of IMRO. There was also no uprising in the Prilep area, immediately to the east of Bitola.

★ Militias active in the region of Serres, led by Yane Sandanski and an insurgent detachment of the Supreme Committee, held down a large Turkish force. These actions began on the day of the Feast of the Cross (Krastovden in Bulgarian, September 27) and did not involve the local population as much as in other regions, and were well to the east of Bitola and to the west of Thrace.

The Preobrazhenie uprising in Thrace

Letter from the General Staff of the Bitola Revolutionary Region to the Bulgarian Government, requestioning military intervention from Bulgaria.^[4]

Preobrazhenie is the feast day of the transfiguration, and was chosen as the date for an uprising in Thrace, along the Black sea coast and inland. Major targets were Adrianople (now Edirne in Turkey), Malko Turnovo, and İğneada. This region now straddles the modern border of Bulgaria and Turkey, beside the Black sea Coast. Details are from the account by Georgi Khadziev.
According to Khadziev, the main goal of the uprising in Thrace was to give support to the uprisings further west, by engaging Turkish troops and preventing them from moving into Macedonia. Many of the operations were diversionary, though several villages were taken, and a region in Strandzha was held for around twenty days. This is sometimes called the Strandzha republic or Strandzha commune, but according to Khadziev there was never a question of state power in the Thrace region.

★ On the morning of August 19, attacks were made on villages throughout the region, including Vasiliko (now Tsarevo), Stoilovo (near Malko Tarnovo), and villages near Adrianople (now Edirne).

★ On August 21, the harbor lighthouse at Igneada was blown up.

★ Around September 3 a strong Ottoman force began reasserting their control.

★ By September 8 the Turks had restored control and were mopping up.

Aftermath

Devastated villages after the Ilinden insurrection.

The reaction of the Ottoman Turks to the uprisings was savage and involved overwhelming force. The only hope for the insurgents was outside intervention, and that was never politically feasible. Indeed, although Bulgarian interests were favored by the actions, the Bulgarian government itself had been required to outlaw the Macedonian rebel groups prior to the uprisings, and sought the arrest of its leaders. This was a condition of diplomacy with Russia.
The waning Ottoman empire dealt with the instability by taking vengeance on local populations that had supported the rebels. Casualties during the military campaigns themselves were comparatively small, but afterwards thousands were killed, executed or made homeless. Historian Barbara Jelavich estimates that about nine thousand homes were destroyed, and thousands of refugees were produced. According to Georgi Khadziev, 201 villages and 12,400 houses were burned, 4,694 people killed, with some 30,000 refugees fleeing to Bulgaria.
At a meeting in early October, the general staff of the rebel forces decided to cease all revolutionary activities, and declared the forces, excepting regular militias, to be disbanded. After the uprising, IMRO became more strongly associated with the Supremacists, and with the goal of hegemony with Bulgaria.
The savagery of the insurrections and the reprisals did finally provoke a reaction from the outside world. In October, Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary and Nicholas II of Russia met at Mürzsteg and sponsored the Mürzsteg program of reforms, which provided for foreign policing of the Macedonia region, financial compensation for victims, and establishment of ethnic boundaries in the region. The reforms achieved little practical result apart from giving more visibility to the crisis. The question of competing aspirations of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and local advocates for political autonomy were not addressed, and the notion of ethnic boundaries was impossible to implement effectively. In any case, these concerns were soon overshadowed by the Young Turk revolution of 1908 and the subsequent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

Subsequent history

Portrayal of the insurrections by later historians often reflect on-going national aspirations. Historians from the Republic of Macedonia see them as a part of the move for an independent state as finally achieved by their own new nation. There is very little historical continuity from the insurrections to the modern state, however. Historians from Bulgaria emphasize the undoubted Bulgarian character of the rebels, but tends to downplay the moves for political autonomy that were a part of the IMRO organization prior to the insurections. Western historians generally refer simply to the ''Ilinden uprising'', which marks the date on which uprising began. In Bulgaria it is more common to refer to the ''Ilinden-Preobrazhenie uprising'', giving equal status to the activities commenced at Preobrazhenie near to the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea and limiting an undue focus on the Macedonian region. Some sources recognize these as two related but distinct insurrections, and name them the ''Ilinden uprising'' and the ''Preobrazhenie uprising''. Bulgarian sources tend to emphasize the moves within IMRO for hegemony with Bulgaria, as advocated by the Supremacist and the right wing factions; Macedonian sources tend to emphasize the early goals of political autonomy when IMRO was established. Ironically, it was the Supremacist faction that pushed for the insurrections to take place in the summer of 1903, while the left wing argued for more time and more planning.^[5]
The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 subsequently split up Macedonia and Adrianople Thrace. Serbia took the major portion of Slavic Macedonia, in the north, which roughly corresponds to the Republic of Macedonia. Greece took Aegean Macedonia in the south, and Bulgaria was only able to obtain a small region in the northeast: Pirin Macedonia. The Ottomans managed to keep the Adrianople region, where the whole Thracian Bulgarian population was put to total ethnic cleansing by the Ottoman empire.^[6] Most of the local Bulgarian political and cultural figures were persecuted or expelled from Serbian and Greek parts of Macedonia, where all structures of the Bulgarian Exarchate were abolished.^[7] Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization supported Bulgarian army during the Balkan Wars and the First World War and continued its struggle against Serbian and Greek regimes in the following two decades, having ''de facto'' full control of Bulgarian Pirin Macedonia (the Petrich District of the time) and acted as a "state within a state", which it used as a base for hit and run attacks against Yugoslavia and Greece.
The leaders of the uprising are celebrated as heroes in Bulgaria and in the modern Republic of Macedonia. They are regarded as Bulgarian patriots in Bulgaria, and as founders of the drive for Macedonian independence in Macedonia. The names of the IMRO revolutionaries like Pitu Guli, Dame Gruev and Yane Sandanski were included into the lyrics of the anthem of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia Denes nad Makedonija ("Today over Macedonia"). There are towns named after the leaders in both Bulgaria and the Republic of Macedonia.
Today, 2nd of August is the national holiday in Republic of Macedonia which considers it the date of its first statehood in modern times, and also being the date on which in 1944 at ASNOM a People's Republic of Macedonia was proclaimed as a constituent republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The ASNOM event in 1944 is referred as 'Second Ilinden' today in Republic of Macedonia, though there is no direct link to the events of 1903.
In Bulgaria Ilinden and Preobrazhenie days are publicly feted on local level mainly in Pirin Macedonia and Eastern Thrace regions.

See also

★ Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization

★ Gotse Delchev

★ History of the Republic of Macedonia

★ History of Turkey

★ Macedonia (region)

★ History of Bulgaria

Sources

★ Twenty-four letters from Macedonia - 1903, John MacDonald

★ Durham, Edith. (1905). The Burden of the Balkans

★ Brailsford, Henry Noel (1906). ''Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future''. London: Methuen & Co

★ Pozzi, Henry. (1935). Black hand over Europe. F. Mott and Co., London (''for online version of relevant pages, click'' here)

★ MacDermott, Mercia. (1978). Freedom or Death — the life of Gotse Delchev. London: Journeyman Press

★ Banac, Ivo. (1984). The National Question in Yugoslavia. Origins, History, Politics. Cornell University Press: Ithaca/London (''for online version of relevant pages, click'' here)

★ Poulton, Hugh. (1995). Who are the Macedonians? C.Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., London

References

1. Bulgarian National Radio
2. Promacedonia.org
3.
4. Letter No. 534 from the General Staff of the Second Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Region to the Bulgarian Government on the position of the insurgent Bulgarian population, requestioning military intervention from Bulgaria, September 9th, 1903, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of History, Bulgarian Language Institute, "Macedonia. Documents and materials", Sofia, 1978, part III, No.92: ''To the Esteemed Government of the Principality of Bulgaria. In view of the critical and terrible situation of the Bulgarian population of the Bitolya vilayet following the devastations and cruelties perpetrated by the Turkish troops and bashibazouks, in view of the fact that these devastations and cruelties continue systematically, and that one cannot foresee how far they will reach; in view, furthermore, of the fact that here everything Bulgarian is running the risk of perishing and being obliterated without a trace by violence, hunger and by approaching poverty, the General Staff considers it its duty to draw the attention of the Esteemed Bulgarian Government to the fatal con­sequences for the Bulgarian nation, if it fails to discharge its duty to its own brothers here in an impressive and energetic manner, made imperative by force of circumstances and by the danger threatening the common Bulgarian homeland at the present moment...'' Source, retrieved on September 6, 2007.
5. Colliers Encyclopedia, ''Macedonia'', 1993 edition.
6. Academician Lyubomir Miletich, "The Destruction of Thracian Bulgarians in 1913", Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, State printing house, 1918. On-line publication of thе phototype reprint of the first edition of the book in Bulgarian here, retrieved on September 6, 2007 (in Bulgarian "Разорението на тракийските българи през 1913 година", Българска академия на науките, София, Държавна печатница, 1918 г.; II фототипно издание, Културно-просветен клуб "Тракия" - София, 1989 г., София).
7. "''The immediate effect of the partition was the anti-Bulgar campaign in areas under Serbian and Greek rule. The Serbians expelled Exarchist churchmen and teachers and closed Bulgar schools and churches (affecting the standing of as many as 641 schools and 761 churches). Thousands of Macedonians left for Bulgaria, joining a still larger stream from devastated Aegean Macedonia, where the Greeks burned Kukush, the center of Bulgar politics and culture, as well as much of Serres and Drama. Bulgarian (including the Macedonian dialects) was prohibited, and its surreptitious use, whenever detected, was ridiculed or punished.''", Ivo Banac, "The Macedoine" in "The National Question in Yugoslavia. Origins, History, Politics", pp. 307-328, Cornell University Press, 1984, retrieved on September 6, 2007.