Andon Kyoseto

Andon Lazov Yanev (Bulgarian: Андон Лазов Янев), nicknamed Kyoseto, was a Bulgarian revolutionary and a freedom fighter of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO).[1][2][3] Although he identified as Bulgarian,[4] according to the historiography in North Macedonia,[5][6] he was an ethnic Macedonian.[7]

Andon Kyoseto
A photograph of Andon Kyoseto
Born1855
Golozinci, Ottoman Empire
Died10 September 1953
Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
NationalityOttoman/Bulgarian
OrganizationIMARO

Biography

Early years
Andon Kyoseto as an IMARO freedom fighter

Andon Kyoseto was born in 1855 in the village of Golozinci, Manastir Vilayet in Ottoman Empire. Until the age of 16, he worked as a shepherd with his two brothers and his two sisters. After his father was arrested and taken away to Thessaloniki, they moved in Veles into the house of their uncle. In Veles, Andon killed an eminent Turk and escaped to Thessaloniki, where he joined the revolutionary organization IMARO. At the beginning, he started to execute simple tasks that were assigned to him by the organization. He met Dame Gruev who became his superior and ordered him to do certain tasks for the organization. Later, he worked as cabman of Doctor Hristo Tatarchev in order to mask his illegal activities. At that time, his brother Nikola, who came to Thessaloniki, placed himself in the service of the Turkish authorities. At the suggestion of Andon Kyoseto, the organization killed his brother, so that he could not betray the organization. Andon also participated in the execution the Serbian teacher Peychinovich in Thessaloniki. With the help of Argir Manasiev, he executed the grecophille Tsitso from the town of Gevgelija. He returned to Thessaloniki, but only for a short time, because the Turkish authorities started investigations against him. Together with the revolutionary band of Iliya Karchovaliyata and Mihail Apostolov Popeto, they collected money from eminent inhabitants of the village of Gorno Brodi, and then they toured the region of Kilkis. There, Andon Kyoseto together with few of his friends, kidnapped the son of a rich man, and after 25 days he received 1000 lira for the ransom. Because of certain misunderstandings, his revolutionary band got arrested in Bulgaria. Gotse Delchev and Anton Bozukov helped their release. During his stay in Sofia, he executed the orders of Gotse Delchev. Later, Andon Kyoseto, Gotse Delchev and Mihail Apostolov Popeto made an unsuccessful attempt to take money by the kidnapping of a bey from Strumica. In 1897, together with Mihail Apostolov Popeto, he organized a revolutionary band, which operated in the regions of Kilkis, Dojran, Gevgelija, Ano Poroia, Maleševo, and Strumica. After the murder of the Romanian publicist Ștefan Mihăileanu, and the rumors of the coming war between Bulgaria and Romania, they went to Kyustendil and then to Sofia. There he was visited by the representative body of the Revolutionary Organization and had meetings with Gotse Delchev, Boris Sarafov, Mihail Gerdzhikov and others. Until the murder of Mihail Apostolov in March 1902, Andon Kyoseto was a leader of a revolutionary band in the region of Strumica, and later in the region of Kilkis. From 1900 he had contacts with Yane Sandanski. In 1901, he participated in the Miss Stone Affair.

During the Ilinden uprising
Application by Kyoseto for membership in the Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Volunteer Corps Society in G. Dzhumaya (1934).

During the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising, Andon Kyoseto was ordered, together with Gyorche Petrov and Luka Ivanov, to lead a revolutionary band in the region of Prilep. In the village of Trojaci, he initiated a minor battle against the Turkish military and after he split with Gyorche Petrov, Luka Ivanov and Pere Toshev, he went to the region of Veles. On 17 October 1903, before leaving the village of Skačinci, Andon Kyoseto together with 30 freedom fighters was engaged in a battle on "Klepata" against 500 Turkish soldiers. Boris Sarafov and his group of 70 freedom fighters then came and struck the Turkish military from the rear. Only four freedom fighters were killed, as opposed to 65 casualties on the Turkish side. The bands managed to escape during the night. They also escaped two ambushes set by Turkish soldiers. From the village of Prosenikovo, they headed to the border with Bulgaria and arrived in Kyustendil in the middle of December 1903.

Balkan Wars and WWI

In the Balkan Wars, Andon Kyoseto, Yonko Vaptsarov, Georgi Zankov, Toshe Kolagov, Tasko Kocherinski, Mihail Chakov, Lazar Topalov, Stefan Chavdarov, Peyo Yavorov and others, formed a revolutionary band that was headed by Hristo Chernopeev. The band accompanied the 27-th Chepinski regiment of Bulgarian Army on its attack on Mehomiya. Afterwards, Andon Kyoseto served in the headquarters of the 13-th Kukush Section of the Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Volunteer Corps.[8] During the First World War he supported the Bulgarian military administration in Macedonia.

After the First World War

After the First World War Kyoseto moved to Bulgaria and settled in Gorna Dzumaya. In 1934 he became a member of the Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Volunteer Corps Society in Gorna Dzhumaya.

After the Second World War
The centre of Skopje in 2015. In left is now the nonexistent monument of Kyoto..

For a period of some years after the war, the Yugoslav and Bulgarian leaders Josip Broz Tito and Georgi Dimitrov worked on a project to merge their two countries into a Balkan Communist Federation. Bulgarian authorities agreed to the recognition of a distinct Macedonian ethnicity and language among parts of the Bulgarian population. Centre of that events was the town of Gorna Dzumaya, where Kyoseto lived at that time. On May 23-24, 1948, in Skopje the second congress of the People's Front of Macedonia was held, at which the President of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia Lazar Kolishevski delivered a speech. A month later Kyoseto sent a greeting telegram where he expressed his hope that Macedonian people will soon live, once and for all, under one roof.[9]

However, differences soon emerged with regard to the Macedonian question. Whereas Dimitrov envisaged a state where Yugoslavia and Bulgaria would be placed on an equal footing and Macedonia would be more or less attached to Bulgaria, Tito saw Bulgaria as a seventh republic in an enlarged Yugoslavia tightly ruled from Belgrade.[10] Their differences also extended to the national character of the Macedonians – whereas Dimitrov considered them to be an national offshoot of the Bulgarians,[11] Tito regarded them as an independent nation which had nothing to do with the Bulgarians.[12] Thus the initial tolerance for the Macedonization of Bulgarian Macedonia gradually grew into outright alarm.

As result gradual change of that policy came in Bulgaria after the Tito-Stalin split in the same year. In the next years Bulgarian Communist Party slowly reverted to the view that the Macedonian nation and language did not exist before 1945 and thus are non-existing in general. As result the Yugoslav government submitted in the early 1950s a memorandum to the UN, where the population in Bulgarian Macedonia was declared a "Yugoslav Macedonian minority", persecuted and terrorized by the authorities in Sofia. A lot of old IMRO revolutionaries as Georgi Pophristov, Dimitar Zaneshev, Lazar Tomov, Alexandra Hadzhidimova, Vasil Chekalarov 's wife Olga Chekalarova, Andon Kyoseto etc. declared themselves in a special declaration against these Yugoslav claims.[13] Andon Kyoseto died in Blagoevgrad in 1953.

Monument controversy in the Republic of Macedonia

In 2014 a memorial of Andon Kyoseto was set up at the Supreme Court in Skopje. The monument was part of the controversial project Skopje 2014, and was sharply criticized by the media of Macedonia (now known as North Macedonia), with Kyoseto declared a terrorist and mass executioner.[14] In February 2018, the monument was dismantled as one of the most disputed of the Skopje 2014 project. This was the first step in the successive removal of monuments from the Project, a decision taken in the autumn of 2017 by the new government of the country.[15]

References and notes
  1. Спомени на Андон Кьосето записани от Боян Мирчев в Илинденско-Преображенското въстание 1903—1968. Издателство на Националния съвет на Отечествения фронт, София, 1968 г. pp. 274-282.
  2. Спомени на Андон Кьосето в Бурилкова Ива, Цочо Билярски. Македония в пламъци - Освободителните борби на българите от Македония в спомени на дейци на Вътрешната македоно-одринска революционна организация, София, 2003. Издател: Синева, ISBN 9549983242.
  3. Спомени на Андон Янев - Кьосето за Христо Чернопеев записани от Боян Мирчев от Прилеп, през 1931 г. в София. Електронна библиотека "Струмски".
  4. After WWII the Yugoslav government submitted a memorandum to the UN, where the population in Bulgarian Macedonia was declared a "Yugoslav Macedonian minority", persecuted and terrorized by the authorities in Sofia. Prominent old VMRO revolutionaries as Kyoseto, announced a special resolution against the Yugoslav claims. For more see: Германов, Стоян, Македонският въпрос 1944 - 1989. Възникване, еволюция, съвременност. София, 2012, стр. 134.
  5. The origins of the official Macedonian national narrative are to be sought in the establishment in 1944 of the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. This open acknowledgment of the Macedonian national identity led to the creation of a revisionist historiography whose goal has been to affirm the existence of the Macedonian nation through the history. Macedonian historiography is revising a considerable part of ancient, medieval, and modern histories of the Balkans. Its goal is to claim for the Macedonian peoples a considerable part of what the Greeks consider Greek history and the Bulgarians Bulgarian history. The claim is that most of the Slavic population of Macedonia in the 19th and first half of the 20th century was ethnic Macedonian. For more see: Victor Roudometof, Collective Memory, National Identity, and Ethnic Conflict: Greece, Bulgaria, and the Macedonian Question, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002, ISBN 0275976483, p. 58; Victor Roudometof, Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Balkans: Greece and the Macedonian Question in Journal of Modern Greek Studies 14.2 (1996) 253-301.
  6. Yugoslav Communists recognized the existence of a Macedonian nationality during WWII to quiet fears of the Macedonian population that a communist Yugoslavia would continue to follow the former Yugoslav policy of forced Serbianization. Hence, for them to recognize the inhabitants of Macedonia as Bulgarians would be tantamount to admitting that they should be part of the Bulgarian state. For that the Yugoslav Communists were most anxious to mold Macedonian history to fit their conception of Macedonian consciousness. The treatment of Macedonian history in Communist Yugoslavia had the same primary goal as the creation of the Macedonian language: to de-Bulgarize the Macedonian Slavs and to create a separate national consciousness that would inspire identification with Yugoslavia. For more see: Stephen E. Palmer, Robert R. King, Yugoslav communism and the Macedonian question, Archon Books, 1971, ISBN 0208008217, Chapter 9: The encouragement of Macedonian culture.
  7. According to pro-Bulgarian Macedonian publicist Vladimir Perev until about ten years ago, Andon Kyoseto was an unknown person in Macedonian history. About him he has heard in his childhood as a nearly mythological person. Gruevski's government wanted to present this hard Bulgarian to an ethnic Macedonian and made him a monument in Skopje, in front of the Courthouse. However the socialist government of Zoran Zaev immediately crashed the monument of this Bulgarian after its coming into power. For more see: Владимир Пеев, Когато кръчмарят потърси своето. Македония трябва да се срещне с историята. Faktor.bg 24, сеп. 2018.
  8. "Македоно-одринското опълчение 1912-1913 г. Личен състав", Главно управление на архивите, 2006, стр.405.
  9. Ванчо Ѓорѓиев, Андон Јанев–Ќосето, Универзитет „Св. Кирил и Методиј“, Скопје: Филозофски факултет, 2016. стр.238.
  10. H.R. Wilkinson Maps and Politics. A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia, Liverpool, 1951. pp. 311–312.
  11. Yugoslavia: A History of Its Demise, Viktor Meier, Routledge, 2013, ISBN 1134665113, p. 183.
  12. Hugh Poulton Who are the Macedonians?, C. Hurst & Co, 2000, ISBN 1-85065-534-0. pp. 107–108.
  13. Германов, Стоян, Македонският въпрос 1944 - 1989. Възникване, еволюция, съвременност. София, 2012, стр. 134.
  14. ОКНО.мк, 11.09.2014, Виктор Цветановски, Андон Ќосето: масовен убиец што доби споменик во Скопје.
  15. OFFNews, 22.02.2018, Македония премахна първия паметник от ерата на Груевски.

Sources
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