Long-Dead Hero’s Memory Tests Bulgarian-North Macedonian Reconciliation

Shared hero becomes bone of contention:

The feud erupted on June 9, when Bulgaria's nationalist Defence Minister, Krasimir Karakachanov, also leader of the junior right-wing coalition party, VMRO, warned that the work of the joint history committee had "stalled" over the issue of Gotse Delchev.

He said that the latest Macedonian proposal to jointly celebrate Delchev's memory on October 7 - marking the date when then Communist Bulgaria returned his remains to the then Yugoslav federation in 1946 - was an insult.

He also said that if a consensus on this topic was not reached, Bulgaria "ought to get off the negotiating table [with North Macedonia], with all the due consequences for the European and NATO integration of North Macedonia".

"We will make no compromises on the truth. We want nothing more but the truth from North Macedonia", another top Bulgarian minister, Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva, told a TV station two days later, calling the transfer of Delchev's bones to Macedonia "one of the greatest acts of treachery" in Bulgaria's history.

She insisted that Delchev had "said what his identity was - Bulgarian - he wrote it dozens of times", warning ominously that Bulgaria expected the government in Skopje to change the content of its history books to acknowledge this.

Many in North Macedonia saw these assertions as virtual blackmail, further aggravating right-wing nationalists in the country who did not much like the agreement with Bulgaria in the first place.  

They responded with heated counter-claims, accusing Bulgaria of trying to rob the country of its Macedonian identity, and attacking the centre-left Prime Minister, Zoran Zaev, and his government, for "treasonously" signing the treaty.

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