Georgi Nikolov Delchev , known as Gotse Delchev, also spelled Goce Delčev, Cyrillic: Гоце Делчев, originally spelled in older Bulgarian orthography: Гоце Дѣлчевъ; was an important revolutionary figure in Ottoman-ruled Macedonia and Thrace at the turn of the 20th century. He was the most prominent leader of what is known today as Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization , a paramilitary organization active in Ottoman territories in the Balkans, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.Born into a Bulgarian family in Kilkis, then in the Salonica Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, in his youth he was inspired by the ideals of earlier Bulgarian revolutionaries such as Vasil Levski and Hristo Botev, who envisioned the creation of a Bulgarian republic of ethnic and religious equality, as part of an imagined Balkan Federation. Delchev completed his secondary education in the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki and entered the Military School of His Princely Highness in Sofia, but he was dismissed from there, because of his leftist political persuasions. Then he returned to Ottoman Macedonia as a Bulgarian teacher, and immediately became an activist of the newly-found revolutionary movement in 1894.Although considering himself to be an inheritor of the Bulgarian revolutionary traditions, as a committed republican Delchev was disillusioned by the reality in the post-liberation Bulgarian monarchy. Also by him, as by many Macedonian Bulgarians, originating from an area with mixed population, the idea of being ‘Macedonian’ acquired the importance of a certain native loyalty, that constructed a specific spirit of "local patriotism" and "multi-ethnic regionalism". He maintained the slogan promoted by William Ewart Gladstone, "Macedonia for the Macedonians", including all different nationalities inhabiting the area. In this way, his outlook included a wide range of such disparate ideas as Bulgarian patriotism, Macedonian regionalism, anti-nationalism and incipient socialism.As a result, his political agenda became the establishment through revolution of an autonomous Macedono-Adrianople supranational state into the framework of the Ottoman Empire, as a prelude to its incorporation within a future Balkan Federation. He revised the Organization's statute, where the membership was restricted only for Bulgarians, emphasizing the importance of cooperation among all ethnic groups in the territories concerned in order to obtain political autonomy. Delchev also launched the establishment of a secret revolutionary network, that would prepare the population for an armed uprising against the Ottoman rule. However, he opposed the IMRO Central Committee’s plan for a mass uprising in the summer of 1903, favoring terrorist and guerilla tactics. Nevertheless, he was killed by an Ottoman unit in May. Thus the liberation movement lost its most important organizer, at the eve of the Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising.
Today Gotse Delchev is considered as a national hero in Bulgaria, as well as in North Macedonia, where it is claimed that he was among the founders of the Macedonian national movement. Despite such controversial Macedonian historical interpretations, Delchev had Bulgarian national identity and viewed his compatriots as Bulgarians. Some modern Macedonian leading historians and politicians have recognized grudgingly this fact. The designation Macedonian according to the then used ethnic terminology included local Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Vlachs, Albanians, Serbs, Jews and so on, and when applied to the local Slavs, it meant a regional Bulgarian identity. Opposite to the Macedonian claims, at that time even some Bulgarian IMRO revolutionaries, natives from Bulgaria, espoused to some extent Macedonian identity. However, contrary to Bulgarian assertions, his autonomist ideas of a separate Macedonian political entity, have stimulated the subsequent development of Macedonian nationalism. Nevertheless, some researchers doubt, that behind the IMRO idea of autonomy was hidden a reserve plan for eventual incorporation into Bulgaria, even for Delchev himself.The most detailed biography of Delchev in English is written by Mercia MacDermott: "Freedom or Death: The Life of Gotse Delchev".
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4. February 1872 – 4. May 1903
