FOR FREEDOM AND PERFECTION. The Life of Yané Sandansky
Mercia MacDermott

5. OF MISSIONARIES AND MONEY

From the leafy streets and gardens of the Beshik, Rila cannot be seen to full advantage, for Dupnitsa lies too close to the mountain, and the houses, trees and lush green foothills obscure the towering peaks. Those who travel south from Sofia, however, see an entirely different view: breathtaking in its immensity, Rila stands like a gigantic wall across the southern horizon, and Dupnitsa seems no more than a handful of pebbles flung against its base. Then Rila was indeed a wall—a prison wall—for the frontier between the free Principality and the Turkish Empire ran along its higher ridges, where the ice glittered like broken glass, and inhospitable rocks did duty for the traditional iron spikes. There, beyond Rila, lay Macedonia, one of the fairest lands on earth, torn from her kith and kin, languishing in alien bondage, and trusting in the young heroes who had sworn on daggers and revolvers to deliver her.

Those who pass beyond the barrier of Rila are immediately challenged by Pirin. Indeed, it is from the heights of Rila, across the Vale of Razlog, that Pirin is best seen panoramically in all her beauty and magnificence, clothed in snow and sunlight—proud, inexorable, inviolate. At their closest point, only a narrow valley and a stream divide the two mountains, yet each has its own peculiar character and appearance. Pirin is a sharp, angular massif, where not only the peaks but even the foothills take the form of cones and pyramids. Eternal and unchanging, Pirin has as many forms and faces as the mythical zmeyové [1] who inhabit her dark caves and bottomless lakes. In threatening weather, when the clouds are beaten down below the dark summits, Pirin resembles a chorus of silent, watching women, with sable robes and veils of floating gossamer. Gilded at daybreak, or stained with sunset crimson, she becomes a cluster of broad-bladed spears, recalling the great deeds of Spartacus and standing ready to impale the tyrant and the knave. Storm-lashed and sullen, or imperiously serene against the blue infinity of the sky, Pirin is essentially an untamed, rebel mountain, ever reaching upwards, ever urging the brave to emulate Prometheus.

To bring the fire of freedom down from heaven into the hearts and homes of all those who dwelt in the dark kingdom of Abdul Hamid—this

1. The zmey (pl. zmeyové) is a mythical creature, something like a dragon, with wings of fire and golden scales, and an ability to change its shape at will.

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was the self-imposed task of the Internal Organization and its sworn adherents.

Yané knew that this task would be neither easy nor soon accomplished, for he had totally accepted the Organization’s thesis that the people must liberate themselves, and that this would require prolonged and patient preparation. Since he was intending to educate rather than fight, his cheta consisted of only eight men, including himself. In his memoirs, Yané mentions the level of schooling attained by several of his men—an indication of the importance which he assigned to this question. Almost certainly Gotsé had had some part in the formation of the cheta, because at least two of the men were from Samokov, where, on Gotsé’s initiative, secret revolutionary circles had been formed in the school for iron-workers, as well as in the college run by American Protestant missionaries. Moreover, the area in which the cheta was to work was the frontier area around Gorna Dzhumaya and Razlog—the area closest to the Principality and therefore most threatened by the officers’ impatience. Yané describes his mission thus: ‘I carried out propaganda along these lines: for the Organization to come out independently, for the population to feel free, by cutting itself off from the Turkish authorities and by concentrating power as far as possible in the hands of the Organization, so that the population could in practice see a little freedom, feel this freedom and come to love it.’ [2]

Here one can surely hear echoes of Chernyshevsky’s appeal: ‘Say to all: this is what will be in the future; the future is bright and beautiful. Love it, strive towards it, work for it, approach it, bring as much as possible of it into the present: the brighter and better your life, the richer it is with joy and pleasure, the more you will be able to bring into it from the future.’ [3]

In the course of three months, Yané visited a number of villages around Rila and Pirin, including Bistritsa, Marulevo, Gradevo, Sŭrbinovo (now Brezhani), Mechkul, Kresna, Senokos, Vlahi, Oshtava, Oranovo, Zheleznitsa, Pokrovnik and Moshtanets. Everywhere he set up committees and collected membership dues.

Everywhere the cheta was well received, but, right from the beginning, Yané had to come to terms with something which at first disturbed and shocked him, namely, the need to deal ruthlessly with traitors, in a situation which required him to choose—not between killing and not killing—but between killing certain persons or risking their killing others.

Andon Kyoseto—a veteran member of the Organization, who was frequently given the task of carrying out death sentences, and who was then working in the Strumitsa Region—has described Yané’s first steps as a leader of the Internal Organization, and, in particular, his first real encounter with the grim realities of the struggle. While Yané was still Governor of the Prison and Chairman of the Macedonian Society in

2. Miletich VII, pp. 16-17.

3. Chernyshevsky: What Is To Be Done? Chapter 4, Part XVI, The Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna, Section 11.

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Dupnitsa, he had written to Andon, advising him to be less cruel, and not to kill priests and teachers, who could be useful to the Organization, but to rely on intensive propaganda rather than terror. Yané also sent the Central Committee in Salonika a similar letter, which was eventually also sent to Andon. Andon had replied: ‘Yané, I received your letter, but I do not accept advice from people outside Macedonia. . .’ Not long after, Andon was invited to go to the frontier near Leshko to meet Yané and his cheta. The two men, who were meeting personally for the first time, talked together at length, and again Yané advocated less terror and more persuasion. This time, Andon told him that he did not yet understand the conditions under which he would have to work in Macedonia, and added: ‘Always remember my advice—don’t reveal yourself at once to everybody, because you will be betrayed. The Organization is not yet strong everywhere, and there are people who do not properly understand what is being required of them and what they have to do.’ Yané, however, still seemed to think that he knew best. He went to a village, collected the whole population together, spoke to them all, swore them into the Organization, and went on his way. He had hardly reached the next village when he was indeed betrayed. Turkish troops came after him, and he was obliged to retreat into the mountains. Andon continues: ‘Then Yané understood that the affairs of the Organization require revolutionary measures as well as agitation. I soon learnt about what had occurred. The Organization’s post was functioning normally, and I wrote to him: "Eh, Yané, do you remember what I told you. . .?" Yané learnt his lesson, and began to root out spies and traitors and to punish them in order to protect the honest and the innocent.’ [4]

At the same time, he tried to analyze and understand what led people to become traitors in the first place, and he took preventative measures along the lines which he described to K.D. Spisarevsky in the presence of Gotsé Delchev: ‘I have long since come to the conclusion—and my daily work among the people has taught me as much—that traitors, spies and

4. See Memoirs of Andon Lazov Yanev (Kyoseto), TDIA, f. 771, op. 1, a.e. 102, pp. 43-45. Andon Kyoseto gives the date of his meeting with Yané and his cheta as 1900. Yané himself does not mention going to Macedonia with his own cheta before April 1901; however, his memoirs are far from detailed, and he may have gone earlier, as several other contemporaries suggest. Dimitŭr Arnaudov (one of Yané’s close comrades), in his unpublished biography of Yané, says that in 1900 Yané was already doing illegal work in the Serres district. Arnaudov’s manuscript is kept among the papers of Ivan Harizanov in the State Historical Archives in Sofia (TDIA, f. 1508, op. 2, a.e. 1). Kostadin Burzachky, who married Yané’s cousin, Slavka, daughter of Spas Harizanov, describes how, on 30.XII.1900, Yané came to his wedding, together with his chetnitsi, and joined in the dancing and other festivities, firing guns into the ceiling (shooting was a traditional feature of Bulgarian weddings). Several times Yané called out: ‘Sister Slavka, this is my last celebration, my last joy!’ Next morning early, the cheta left for Macedonia. (See Burzachky’s unpublished memoirs in the possession of the artist, Nikola Vulchev, who married his daughter, Radka.)

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stooges come from the ranks of people without work, homes or skills. Give work to a poor man, assure him a living, and there’s no more devoted worker. The idea was mine, and it has yielded excellent results: we don’t give any money from Organization funds, not even to a poor man, but we buy him tools so that he can work, or we open a little shop for him. The Organization keeps an eye on him, and, if we’ve struck an honest man, we increase our aid to him. If he proves dishonest, we send him to Kingdom Come. And that serves as a lesson to others who might be thinking of taking advantage of the Organization. Once he’s assured of a living, there’s no more devoted member of the Organization. The authorities cannot make a spy or a traitor out of him; he can’t sell himself easily, because it’s hard for the authorities to bribe him. Thus the Organization has turned good proprietors into good revolutionaries—and it is proud of them.’ [5]

Right from the beginning, Yané set out to build the Organization on the broadest possible basis. In the Pirin village of Krushevo (now Dzhigurovo), he made a point of meeting the local Patriarchists—Bulgarians, who continued to recognize the Greek Patriarchate after the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, and who were usually at daggers drawn with their Exarchist fellow-countrymen. Yané addressed the Patriarchists of Krushevo, and told them that he did not care whether they were Patriarchists or not: he simply wanted them to be good members of the Organization. Whatever the reason—whether it was Yané’s personal charm, which was considerable, or the unusual display of religious tolerance, that won them over—the Patriarchists of Krushevo became staunch members of the Organization and remained so, averring that they were doing it for Yané. [6] In the years to come, constant efforts were made to recruit ethnic Greeks, and even Turks, for the Organization. The results were disappointingly meagre, but the efforts continued.

Everywhere, in his speeches to villagers secretly assembled in houses, churches or schools, Yané urged his listeners to collect money and buy guns, but the appalling poverty which he saw on all sides soon convinced him that in most cases he was asking the impossible. There was now little hope of real help from the new Supreme Committee, although the societies continued to send in their contributions, believing that the Organization would benefit, and Yané’s anger kindled against Sarafov, whom he considered to have squandered good money. [7] Sarafov, though skilled at collecting funds, was quite incapable either of economizing or of accounting for public money, and he took the view that, since he had provided the money, he could spend it as he pleased. Such an attitude was totally alien to the thrifty Yané, who, though not particularly squeamish about how he obtained money for the Cause, nevertheless regarded such money,

5. Memoirs of K.D. Spisarevsky, BIA NBKM, f. 626, 1.3.106, pp. 50-52.

6. Memoirs of Stoyan Stoyanov, TDIA, f. 1508, op. 2, a.e. 2, p. 61.

7. Miletich VII, p. 16.

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once acquired, as the sacred property of the Organization, to be treated as such. Faced with the need to buy guns, and with the absence of funds, Yané began to ponder over ways and means, and to toy with the idea of kidnapping someone for ransom.

Financial problems had already forced members of the Organization to do many things which would normally have been repugnant to them. The young men in the Samokov revolutionary group had, for example, stolen a sack of coffee and a bicycle from the American college. [8] Gotsé himself had made several attempts at kidnapping rich men. In two cases, one involving a Turk and the other—a Greek, he had managed to abduct his victims, but both had escaped before the ransom had been paid, because Gotsé was too soft-hearted to confine them sufficiently strictly. During the period of co-operation with the officers, a joint scheme had been made for the kidnapping of Nikola, the son of Ivan Geshov. [9] Gotsé, Gyorché Petrov and Sarafov had all been in the plot, and Gotsé’s fiancée, Yanka Kanevcheva, and another girl were to play the role of demimondaines in order to lure Nikola out of Sofia. Another member of the plot was Krum Chaprashikov, a tobacco merchant from Dupnitsa, who was a friend of Nikola’s and his fellow student. Nothing came out of the plan because the Geshov family suddenly departed for Paris. [10] During 1901, a group of young men, led by Timo Angelov, [11] nicknamed ‘The Prince’, began making counterfeit silver coins in the courtyard of Yané’s home. The coins were placed mainly by Alexander Dyulgerov—a teller in the Bulgarian Agrarian Bank—and production continued for about eighteen months. [12]

Since neither collections among the population, nor illegal action produced money in the quantities required, several leading members of the Organization, including Gotsé, Yané and Hristo Chernopeev, met in Kyustendil during the summer of 1901 to discuss the financial situation. Yané boldly proposed kidnapping Prince Ferdinand himself, on the grounds that it was fitting to use the Prince’s money against the Prince—a reference to the fact that Tsonchev, the principal source of the Organization’s troubles, was generally thought to be an agent of the Palace. Ferdinand was a frequent visitor to the Rila Monastery, and Yané proposed seizing him at a bend in the road near the hamlet of Pastra, on the way to the shrine. [13] Gotsé, however, was against anything so drastic, and it was

8. Den, Sept. 11, 1945. Article by Ivan Harizanov.

9. Ivan Evstratiev Geshov, a right-wing Bulgarian politician, banker and writer, was Prime Minister from 1911-1913.

10. Den, Sept. 11, 1945. Article by Ivan Harizanov.

11. Timo Angelov, a graduate of a technical school, was also a maker of bombs. He was killed in 1903 when a time-bomb which he had assembled in Plovdiv exploded prematurely. See memoirs of Mihail Gerdzhikov, recorded by Ivan Harizanov, TDIA, f. 1508, op. 2, a.e. 25, pp. 2-3.

12. Medzhidiev, Opus cit., pp. 88-89; also Den, Sept. 11, 1945. Article by Ivan Harizanov, also TDIA, f. 1508, op. 2, a.e. 4, p. 3.

13. Den, Sept. 12, 1945. Article by Ivan Harizanov.

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decided that, if anybody was to be kidnapped, it had better be done not in the Principality, but on Turkish territory.

It was at this time that Yané and Hristo Chernopeev began to work together in a partnership that was to last for many years. Chernopeev’s real name was Chernyu Peev, but it had somehow turned into a composite surname when he joined the Macedonian movement. Unlike Yané, he was not Macedonian-born, but came from a village called Dermantsi, near Pleven in northern Bulgaria. He completed only three years of post-elementary education in Pleven itself, and then became a soldier, first in the Pleven Regiment and then in the Lom Regiment, remaining in the army, with one break, for about ten years. Pleven is a town where even today a person is very much aware of Bulgaria’s liberation from the Turks. Everywhere there are reminders of the mighty battles that took place between the Russian liberators and the armies of Osman Pasha. As a child of nine, Chernopeev had lived near Pleven in those momentous days, and, as a schoolboy and a soldier, he must have listened to many a heroic tale. When the cheti of 1895 were organized, he was deeply moved by what he saw as an attempt to continue the process of liberation, and he wanted to resign from the army in order to participate in the cheti, but it was too late. However, he met Boris Sarafov, who briefly joined the Lom Regiment on his return from Macedonia, before being posted to Rusé. From Sarafov, he learnt more about the Macedonian movement, and on Sarafov’s instigation, he formed a circle of privates and non-commissioned officers, whose task was to collect arms and supplies for the Macedonian Committee. When he finally left the army in August 1899, with the rank of sergeant-major, Chernopeev handed over quite a collection of weapons to the Officer’s Brotherhood in Lom for shipment to the Sofia Committee. During the period when Sarafov headed the Supreme Committee, Chernopeev met leaders of the Internal Organization, and, abandoning his wife and children, went to Macedonia, where he joined a cheta in the Gevgeli-Enidzhe Vardar area and toured the villages, instructing and organizing the peasants. In 1900, he and his men fought the first major engagement between the Organization’s cheti and the Turks, after the latter had encircled the cheta in the village of Bayaltsi. Chernopeev finally fought his way out, but with the loss of half his men, including Gotsé’s younger brother, Mitso.

Chernopeev was a man with few, if any, personal ambitions. He did not share the officers’ illusions of grandeur, and, when they began to force the pace, Chernopeev broke off relations with his one-time mentor, Sarafov, and put himself at the disposal of Gotsé Delchev, who sent him to the sensitive frontier area of Gorna Dzhumaya to urge the population not to accept persons sent by the Supreme Committee. [14]

Here he met up with Yané and two other men who were also strongly

14. See Chernopeev’s memoirs. Miletich VII, pp. 58-59.

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convinced of the need to oppose the officers. One of them was Sava Mihailov, born in the village of Machukovo, near Gevgeli (1877), and educated in Constantinople and at the High School in Salonika. On graduating, he was appointed teacher in Kavadartsi, where he joined the Organization. Later, he taught in other places, including Tikvesh, Negotino, Gevgeli, and finally Gorna Dzhumaya, where he became leader of the Organization’s district committee, entrusted by Gotsé with the task of defending the Internal Organization’s territory against possible incursions on the part of the officers. [15]

The second man was Krŭstyu Asenov, a great bear of a man, of whom it is said that he personally carried a bell up into the belfry of the church in Leshko, when the peasants, who were trying to do it secretly, had failed because of the bell’s great weight. Not only did Krŭstyu Asenov possess legendary physical strength, but he also came from a legendary family, for his uncle was Hadzhi Dimitŭr, whose death in battle with the Turks, in 1868, forms the subject of the most famous poem in all Bulgarian literature, in which Hristo Botev triumphantly proclaims that ‘He who falls in the struggle for freedom, he does not die. . .’ Asenov was born in Sliven, a town famed for its many haidut heroes, and he himself was wild and belligerent even as a boy. He was expelled from school for drawing a knife against a policeman who was beating someone up, and thus he lost the stipend which he received as the nephew of a famous man. He finished his education in Varna, and enrolled for a time at Sofia University. He remained, however, a true son of haidut Sliven, a true heir of Hadzhi Dimitŭr. Once, when still a schoolboy, he had taken his comrades up to the Blue Stones—spectacular crags in the Stara Planina (Balkan Range) above Sliven—and had asked them to look at the southern horizon. He had then taken out his knife and made them swear to liberate Macedonia. Now as a grown man, without having completed his course in Sofia, he went to Gorna Dzhumaya, sent by Gotsé to Sava Mihailov, and was appointed teacher in the village of Leshko, a few miles to the south-west. [16]

In the summer of 1901, the danger from the officers was still more hypothetical than actual, and the main problem was money for arms. Indeed, without arms, they could not hope to prevent Supremist incursions. Chernopeev and Yané first considered kidnapping a rich Turk from the village of Simitli, some miles south of Gorna Dzhumaya. The Turk had been recommended to them by local peasants as being very wealthy, but when the two voivodi went into the matter, it appeared that the man was not really so very rich after all, so they switched their choice to Suleiman Beg, son of a pasha in Gorna Dzhumaya. Once again nothing came of their plans. On the crucial days, Suleiman was apparently ill and stayed at home, and the operation had to be abandoned in view of the impossibility

15. See Sava Mihailov’s memoirs. Miletich VII, pp. 85-86.

16. See article by Ivan Rupov, Uchitel-revolyutsioner, in Pirinsko Delo, 18.IV.1962. Also Anton Strashimirov— article in Revolyutsionen List, No 5: 27.X.1904.

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of keeping the necessary twenty or so chetnitsi hidden in the town indefinitely. [17]

Many a man in Yané’s place might, by now, have given up the idea of raising money by ransom. So many attempts had been made by so many people, and all had been unsuccessful. Yané, however, had within him a streak of implacable obstinacy, which would not allow him to admit defeat while even the faintest spark of hope remained. Determined to kidnap somebody, he turned his thoughts away from Turkish notables to the American Protestant missionaries who had opened schools, colleges and chapels both in the Principality and in the Turkish Empire. The Protestants were particularly active in Bansko, a large village at the foot of Pirin, and several of its leading families had been converted to the new faith. [18]

Bansko was, in many respects, an unusual village. Indeed, it looked more like a little town than a village, with its wide, clean streets, its large church and impressive belfry, its solid, two-storeyed stone houses, and its well-appointed school, where Gotsé had, for a time, been head-master. Bansko was the most important settlement in Razlog—a triangular upland valley, 3,000 feet above sea-level, enclosed by three mountain ranges, Pirin, Rila and the Rhodope. Officially, Mehomiya was the administrative centre of Razlog, but the area’s richest and most important merchants lived in Bansko. The inhabitants of Bansko were wide-awake, well-informed people, and most of the men had been more than once to Sofia, Plovdiv, Salonika and other places far away from their village. Before the Napoleonic Wars, Bansko merchants used to buy up all the cotton grown in the Aegean lands around Drama and Serres, and would sell it as far afield as Vienna. The trade with Austria had long ago ceased, but Bansko kept its alert, outward-looking attitude. The absence of resident Turks and the proximity of Pirin added to the independence of the Banskalii (people of Bansko). They were unconventional in many ways. Nobody wore black at funerals; the relatives would go in their best attire, and the young women—in their wedding dresses. Funerals were followed by much feasting, both at the home of the deceased and in the cemetery. In general, the Banskalii—both men and women—loved eating and drinking: they openly ignored church fasts, and ate meat at all times of the year. While most Bulgarian families would keep a pig to be slaughtered at Christmas, every Bansko family kept two or three, or even as many as ten pigs. In

17. Accounts of the attempt to kidnap Suleiman Beg can be found in Yané’s memoirs, Miletich VII, pp. 17-18, and in the memoirs of Dimitŭr Kyoseto, recorded by Ivan Harizanov, TDIA, f. 1508, op. 2, a.e. 22, pp. 55-58.

18. Protestant converts were not very numerous, partly because the Bulgarians are a markedly unreligious people, and partly because the Muslim occupation had invested the Orthodox Church with a national character, so that the ordinary Bulgarian associated Orthodoxy with nationality and felt that if one became a Protestant or a Catholic, one somehow ceased to be Bulgarian.

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small Bulgarian towns, to this day, private animals are taken out to pasture by hired herdsmen, who, in the evening, bring them back to some central place from which the animals—usually cows and sheep—find their own way home, each to its own yard, and at sundown Bansko would be crammed with pigs, grunting, squealing, barging and shoving. It followed that every Bansko family had vast stores of sausages, salami, salted pork and other delicacies provided by this multitude of pigs. The Banskalii were also well supplied with fresh trout from the undefiled rivers and lakes of Pirin, which endowed the village with a superabundance of perfect water, and kept its fields and meadows as green and attractive as gardens. They were, however, great drinkers of things other than water, and Bansko was full of taverns, where the men congregated to talk over glasses of rakiya or light red wine from Kresna, often bringing their own home-made salami, etc., to eat with their drinks, although there was always plenty of food available in the taverns. The women, too, emulated the men, as far as modesty would permit. They could not, of course, enter a tavern, but they would gather in each other’s houses, from time to time, to enjoy a glass or two. [19]

Bansko was also a village of secrets. From the streets little could be seen of the houses, tucked away behind walls that were taller than a man: clouds of pink and white blossom, or tree-tops bending under fruit, glimpses of brilliantly coloured rugs hung out to air on high balconies decked with geraniums, smoke coiling up from elegant white chimney-pots roofed with tiles—and that was all. Even the comings and goings through the massive gates that punctuated the otherwise unbroken walls were no reliable source of information, for the Banskalii could roam all over their town without going out into the streets, simply by passing from courtyard to courtyard through internal doors. There were even secret passages and houses like fortresses, with embrasures and fire-proof chambers, and multiple entrances and exits giving maximum advantage to defenders.

Yané was already acquainted with Bansko and the Banskalii. He had been there earlier in the year with his cheta, and had found that little preliminary work was necessary, since the committee founded by Gotsé in 1896 was still functioning. Several of its members were Protestants, and it occurred to Yané that, with their assistance, some important American, such as Dr House, senior missionary in Salonika, might be lured to Bansko and kidnapped. He therefore took his men to Razlog, and camped in the forests on Pirin. Yonkata Vaptsarov [20] came up from Bansko to meet them, and, when Yané learnt that there were Turkish soldiers in the village, he left his cheta in the safety of the mountain, while he and Chernopeev went down into Bansko with Vaptsarov.

19. Much of the information about Bansko is taken from Vasil Kŭnchov, Izbrani Proizvedeniya, vol. I, 1970, pp. 283-297.

20. This Vaptsarov was the father of the poet Nikola Vaptsarov.

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Yané’s discussions with the local Protestants convinced him that the idea of luring Dr House to Bansko was a non-starter, but he learnt that another American missionary, Miss Ellen Stone, would actually be in Bansko at the time required.

Miss Ellen Stone was a missionary of long-standing. Born in Roxbury, Massachussetts in 1846, she had come to Bulgaria in 1878 to work in the American girls’ school in Samokov. Later she had moved to Plovdiv, where she taught hygiene, reading and Protestantism to women in their homes. In 1898, after a short visit to the United States, she was appointed by the American Board of Missionaries to Salonika, where she was in charge of evangelistic work among women, a job which involved frequent travel. In the fateful summer of 1901, she had gone to Bansko to conduct a short training course for Bulgarian teachers in Protestant primary schools and for ‘Bible women’, a task in which she was assisted by Mrs Ekaterina Tsilka (née Stefanova), who was Bulgarian and a native of Bansko. Mrs Tsilka’s husband was an Albanian Protestant minister; both had studied in American mission schools before going to New York, where Gregory Tsilka had graduated from the Union Theological Seminary, while Ekaterina had studied both at the Northfield Seminary and at the Training School for Nurses at the Presbytarian Hospital. The couple had met and married in the United States and had returned to the Balkans to propagate their Protestant faith. When the summer course was over, Miss Stone would be travelling back to Salonika, while the Tsilkas would be returning to their little congregation in Korcha.

Yané decided that Miss Stone was a person of sufficient consequence to substitute for Dr House. Chernopeev even welcomed the change: ‘Dr House had always been a friend of the peasants; when we heard that he had decided not to come our way, I, for one, only half regretted it. . . I didn’t mind Miss Stone so much. She often preached against us, telling the poor peasants that God would right their troubles, and not the "brigands". All harmless stuff—nobody took it seriously, but it made the business less difficult for us to gulp down.’ [21]

Curiously enough, after much discussion and some hesitation, the plan to kidnap Miss Stone also found favour in the eyes of the Bansko Protestants, whose loyalty to the Organization and its aims took precedence over their loyalty to their Church, and who now offered to keep Yané informed about Miss Stone’s movements.

All these inquiries and discussions took about a fortnight, during which time the cheta, under the temporary command of Nikola Dechev, was waiting in the forest. Dechev finally became tired of waiting, and sent Yané an angry letter in which he said that unless he and Chernopeev returned from Bansko that very evening, the entire cheta would leave for

21. Sonnichsen, Albert: Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit. New York 1909, p. 259. Sonnichsen had the opportunity of speaking personally to Chernopeev.

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the Principality. Yané and Chernopeev indeed came that evening, but accompanied by seven or eight armed peasants. The whole company withdrew higher into the mountains and began to quarrel. Yané and Chernopeev took issue with Dechev over the tone of his letter, while Dechev criticized them for keeping the cheta waiting so long without word. In the end, eleven of the chetnitsi opted to return to the Principality, and proposed taking their weapons with them. Yané, however, had foreseen this possibility. He was prepared to let them go, but he was not prepared to allow a single gun to leave Macedonia, and he immediately ordered the peasants to surround the dissidents and to disarm them. He then sent the eleven back to the Principality with one of the Organization’s couriers to guide them.

Only five of the original cheta now remained—Yané, Chernopeev, Dimitŭr Kyoseto, [22] Stoil Prosyakov (a relation of Yané’s) and Dimitŭr Inev, from Samokov. Yané and Chernopeev told the other three about the plan to kidnap Miss Stone, and it was decided that they should wait in Vlahi until the time was ripe. They started out for Vlahi by the shortest way—over the main ridge of Pirin, but when they were already high up, under the peak of El-tepe, a courier came from Simeon Molerov, one of the leaders of the Organization in Bansko, with a letter in which Molerov asked them to return, since some of the chorbadzhii—the richer and more influential citizens of Bansko—were against the kidnapping.

The cheta retraced its steps, and again camped above Bansko. Yané called the chorbadzhii to a meeting, and four of them came to point out the terrible risk to the village that the kidnapping would entail, and to express the opinion that, ‘instead of pencilling our eyebrows, we would be putting out our eyes’. Seven years earlier, Gotsé had encountered similar opposition from the chorbadzhii of Bansko, who had told him that they could not tolerate a headmaster who spent his time trying to set the world on fire. [23] Gotsé had replied: ‘Eh, brothers, God give you life, and you yourselves will bring brands to this fire.’ Evidently, the chorbadzhii had not yet quite reached that stage, and Chernopeev silenced their protests by saying: ‘Very well, if each of you gives us 5000 liri, we’ll give up the idea.’ This proposal was even less welcome, and finally the chorbadzhii gave their grudging consent, providing that Miss Stone was kidnapped after she had left Bansko, at a place sufficiently far from the village and other inhabited places to avoid incriminating the local population.

Having obtained the consent and co-operation of the Banskalii, Yané

22. The account of the split in the cheta is taken from the memoirs of Dimitŭr Kyoseto, recorded by Ivan Harizanov, TDIA, f. 1508, op. 2, a.e .22, pp. 58-60. Yané himself does not give any details, but merely says that eleven went back to the Principality, leaving the five mentioned by Dimitŭr Kyoseto. Miletich VII, p. 18.

23. Peyu Yavorov. Sŭchineniya, vol. III, Sofia, 1965, p. 175.

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collected some more men, [24] and stationed his cheta on the road along which Miss Stone was due to travel on her way home to Salonika. The place which they chose was, indeed, miles from any Bulgarian settlement— a heavily wooded narrow valley, where the road from Bansko to Gorna Dzhumaya followed the course of the brook which divides Rila from Pirin. Here, at the narrowest point, the so-called ‘Supported Rock’ [25] (Podpryanata Skala) jutted out into the stream, thus obscuring the way ahead.

Here Yané and his men were joined by Krŭstyu Asenov, who had come from the Principality with four companions. [26] And here, when the cavalcade of Protestants, thirteen in number, arrived all unsuspecting in the late afternoon of September 3 (August 21 old style) 1901, here Miss Stone was duly kidnapped.

The whole party of Protestants was driven at great speed up the steep mountainside, which was so thickly wooded that sometimes the chetnitsi had to cut back the bushes and branches, so that the horses could pass. When they were sufficiently far from the road and the Turkish guardhouse, which was at no great distance from the scene of the kidnapping, they halted on a little meadow where there was a spring. He