# Petar Poparsov

Petar Poparsov or Petar Pop Arsov (Bulgarian: Петър Попарсов, Macedonian: Петар Поп Арсов, Serbian: Петар Поп Арсић; 14 August 1868 – 1 January 1941) was a Macedonian Bulgarian revolutionary, educator and one of the founders of the Internal Macedonian Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO). He is regarded as an ethnic Macedonian by the historiography in North Macedonia.

## Early life

He was born in 1868 in the village of Bogomila, near Veles. He was one of the leaders of the student protest in the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki in 1887/1888. The reason was the disagreement with the controversial policy led by the Bulgarian Prime Minister Stefan Stambolov, which was also promoted by the school authorities. The students aimed to replace lecturing in standard Bulgarian with the local Macedonian dialects. As a consequence, he was expelled along with 38 other students. Then they accepted the offer to study for free at the expense of the Serbian society "St. Sava" in Belgrade. He managed to enroll in the philology studies program at Belgrade University in 1888, but due to the resistance to Serbianisation, the group was once more evicted in 1890 and moved to Sofia. In 1892 he graduated in Slavistics from Sofia University. In 1891 he is one of the founders of Young Macedonian Literary Society in Sofia and its magazine Loza (The Vine). One of the purposes of the magazine of Young Macedonian Literary Society was to defend the idea the dialects from Macedonia to be more represented in Bulgarian literature language. The authors of this magazine clearly considered them as Macedonian Bulgarians. However, the Stambolov government suspected them of lack of loyalty and some separatism, and the magazine was promptly banned by the Bulgarian authorities after several issues.

## IMARO

Afterwards he became an active participant in the so-called "Committee for Obtaining the Political Rights Given to Macedonia by the Congress of Berlin" from which, as Petar Poparsov wrote, later developed the IMARO. According to Poparsov the brutal policy of Serbianization, which denied all human dignity in the Macedonian Bulgarians was the main reason for its creation. In 1894 Petar Poparsov was asked by the founders to prepare a draft for the first statute of the IMARO, based on the Statute of Vasil Levski's Internal Revolutionary Organization, which was available to them in Zahari Stoyanov's Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings. Some international, Macedonian and Bulgarian researchers assume, that in this first statute the organization was called Bulgarian Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Committees, and Poparsov was its author. The membership in the first statute was allowed only for Bulgarians.
From 1896 to 1897 he worked in Štip as a Bulgarian teacher and president of the regional IMARO section. In 1897 he was arrested by Ottoman authorities on charges of inciting rebellion, and sentenced to 101 years in prison. He was pardoned in August 1902. During the wave of arrests that followed the Thessaloniki bombings of 1903, Poparsov was arrested in Veles and taken to Skopje prison. For this reason he did not participate in the following Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising. At the Rila Congress of IMRO in November 1905, he was admitted to the organization’s Foreign Representation in Sofia. Poparsov is considered to have been among the leftist federalist faction of the revolutionary organization, favoring political autonomy of Macedonia and strongly opposed to the ring-wing centralist faction which favored unification with Bulgaria. After the Young Turk revolution of 1908, he took an active part in the preparation and holding of the elections for the Ottoman Parliament with the list of the People's Federative Party (Bulgarian Section) but did not receive the necessary number of votes for a deputy. During the First Balkan War he participated in an unsuccessful meeting attended by some local revolutionaries from the IMARO in Veles. It was organized by Dimitrija Čupovski and its aim was to authorize representatives to participate in the London peace conference, with the goal of preserving the integrity of the region of Macedonia.

## In Bulgaria

After the Second Balkan War, he was persecuted by the Serbian authorities and moved with his wife Hrisanta Nasteva, a teacher of the Bulgarian Girls' High School of Thessaloniki, to Bulgaria. They settled in Kostenets in 1914, where he continuously taught from 1914 to 1929. He worked not only as a teacher but also as a director until his retirement. There Poarsov participated in the activities of the so-called Temporary representation of the former IMRO. In 1920, he protested against the Serbianization of Macedonian Bulgarians implemented in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1930, he moved to Sofia, where he lived until the end of his life with his wife. He died after a brief illness in Sofia in 1941.

### Relatives

His brother Andrey Poparsov was also an IMARO activist and Bulgarian teacher in the villages of Bogomila and Oreše. Andrey became a mayor of Bogomila during the Bulgarian occupation of Serbia in the First World War. He was killed in October 1918 by the Serbian authorities as a Bulgarian collaborator.

## Books

* Стамболовщината въ Македония и нейнитѣ прѣдставители - Петъръ Попъ Арсовъ