# Bloody Christmas (1945)

The Bloody Christmas (Bulgarian: Кървав Божик, romanized: Karvav Bozhik; Macedonian: Крвав Божиќ, romanized: Krvav Božikj) was a campaign in which several hundred people of Macedonian Bulgarian descent were killed as collaborationists by the Yugoslav communist authorities in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in January 1945. Thousands of others who retained their pro-Bulgarian sympathies or views, suffered severe repression as a result. Many people with a pro-Bulgarian orientation or accused of having one were arrested and sentenced on fabricated charges.

## Development

After the end of the Second World War, Bulgarians in the so-called "new lands" in Vardar Macedonia, briefly annexed to Bulgaria during the war, were persecuted using charges of "great-Bulgarian chauvinism". During the Cold War, the event was silenced by the communist authorities. To wipe out the Bulgarophile sentiments of parts of the local population, the Yugoslav communists started a process of nation-building.
From the start of the new Socialist Republic of Macedonia, accusations surfaced that new authorities were involved in retribution against people who did not support the formation of the new ethnic Macedonian identity. The number of dead "traitors" and "collaborationists" due to organized killings of Bulgarians during Bloody Christmas and afterwards is unclear, but some sources put the number of victims at around 1,200. The idea was to weaken the Bulgarian intelligentsia in Macedonia, to eradicate the Bulgarian self-identification of parts of the population, and to speed-up the process of Macedonisation. At the end of 1944, a law was passed for the protection of the Macedonian national honour, which persecuted people with a Bulgarian identity, pro-Bulgarian views, collaborationists or those who wanted more independence from Yugoslavia. A special court was also set up between April and August 1945 to implement the law.
According to Bulgarian authors during the terror of January 1945, on the road between Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa, and on the hills of Galičica mountain near the village of Oteševo and other villages, more Bulgarians were executed. Most of the bodies were disposed of in Lake Prespa. Nearly all inhabited places in Vardar Macedonia provided victims for the campaign. In several cities in Vardar Macedonia, where people's courts were set up, death sentences over citizens charged with "great-Bulgarian chauvinism" were issued. In Skopje, in 1945 alone, 18 trials were held with 226 defendants, 22 of whom were sentenced to death. In Štip in the same period, seven Bulgarians were sentenced to death. Ten Bulgarians were sentenced to death in Prilep and in Veles. In Bitola, nine were sentenced to death.
The central Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) expressed discontent with these actions of the Communist Party of Macedonia (CPM), with an exchange of letters showing that the latter misunderstood the repressions to be greenlit by the former. The CPY struggled in these earlier years to assert itself over the affairs of the CPM, which was subject to considerable factionalism at the time. To make matters worse, the CPY's former representative in Macedonia with considerable understanding of the regional situation, Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, had been recalled earlier in November 1944 and replaced with the less knowledgeable Miha Marinko.
According to Bulgarian sources, between 1945 and 1946 over 4,700 Bulgarians were massacred or went missing. As a result of the purge, up to 100,000 people were deported, displaced, imprisoned, persecuted or sent to concentration camps in Yugoslavia. The bodies of 50 executed victims were exhumed near the village of Letevci on June and July 1996. In 2005, a scholarly conference was organized in Veles to commemorate the murder of more than fifty locals but they were portrayed as patriotic Macedonians wrongly accused of pro-Bulgarian sentiments.