page_title: Boatmen of Thessaloniki
section_title: Origins and etymology
hierarchical_section_title: Boatmen of Thessaloniki / Origins and etymology
caption_attribution_description: English: Svetoslav Merdzhanov, (1876 - 1901) Bulgarian anarchist
context_page_description: The Boatmen of Thessaloniki or the Assassins of Salonica, was a Bulgarian anarchistic group, active in the Ottoman Empire in the years between 1898 and 1903. The members of the Group were predominantly from Veles and most of them − young graduates from the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki. The group was radicalized by the Bulgarian anarchist Slavi Merdzhanov, whose initial target was the capital Constantinople, and subsequently Adrianople, but after his execution by the Ottomans in 1901, the group's attention shifted to Thessaloniki. From 28 April until 1 May 1903 the group launched a campaign of terror bombing in Thessaloniki. Their aim was to attract the attention of the Great Powers to Ottoman oppression in Macedonia and Thrace. The group's roots can be traced to 1898 in Geneva, and nearly all its founders were natives from Bulgaria. It was associated with the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization, but had also close ties with the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee. The result of the bombings was disastrous for the Bulgarian community in Thessaloniki.
context_section_description: The Group draws its roots from the Bulgarian anarchist movement which grew in the 1890s, and the territory of Principality of Bulgaria became a staging-point for anarchist activities against the Ottomans, particularly in support of Macedonian and Thracian liberation movements. The Boatmen of Thessaloniki  were a descendant of a group founded in 1895 in Plovdiv and called "Macedonian Secret Revolutionary Committee", which was developed in 1898 in Geneva in  a secret, anarchistic, brotherhood called "Geneva group". Its activists were the students Michail Gerdjikov, Petar Mandjukov and Slavi Merdjanov. They were influenced from the anarcho-nationalism, which emerged in Europe, following the French Revolution, going back at least to Mikhail Bakunin and his involvement with the Pan-Slavic movement. The anarchists in the so-called "Geneva group" of students played key roles in the anti-Ottoman struggles. Nearly all the members who founded the Committee in Geneva were natives from Bulgaria and not from Macedonia. Despite of non-Macedonian descent, they espoused Macedonian identity, emancipated from the pan-Bulgarian national project.
  In 1899 Merdjanov moved to the Bulgarian school in Salonika, where he worked as teacher and sparked some of the graduates with this ideas. In 1900 Petar Mandzhukov also resided in Thessaloniki, where had a contact with the Gemidzii and they were influenced by his anarchist ideas, especially those relating to methods of terrorist struggle. The first meetings of the group took part in 1899 with the purpose of forming a revolutionary terrorist group with aim of changing international public opinion in the matter of the freedom of Macedonia and Adrianople Thrace through urging the social conscience of the oppressed. The group is found in published works with several names: "The boatmen of Thessaloniki", the "Crew", or the "Gemitzides", form of the Turkish word for "boatman". At their start, they had a different name, the "Troublemakers", gürültücü. The name "boatmen" was due to "leaving behind the everyday life and the limits of law and sail with a boat in the free and wild seas of lawlessness."
caption: Slavi Merdzhanov (1876 - 1901), Bulgarian anarchist and founder of Gemidzhii group.[22]
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