Yane Sandanski
Sandanski was born in the village of Vlahi near Kresna in Ottoman Empire on May 18, 1872. His father Ivan participated as a standard-bearer in the Kresna-Razlog Uprising. After the crush of the uprising, in 1879 his family moved to Dupnitsa, Bulgaria, where Sandanski received his elementary education. From 1892 to 1894 he was a soldier in the Bulgarian army. Sandanski was an active supporter of the Radoslavov's wing of the Liberal Party and shortly after it came to power in February 1899, he was appointed head of the Dupnitsa Prison. Because of that, his name ""Sandanski"" distorted from ""Zindanski"" that comes from Turkish ""Zindancı"" (lit. "Dungeon Keeper" or "Jailer").
Yane Sandanski was involved in the Revolutionary Movement in Macedonia and Thrace and became one of its leaders. He joined initially the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee (SMAC) in 1895 during an incursion into the Muslim-inhabited regions of the central Rhodopes ìn Thrace. In the next five years, Sandanski was a SMAC activist in the Pirin region, but in 1900 returned to become a director of the local prison in Dupnitsa. In 1901, Sandanski switched to the Internal Macedono-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Organization (IMARO). He built up the organization’s network of committees in the districts of Serres and Gorna Dzhumaja in the Pirin region, and that is why the people gave him the nickname "PirinTsar" (Pirinski Tsar). He was also one from the organizers of the Miss Stone Affair - America's first modern hostage crisis. On September 3, 1901, a Protestant missionary named Ellen Stone set out on horseback across the mountainous hinterlands of Macedonia and was ambushed by a band of armed revolutionaries. Sandanski was also active in the anti-Ottoman Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising. The Militias active in the region of Serres, led by Yane Sandanski and an insurgent detachment of the "Macedonian Supreme Committee", held down a large Turkish force. These actions began on the day of the Feast of the Cross and did not involve the local population as much as in other regions, but were well to the east of Monastir and to the west of Thrace.
Yane Sandanski
The historian Hristo Silyanov provides a position of Sandanski’s where he states that "the solution of the Macedonian question is not the unity with Bulgarians, and that the Macedonian population had to emancipate itself as a self-determining (or an independent) people". However Siljanov described all IMARO revolutionaries as Bulgarians and used the term "Macedonian" only as regional designation.
In the Republic of Macedonia Sandanski is considered a national hero and one of the most prominent revolutionary figures of the 20th century. However some Macedonian mainstream specialists on the history of local revolutionary movement, like Academician Ivan Katardžiev and PhD. Zoran Todorovski, argue that the political separatism of Sandanski represented a form of early Macedonian nationalism, asserting that at that time it was only a political phenomenon, without ethnic character. Both define all Macedonian revolutionaries from that period as "Bulgarians", as products of the Bulgarian educational system and Bulgarian Church, which had a policy of producing “Bulgarian national consciousness” in its Exarchist schools. According to them Macedonian identity arose mostly after the First World War and Sandanski identified himself as Bulgarian too. Вulgаriаn historian Stoyan Boyadziev has described Sandanski as extremely controversial Bulgarian revolutionary, whose separatist асtivitу however, produced as a whole Macedonian nationalism. Today, Sandanski is one of the names mentioned in the National anthem of the Republic of Macedonia. In Bulgaria the communist regime appreciated Sandanski because of his socialist ideas and honoured him by renaming the town Sveti Vrach to Sandanski, in 1949. In the years after the Fall of Communism some right-wing Bulgarian historians have been keen to discredit his reputation. Sandanski Point on the E coast of Ioannes Paulus II Peninsula, Livingston Island, Antarctica was named after him by the Bulgarian Antarctic Expedition.