Yane Sandanski
Yane Ivanov Sandanski or Jane Ivanov Sandanski (, ) (18 May 1872 – 22 April 1915), was a Bulgarian revolutionary recognised as a national hero in Bulgaria and the Republic of Macedonia.
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.