Bulgarian Millet in the context of "Macedonian Struggle"

The Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary (Macedonian: Црква „Св. Богородица“, romanized: Crkva „Sv. Bogorodica“) is a Macedonian Orthodox church of the Prespa-Pelagona Diocese in Bitola, North Macedonia. The church was built in 1870 and consecrated in 1876 by the Bulgarian Exarchist community and has icons dating from the 19th century. Among the church's icons is a čudotvorna ("miraculous") icon of the Virgin Mary that had been stolen from the church in the 1970s and returned in 2017.

The church is listed as an Object of Cultural Heritage by the Ministry of Culture.

Georgi Nikolov Delchev (Bulgarian: Георги Николов Делчев; Macedonian: Ѓорѓи Николов Делчев; 4 February 1872 – 4 May 1903), known as Gotse Delchev or Goce Delčev (Гоце Делчев), was a prominent Macedonian Bulgarian revolutionary (komitadji) and one of the most important leaders of what is commonly known as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). He was active in the Ottoman-ruled Macedonia and Adrianople regions, as well as in Bulgaria, at the turn of the 20th century. Delchev was IMRO's foreign representative in Sofia, the capital of the Principality of Bulgaria. As such, he was also a member of the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee (SMAC) for a period, participating in the work of its governing body. He was killed in a skirmish with an Ottoman unit on the eve of the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising.

Born into a Bulgarian Millet affiliated family in Kukush (today Kilkis in Greece), then in the Salonika vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, in his youth he was inspired by the ideals of earlier Bulgarian revolutionaries such as Vasil Levski and Hristo Botev, who envisioned the creation of a Bulgarian republic of ethnic and religious equality, as part of an imagined Balkan Federation. Delchev completed his secondary education in the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki and entered the Military School of His Princely Highness in Sofia, but at the final stage of his study, he was dismissed for holding socialist literature. Then he returned to Ottoman Macedonia and worked as a Bulgarian Exarchate schoolteacher, and immediately became an activist of the newly-found revolutionary movement in 1894.

In the earliest dated samples of statutes and regulations of the clandestine Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) discovered so far, it is called Bulgarian Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Committees (BMARC). These documents refer to the then Bulgarian population in the Ottoman Empire, which was to be prepared for a general uprising in Macedonia and Adrianople regions, aiming to achieve political autonomy for them. In thе statute of BMARC, that itself is most probably the first one, the membership was reserved exclusively for Bulgarians. This ethnic restriction matches with the memoirs of some founding and ordinary members, where is mentioned such a requirement, set only in the Organization's first statute. In fact, the founders of IMRO were sympathetic to Bulgarian, but hostile to the Serbian nationalism, which led them to establish in 1897 a Society against Serbs. The organization's ethnic character is confirmed by the lack of any mention of Macedonian ethnicity. The name of BMARC, as well as information about its statute, was mentioned in the foreign press of that time, in Bulgarian diplomatic correspondence, and exists in the memories of some revolutionaries and contemporaries.

Due to the lack of original protocol documentation, and the fact its early organic statutes were not dated, the first statute of the Organisation is uncertain and is a subject to dispute among researchers. The dispute also includes its first name and ethnic character, as well as the authenticity, dating, validity, and authorship of its supposed first statute. Moreover, in North Macedonia, any Bulgarian influence on the country's history is a source of ongoing disputes and sharp tensions, thus such historical influences are often rejected by Macedonian researchers in principle. Certain contradictions and even mutually exclusive statements, along with inconsistencies exist in the testimonies of the founding and other early members of the Organization, which further complicates the solution of the problem. It is not yet clear whether the earliest statutory documents of the Organization have been discovered. Its earliest basic documents discovered for now, became known to the historical community during the early 1960s.