Разговорът на Ванче Михайлов от 1931 г. с американския публицист, философ и разузнавач Джон Бейклес (написал предговора на фундаменталната книга "Македония - Швейцария на Балканите"). Разговорът е част от кратък анализ на Бейклес, публикуван през януари, 1935 г. след убийството на крал Александър Караджорджевич.

After the peace treaty, Macedonia was split up into three parts. The Greeks were given the seacoast, the Yugoslavs took almost all that was left, and the Bulgarians were given a small district about Petritch. The Macedonians immediately found that they had changed masters for the worse. They were denied the use their own language; they were forbidden to worship in their own language, they were forbidden a press in their own language; they were forbidden right of free and peaceable assembly and they were placed under the control of some eighty thousand Serb gendarmes.
The final blow was a requirement which to the American always seems grotesque, which seems a little thing to fight about, but which was a bitter thing in the Balkans. The people were compelled to change their names from the Macedonian-Bulgarian "off" to the Serbian "ovitch." To an American, I suppose that seems amusing; and yet if you were compelled to worship in Serbian, and forbidden English language newspapers, and compelled to make your names end in "ovitch," I imagine that there would be a very considerable disturbance in Philadelphia. I know that if I were compelled to change my name to "Bakelessovitch," I should do something drastic about it. It is a small thing, but it means a great deal. (...)

As I walked in to talk with Mihailoff, I glanced over my shoulder and my heart stopped at least three beats, because behind me stood eight or nine picked political assassins. They were the best men in the organization, chosen as Mihailoff's personal bodyguard. I have seen some good troops in my time, but I never saw finer fighting men than those fellows. Only one thing puzzled me. Their faces were quite white, the faces of townsmen; and yet these were obviously men in the pink of physical condition, used to the hardest kind of outdoor life. I was so curious I asked why. Mihailoff smiled and said, "Well, you see, we never see the sun, we move at night." It gives you some notion of what life of a comitadji leader is-a hunted man who could not stay more than two days in one place even before the upset in the Bulgarian Government made him a fugitive on the face of the earth.

When it was all over and we were ready to go, Mihailoff saw me looking closely at his men. "Would you like to inspect the troops?" he asked. "You bet I would like to inspect the troops," said I. "Well, come on down." We went down, and the comitadjis, who were quite as inter- ested in an American as I was in them, and who thought me a far stranger object, I dare say, than I thought them, gathered around. Mihailoff tore open the bandoleers and showed me the little bombs which the IMRO makes for just such occasions as the assassination in Marseille, though that assassination happened to be carried out with a pistol. I noticed that the bombs, like those of any other government, carried the stamp of the government, "IMRO"; or in Bulgarian, "VMRO." "Is this discreet?" I asked. Mihailoff smiled slightly: "Oh, yes. We want people to know where they come from"...

Източник: Сканирана от оригинален екземпляр

Автор: Иван (Ванчо, Ванче) Михайлов Гаврилов (1896-1990, Рим, Италия) е легендарен български революционер, последният дългогодишен лидер на ВМРО.
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