Mencha Karnicheva

Who was Mencha Karnicheva?

Melpomena Dimitrova Karnicheva, popularly known as Mencha was a female revolutionary of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation. The wife of IMRO leader Ivan Mihailov, she is known for assassinating IMRO left-wing activist Todor Panitsa.

Karnicheva was born in Kruševo in Ottoman-ruled Macedonia to a Bulgarophile Aromanian family. Her father worked in Sofia and Tsaribrod. Upon the crushing of the 1903 Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising, Mencha and her mother moved to Bulgaria. In September 1918 she went to study in Munich, but returned to Bulgaria after the end of World War I.

Karnicheva joined the female Macedonian movement in Bulgaria and was part of Todor Panitsa's circle. She gradually got to be disappointed by his leftist views that advocated Comintern ties and collaboration with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, acts she believed would be fatal to the Bulgarian population of Macedonia. Karnicheva reoriented to IMRO's right wing; she joined the organisation on 15 March 1924 and took an independent decision to assassinate Panitsa, who was alleged by IMRO to have ordered the assassinations of Boris Sarafov and Ivan Garvanov and to have served foreign interests.