Dimitar Ganchev

Who was Dimitar Ganchev?

Dimitar Ganchev was a Bulgarian revolutionary and a member of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization.

Dimitar Ganchev was born in 1875 in the town of Ruse, Northern Bulgaria. After he graduated from the high-school in Ruse, he studied natural sciences at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. In 1897 he became a member of the so-called Geneva group – an anarchistic revolutionary circle led by Mihail Gerdzhikov and Petar Mandzhukov. With the assistance of his close friend Gotse Delchev, in 1901 Dimitar Ganchev was successfully hired as a teacher at the Bulgarian Pedagogical School in Skopie. In this city, he became a member of the IMARO and in 1902 he was chosen a member of the Skopie district revolutionary committee. Furthermore, in the beginning 1903 he was a delegate to the Solun congress, where a decision was made for an armed uprising. Dimitar Ganchev was against precipitate actions, but in the end he too signed the decision. During the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising, Dimitar Ganchev was in Skopie. In September 1903, after the Solun affair, he was arrested and sentenced to jail for 101 years.