About Venko Markovski /1915-1983/

The famous Bulgarian poet, patriot and public activist Venko Markovsky /1915-1983/ was son and victim of his controversial, complex and cruel time. Because of his patriotic activity just in 1934, he was expelled from the Skopie High School and was sent to prison by the Serbian King authorities. In 1937, he managed to go to Bulgaria and became student of Slavonic Philology at the Sofia University. 

Even here, because of his public activity and creative work he was arrested and sent to the concentration camp “Gonda voda” and “Krasto pole”. Later, he was transferred to the Sofia Central Prison. Considering his high erudition and substantial talent definite forces of the Bulgarian Communist Party confided him and thrusted on him the Comintern task to work on the creation of a Macedonian language. Venko Markovsky managed to leave the old confines of Bulgaria. In Western Macedonia, he was immediately attracted in the headquarters of the partisan groups, which in fact were commanded by Serbs and Serbo-mans. After the end of the World War II, he occupied most responsible positions in Yugoslavia inclusive the position of a member of parliament in Belgrade. In 1955, under the alias Leopardy he published his poem “Contemporary Paradoxes”. 

He was soon revealed and because of this and because of his unhidden Bulgarian national conscious he was sent to one of the most sinister concentration camps in Europe – the Tito “Goli otok”. In the camp, which is the ninth circle of hell, Venko Markovsky spent five years under continuous terror, humiliations, beatings, and anti-human conditions of life. After serving his severe sentence, under the pretext that he needed an ophthalmologic operation in the Soviet Union, he left Tito Yugoslavia and stayed in Bulgaria on the invitation of the poet Ivan Argentinsky. In Sofia, he instantly joined the struggle for the victory of the truth about the artificially created so-called Macedonian issue. He has long understood the whole groundlessness of the formulation of subordination “of the national to the class-party principle”. 

Of course, in the specific case, everything that was conducted in the Republic of Macedonia was a new form of Serbization of the Bulgarian population, which was forcefully torn from Bulgaria.  The result of these strivings and ambitions of his was not only his enormous poetic creative work. Especially indicative is his work of many years – “History of the Macedonian Struggles” /Blood never turns to Water/. In the framework of more than 620 large-format machine-typed pages, he denounced the falsifiers of the so-called “History of the Macedonian People”, published in Skopie in 1969. In deed, the contributive and grounded work of Venko Markovsky under the title “Blood never Turns to Water” was published in 1981 in Sofia. 

Unfortunately, because of the “warming of the Balkan relations” it did not contain the entire text of the initial four volumes. Moreover, immediately after it appeared the book was confiscated and destroyed. All this requires the work of Venko Markovsky to be published again in the appropriate total print. It is paradoxical that another book of Venko Markovsky – “Goli Otok – the Island of Death” remains inaccessible for the Bulgarian reader. In the United States it was published in English still in 1984.