Svoboda ili smart (Bulgarian: Свобода или смърт, lit.'Freedom or Death',[2] written in pre-1945 Bulgarian orthography: "Свобода или смърть"[3]) was a revolutionary slogan used during the national-liberation struggles by the Bulgarian revolutionaries, called comitadjis.[4] The slogan was in use during the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries.
The book of Rakovski Gorski Patnik (Forest wanderer), where the motto appeared for the first time in 1857.[1]Vasil Levski in a First Bulgarian Legion uniform in 1862. The legionnaires wore caps, on which metal lions marked with the motto were attached.
For the first time, the slogan appeared in Georgi Rakovski's poem "Горски пътник", written in 1854 and issued in 1857. The plot of this poem concerns a Bulgarian who recruits a rebel cheta to mutiny against the Turks. He most likely accepted and transliterated the slogan Eleftheria i thanatos from the Greek liberation struggles, which was a national motto of Greece. Rakovski summoned his fellow countrymen to go to the battlefields under the banners of the Bulgarian lion. The flag with the lion was provided in 1858, when he stipulated that the national flag will have on its front side a lion depicted and the inscription "Svoboda ili smart" and on its reverse side a Christian cross and the inscription "God with us, forward!".[5] It was used for the first time during the 1860s from the Bulgarian Legions in Serbia. Then Georgi Rakovski ordered a flag and a seal with the inscriptions "Свобода или смърть".[6]Bulgarian committees used the same slogan on their flags during the April uprising of 1876. Ivan Vazov wrote the poem "Свобода или смърть" in the same year. During the Kresna–Razlog uprising in 1878, there was a banner with such inscription, prepared by the Unity Committee.[7] During the Bulgarian unification of 1885, flags with this inscription were also waived by members of the Bulgarian Secret Central Revolutionary Committee.[8] The Bulgarian Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization, established in 1893 in the Ottoman Empire, also accepted the same slogan.[9] In the Ilinden Uprising, the Kruševo Republic's flag contained the motto.[10] The motto was also used by the Sofia-based Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Committee between 1894 and 1904. During the Balkan Wars the volunteers from the Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Volunteer Corps in Bulgarian army, had several flags with this motto. In interwar Greece and Yugoslavia the motto was used by the pro-Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation and Internal Thracian Revolutionary Organisation. In interwar Romania, it was used by the pro-Bulgarian Internal Dobrujan Revolutionary Organisation in Southern Dobruja. During the Second World War, this motto was utilized by the pro-Bulgarian Ohrana active in Northern Greece. The uniforms of the Ohranists were supplied by the Italians and were resplendent with shoulder patches bearing the inscription "Italo-Bulgarian Committee: Freedom or Death".[11] It was also utilized as title of several newspapers of these organizations.
Bulgarian flag with the motto.Banner presenting the motto written in post-1944 Macedonian language as the original slogan of the defunct in 1934 IMRO.
After 1944 in SFR Yugoslavia a distinct Macedonian language was codified and separate Macedonian nation was recognized.[12] Macedonian became the first official language in the newly proclaimed SR Macedonia, Serbo-Croatian was the second official language, as it was the official language of SFR Yugoslavia, while Bulgarian was prohibited.[13] The Bulgarian spelling "Свобода или смърть", used by the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization, was transformed into Macedonian as "Слобода или смрт". All documents written by IMRO revolutionaries in standard Bulgarian were translated into Macedonian.[14] Today in North Macedonia the motto has been sometimes described as written originally in Macedonian, which has caused protests from Bulgaria.[15][16] As part of the controversial Skopje 2014 project,[17] street lamps were mounted in the center of Skopje, on which the inscription "Свобода или смърть" is readable.[18]
The word komitadji is Turkish, meaning literally "committee man". It came to be used for the guerilla bands which, subsidized by the governments of the Christian Balkan states, especially of Bulgaria. "The Making of a New Europe: R.W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years of Austria-Hungary", Hugh Seton-Watson, Christopher Seton-Watson, Methuen, 1981, ISBN0416747302, p. 71.
Veselin Traĭkov, G. Mukherjee, Georgi Stoikov Rakovski, a Great Son of Bulgaria and a Great Friend of India, Northern Book Centre, ISBN8185119287, p. 127.
IMRO group modeled itself after the revolutionary organizations of Vasil Levski and other noted Bulgarian revolutionaries like Hristo Botev and Georgi Benkovski, each of whom was a leader during the earlier Bulgarian revolutionary movement. Around this time ca. 1894, a seal was struck for use by the Organization leadership; it was inscribed with the phrase "Freedom or Death" (Svoboda ili smurt). Duncan M. Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements, 1893–1903, Duke University Press, 1988, ISBN0822308134, pp. 39–40.
Yugoslav Communists recognized the existence of a Macedonian nationality during WWII to quiet fears of the Macedonian population that a communist Yugoslavia would continue to follow the former Yugoslav policy of forced Serbianization. Hence, for them to recognize the inhabitants of Macedonia as Bulgarians would be tantamount to admitting that they should be part of the Bulgarian state. For that the Yugoslav Communists were most anxious to mold Macedonian history to fit their conception of Macedonian consciousness. The treatment of Macedonian history in Communist Yugoslavia had the same primary goal as the creation of the Macedonian language: to de-Bulgarize the Macedonian Slavs and to create a separate national consciousness that would inspire identification with Yugoslavia. For more see: Stephen E. Palmer, Robert R. King, Yugoslav communism and the Macedonian question, Archon Books, 1971, ISBN0208008217, Chapter 9: The encouragement of Macedonian culture.
The Macedonian partisans established a commission to create an "official" Macedonian literary language (1945), which became the Macedonian Slavs' legal "first" language (with Serbo-Croatian a recognized “second” and Bulgarian officially proscribed). D. Hupchick, The Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism, Springer, 2002, ISBN0312299133, p. 430.
The Macedonian Revolutionary Organization used the Bulgarian standard language in all its programmatic statements and its correspondence was solely in the Bulgarian language, nearly all of its leaders were Bulgarian teachers or Bulgarian officers, and received financial and military help from Bulgaria. After 1944 all the literature of Macedonian writers, memoirs of Macedonian leaders, and important documents had to be translated from Bulgarian into the newly invented Macedonian. For more see: Bernard A. Cook ed., Europe Since 1945: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2, Taylor & Francis, 2001, ISBN0815340583, p. 808.
Janev, G. (2015). ‘Skopje 2014’: erasing memories, building history. In M. Couroucli, & T. Marinov (Eds.), Balkan heritages: Negotiating history and culture (pp. 111–130). Taylor & Francis, 2017, ISBN1134800754.
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