Tatarchev was born on 16 December 1869 in the town of
Resen, in the
Ottoman Empire (present-day
North Macedonia), to a rich merchant family. His father Nikola was a banker and merchant, and a leading member of the
Bulgarian Exarchist community in Resen, while his mother Katerina was a descendant of a prominent family from
Jankovec. When he was eight, Albanian bandits robbed his home, and his mother ended up dying due to the shock from the experience. Influenced by socialist ideas, Tatarchev wanted to go abroad to study
philosophy, but his father insisted on
medicine. He talked with Gruev about what they as Bulgarians should do to improve the political condition of their people, with both of them agreeing that it was necessary to find other like-minded people, and Gruev took up the task. In official documents and personal correspondence, he wrote in standard Bulgarian, with dialectal influences. He was released in 1902 and became a representative of the Foreign Committee of the IMRO in
Sofia, along with Matov. arguing that the authorities had already arrested too many members and that it was time to act. Tatarchev attended the Kyustendil congress of IMRO in March 1908, where he condemned the Serres faction along with the rest of the participants, after the assassination of Ivan Garvanov and
Boris Sarafov. In 1920, he entered the
Macedonian Federative Organization. Shortly after that, Tatarchev was forced to emigrate to
Italy, because of significant discord between then IMRO's leader
Todor Alexandrov and him. There he wrote his memoirs, and all the time until the Second World War he wrote articles for the newspapers "Macedonia", "Zarya", "Vardar". In his newspapers, he actively criticized the Serbian and Yugoslavian government for the
Serbianisation of the Macedonian Slavs. Tatarchev became a close friend of the new leader of the IMRO,
Ivan Mihailov. He lived briefly in his native Resen during the
Second World War, when Macedonia was annexed by
Bulgaria (1941–1944). Later he returned to Sofia, but in 1943 after the bombings there, Tatarchev moved to
Nova Zagora. The
Germans offered him in 1944 to become a president of the
Independent State of Macedonia, but he refused, because the Red Army was entering Bulgaria. Bulgaria also ordered its troops to prepare for withdrawal from former
Yugoslavia. After the end of the Second World War, he and his family were persecuted by the authorities of
PR Bulgaria and
DFR Yugoslavia. Thus Tatarchev returned to
Turin, where he also communicated with Mihailov, who moved to Italy as well. He died on 5 January 1952 in Turin.
Relatives Tatarchev's relatives were also involved in the Macedonian revolutionary movement. His brother Mihail was an activist of IMRO and the mayor of Resen during the
Bulgarian occupation of Serbia in the First World War, when he was killed. His nephew, Asen Tatarchev, was also an IMRO activist in the interwar period. Tatarchev's grand nephew,
Ivan Tatarchev, became Bulgaria’s
prosecutor general after the
fall of communism and was elected honorary chairman of the
IMRO – Bulgarian National Movement in the 1990s. ==Legacy==