Vlado Chernozemski

Velichko Dimitrov Kerin was born in the village of Kamenitsa, then in the Principality of Bulgaria, now a quarter of the town of Velingrad. His father, Dimitar Kerin, and his mother, Risa Baltadzieva, were both local peasants. He received primary education in his native village. His mother died when he was 14 years old and the young Kerin was induced to help his father feed the family along with his younger brother and two sisters. Chernozemski joined the military in Plovdiv. During World War I, he served in the engineer corps. After the war, he worked as a driver and watchmaker. As a youngster, he was prone to drinking alcohol, but later reformed and became a vegetarian. He married in 1919. In 1923, his daughter Latinka was born. In 1925, he divorced and remarried. He lived in Sofia until 1932. According to a conspiracy theory promoted by himself, he was born in a village called Patrick near Štip, that was burned down by the Serbian army during the Second Balkan War, and was never restored. His mother and father were therefore living in Bulgaria as refugees. He used different aliases and pseudonyms such as Vlado Georgiev Chernozemski, Peter Kelemen, Vlado the Chauffeur, Rudolph Suk, Vladimir Dimitrov Vladimirov etc. Even his second wife did not know his real name or anything about his past. There are no records of him in Bulgaria beyond 1932, but he was re-identified in 1934, after his death in France. ==Revolutionary activity==

IMRO A legend describing Chernozemski as Vlado the Driver () appeared in Macedonia, since he worked for a company in Dupnitsa as a driver for a short time. In the early 1920s, he moved to Bansko, when the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) was re-established by Todor Alexandrov. Chernozemski joined the IMRO in 1922 in the unit of the voivode Ivan Barlyo. From 1923 to 1924, he was a member of Trayan Lakavishki's cheta. Chernozemski also entered the region of Vardar Macedonia with IMRO bands and participated in more than 15 skirmishes with Yugoslav police. He soon became one of the best marksmen in the organization, Chernozemski was arrested and sentenced to death by hanging for Hadzhidimov's assassination, but his execution was never carried out. In 1925, Chernozemski escaped from a police escort. In 1927, Chernozemski proposed to the IMRO Central Committee to enter the main conference building of the League of Nations in Paris and detonate grenades attached to his person, in order to attract the attention of the world and generate publicity over the question of the Bulgarians in Macedonia, but his proposal was rejected. In 1929, the leadership of the IMRO called on Ante Pavelić and the Ustaše for cooperation. In 1930, Chernozemski, following an order by Mihailov, assassinated another member of the IMRO, Naum Tomalevski, and his bodyguard. As King Alexander's motorcade drove at a few miles per hour down a Marseille street, Chernozemski emerged from the crowd, approached the king's car and leapt onto its running board while concealing his Mauser C96 semi-automatic pistol in a bouquet of flowers and chanting "Vive le roi" ("Long live the King"). He shot Alexander repeatedly, hitting him twice, once in the abdomen and the other in the heart; King Alexander died within minutes. The chauffeur—who tried to push Chernozemski off the car—and General Georges were also shot. Chernozemski killed the chauffeur, apparently unintentionally. A police officer fired at Chernozemski but missed and fatally wounded Alexander's companion French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. The chauffeur died almost immediately, with his foot pressed on the brake of the car, providing the opportunity for a photographer outside the car to photograph most of the grisly affair. Barthou might have survived, but did not, apparently because of inadequate medical attention. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the Marseille cemeteries with only two detectives and the gravediggers present. A Yugoslav journalist who saw the tattoo told the press it was the symbol of the IMRO. In the night of October 10, the French police arrested in Paris the Ustaša terrorists Zvonimir Pospišil and Ivan Raić. Five days later Mijo Kralj was arrested, who admitted everything. As a result, an exhumation was organized and fingerprints were sent from Paris to Sofia and Belgrade. On 17 October it was officially announced from Bulgarian police that the killer was Vlado Chernozemski. His act was celebrated in Croat and Macedonian circles. ==Legacy==

In 1934, sections of the Macedonian Patriotic Organization, named after him, were founded in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and Shepparton, Victoria, Australia. According to an article by the last leader of the IMRO, Ivan Mihailov, published in 1971 in the Macedonian Patriotic Organization's newspaper Macedonian Tribune under the headline: "A necessary clarification. What was Vlado Chernozemski's nationality", the following is stated: Chernozemski remains a symbol of lasting friendship between the Croatian people and the Bulgarians, but in no case he is a symbol of any Macedonian nation, such as Chernozemski had never met anywhere in Macedonia, although he had been there for a long time as a guerrilla... We need to point out that both, under the Ottoman regime and in the Great war against Serbia, as well as between the two world wars, not some imagined Macedonians, but only Bulgarians, fought against the Serbian rule in Macedonia. Per Mihailov, anyone who claims he was not a Bulgarian insults his memory. In October 2000, he was commemorated by a group of Macedonians as a martyr for the Macedonian cause. VMRO-DPMNE also participated in the commemoration. A memorial plate was erected in his honor in Velingrad in October 2005, with the financial support of VMRO-BND and a Macedonian Bulgarian association "Horizonti" (Horizons) from Ohrid, present day North Macedonia. In Bulgaria, there are streets named after him in Blagoevgrad and Velingrad. ==Gallery==

File:Cernozemski ustaska uniforma.jpg|Chernozemski in Ustaše uniform in 1934. File:Chernozemski Automatic Pistol.jpg|Semi-automatic pistol used by Chernozemski to assassinate Alexander of Yugoslavia. File:Chernozemski tattoo.png|Chernozemski's tattoo, depicting the abbreviature of the IMRO in Bulgarian. File:Vlado Chernozemski Kamenitsa Memorial stone2.jpg|Memorial stone of Chernozemski in Kamenitsa, Bulgaria. File:Vlado Chernozemski Street Kamenitsa.jpg|The central street in Kamenitsa - „Владо Черноземски“. File:Members of MPO in Windsor, ON.jpg|Members of the MPO chapter "Vlado G. Chernozemsky" in Windsor, Ontario, 1936 ==See also==