Thousands of Bulgarians all over the country honored Sunday the memory of the Bulgarian revolutionary hero from Macedonia Gotse Delchev on the day he was murdered by Ottoman Turkey's troops 105 years ago.

One of the largest ceremonies took place in the city of Blagoevgrad in southwest Bulgaria where a number of representatives of national and local authorities, and of leading political parties and other public organizations paid their respect before Gotse Delchev's monument on Macedonia Square.

The Bulgarian revolutionary hero was also honored by many in the town bearing his name - the town of Gotse Delchev, which has a population of about 20 000 people and is located in the valley between the Pirin and the Rhodope Mountains. Until 1951 when it took Delchev's name, the town was called Nevrokop.

Another large-scale remembrance ceremony in honor of the Bulgarian freedom fighter took place in the Black Sea city of Varna. Hundreds of Bulgarians laid flowers at Gotse Delchev's monument on the Alley of Bulgarian National Revival Heroes in the Varna Sea Garden.

Gotse Delchev was born in 1872 in the town of Kukush, present-day Greece. He attended the Bulgarian Military Academy in Sofia, and became involved with the Bulgarian Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Committee, which was founded in 1893 and was later transformed into the Internal Macedonian(-Adrianople) Revolutionary Organization (VMORO).

Delchev quickly became one of the leaders of the VMORO, the organization seeking to liberate the Macedonian and Adrianople Region Bulgarians from the Ottoman Empire, in its most successful period - 1894-1903.

Gotse Delchev was killed in 1903 close to village of Banitsa, present-day Greece, as his regiment of rebels skirmished with Ottoman Turkish troops, three months before the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising of 1903.

One of the most important books on Gotse Delchev, "Freedom or Death, the Life of Gotse Delchev", was written by the British historian Mercia MacDermott.

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