The Gospel of Herod the Great

On the fourteenth of May, nineteen twenty-three, they murdered former Prime Minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski. Velichko “the Uncle” Velyanov did the deed. The Minister of War Ivan Valkov personally ordered Captain Harlakov to do it, and the whole operation was led by retired Colonel Slaveiko Vassilev.

Ivan Valkov lived to be eighty-seven, and claimed it wasn’t he who ordered the murder, but Aleksandar Tsankov. And so he said, “Slaveiko Vassilev turned Stamboliyski over to Harlakov, who carried out the murder, personally ordered by Tsankov, as a way to implement the decision of the Military Union.”

Aleksandar Tsankov lived to be eighty years old and said that it had all happened on the order of Ivan Valkov. He said, “Ivan Valkov and the people around him were cleansing Bulgaria from any and all traitors, spies, and saboteurs.”

Ivan Harlakov lived to be fifty-seven and said that both of the others ordered him to do it. But he added: “It is my deep conviction that out of everything done on the ninth of June, this murder was carried out with the king’s knowledge and consent.”

Velichko Velyanov lived to be sixty-nine and said nothing.

Slaveiko Vassilev lived to fifty-five and killed himself on September ninth, nineteen forty-four.

Etcetera.

On August twenty-sixth, nineteen twenty-three, they killed the politician Rayko Daskalov. He was thirty-five, and they detested him almost as much as they detested Stamboliyski. He had decided not to return to Sofia and instead stay in Prague—maybe the whole thing would blow over and they’d forget about him. But they found him in Prague anyway and killed him there. Yordan Tsitsonkov, an agent of IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, was behind the murder, and they caught him at the scene of the crime. First they acquitted him, then they sentenced him to twenty years, and in the end he hung himself in jail. This happened on January twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty-five. Yordan Tsitskonkov had just turned twenty-six.

On September twelfth, nineteen twenty-three, the police arrested dozens of communists based on reports of informants that revolts were imminent. They even arrested Dimitar Blagoev, but he had just turned eighty-seven, so they put him under house arrest.

On September fourteenth, nineteen twenty-three, the communists caused a big stir at the Sofia outdoor market and the deputy of the local police station, Konstantinov, fell dead to the ground in the hullabaloo. An anarchist from Aytos by the name of Anton Kutev killed him.

The intelligence that the communists were cooking up a revolt ended up being true. The authorities put an end to it, but not without numerous victims—it’s doubtful anyone could ever confirm how many died. Some say this many, others say that many, and the truth about death is never somewhere in the middle. The leaders of the revolt—Georgi Dimitrov, who would go on to become Bulgaria’s first communist leader, and Vasil Kolarov, future deputy prime minister of Dimitrov’s government—ran away to the Serbia, and Dimitar Blagoev cursed them from his house arrest.

On October seventeenth, nineteen twenty-three, at eight thirty in the evening, they killed Nikola Genadiev. They ambushed him at the corner of Krakra and Shipka Streets and shot him several times. The killers were never found. The parliamentary opposition proposed Milan Grashev be assigned as special investigator to the case with unrestricted rights. Milan Grashev was born in Prilep and his real name was Mihail, Mihail Grashev. He had lived in Sofia for twenty years and was a well-known attorney. He authored a leaflet declaring the IMRO a mafia, Todor Aleksandrov and Aleksandar Protogerov mobsters, and the king’s court: their main patron.

On April thirtieth, nineteen twenty-four, they shot down the deputy of the Second Police Precinct, P. Karamfilov, at the Bodega beer hall on the corner of Nishka and Osogovo Streets. The man had sat down to drink with his friends Dimo and Konstantin Antonov, but around eight o’clock, a middle-aged stranger enters, hat pulled down low, and heads straight for their table. He approaches, pulls out his revolver and fires three bullets into Karamfilov, who falls dead on the spot. One of the bullets shattered his jaw, knocking out several teeth, while the other two bullets pierced straight through his heart and kill him instantly. Mayhem ensues, and the killer disappears into the night. Some said it was that same Anton Kutev from Aytos, others claimed that no, it wasn’t him at all, it was Hristo the Hare from Dupnitsa, but either way, he was never caught.

They killed Milan Grashev on the twenty-sixth of May, nineteen twenty-four. He was twenty-four, and his killers were never found.

On November tenth, nineteen twenty-three, they killed Spas Douparinov. They were allegedly taking him to Sofia to stand trial, but they killed him on the way there. Then they buried him around Cheshmadinovo, where he was born. He wasn’t even thirty years old.

On the fourteenth of June, nineteen twenty-four, on the corner of Moskovska and Rakovski Streets, the plainclothes police officer Stefan Karkalashev fired three bullets into Petko D. Petkov, killing him. Karkalashev was from IMRO. They caught him at the scene, but he showed them his badge and they let him go. They arrested him again and sentenced him to death, then changed it to life. He was out in three months. Petko D. Petkov had been only thirty-three.

They killed Mihail Dashin in Samokov on the eighteenth of August. He’d barely qualified for amnesty and returned to Samokov, where he’d briefly acted as mayor during the second local commune. It wasn’t clear who killed him and why—too many people had it out for him already for leading the June uprising.

On the thirty-first of August, they killed Todor Aleksandrov up in the Pirin Mountains as he traveled to the congress of the Serski Revolutionary Region. He was killed by Shteryo Vlahov and Dincho Vretenarov. They, in turn, killed themselves on the fifteenth of September in some shack by Pripechene, and when their bodies were found, they were thrown into the Struma River. Todor Aleksandrov was forty-three, Shteryo Vlahov had just turned forty, and Dincho Vretenarov couldn’t remember when he’d been born.

On the twelfth of September, Kiril Drangov killed Aleko Pasha in Gorna Dzhumaya.

On the thirteenth of September in Sofia, Vladislav Kovachev from Štip was killed by Mircho Kikiritkov. Kikiritkov was forty years old when they killed him in Yugoslavia.

On the same day, the thirteenth of September, they killed Dimo Hadzhidimov from the communist party. He was forty-nine. He was killed by Velichko Kerin, aka Vlado Chernozemski, from IMRO.

[Let it be said! Vlado Chernozemski lived to be thirty-seven, becoming Vanche Mihailov’s right-hand man. Vanche Mihailov personally referred him to Ante Pavelić, who then made him a terrorist instructor for the Croatian Ustashas. On October ninth, nineteen thirty-four, now going by the name Peter Kelemen, with a Czechoslovakian passport in his pocket, two guns—a Parabellum and a Mauser—and a bomb beneath his blue blazer, Vlado stood together with the crowds lining Marseille’s lakeshore boulevard, La Canebière, to greet the King of Yugoslavia, Alexander I Karađorđević. The king had arrived in France to discuss a joint action regarding the problem with Macedonia. The king and the French Foreign Minister, that old fox Louis Barthou—seventy-two at the time—sat in the back seat, with the top down, making what little security there was—two mounted policemen and one civil agent, someone named Gale—completely useless. Vlado Chernozemski jumped out of the crowd and apparently yelled “Vive le roi!” But as he tore through the street and threw himself onto the step of the black Delage, he screamed, in Serbian, “Death to the tyrant!” He then withdrew the barrel of the perfect killing tool—his Mauser—and shot once, then again, and then again straight into the king’s heart, and the latter slid down the car seat. The third bullet pierced Barthou’s arm, four others were fired at General Alfonse George, who had attempted to stop Vlado, and also gunned down the unlucky Gale. Only then did one of the pair of mounted police finally get to the automobile and twice hit Chernozemski with his sabre as the assassin clung to the vehicle’s door. Vlado Chernozemski collapsed on the pavement, but continued to shoot. The policemen swarmed him and jumped on top of him, and the bystanders went delirious: people tore through the cordon and stampeded toward the car, trampling Vlado. King Alexander I Karađorđević died on the spot, having not yet turned forty-six. Louis Barthou died as well, but later: in the commotion someone attempted to stop the bleeding from his wounded arm, but did an amateur job tying it up, instead of stopping it making the bleeding even worse. An ambulance arrived and took them both—him and the killer—to the nearest hospital, but Barthou had lost too much blood and lost consciousness. He died in the doctors’ arms. He was seventy-two. And General George? He lived and survived World War II, even with four bullet wounds in his chest. He died in nineteen fifty-one—just a little short of his seventy-sixth birthday. Vlad Chernozemski, slain by the policemen and trampled by the rabid crowd, died that same evening at eight o’clock. He would have turned thirty-seven ten days later.

But this would be another gospel altogether.]

On December fifteenth, nineteen twenty-four, around six thirty in the evening, after darkness had set, they killed the prosecutor Joakim Dimchev—thirty-six, French-educated, pretty as a rosebud and spiteful as a widow. He had been the one who ordered the prison directors to keep political prisoners chained up at all times and to deny them newspaper reading privileges, and as for newspapers in general, he ordered that they be confiscated at his whim—he really was spiteful as a widow, this guy. But he was gunned down on the doorstep of his home with a single bullet to the heart. That was it for prosecutor Dimchev!

On January second, nineteen twenty-five, about two weeks after Joakim Dimchev’s murder, they got Nikola Kuzinchev. He was Pane Bichev’s personal agent. His murder was identical to that of Dimchev: both men were taken down in the same way, and in both cases the murderer—or perhaps murderers—left a trilby hat next to the corpse. Utro was having a field day with the police. “Maybe next time the killer ought to leave a business card too, so that the Police Department can know for sure who the perpetrator was.”

On the eleventh of February, nineteen twenty-five, they killed Vulcho Ivanov. They strangled him and hung a note on him, “Go to court with prosecutor Dimchev!” and dumped his body right below journalist Joseph Herbst’s windows, knowing he’d write about it the very next day in his newspaper Ek Vecheren. And he did. “They took him,” he wrote, “and with no court or trial, strangled him and dumped his body out on the street—in the capital of a democratic Bulgaria, lead by the most enlightened government in the world.” Vulcho Ivanov was killed by Kocho Stoyanov’s men. They didn’t even know which side they were on, they just liked to kill—regardless of who—and couldn’t care less how they did it: rope, bludgeon or dagger. That year, however, they felt as though they were government executioners—they killed with righteousness, they did important work, for which they weren’t reprimanded, but paid off. Kocho Stoyanov, their captain, was the police commandant of Sofia. He was fifty-one years old when he killed himself on September ninth, nineteen forty-four, the day of Bulgaria’s communist coup d’état.

On February thirteenth, they killed Nikola Milev, who was from the village of Mokreni, on Dondoukov Boulevard. He was a history professor and chair of the Union of Sofia Journalists, and also director of the newspaper Slovo, a member of the alliance board of the Grand Mason Lodge of Bulgaria, and God knows what else: he would kill for status. He perpetually attacked Stamboliyski any which way he could, but it didn’t stop him from accompanying the latter to the conference in Lozana. He had a hand in drafting the Bulgarian Law for the Protection of the Nation, and was even being groomed as an ambassador to the United States. He took advantage of every single perk Bulgaria had to offer, yet persistently referred to the country as a foreign constituent. Many took credit for his murder, but officially it was attributed to Milan Manolev from Kukush, a statistics clerk. He in turn was killed on the fourteenth of April. When they killed Manolev, they also dumped the body where Nikola Milev was killed. Nikola Milev was from the Democratic Alliance, and Milan Manolev was an anarchist and a member of IMRO. The thirteenth of April that year was on a Friday. Friday the thirteenth.

On the seventeenth of February, at seven thirty in the evening, they killed Todor Strashimirov with a single shot to the back of the neck. His killer was never found. His brother, Anton Strashimirov, wrote an obituary that read, “They’ve murdered my brother, Todor! May God save us all!” A rumor began to circulate that the authorities ordered the dead man’s corpse be driven to the cemetery while it was still dark out—seven thirty in the morning—and that Todor Strashimirov was buried with only four or five people as witnesses. But it wasn’t a rumor; it was the sad truth.

On March sixth, while the amendments to the Law for the Protection of Bulgaria were being voted on, Haralampi Stoyanov walked out of the National Assembly. Haralampi Stoyanov had started off as a member of the Communist Parliamentary Group, then became one of the six who left the group almost immediately and formed his own, called the Independent Labor Parliament Group, and then abandoned that, too, and proclaimed himself a communist. But never mind all that. He stopped by the Army Club to buy some newspapers. They killed him with a single shot to the temple. The killer never did surface: the newspapers wrote that a Ipokrat Razvigorov from Štip had done it, but he never did confess to anything of the sort.

On the fourteenth of April, around eight o’clock in the evening, they killed the reserve general Konstantin Georgiev—also a member of parliament, but from the Democratic Alliance—in the garden in front of Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church. He was quite young for a general—not yet fifty-two. The two killers were from Petar Abadjiev’s Six. Their names were Atanas Todovichin and Jivko Dinov. Three shell casings from a Luger pistol were found next to the body.

[Petar Abadjiev lived a long life; he even became a colonel in the Red Army, after which he came back to Bulgaria and was appointed lieutenant commander in the Air Forces. In April of forty-six, during military exercises, his commander’s automobile crashed and his head was decapitated by the front windshield. They found the head eight meters away on the side of the road.]

The general’s wake was scheduled for three o’clock in the afternoon on the sixteenth of April, Holy Thursday, in the St. Nedelya Church.

[Sure enough! It was a time of casting stones and a time of gathering stones, a time to kill and a time to die.

A time of silence and a time to speak.

Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, arm for arm, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound. Stripe for stripe.

It was a time for war, but not a time for peace . . .

After that, there was lightning and voices, thunder and quakes, and a great hail.

That’s how it was.]

On April sixteenth, Holy Thursday, at precisely twenty-three minutes after three o’clock in the afternoon, fifty kilograms of melinite and pyroxylin erupted beneath St. Nedelya’s main dome. Five fuses were used to detonate the bomb. The tails of the fuses were dipped inside a tin filled with rubbing alcohol, so that when the rubbing alcohol was lit—the fuses would light up alongside it, burn together, and blow up the entire devil’s apparatus in synchronicity. That’s how it happened—it all blew up. And the man behind it all was Nikola Petrov. On that particular day, Nikola Petrov had not yet turned nineteen years old, but it was he who lit the match and ran out of the church, revealing the inferno in his wake. One hundred thirty-four people died instantly from the blast—twelve generals, fifteen colonels, seven lieutenant colonels, three majors, nine captains, three members of parliament and the head of the Office of the National Assembly, Krastev, mayor Paskal Paskalev, district governor Nedelchev, three masons, a whole lot of other people, one baby, and four Jews. Some died from asphyxiation due to the poisonous gas from the fuming sulfuric acid, which the attackers had placed right underneath the bomb. Those wounded inside the church and around it numbered over five hundred, and since some died later from their injuries, the total number of victims reached two hundred and thirteen.

But not a single priest!

And not a single minister!

The king did not step foot inside the temple that entire day. Some said that he and his retinue were attending the funeral of their chief huntsman Petar Kotev in Beli Iskar.

That’s the story of how God turned his back on Bulgaria, how the gates of hell opened once more, and how in the weeks following, this same hell claimed victims who would forever remain uncounted.

Tsar Boris said: thousands perished.

The Minister of War, General Ivan Valkov, said: twenty-five people, in total.

Amen!