List of massacres in North Macedonia

The following is a list of massacres that have occurred in North Macedonia and its predecessors:

Ottoman period

See also: Massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars
Name Date Location Deaths Perpetrator Victims Notes
Massacre of the Albanian Beys 9[1] or 26 August 1830 Bitola, Ottoman Empire 500[2] Ottoman forces Albanian beys Albanian beys massacred by Ottoman forces.
Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising 2 August – October 1903 Ottoman Empire (Throughout modern-day North Macedonia) Over 4,500 Ottoman forces Macedonian Bulgarians and Aromanians Macedonian Bulgarians and Aromanian civilians massacred by Ottoman forces.[3][4][5]
Takeover of Skopje 1912 Kumanovo and Skopje 3,000 Serbian forces Albanians [6]
Slaughter in Bitola 1913 Hospitals in Bitola Serbian forces Turkish patients When Serbian forces entered Bitola, they killed Turkish patients to make room for injured Serbs.[6]
Massacre at Ohrid 1913 Ohrid 650 Serbian forces Bulgarians, Turks, and Albanians Serbian forces killed 150 Bulgarians and 500 Albanians and Turks.[7]
Kokošinje murders 1904 Kokošinje 53 Bulgarian forces Serbs Bulgarian forces killed 53 Serbs [8][9][10]

World War I

See also: Massacres of Albanians in World War I
Name Date Location Deaths Perpetrator Victims Notes
Bitola massacre 1915 Kičevo and Kruševo 555 Bulgarian forces Albanians Bulgarian forces killed hundreds of Albanian civilians and burned hundreds of homes.[11]
Štip massacre 1915 Ljuboten, Štip region 118–120 VMRO Serbian soldiers [12][13]

Interwar period

Name Date Location Deaths Perpetrator Victims Notes
Massacre in Kadrifakovo 16 January 1923 Kadrifakovo 20–30[14] VMRO Serb colonists Serb colonists were killed by a VMRO detachment led by Ivan Barlyo.[15]
Massacre in Garvan 3 March 1923 Garvan, Radoviš[16] 28–29[17][18] or 53[19] Yugoslav troops Male villagers All male inhabitants of Garvan were killed on the orders of Dobrica Matković.[14]

World War II

See also: World War II in Yugoslavia
Name Date Location Deaths Perpetrator Victims Notes
Radolishta massacre 28 October 1944 Present-day Struga Municipality, North Macedonia 84 Wehrmacht Albanians Massacre of Albanians by the armed forces of Nazi Germany.[20]
Bloody Christmas (1945) January 1945 Throughout the Socialist Republic of Macedonia 1,200 Yugoslav Macedonian communists Bulgarians Macedonian Bulgarian children, women, and men found in mass graves.[21]

Modern period

See also: 2001 insurgency in Macedonia
Name Date Location Deaths Perpetrator Victims Notes
Vejce ambush 28 April 2001 Tetovo region, on the Šar Mountains, Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia) 8 NLA Macedonian soldiers Macedonian soldiers massacred by Albanian insurgents.
Karpalak massacre 8 August 2001 Motorway Skopje - Tetovo, near the village of Grupčin, Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia) 10 NLA Macedonian soldiers Macedonian army reservists killed by Albanian insurgents.[22]
Ljubotenski Bačila massacre 10 August 2001 Locality Ljubotenski Bačila on the Skopska Crna Gora mountains, between the villages of Ljuboten and Ljubanci, Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia) 8 NLA Macedonian soldiers Macedonian army reservists killed by Albanian insurgents.[23]
Luboten massacre[24] 12 August 2001 Ljuboten, Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia) 10 Macedonian police Albanian civilians Massacre of Albanian civilians two days after an ambush of Macedonian soldiers by the NLA.
Smilkovci lake killings 12 April 2012 Butel Municipality, Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia) 5 Albanians Macedonian civilians Five Macedonian men aged between 18 and 21 years old found killed near Skopje. Subsequent investigations found that they were killed by Albanians.[25]

See also

  1. ^ Basil C. Gounaris (2018). "Blood Brothers in Despair: Greek Brigands, Albanian Rebels and the Greek-Ottoman Frontier, 1829‑1831". Cahiers Balkaniques. doi:10.4000/ceb.11433.
  2. ^ Miranda Vickers (1999). The Albanians: A Modern History. I.B. Tauris. p. 24. ISBN 1-86064-541-0.
  3. ^ Brown, Keith (12 April 2013). Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia. pp. 4–5. ISBN 978-0253008473.
  4. ^ "However, contrary to the impression of researchers who believe that the Internal organization espoused a "Macedonian national consciousness," the local revolutionaries declared their conviction that the "majority" of the Christian population of Macedonia is "Bulgarian." They clearly rejected possible allegations of what they call "national separatism" vis-a-vis the Bulgarians, and even consider it "immoral." Though they declared an equal attitude towards all the "Macedonian populations." Tschavdar Marinov, We the Macedonians, The Paths of Macedonian Supra-Nationalism (1878–1912), in "We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe" with Mishkova Diana as ed., Central European University Press, 2009, ISBN 9639776289, pp. 107-137.
  5. ^ Autonomy for Macedonia and the vilayet of Adrianople (southern Thrace) became the key demand for a generation of Slavic activists. In October 1893, a group of them founded the Bulgarian Macedono-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Committee in Salonica...It engaged in creating a network of secretive committees and armed guerrillas in the two regions as well as in Bulgaria, where an ever-growing and politically influential Macedonian and Thracian diaspora resided. Heavily influenced by the ideas of early socialism and anarchism, the IMARO activists saw the future autonomous Macedonia as a multinational polity, and did not pursue the self-determination of Macedonian Slavs as a separate ethnicity. Therefore, Macedonian (and also Adrianopolitan) was an umbrella term covering Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, Vlachs (Aromanians), Albanians, Serbs, Jews, and so on. While this message was taken aboard by many Vlachs as well as some Patriarchist Slavs, it failed to impress other groups for whom the IMARO remained the Bulgarian Committee.' Historical Dictionary of Republic of Macedonia, Historical Dictionaries of Europe, Dimitar Bechev, Scarecrow Press, 2009, ISBN 0810862956, Introduction.
  6. ^ a b Leo Freundlich: Albania's Golgotha Archived 31 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ^ Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. p. 138.
  8. ^ Јанићије Поповић, Пламен, Приштина 1930, 25.
  9. ^ С. Симић, Српска револуционарна организација, комитско четовање у Старој Србији и Македонији 1903-1912, Београд 1998, 123-129.
  10. ^ Николов, Борис Й. Вътрешна македоно-одринска революционна организация. Войводи и ръководители (1893—1934). Биографично-библиографски справочник, София, 2001, pp. 158-159.
  11. ^ Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922. March 1, 1996. p.183
  12. ^ Report of the International Commission (1919). Album des crimes bulgares : annexes aux documents relatifs aux violations des conventions de la Haye et du droit international en général, commises de 1915-1918 par les bulgares en Serbie occupée. Paris: Yugoslavia.
  13. ^ Willmott, H. P. (2003). World War I. New York: Dorling Kindersley.
  14. ^ a b Marko Attila Hoare (2024). Serbia: A Modern History. Oxford University Press. p. 468. ISBN 9780197790441.
  15. ^ Ivo Banac (1984). The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Cornell University Press. p. 323. ISBN 9780801494932.
  16. ^ Hugh Poulton (2000). Who are the Macedonians?. Hurst. p. 93. ISBN 9781850655343.
  17. ^ Dimitar Bechev (2019). Historical Dictionary of North Macedonia (2nd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 179. ISBN 9781538119624.
  18. ^ Dmitar Tasić (2020). Paramilitarism in the Balkans: The Cases of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania, 1917-1924. Oxford University Press. p. 94. ISBN 9780198858324.
  19. ^ Yves Tomic (7 June 2010). "Massacres in Dismembered Yugoslavia, 1941-1945". SciencesPo.
  20. ^ Zekoli, Arsim (3 December 2020). "Три масакри и злосторството кое трае – DW – 3.12.2020". Deutsche Welle (in Macedonian). Retrieved 24 February 2024.
  21. ^ Bechev, Dimitar (2009) Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia. Scarecrow Press. p.287. ISBN 0810855658
  22. ^ "Ten Macedonian troops die in ambush". TheGuardian.com. 9 August 2001.
  23. ^ "North Macedonia Vows to Finally Build Memorials to Troops Killed in 2001". Balkan Insight. 3 October 2023.
  24. ^ "Today marks 24 years since the Ljuboten massacre". Telegrafi. 12 August 2025.
  25. ^ "Adnkronos". www1.adnkronos.com. Retrieved 2020-12-15.


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