Macedonian Blood Wedding

Macedonian Blood Wedding (original title: Македонска кървава свадба, transliterated as Makedonska Karvava Svadba) is a play by the Bulgarian publicist, Voydan Chernodrinski.Chernodrinski was inspired to write the play after he read a real-life story of a girl from Valandovo who was kidnapped from the fields by an Ottoman agha.A turnover point arises with the kidnapping of Cveta by Osman bey one day while she works in the field with her family members during the harvest season.[4] In the meantime, Cveta's brother Duko and the young shepherd Spase, her love interest are strongly objecting to the forceful kidnapping in front of his harem.The author found inspiration to write the play in the real-life case of a girl named Bozhija Manadzhieva from Valandovo about which he read in the newspaper Reformi.[5] In order to avoid additional exasperation of its relations with its neighbour - the Ottoman Empire, the government banned the premiere of the openly anti-Turkish play.[8] Chernodrinski reworked it later to give the plot and the libretto for a new opera called Tsveta that was written by the Bulgarian composer Georgi Atanasov.[9] On 23 November 1924, the opera of Maestro Atanasov was presented for the first time in Sofia, as well as aх exhibition with paintings based on the play by the eponymous drama by V. Chernodrinski.In the foreword to the edition, he comments on the historical changes, not forgetting to mention the relevance of the material:[11]"Although the regime of Old Turkey in Macedonia was replaced by two new Christian ones - the Serbian and the Greek - the sufferings of the Macedonian Bulgarians not only did not stop but on the contrary, became more unbearable.[13] In 1928, a People's Home was open in Toronto by the Macedono-Bulgarian Orthodox Church "St. Cyril and Methodius", where "Macedonian Bloody Wedding" was played for the first time in Canada.[30] All other texts besides conversations between the characters, such as the preface and the instructions to the actors which were written originally using the Bulgarian language, were subsequently translated to Macedonian.[32] According to Chernodrinski's nephew, Arseni Yovkov, an IMRO revolutionary and publicist, the drama played a decisive role to prove to the local public in Yugoslavia, that Macedonian dialects are not part of the Serbian language, as it was claimed there.[30] On 16 December 2012, a musical adaptation of the play premiered at the Dramski Theater in Skopje, directed by Croatian director and choreograph Staša Zurovac.