The Congress of the IPO will be held in the state of Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer has declared March 3, 2024 as Bulgaria's Liberation Day.
Today in Michigan begins the 103rd Congress of the Macedonian Patriotic Organization in the USA and Canada - IPO. MPO is the oldest active emigrant organization in the world, founded by Macedonian Bulgarians in 1922. in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a BGNES reporter reported.
The organization was created by order of Todor Alexandrov, whose 100th anniversary of death (August 31, 1924) will be honored within the Congress with a special discussion.
The anthem of the IPO is the Bulgarian military march "Rise the Dawn of Freedom", also known as the "March of the Macedonian Revolutionaries". The first meeting of the Anti-Fascist Assembly for the People's Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM), held on August 2, 1944 in the monastery "St. Prokhor Pczynski", opens with the singing of "The Dawn of Freedom". The song became the unofficial anthem of the newly formed People's Republic of Macedonia, where it was performed until 1948, when it was banned by the communist authorities as pro-Bulgarian.
After the death of Todor Alexandrov in 1924, the leader of VMRO and MPO became Ivan Mihailov, who until his death in 1990 was the main ideologist of the organization. MPO publishes the books Memories of Ivan Mihailov, in which he describes, in addition to his personal life, the atrocities to which the Macedonian Bulgarians were subjected in Yugoslavia and Greece. For most of the last century, the IPO has long been the only organization that defended the rights of Bulgarians from the three parts of Macedonia before the international community and fought against attempts to forcibly assimilate and debulgarize them.
One of the greatest achievements of the IPO is the Macedonian Tribune newspaper, which has been published from 1927 to the present day. One of the challenges facing the IPO is the recent digitization of the newspaper, as well as the organization's archive, which is a rich source of historical information about the work and achievements of the Macedonian Bulgarians in America. The digitization of the archive would make it possible to conduct historical research on the IPO, as well as to restore the link between the Macedonian Bulgarians who emigrated to Bulgaria and those in the New World, which had been broken during the communist period.
Currently, MPO has nine clubs in the USA, the last one was restored last year in the city of Indianapolis with the name "Damyan Gruev".
The Congress of the IPO will be held in the state of Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer has declared March 3, 2024 as Bulgaria's Liberation Day. In her proclamation, she noted that Macedonian Bulgarians built the largest Bulgarian Orthodox church in the state - "St. Kliment Ohridski", near Detroit in 1929. In September 2023. Governor Wimmer rescinded her Macedonian Heritage Month proclamation after it was found that importers from the nationalist organization United Macedonian Diaspora had included in it falsifications distorting the historical heritage of Macedonian Bulgarians in the United States. This decision of the governor caused anti-Bulgarian hysteria in North Macedonia, which, as expected, did not lead to anything.
In 2023, a BGNES team sent a team to the Congress of the IPO, which created the film "IPO - 100 years of struggle for an independent Macedonia". I BGNES
