Macedonian Blood Wedding
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Macedonian Blood Wedding (original title: Македонска кървава свадба, transliterated as Makedonska Karvava Svadba) is a play by the Bulgarian publicist, Voydan Chernodrinski.[1][2] It was first published and shown in theaters in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1900. The drama was written in the Macedonian Debar dialect and in standard Bulgarian, making it one of the first books written mostly in a Macedonian dialect.
Macedonian Blood Wedding | |
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Written by | Voydan Popgeorgiev – Chernodrinski |
Characters | Cveta Spase Osman Bey Duko |
Date premiered | November 7, 1900 (1900-11-07) |
Place premiered | Sofia, Bulgaria |
Original language | Macedonian Debar dialect |
The play tells the story of a young woman Cveta who is kidnapped by the bey who rules the fictional village Stradalovo. It follows her resistance to be converted to Islam and to renounce her identity along with the parallel revolt of the locals against the Ottomans and their mistreatment of the local population. 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.
Today, in North Macedonia Macedonian Blood Wedding is considered one of the most important works in Macedonian literature. It has received numerous stage adaptations, and has been adapted in Bulgaria as an opera in 1924, in Yugoslavia as a movie in 1967, and in North Macedonia as a musical in 2012. The play is also considered part of the history of Bulgarian theater. While in the original drama the author referred to the play's characters and to himself as Bulgarians, his identity and the play's subjects' ethnicity are disputed today between Macedonian and Bulgarian scholars.[3]