Damyanov, Gancho Lazarov (1910–2004)

Gancho Lazarov Damyanov was born on September 15th, 1910, in the village of Kovachevets in Bulgaria, near the town of Popovo.

He became an anarchist in autumn 1927, when he entered the 7th grade of the Svishtov State Commercial High School and read Kropotkin's autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary.".From that moment on, he joined the anarchist communist movement and joined a trade union as well as the temperance and cooperative movements. He was later to remark that “even before I knew that I was an anarchist communist, I worked as one since 1925, publishing leaflets about Hristo Botev in Popovo. In January 1928 he started to learn Esperanto and in summer of that year became a member of SAT (The World Workers Esperanto Organisation). Much later, in 1990, he became SAT representative in Bulgaria and over the course of time initiated 50 people into Esperanto. He became a vegetarian in 1929, and his wife and children followed him in this.He has trained and recruited over 50 people from the Esperanto country. Since 1929, he has been a vegetarian, followed by his wife and children.

In autumn 1928 he was arrested for his beliefs and activities for the first time. Over the course of his life he spent many years in prisons and labour camps, including those of the Communist regime. His anarchist communist comrade Alexander Nakov was to write, ““In the concentration camps there was also someone to speak Esperanto with, for example with Gancho Lazarov Damyanov, whenever we had the opportunity, we did not miss a chat in our favourite language.”

After the collapse of the Stalinist regime in 1989, anarchists in south west Bulgaria began to re-establish contact with each other. They began to work towards the organisation of a national conference and the restoration of the Federation.

Gancho was extremely active in this and organised comrades in the entire region. The projected national congress took place in Kazanlak on May 19-20th, 1990 and Gancho was its main organiser and host. “Both old comrades and very young ones had come to the conference. The meeting was very cordial. There was a little tacit agreement between old and young about the name of the Federation. The old ones wanted to restore FAKB (Federation of Anarchist Communists in Bulgaria), while the young ones insisted that those who called themselves communists had defiled this name and it would be more useful to call it just FAB (Federation of Anarchists in Bulgaria)."

Gancho was a member of the federal secretariat of the FAB and was an active contributor to its paper Svobodna Misl.

He died in Kazanlak on April 8th, 2004.

Nick Heath

Sources: https://www.anarchy.bg/история/анархокалендар/на-08-04-2004-г-в-гр-казанлък-умира-анархистът-и/