the commune and the balkans: a love letter to forgotten revolutions 2026
we just finished yavor tarinski’s the commune and the balkans (theanarchistlibrary.org) while dominus chewed on a squeaky bat and the coffee went cold.
here’s the anarchist hot take, straight from two married gremlins who believe the balkans never stopped dreaming of freedom.
the big picture
the balkans didn’t just fight the ottoman empire for “independence.”
they fought for communes.
self-managed villages, worker councils, armed assemblies—real, breathing anarchism before the word “anarchism” even reached them.
the receipts
– 1876 april uprising: peasants in places like koprivshtitsa declared a commune, abolished taxes, and ran the town by assembly for ten days before the ottomans drowned it in blood
– hristo botev (poet-revolutionary) openly defended the paris commune and called for “social revolution,” not just national flags
– the strandzha commune (1903): 40,000 people in eastern thrace declared a libertarian republic for three weeks—direct democracy, no landlords, no priests
– makhnovist influence reached bulgarian partisans in the 1920s—black flags in the mountains, mutual aid instead of red bureaucracy
why this matters to anarchists today
every time someone says “anarchism is a western import,” point to the balkans.
these were peasants who never read kropotkin yet built exactly what he described.
they didn’t need theory—they had lived experience of ottoman feudalism and said “fuck this” in the most beautiful way possible.
the tragedy
every commune was crushed—by ottomans, by monarchs, by “socialist” states, by nationalists.
but the memory survived in songs, in poems, in the stubborn refusal to bow.
the hope
tarinski ends with: “once again political projects of equality and justice can flourish around the region.”
we say: they never stopped.
every squat in sofia, every free festival in the rhodopes, every time someone grows tomatoes on a balcony instead of paying rent—they’re continuing the strandzha commune, the koprivshtitsa commune, the dream.
read the full piece here (free):
then go outside.
find your neighbors.
plant a garden.
share a meal.
refuse to ask permission to exist.
the balkans taught us:
the commune is not a historical curiosity.
it’s a seed that keeps sprouting, no matter how many times they burn the field.
— rebelzva & cptxbonnot 🖤🏴🇧🇬
RebelZva - Anarchy Guru 
Leave a comment