“The opening of a North Macedonia culture club in Bulgaria’s Blagoevgrad on 30 October should not breed tension,” said the town’s municipal council chairman Radoslav Taskov, adding that he hoped the authorities in North Macedonia would not allow the club to build up tensions in the country’s relations with Bulgaria.  

The club is financed by the Macedonian Human Rights Movement International in Canada, registered in 2019 by the Association for the Protection of Basic Individual Human Rights. Judicial proceedings are ongoing against the registration, BNR’s Radio Blagoevgrad reports.

Maya and Nikola Vaptsarov, nephews of poet Nikola Vaptsarov, whom the club has been named after, have been invited to its opening. They said, for the BNR, that Nikola Vaptsarov has never identified as Macedonian, and that he has nothing to do with what is today North Macedonia.