GIRL LEADS VENDETTA

RS Fendrick   Paris, 1928

A girl 29 years old is now one of the three chiefs of the greatest vendetta in the world. Mentcha Karnitcheva, the famous "Avenging Angel" has just been elected a member of the Troika, or Supreme Council of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which has 100.000 desperate comitadjis at its command.

It is an extraordinary tribute that these fanatically patriotic Balkan mountaineers have paid to a young woman, but she has a big nick on her gun as a proof of her desperate courage.

When Todor Alexandroff, the Supreme Chief of "the Organization", was assassinated by Macedonian traitors in the pay of Moscow on August 31, 1924, young Ivan Mihailoff who succeeded him, immediately summoned the high tribunal which convened at a secret spot in the mountains of Southwestern Bulgaria and pronounced a death sentence against forty renegades implicated in the assassination. A man condemned to death by "the Organization" is absolutely doomed, for it pursues its traitors to the end of the earth regardless of time, expense or other considerations.

Mihailoff then only 23 years old, picked out avengers from the thousands of volunteers who came forward, provided them with funds and letters of introduction to the Macedonian "ambassadors" in the various capitals, and sent them out on their mission.

He chose Miss Karnitcheva, his own sweetheart, to run down Todor Panitza, one of the principal leaders of the plot. She trailed him across the Balkans to Vienna, but he remained so closely in hiding that she shadowed him for weeks before she had an opportunity to carry out the vengeance. Finally, Panitza went to a performance of "Peer Gynt" at the Burg Theatre in Vienna on the night of May 7, 1925, and during the play she slipped into the balcony, flung open the door of his box and put six bullets through his heart without blinking an eye.

The Austrian courts condemned her to a long term of imprisonment but freed and expelled her from the country a few months later on the pretext that she could not endure the prison life on account of her weak lungs. In reality the Austrian authorities had much sympathy for the girl and none for the man she killed.

Acclaimed as a noble heroine when she returned to Macedonian headquarters in Southwestern Bulgaria, she married Mihailoff and was given a high place in the councils of "the organization". She has now been elected a member of the Troika, or supreme council of three, of which her husband is a sort of chairman, and not a single comitadji goes raiding until she says the word. What a desperate body of men this frail young woman now helps to command!

Organized as a secret revolutionary committee by three militant Macedo-Bulgarian school teachers at Shtip in 1893 to free their homeland from Turkish rule, the comitadjis have been carrying on their merciless guerrilla warfare almost continuously for thirty-five years, and they are fighting the Serbs just as bitterly today as they used to fight the Turks.