Metodija Andonov-Čento (; ; 17 August 1902 – 24 July 1957) was a Macedonian statesman, the first president of the Anti-Fascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia and of the People's Republic of Macedonia in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia after the Second World War. In the Bulgarian historiography he is often considered a Bulgarian.
Biography
Early life
Metodi Andonov was born in Prilep, which was then part of the Manastir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. His father was from Pletvar, while his mother was from Lenište. After the Balkan Wars in 1913 the area was ceded to Serbia. During the World War I Bulgarian occupation the authorities consisted of local activists and thus were popular enough there. After the war the area was ceded to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). As a child, he worked in opium poppy fields and harvested tobacco. During his adolescence, he was considered to be an excellent gymnast. He graduated from trade school in Prilep and in 1926 he opened a grocery store and provided himself with a decent living. On March 25, 1930, in Novi Sad, he entered into a civil marriage with Vasilka Spirova Pop-Atanasova. In the interwar period the young local intelligentsia attempted at a separate Macedonian way of national development, as a reaction of the controversial domestic policy of serbianization. Čento underwent such a transformation from pro-Bulgarian to an ethnic Macedonian.
In 1926 he opened a shop and was engaged in retail trade and politics. On 25 March 1930 he married Vasilka Spirova Pop Atanasova in Novi Sad and fathered four children. At that time Čento headed a group of young Macedonian nationalists, who took up decidedly an anti-Serbian position. In fact the politicians in Belgrade actually helped to strengthen the developing Macedonian identity by promoting forcible Serbianization. He was a sympathizer of Vladko Macek's idea on the creation of a separate Banovina of Croatia and after its realization in 1939 proclaimed the thesis on the foundation of a separate Banovina of Macedonia. At the 1938 Yugoslav elections, he was elected deputy from the Croatian Peasant Party, but didn't become a Member of Parliament because of a manipulation with the electoral system. In 1939, he was imprisoned at Velika Kikinda for co-organizing the anti-Serbian Ilinden Demonstrations in Prilep. The following year, he imposed the use of the Macedonian language in school lectures and was therefore imprisoned at Bajina Bašta and sentenced to death by the government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for advocating the use of a language other than Serbo-Croatian. On 15 April 1941 he was presented to a firing squad, but was pardoned just prior to being shot, due to the public pressure on the background of the Blitzkrieg conducted by the Axis Powers during their invasion of Yugoslavia.
During World War II
After the capitulation of Yugoslavia, Čento was set free from prison and came in contact with the right-wing Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) activists and pro-Bulgarian political forces. The Macedonian communists also fell in the sphere of influence of the Bulgarian Communist Party under Metodi Shatorov's leadership, with whom Čento was also in close contact. Although he received at that time an invitation to collaborate with the new Bulgarian authorities Čento refused, considering that idea unpromising and insisting on independence. In 1942 Čento began to sympathize with the resistance and his store was used as a front for the Macedonian Partisans, which prompted Bulgarian authorities to arrest him. By the end of 1942 he was interned in the inland of the country and later sent to a labor camp.