Ivan Mihailov

Ivan Mihailov Gavrilov , sometimes Vancho Mihailov, was a Bulgarian revolutionary in Ottoman and interwar Macedonia, and leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization after 1924.

Ivan Mihailov was born on August 26, 1896, in the village of Novo Selo in the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. Mihailov studied at the Bulgarian Mens High School in Thessaloniki up until the Second Balkan War when the school was closed by the new Greek administration, he later continued his studies at a Serbian school in Skopje. He was offered a scholarship by the Serbian Ministry of Education to pursue a degree at a European university but declined, later enlisting in the Bulgarian army, which had by that time occupied a significant portion of the region. After the end of World War I, Mihailov emigrated to Bulgaria, settling in Sofia. Here he began studying law at the Sofia University, at which time he was contacted by IMRO activists and offered to work as a personal secretary for IMROs leader at that time, Todor Aleksandrov.

Source: Wikipedia