On this day, June 16, 1943, a terrible massacre took place in Vatasha, when 12 young men from the village of Vatasha near Moklishte, in the Chair locality, 2 kilometers away from Vatasha, were shot. The massacre was carried out by Bulgarian army and police detachments led by Captain Boris Zheglov, Lieutenant Boris Kostov and Non-Commissioned Officer Petko Oprekov under the command of Colonel Ljuben Apostolov, commander of the 56th Veles Infantry Regiment of the Fifth Bulgarian Army.
In the spring of 1943, after several actions by partisan detachments of the Third Operational Zone, three regiments of the Bulgarian army and police detachments, under the command of Colonel Apostolov, from June 7 to June 16, 1943, undertook an offensive to destroy the partisans and also attacked the civilian population. The culmination of the pogroms against the civilian population was the mass shooting in Vatasha on 16 June 1943, when 12 young men were killed on the birthday of the Bulgarian Crown Prince Simeon II. On the evening of 15 June, news spread throughout Vatasha that no one should go to work the next day, because it was the Crown Prince’s birthday and a parade would be held in Kavadarci. When dawn broke on June 16, the village was blocked by the army and police. No one could leave, and those who were going to work were turned back.
The cruelty of the Bulgarian fascists is also evidenced by the fact that parents were not allowed to bury their children, so they quickly threw dirt and covered them with branches.
Today, a small monument stands at that place. After the war, a real burial was organized. When the victims’ families dug up their bones, they washed them in the river and buried them in small coffins in Moklishte. Then they were buried for the third time in 1963, where there is a large monument today.
