Metodija Andonov-Čento

Metodija Andonov-Čento Методија Андонов Ченто
Monument of Metodija Andonov-Čento on Macedonia Square in Skopje
Born	(1902-08-17)August 17, 1902 Pirlepe (Prilep), Manastir Vilayet, Ottoman Empire
Died	July 24, 1957(1957-07-24) (aged 54) Prilep, SFR Yugoslavia (now the Republic of Macedonia)
Organization	Yugoslav Partisans (People's Liberation Army of Macedonia)

Metodija Andonov-Čento (Macedonian: Методија Андонов Ченто) (August 17, 1902 – July 24, 1957) was a Macedonian statesman, the first president of the Anti-Fascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia and of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the Second World War.

Metodi Andonov was born in Prilep, which was then part of the Manastir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. Today it is called Prilep and is in the Republic of Macedonia. He was the first healthy child of Andon Mitskov and Zoka Koneva, as his older siblings bore diseases. His father was from Pletvar, while his mother was from Lenište. As a child, he worked in opium poppy fields and harvested tobacco. During his adolescence, he was considered to be an excellent gymnast. On March 25, 1930, he married Vasilka Spirova Pop Atanasova in Novi Sad and fathered four children, including Ilija Andonov-Čento, a politician in today's Republic of Macedonia.

At the 1938 Yugoslav elections, he was elected deputy but not a Member of Parliament because of a manipulation with the electoral system. In 1939, he was imprisoned at Velika Kikinda for co-organizing the 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 April 15, 1941, he was presented to a firing squad, but was released just prior to being shot.