Novo Selo is a large village in the southeastern part of the Republic of Macedonia

Republic of Macedonia

Macedonia , officially the Republic of Macedonia , is a country located in the central Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991...

. It is the administrative centre of the eponymous municipality

Novo Selo municipality

Novo Selo is a municipality in eastern Republic of Macedonia. Novo Selo is also the name of the village where the municipal seat is found. Novo Selo means "New Village" in Macedonian. Novo Selo Municipality is part of the Southeastern statistical region.-Demographics:According to the last...

. Located in the valley of the Strumica River

Strumica River

The Strumica or Strumeshnitsa is a river in the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria...

 9 km from the Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

n border, it has a population of 2,756 . Novo Selo lies, 238 m above sea level.

Bulgarian military cemetery

The Bulgarian military cemetery near Novo Selo is the final resting place of 71 Bulgarian military men of the 2nd Infantry Thracian

Thrace

Thrace is a historical and geographic area in southeast Europe. As a geographical concept, Thrace designates a region bounded by the Balkan Mountains on the north, Rhodope Mountains and the Aegean Sea on the south, and by the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara on the east...

 Division and the 11th Infantry Macedonian

Macedonia (region)

Macedonia is a geographical and historical region of the Balkan peninsula in southeastern Europe. Its boundaries have changed considerably over time, but nowadays the region is considered to include parts of five Balkan countries: Greece, the Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, as...

 Division who perished during the First

First Balkan War

The First Balkan War, which lasted from October 1912 to May 1913, pitted the Balkan League against the Ottoman Empire. The combined armies of the Balkan states overcame the numerically inferior and strategically disadvantaged Ottoman armies and achieved rapid success...

 and Second Balkan War

Second Balkan War

The Second Balkan War was a conflict which broke out when Bulgaria, dissatisfied with its share of the spoils of the First Balkan War, attacked its former allies, Serbia and Greece, on 29 June 1913. Bulgaria had a prewar agreement about the division of region of Macedonia...

 and the First World War. While most of the soldiers were from various parts of modern Bulgaria, among the buried are also 15 people from Vardar Macedonia

Vardar Macedonia

Vardar Macedonia is an area in the north of the Macedonia . The borders of the area are those of the Republic of Macedonia. It covers an area of...

  (two of them from Novo Selo), three people from Aegean (Greek) Macedonia

Macedonia (Greece)

Macedonia is a geographical and historical region of Greece in Southern Europe. Macedonia is the largest and second most populous Greek region...

, two from the Western Outlands in modern Serbia

Serbia

Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...

 and one each from Eastern Thrace in modern Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

, from Kosovo

Kosovo

Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...

 and from Dobruja

Dobruja

Dobruja is a historical region shared by Bulgaria and Romania, located between the lower Danube river and the Black Sea, including the Danube Delta, Romanian coast and the northernmost part of the Bulgarian coast...

. One Serbian prisoner of war

Prisoner of war

A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...

 and later two Serbian gendarmes were also interred at the cemetery, which was used as an argument in 1966 by the local mayor to save the cemetery from planned destruction (as happened to most Bulgarian cemeteries in the Macedonian SR of Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....

) by proclaiming it a Serbian one.

Surrounded by a stone fence, the cemetery has identical crosses of valour over the graves, with the name of the interred, his rank, date of birth and death and native place also inscribed. A common memorial was erected in the central part, featuring a carved cross of valour and the inscription „Българио, за тебе тѣ умрѣха“ ("O Bulgaria, for you they died", from national writer Ivan Vazov

Ivan Vazov

Ivan Minchov Vazov was a Bulgarian poet, novelist and playwright, often referred to as "the Patriarch of Bulgarian literature". He was born in Sopot, a town in the Rose Valley of Bulgaria ....

's The New Graveyard Above Slivnitsa 1885 poem).

During the past years the initial cement crosses were shattered or damaged due to the weathering of the cement, while the central memorial was torn down by treasure hunters. However, in 2004 local citizens notified Bulgarian National Historical Museum

National Historical Museum (Bulgaria)

The National Historical Museum in Sofia is Bulgaria's largest museum. It was founded on 5 May 1973 and its first representative exposition was opened in 1984 to commemorate 1300 years of Bulgarian history...

 director Bozhidar Dimitrov

Bozhidar Dimitrov

Bozhidar Dimitrov Stoyanov is a well-known Bulgarian historian working in the sphere of Medieval Bulgarian history, the Ottoman rule of Bulgaria and the Macedonian Question...

 about the cemetery and its bad condition, who in his turn informed President of Bulgaria Georgi Parvanov

Georgi Parvanov

Georgi Sedefchov Parvanov is a President of Bulgaria, whose second and last mandate expires on January 22, 2012; he was elected after defeating his predecessor Petar Stoyanov in the second round of the presidential elections in November 2001 and he came into office on January 22, 2002...

. With the president's call to reconstruct the cemetery and with his political support, Bulgarian ambassador to the Republic of Macedonia Miho Mihov helped to observe all respective formalities to obtain a permission from the Macedonian authorities. Meanwhile, the Pliska

Pliska

Pliska is the name of both the first capital of Danubian Bulgaria and a small town which was renamed after the historical Pliska after its site was determined and excavations began....

 Association produced exact marble copies of the original crosses. An official permission was received on 19 October 2006 and the reconstruction began, supported by locals and the Novo Selo municipal administration.

On 4 November 2006, an Eastern Orthodox holiday of Archangel Michael, the renovated cemetery was officially inaugurated with a military and a religious ceremony paying tribute to the perished Bulgarian soldiers. The ceremony was attended by Georgi Parvanov, a number of officials and citizens of Bulgaria and the Republic of Macedonia.

The Novo Selo cemetery is the second reconstructed Bulgarian military cemetery in the Republic of Macedonia after the one in the village of Capari

Capari

Capari is a village in Macedonia. It was formerly a municipality center, but is now within the Bitola municipality.-External links:**...

.