On 12 September 1942, near the village of Bolno in the Resen area, Bulgarian soldiers and police surrounded and killed Stefan Naumov - Stiv and Dimitar Bogoevski - Mite. Naumov was 21. Bogoevski was 22.

Eighty-four years later, flowers were laid at the monument on Shirok Sokak in Bitola by representatives of the municipality, the Council, the Veterans' Association, political parties, family and relatives, associations and citizens. The headteacher and pupils of the primary school that bears his name also paid their respects, and the school choir performed a song dedicated to the hero.

Two young men, not two monuments

The story is usually told as a story about a death. But both of them had a life before that, and that life is more concrete than any anniversary.

Stefan Naumov was born on 27 October 1920 in Bitola, into a family of migrant labourers. After the Bitola gymnasium, in 1938 he enrolled at the Technical Faculty in Belgrade, where he joined the workers' movement. In 1939 he became a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and on returning to Bitola in September 1940 he was elected secretary of the Local Committee. He was arrested several times for his political activity.

After the occupation in 1941 he joined the organising of the resistance. In April 1942 he took part in forming the Bitola partisan detachment "Pelister", and the same year became a member of the Operational Staff of the General Staff of the partisan detachments in Macedonia. So from student to member of the operational staff in under four years - and he became secretary of the Local Committee at nineteen, a month before his twentieth birthday.

Dimitar Bogoevski was born on 31 October 1919 in the village of Bolno itself, where he would later be killed. Primary school in his home village, lower secondary in Resen, the Commercial Academy in Bitola from 1935 to 1937. While still a pupil he wrote poetry - "The Lonely Traveller", "By the River", "Little Horse", "Unlucky Ilija", "Two Sparrows". By 1938 he had written around fifty poems, among them "On the Eve of Ilinden", which remains one of his best known.

Fifty poems before nineteen

That is the figure that says the most. A man who by the age of nineteen had written fifty poems, and at twenty-two was killed in his own village.

Naumov's house in Bitola is today a memorial site presenting his life, his family and his revolutionary activity. The Municipality of Bitola describes him as a figure who grew into a legend while the war was still on.

Anniversaries turn into ritual easily enough - flowers, a choir, a speech, the end. What makes them different is when somebody remembers that these are two specific biographies that ended before they began. Twenty-one and twenty-two. The age at which people finish university today.