On the late afternoon of September 3, 1901 enroute from the village of Bansko, Macedonia (now Bulgaria) to the town of Gorna Dzhumaia (now Blagoevgrad), an American missionary woman, Ellen Maria Stone, of Chelsea, Massachusetts, was taken hostage with a Macedonian companion, Mrs. Katarina Stefanova Tsilka. The women's captors, a band of twenty armed men were affiliated with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and led by Yane Sandansky and Hristo Chernopeev. 

The capture of Miss Stone was no accident. The plan for the detention and ransom of a high-profile American connected with the missionaries had been under consideration for some time. The immediate demand for 25,000 Turkish lira (about $110,000) to release Miss Stone had been calculated so as to support an erupting revolutionary situation between the Turkish authorities and their subjects in Macedonia. The Ilinden Uprising of 1903 was the manifestation of these troubled times. 

The drama of the Stone-Tsilka Affair was heightened when the world learned that Miss Stone's companion was pregnant (a fact unknown to the women's abductors at the time of the capture). The fate of the women captured the attention and imagination of most of the Western world and the incident received extensive press coverage. In the intervening century, chapters of Macedonian and Balkan histories have been devoted to it, a 1958 Yugoslav motion picture was inspired by it, a scholarly thesis was drawn from it, and in 2003, Simon and Shuster published a well- researched account of it (The Miss Stone Affair) by the Pulitzer-prize winning author, Teresa Carpenter.  A paperback edition of Ms. Carpenter's work was issued in 2004.

These pages offer a glimpse into contemporary accounts of the incident and, in particular, highlight subsequent events in the lives of Katarina Stefanova Tsilka (great grandaunt of the author of this website) and her family.