Revolutionary Rusha Chopova

Maria Nikolova Chopova, known as Rusha, was born in 1868 in Kukush, Ottoman Empire, now Kilkis, Greece, into the family of Nikola and Sultana Delchev. She was the elder sister of Gotse Delchev, the well-known leader of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organisation (IMARO). In 1895, after her brother founded IMARO's Kukush Committee, Rusha joined the organisation and carried out various important assignments, while her home became a centre for the organisation's underground activists.

Rusha Chopova became an adviser to IMARO's Kukush governing body and a courier. After the Young Turk Revolution in 1909, she helped depose Sultan Abdul Hamid II. During the First Balkan War she volunteered for the Macedonian-Adrianople Volunteer Corps alongside her sons and brother. After the war she worked as a medical orderly.

Rusha's family settled in Sofia after the Second Balkan War; she had seven children. She supported her son Tushe's communist activity and offered her home as a refuge for underground Bulgarian Communist Party activists. Rusha Chopova died in Sofia on 9 June 1945.