Mirka Ginova

Mirka Ginova , also known as Irini/Eirini Gini (; 1916 – 26 July 1946), was a Slavic Macedonian communist partisan and teacher during World War II and Greek Civil War. She was the first woman to receive capital punishment in Greece.

Biography

Ginova was born in a pro-Bulgarian family in the village of Rusilovo (now Xanthogeia), near Vodena (now Edessa), Greece, in 1916. In the 1930s, she attended the Kastoria Nursery School Teachers' Academy. Ginova joined the Young Communist League of Greece in 1943. She was also a member of the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS). The right-wing village council had her removed for "unseemly conduct" and alleged complicity in a murder of two brothers, and she fled to avoid arrest. After the Greek Civil War broke out in 1946, she joined a guerrilla group of NOF. She was the first woman in Greece to be executed. Her memory has been honored in North Macedonia and among the Greek leftists. A bust of her is in Bitola.