Boris Trajkovski

Boris Trajkovski

Sir Boris Trajkovski GCMG (Macedonian: Борис Трајковски ; 25 June 1956 – 26 February 2004) was the president of the Republic of Macedonia from 1999 to 2004.

Trajkovski was born into a Methodist family. His father, Kiro, who died in September 2008, was a landworker who had served in the Bulgarian army and had been imprisoned for two years for feeding POWs. Trajkovski graduated in 1980 with a degree in law from the St. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. He subsequently specialized in commercial and employment law and made several visits to the United States, where he studied theology to become a Methodist lay minister.

After he finished his studies, the Communist government confined him for a time to a remote village owing to his religious activities. There he took care of an impoverished Roma parish of the United Methodist Church. Following political liberalisation in the 1980s, he went on to head the legal department of the Sloboda construction company in Skopje. He served as secretary of youth work in the Methodist Church in the former Yugoslavia for over 12 years. Later he was President of the Church Council of the Macedonian United Methodist Church. In 1988 he took part in a Youth Exchange programme between the United Methodist Church of Macedonia and the Berkhamsted and Hemel Hempstead Methodist Circuit in England. In 1991 he studied English at a Christian Language College in Bournemouth, England.