Metodija Andonov-Čento (Методија Андонов-Ченто; Методи Андонов-Ченто; 17 August 1902 – 24 July 1957) was a Macedonian statesman, the first president of the Anti-Fascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia and of the People's Republic of Macedonia in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia after the Second World War. In the Bulgarian historiography he is often considered a Bulgarian.
Metodi Andonov was born in Prilep, which was then part of the Manastir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. His father was from Pletvar, while his mother was from Lenište. After the Balkan Wars in 1913 the area was ceded to Serbia. During the World War I Bulgarian occupation the authorities consisted of local activists and thus were popular enough there. After the war the area was ceded to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). As a child, he worked in opium poppy fields and harvested tobacco. During his adolescence, he was considered to be an excellent gymnast. He graduated from trade school in Prilep and in 1926 he opened a grocery store and provided himself with a decent living. On March 25, 1930, in Novi Sad, he entered into a civil marriage with Vasilka Spirova Pop-Atanasova. In the interwar period the young local intelligentsia attempted at a separate Macedonian way of national development, as a reaction of the controversial domestic policy of serbianization. Čento underwent such a transformation from pro-Bulgarian to an ethnic Macedonian.
In 1926 he opened a shop and was engaged in retail trade and politics. On 25 March 1930 he married Vasilka Spirova Pop Atanasova in Novi Sad and fathered four children. At that time Čento headed a group of young Macedonian nationalists, who took up decidedly an anti-Serbian position. In fact the politicians in Belgrade actually helped to strengthen the developing Macedonian identity by promoting forcible Serbianization. He was a sympathizer of Vladko Macek's idea on the creation of a separate Banovina of Croatia and after its realization in 1939 proclaimed the thesis on the foundation of a separate Banovina of Macedonia.
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