At the end of this month, Bulgaria once again commemorates the 1876 April Uprising, which in spite of proving a false start to the overthrow of Ottoman Rule, was a turning point towards the war that would bring liberation.

Cannons made of cherry tree wood and the chill spectacle of a cluster of skulls and bones in a church may be the most prominent symbols of Bulgaria's 1876 April Uprising.

While the uprising itself failed because of poor co-ordination by the rebels and a relentless and ruthless backlash by the Ottoman authorities, then in their fifth century of rule over Bulgaria, the very brutality of the suppression of the revolt got international attention and was a contributing factor to the Russo-Turkish War in 1877/78 that opened the way for Bulgaria's liberation.

Even though it was a military failure, the uprising has a particular place in modern Bulgarian consciousness.

Professor Georgi Bakalov, in an interview with Bulgarian National Radio in 2006 just before the 130th anniversary commemoration, said: "It is generally accepted that the April Uprising marked the culmination in the armed struggle of the Bulgarians for liberation from Ottoman domination... The Bulgarian people staged the uprising without resorting to help from foreign revolutionaries."

Vassil Levski had a major role in the groundwork for the uprising in setting up revolutionary committees that would later attempt to drive the foreign rulers from Bulgaria.
Bakalov said that those who planned the uprising wanted to attract the attention of the Great Powers of the time to the plight of the Bulgarian people.

In an interview at the time of the 130th anniversary, professor Georgi Markov, director of the Institute of History at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, said that in general, "Bulgarians lack self-esteem, but events like the April Uprising give us a sound reason to be proud of our history".

He agreed with the view that there would have been no Russo-Turkish war had there been no April Uprising.

Culture Minister Stefan Danailov, reflecting on the significance of the uprising, said that the objective was to restore Bulgarian statehood. "We should not forget Vassil Levski's legacy that Bulgarians should become equal with other European nations," Danailov said.

The overture
The most active preparation for the uprising took place in the Plovdiv region where Georgi Benkovski emerged as its leader.

Following a resolution of the Giurgiu Committee (named for the town in Romania where it was formed), the leaders of the Plovdiv region met on April 14 1876 near Oborishte to plan the uprising, including a decision on the date it should start. In a tragic turning point for the hopes of the rebels, an informer passed on details of the meeting to the Ottoman authorities.

Police arrived in Koprivshtitsa on April 20 (old style; May 2 in the modern calendar) to arrest the local revolutionary committee. Committee leader Todor Kableshkov responded with an attack on the local Ottoman government office, scoring an early if minor success in killing some of the Ottoman police and forcing the rest to flee.
The group sent out what was to become known as the "Bloody Letter", so called because, according to varying accounts, it was either written in, or sealed with, the blood of one of the slain Ottoman gendarmes. The rebels called on others to join them.

When the letter reached Benkovski, who was in Panagyurishte, he formed what was to be known as the Flying Detachment and rushed to the villages of the Sredna Gora.
The rebellion spread to the Maritsa River valley and part of the Rhodopes, but the Ottomans responded with troops and a large number of bashibazouk, in essence mercenary irregulars.

The Ottomans took Klisoura, moved on to Tossun Bei, razing it on April 26 and four days later, burning Panagyurishte. Koprivshtitsa escaped a similar fate when its town elders paid off the Ottomans to spare it.

Bratsigovo, under siege some days later, was spared when the town's leaders agreed to hand over rebel leader Vassil Petleshkov to the Ottomans.

The most notorious episode of the uprising followed on May 2 when Ottoman regular troops commanded by Ahmed Aga Barutanliyata entered Batak, massacring more than 3000 residents, women and children included, over three days. Similar ruthlessness followed when in Perushtitsa, Ottoman troops let loose artillery fire on a church in which rebels and residents had taken shelter.

In today's Veliko Turnovo region, the rebels took a stand at the Dryanovo Monastery, holding out for nine days until the Ottomans laid waste to most of the monastery with artillery fire.

Elsewhere, notably in Sliven, a contributing factor to the failure of the uprising was that the local populace did not join in in any significant numbers.

In a straightforward military defeat, the detachment led into Bulgaria across the Danube by exile poet and revolutionary Hristo Botev was defeated, with Botev dying in combat.

Less than two months after the first shots were fired, and the first cherry tree cannon sounded to signal Bulgarians to arms, the April Uprising had been crushed.

The aftermath

The very ruthlessness that the Ottomans had used to crush the rebellion was to blow up in their faces as foreign journalists, diplomats and politicians spread word of the methods used against the Bulgarians.

US journalist Januarius MacGahan was one of the leading journalists in exposing what had happened.

MacGahan, with the help of US diplomat Eugene Schuyler and accompanied by English writer Archibald Forbes, visited the burnt towns and villages of the Rhodopes, sending to the outside harshly explicit accounts of what had happened there. MacGahan's reports appeared in major newspapers in the UK, the US, France and Russia.
In an official report in November 1876, Schuyler said that 15 000 people had been killed (a dispute continues about the number of victims) and that 58 villages and five monasteries had been laid waste.

A number of newspapers and illustrated magazines - Russian, German, English, Swiss, Swedish, American, Belgian - sent correspondents to the Bulgarian territories of the Ottoman empire. Their reports added to the sense of outrage elsewhere in Europe.

In Britain, Liberal party leader William Gladstone spearheaded a campaign in the house of commons and in British public opinion on behalf of the Bulgarians. He attacked the Conservatives over their failure to respond to Ottoman conduct in the Balkans, and wrote a pamphlet "The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East". Gladstone's interest in Bulgaria was not incidental and had not begun with the news of the massacres. He was a major shareholder in a British company which had won a bid to construct the first railway line in Bulgaria, from Rousse to Varna, in 1866. In his pamphlet, Gladstone wrote: "Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves..."

With the "Bulgarian Question" now firmly on the agenda, representatives of the Great Powers - Great Britain, Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary - met in Istanbul in December 1876 to resolve what should be done. After the talks collapsed in failure, April 1877 saw Russia declare war on the Ottomans, a war that meant the beginning of the end of Ottoman rule in Bulgaria.

The world on the uprising

On both sides of the Atlantic, prominent public figures, journalists, famous names and observers were almost entirely unanimous in their sympathy and respect for Bulgarians after news emerged about the suppression of the April Uprising.

The prominent figures included Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, Charles Darwin, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Fyodor Dostoyevski, Ivan Turgenev and William Gladstone.
Reporting to their governments from Sofia from the days of the uprising were France's vice consul Leandre Francois Rene le Gay and Italian consul Vito Pozitano who did their best to stop Ottoman authorities from wreaking revenge on Bulgarians in Sofia.

Bulgarians have honoured the support they got from Europe's best at the time by naming streets and squares after them.

Sofia is the best example with most of its central streets carrying the names of Pozitano, Garibaldi, Gladstone, Hugo and le Gay (pronounced in Bulgarian as Lege).
Other street and place names in Sofia commemorating people and places closely associated with the April Uprising include Hristo Botev (boulevard and streets), a MacGahan Street, Todor Kableshkov Street (in Buxton), Victor Hugo Street, the residential district of Oborishte, Oborishte (now Zaimov) Park and Oborishte Street in central Sofia, Bacho Kiro Street, Hristo Karaminkov Street and Lyuben Karavelov Street. Among those to have several places named in his honour is Georgi Benkovski, who has a district in Sofia named after him and a stadium in Pazardjik.

Not least among the many examples of places with names linked to the April Uprising is Batak Street in the Hadji Dimitar district of Sofia.