Lentorama 2022: It Happened on Easter

Day 27: Bulgaria rises up

While the Irish may have the best known rising related to the Easter holiday, the Bulgarians did it first, and on Easter Sunday to boot (albeit Western Easter).

What we think of today as Bulgaria became part of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-15th century. For a time the Ottomans were able to suppress Bulgarian identity, but Russia and Austria-Hungary would support Bulgarian Christians in occasional revolts, with an eye towards destabilizing Turkish rule in the region.

As the idea of the nation-state took hold in Europe in the 19th century, Bulgarians began to reassert their national identity, and saw an opportunity to throw off the yoke of the Ottomans, who were having their own issues in maintaining the empire. An 1875 tax on non-Muslims led to a revolt in Herzegovina, which the Ottomans put down, but the act of revolt exposed the weakness of the empire. Later that year a revolutionary committee of Bulgarians decided it was time to have a rising of their own.

After about six months of planning and preparation, the rising started on April 20, 1875, two weeks before it was planned to start thanks to a local revolutionary committee's decision to attack an Ottoman police headquarters near Sofia. The revolt spread quickly over the next few days, but the Ottomans replied in force starting on April 25. Their response was brutal, with an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 killed and 58 villages destroyed by the end of the rising in mid-May.

Reaction to the rising and its bloody quelling in the rest of Europe was strongly anti-Turkish, especially after accounts of what happened spread. The UK, which had been a supporter of the Ottomans, distanced themselves, and when Russia attacked the Ottomans in 1877 the British refused to help the Turks, citing negative public opinion due to the aftermath of the Bulgarian uprising.

It was the treaties that came after the Russo-Turkish War that would lead to the re-establishment of an independent Bulgaria, albeit a small principality that was still legally affiliated with the Ottoman Empire. It wouldn't be until 1908 that a fully independent Kingdom of Bulgaria was proclaimed.