Bulgarian April Uprising
Bulgarian revolutionaries rose against Ottoman rule in April 1876, were suppressed within weeks, and the manner of the suppression brought about an independent Bulgaria within two years. The rising was badly prepared and launched early after the plans were betrayed. It was concentrated in a few towns south of the Balkan range, and the regular Ottoman army was not chiefly used against it. What was used were bashi-bazouks — irregular auxiliaries, unpaid and supplied with weapons rather than wages, whose compensation was what they took. The killings at Batak are the ones that reached Europe. A town that had surrendered on terms was destroyed, and the dead, mostly women and children, were left where they fell; an American journalist, Januarius MacGahan, and the diplomat Eugene Schuyler reached it that summer and MacGahan's dispatches to the Daily News described the church full of bones. Estimates of the total dead run from 15,000 to 30,000. The political effect was in Britain. Disraeli's government was pro-Ottoman on the standard reasoning that a weak Ottoman Empire kept Russia out of the Mediterranean, and had dismissed the first reports as coffee-house babble. Gladstone came out of retirement to write a pamphlet — Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East — that sold 200,000 copies in a month and demanded the Turks clear out bag and baggage. Public opinion made it impossible for Britain to intervene when Russia declared war in 1877. Bulgaria became autonomous at Berlin in 1878. Batak is a national memorial, and its church still holds the bones.
- Year: 1876 CE
- Category: Military
