100 years since the Balkan Wars: the patriotic upsurge within the Bulgarian society

The idea about the independence of the Bulgarians in the regions of Macedonia and Edirne Thrace that remained within the confines of the Ottoman Empire after the Berlin Treaty of the summer of 1878 never died and remained a powerful social cause of the residents of the Bulgarian Kingdom. It was embraced by politicians and intellectuals alike, and by a great many ordinary Bulgarians.

A climax in the movement for liberation of the Bulgarians in the mentioned regions was the Ilinden-Transfiguration Uprising of 1903, which unfortunately failed. Several years later, in the autumn of 1911, Bulgarian revolutionaries staged a terror attack in the town of Shtip in the region of Macedonia with the aim to attract the attention of the international community towards their claim for an autonomous Macedonia. The attack resulted in one fatality. And that unleashed a wave of violent repressions on the Bulgarian population on the part of the Ottoman authorities. Some 20 people were killed and another 300 injured in the quelling of the uprising. The tragic events resounded in the Kingdom of Bulgaria with a power so great that a wave of protests followed with the claim for the liberation of the fellow Bulgarians from Ottoman domination.

The social movement encouraged the Bulgarian government to form a Balkan Alliance by engaging in bilateral agreements first with Serbia and then with Greece. Thus a complex diplomatic task was achieved. The strengthening of the patriotic upsurge, triggered especially after yet another massacre on the part of the Ottoman authorities in the village of Kochani in July 1912, led the Bulgarian government no other choice, but to take up arms and fight for a decisive victory. From the point of view of the contemporary historians, the war was somewhat hastily prepared, with certain shortcomings, especially as regarded the drafting of the international agreements about the post-war territorial reshaping of the Balkan countries. But the patriotic surge of the Bulgarian society went so high that it was impossible not to ride on its the wave.
According to historian Georgi Markov, head of the Institute for History Studies with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the Bulgarian prime minister at the time, Ivan Evstratiev Geshov, who was also a banker and a president of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, was against the war.

Citizens reading army recuitment posters

“The members of his Popular Party were also against, but after the massacres in Shtip and Kochani a wave of protest rallies and meetings swept Bulgaria, and the Palace and the Parliament were bombarded with telegrammes. The personal archives of King Ferdinand contain eight files full of such telegrammes and letters insisting that Bulgaria waged a war on the Ottoman Empire. I was very much moved by a speech Nikola Obretenov, a revolutionary in his old age, who had joined Hristo Botev’s detachment in 1876, and was son of the legendary Baba Tonka, gave in his native city of Rousse, on the river Danube: “We ought to finish the sacred work Levski and Botev, and the Russian Tsar Liberator started, and we need to free our fellow Bulgarians. And even in my old age I am ready to take my rifle and go to war against the Ottoman Empire.”

The truth is that the entire Bulgarian nation was conquered by the exhilaration of the future liberation of the Bulgarians under Ottoman rule. Poet Peyo Yavorov joined a voluntary detachment to fight in Pirin Macedonia even before the outbreak of the First Balkan War. He joined the unit led by chieftain Yonko Vaptsarov and took part in some of the battles they fought.

Yavorov's military unit during the Balkan war (Yavorov - sitting left)

But Yavorov’s heroic exploits were not a singular case. A great many foreign correspondents were dismayed in their reports that the Bulgarian armed troops were not a mere army, but a nation in arms. During the war the National Theatre froze its productions, because the majority of the male actors went to fight in the battlefields. In fact the news of the war’s outbreak was announced on the night of October 5th during a performance at the National Theatre. The legendary actor Sava Ognyanov who was performing on stage heard rumours about that off stage. And then the actor who was in the middle of a speech suddenly made a pause, and turned to the audience: “Gentlemen, the war had been declared. Let us all go and fulfill our patriotic duty!” One actor died in the war and many others were injured. But there were other renowned Bulgarian intellectuals and artists who joined the army ranks, too.

The mobilization of the troops and their march towards the Turkish border gave body to the national spirit in a number of immortal descriptions made by a number of war correspondents. Thus, Captain Spas Ikonomov, famously wrote, “The call for mobilization was met not with joy, not with approval, but with a wild, irrepressible, insane exhilaration.”

And here is how the French war correspondent for Le Temps Ren Puaux described the events he witnessed in Bulgaria in the autumn of 1912, “There are thousands and thousands of men, who have just been called to arms, wearing either some items of military uniforms or no uniforms at all, armed with old rifles, strapped with cartridge belts, and followed by ox carts and a cavalry reminiscent of the prehistoric times… the elderly men walk with their woolen caps drawn over their eyebrows, while the youngest wear furry hats that reminds us of the Napoleon army… and they march along, day and night, happy, feverish, with an exalted and belligerent flare in their eyes, south towards the border…”

English version by Radostin Zhelev

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100 years since the Balkan Wars: the patriotic upsurge within the Bulgarian society

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