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Bulgaria marks 165 years since birth of Bulgarian Revival Period heroine Rayna Knyaginya

Photo: Library

On January 18, 1856 Rayna Popgeorgieva was born in the town of Panagyurishte. Known by the nickname "Rayna Knyaginya" (Rayna the Princess), she was a Bulgarian teacher and a midwife who sewed the main insurgent flag of the Panagyurishte Revolutionary District of the April Uprising and waved it along with emblematic revolutionary leader Georgi Benkovski. The revolutionary commissioned her to make a flag with the inscription "Freedom or Death" when she was 20 years old. 

After the April Uprising which was brutally crushed by the Ottomans, she was captured by the Turks and subjected to severe torture, but after the intervention of European diplomats, she was released and sent to study medicine in Moscow. 

She had five sons, four of whom became officers in the Bulgarian Army.



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