Well, when you are fighting 3 out of your 4 neighbours you need every soldier. As it is a custom for Bulgaria – great military, poor diplomacy and foreign politics…
Bulgarian Demon Chasers. Photography: Aron Klein. Source
“Kukeri is an ancient pagan ritual practiced annually across the Balkan mountain regions where local men wear carved wooden masks of beasts’ faces and hang heavy bells around their waists as they perform arcane dances,” says London-based photographer Aron Klein. The Kukeri Project is Aron’s magical and dreamlike series that consists of hypnotic images of large men in carnivalesque costumes, posing menacingly in the wintry Bulgarian mountains.
The treaty led to the creation of the Principality of Bulgaria, a de facto independent, and de jure vassal state under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Bulgaria would only become fully independent in 1908
>finally rise up to the opressor that murdered and raped hundreds of thousands of your fellow Bulgarians >Russia helps, the West doesnt move >win the independance war through blood and strife after a very violent war in which t*rks use that as an excuse to murder even more people >anglos step in >literally cuck you out of your main cities and provinces inhabited by ethinc bulgarians for centuries and forced to be a puppet of the roaches all because the perfidious albion depended on ottoman oil and didnt want to jeopardize the whole thing
exterminate anglos
I’m sorry, and France was doing what?
mostly here for the Serbs but we still had Bulgarians in a good light. There’s a reason they liked us and based a lot of their post-liberation culture on ours.
Doesn’t disprove my point. France was as against Bulgaria as Britain was, so to blame the subsequent Treaty of Berlin on ‘perfidious albion’ is a complete load of bullshit.
We werent the ones who went “well they’ll have to deal with their old opressors because our interest in the region, both economic and military, rests on turkey not being fucking uppity faggots” tho
we gave (wrongly) the Nis region to serbia but there’s a reason the Bulgarians liked us, again.
Yeah, politics is annoying when that happens, isn’t it? It’s like… nations and empires have interests they want to protect and see that they aren’t destroyed in a conflict.
point is that bulgaria was crushed into the dirt for centuries by turks and the day they got their independance the albion, who never gave two shits about the region, told bulgarians “up yours” because their own economy matters more than being genocided.
That’s what’s awful.
Like you even give two shits in the first place.
I give a shit, yeah. Bulgarians kept getting backstabbed by everyone in the region and I dont think the major powers needed to step in to backstab them some more, especially not to put the turks interest first.
So, I ask again, and France was doing what to help? Nothing! France is exactly as culpable in the situation Bulgaria was in, the same as Britain. This isn’t just something where you can solely blame Britain for. This is the fault of all the major European powers (barring Spain, since… well, Spain’s shit) not just one.
Well, the major powers of the time didn’t have interest of creating a large Bulgarian state that would be under Russian influence, especially Great Britain which just 20 years prior to that fought the Russians in the Crimean war and still completed against them in Asia in the Great Game and Germany surely didn’t want any more Russian influence in the region. If I recall correctly at the Berlin congress Bismarck said something in the lines of “We are not here to arrange the happiness of the Bulgarians.”
But actually the San Stefano treaty was temporary and Russia knew that before the war even started. In 1876, 3 months after the April uprising in Bulgaria, Russia signed the
Reichstadt agreement
with Austria that no large state is to be created after a major defeat of the Ottoman empire and that Bosnia and Herzegovina will be ceded to Austria-Hungary.
Later the Russians signed another treaty with the British – the London agreement of 30 May 1878 – 2 weeks before the Berlin congress. They agreed that Bulgaria would be divided to a northern and southern part – the northern would be a principality vassal to the Ottomans and the southern one would have autonomy with a Christian governor. The Russians insisted of no Turkish troops in the southern territory, the English agreed under the condition that the Ottomans can enter in case of a foreign invasion. The British retained the right to name the southern territory ( which turned out to be Eastern Rumelia)
And then you have the Berlin congress which finally solved the matter the way the map in the original post shows.
However, the treaty didn’t last long as the Bulgarians unified the Principality and the Eastern Rumelia in 1885 and fought in the subsequent Bulgaro-Serbian war. And in 1908 Bulgaria proclaimed its independence, taking advantage of the revolution of the Young Turks and the refusal of Austria-Hungary to give back Bosnia & Herzegovina.
To be honest, as a Bulgarian it isn’t great to see the fate of your nation to be tossed like a coin between the major powers but we have to understand their motives and try to see the situation through the prism of the time they were living in, and not judge it through our modern understanding.
September 29, 1918 – Bulgaria surrenders. The Allies take over 25,000 prisoners in Macedonia. The rest of the Bulgarian army heads home to put down revolution.
Pictured – Bulgarian troops, wearing German-style steel helmets. By September 1918 help from Bulgaria’s senior allies had all but dried up, and the Balkan tsardom could not resist the Allies alone.
The front in Salonika had been static since 1915. Bulgarian troops supported by their allies had proved a tough nut to crack. But the tsardom could only take so much. Almost half of its men were in the front-lines, and its women working around the clock back home to deal with widespread food shortages. Barely enough supplies reach the trenches to keep the army fed. Most Bulgarian soldiers had been fighting for three years, and many had fought in the two Balkan Wars before that. They were tired and wanted to go home.
The French-led offensive that began on September 15 brought about the end-game. The Allies had dragged heavy artillery into the mountains above the Vardar River valley, where the Bulgarians had their defenses. Under the cover of these cannons French, Greek, and Italian troops, plus a new division of “Yugoslav” troops from all the southern Slavic states rolled into the Bulgarian lines like a mighty wave of steel, taking the first trenches with the bayonet. Anglo-Hellenic forces launched offensives on the flanks of the Bulgarian lines to prevent reinforcements from being rushed to the front.
By September 16 there were no reserves left. The Allies had penetrated 6-miles deep along a 19-mile front. The Bulgarian commander General Zhekov appealed to the Austrians for aid, the Hapsburg Chief of Staff Ars von Straussenburg told him there was none to be had. Only one German brigade could be sent from the Crimea, which would take weeks to arrive. From their HQ at Skopje the Germans recommended that staff officers go to the front and try and stop the rout with their pistols.
Two regiments of Bulgarian infantry mutinied on September 16 and refused to take any further part in the fighting. The commander of the Bulgarian Second Army, which was in the middle of the fighting, wrote to the Tsar about the possibility of an armistice. Tsar Ferdinand wrote back: “Go out and get killed in your present lines. “
BSCRC – Kosta Panitsa, Ivan Stoyanovich, Zahari Stoyanov, Ivan Andonov, Dimitar Rizov
Knyaz Alexander Battenberg of Bulgaria
Tophane agreement – 24 March 1886
On the 6 September 1885 the Bulgarian Unification took place. Following the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 which arranged the political role of the new Bulgarian Principality after the war of Liberation from Ottoman yoke, the Bulgarian lands were divided into 5 parts:
Principality of Bulgaria which was a vassal to the Ottoman Empire
Eastern Roumelia – autonomous territory populated mostly by Bulgarians
Northern Dobridja which was given to Wallachia for it’s participation in the war and in return of the Wallachian loss of South Bessarabia to Russia
The Western Outlands which are given to Serbia
The governor of Eastern Roumelia was elected by the populace.
The local Bulgarians were eager to unite with their brothers in Bulgaria and having the support of the Bulgarian Knyaz Alexander, the Bulgarian Secret Central Revolutionary Commitee organised revolt across all the territory and made a coup at it’s capital – Plovdiv.
On the 8 September Knyaz Alexander, prime minister Petko Karavelov and the head of Parliament Stefan Stambolov went to Plovdiv thus accepting the Unification.
The act of Unification was approved by the Tophane agreement of 24 March 1886 and small territorial compensations for the Ottoman Empire.
At the first image you will see a crying woman at right – that’s allegory for Macedonia which remained under Ottoman rule
In this painting, titled The Defence of the Eagle’s Nest, by Alexey Popov (1893), is depicted the crucial moment of the battle in August 1877, when a group of 5,000 Bulgarian and 2,500 Russian troops repulsed an attack against the peak by a nearly 40,000 strong Ottoman army.
Notice how various Russians and Bulgarians are throwing rocks, as at this point in the battle they had run out of ammunition.
The art of war 