Here is one of history's better ironies. On this date in 1877, a Russian army won a quick, clean victory at Nikopol on the Danube, and in doing so accidentally set up the single bloodiest episode of the entire war to free Bulgaria. Win a battle, create a catastrophe. The place that catastrophe happened was Plevna.
What happened on this day
By the summer of 1877 the Russo-Turkish War, the one Bulgarians simply call the War of Liberation, was rolling south across the Danube. On 16 July the Russian IX Corps under General Nikolai Kridener, some twenty thousand men, closed on the Ottoman fortress town of Nikopol. After a heavy bombardment the garrison, around seven thousand strong under Hasan Pasha, surrendered. The Russians took roughly 7,000 prisoners along with more than a hundred guns, for the loss of a few hundred of their own men. As victories go, it was emphatic.
Here is where it turns. A second Ottoman commander, Osman Pasha, was marching hard from Vidin to relieve Nikopol. He arrived too late; the fortress had already fallen. Rather than throw his army at the victorious Russians, he swung south and dug in at a then-obscure town called Plevna. What followed was the Siege of Plevna, five months of grinding, catastrophic assaults that cost tens of thousands of lives and became one of the most studied battles in modern military history. The neat Russian win at Nikopol is the reason Osman Pasha was at Plevna at all.
Today's name days
Today is also a name day, and a fitting one for the month. Yulia, Yuliyan and the short form Yuli all celebrate. The names come straight from the Latin Julius and Julia, the same root that gave us the month of July itself, so a Yulia celebrating this week is quietly carrying her name's origin around with her. The usual rule applies if you find yourself invited: a Bulgarian name day is an open house, you drop in rather than wait for a formal invitation, and you never arrive empty-handed. A cake or a bottle does the job, and if you bring flowers, keep the number odd. Say chestit imen den, happy name day.
Why this matters for British expats
If you only ever learn one chapter of Bulgarian history, make it this war. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878 is the hinge of the whole national story: it ended nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule and created the modern Bulgarian state. It is why almost every town has an Osvobozhdenie (Liberation) street, why 3 March is the national day, and a good part of why Bulgaria's relationship with Russia is so much more emotionally loaded than a Brit tends to expect. Grasping that this happened, and how recent it is, explains a great deal of what you see around you.
The siege it led to, Plevna, was world news at the time; Victorian Britain followed it closely, and it shaped military thinking for a generation. And the war was not fought only at Nikopol and Plevna. Shumen was one of the four great Ottoman fortress cities of exactly this conflict, the famous Quadrilateral of strongholds guarding the northeast, so the Liberation was playing out right on our own doorstep too. The next time you drive past a monument to the fallen of 1877, and you will, this is the day it started to turn.
Sources and further reading
The account here draws on the Bulgarian and English Wikipedia entries for the Battle of Nikopol, which set out Kridener's numbers, the size of the garrison, the seven thousand prisoners and the fateful diversion of Osman Pasha to Plevna.