Two neutral countries walk into a war and sign a secret alliance with each other. It sounds like the set-up for a joke, but it is exactly what happened in Sofia on 19 August 1914, and I have been here 13 years without ever clocking that this date existed. The treaty in question is one of those documents that quietly paved the way for everything that followed while officially changing nothing at all.
What happened on this day
On 19 August 1914 (6 August by the old-style calendar Bulgaria still kept at the time), the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Bulgaria signed a treaty of alliance in Sofia. Putting pen to paper for Constantinople were Talaat Pasha, the Minister of the Interior, and Halil Bey, President of the Chamber of Deputies; for Bulgaria, Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov. The oddity, and it is a genuine one, is that neither country was actually in the war yet. Both were neutral. This was a war pact signed in peacetime, which is rather like two neighbours solemnly agreeing not to join the street fight outside while quietly oiling the gate between their gardens.
The treaty ran to seven articles and was, on paper, purely defensive: each side had to fight only if the other was attacked by another Balkan country, and neither could attack a Balkan neighbour without consulting the other first. In theory, anyway. Article IV left the door open for Ottoman troops to cross Bulgarian soil on their way to attack somebody else, which is a fairly roomy definition of defensive, and under Article V the Ottomans promised to negotiate an affirmation of Romania's neutrality. The whole thing was secret and was to last for the duration of the general European war, and, unlike the equally secret Ottoman-German treaty that Minister of War Enver Pasha had concluded on 2 August, it was apparently the more coherent and purposeful document of the two. Make of that what you will.
What followed was a year of diplomatic hedging. Constantinople pressed Sofia to upgrade the pact into an offensive alliance aimed at Russia and got nowhere; Grand Vizier Sait Halim spent late August 1914 pursuing negotiations in every direction at once, with Romania, Russia, Greece and France. On 30 August the Ottomans suggested to the Germans that a Bulgarian alliance directed at Serbia and Greece looked more feasible; Berlin objected, and the Ottomans sent a colonel to Sofia to open talks with the Bulgarian general staff anyway. Berlin was not told the Bulgarian treaty even existed until 17 December 1914, which tells you something about how allies behaved in that war. Bulgaria finally committed itself by the Convention of Sofia on 6 September 1915, and the secret 1914 document is generally regarded as the first paving stone on that road.
Towns celebrating today
Today is also the town day of Kula (Кула), up in the far northwest of Bulgaria, because 19 August is the feast of the Transfiguration (Преображение, pre-ob-rah-ZHE-ni-e) by the old calendar. Kula is a small place, about 2,400 people as of 2021, the third largest town in Vidin Province after Vidin and Belogradchik, sitting 30 kilometres west of Vidin and a short hop from the Serbian border crossing at Vrashka Chuka. The name literally means tower, and the tower in question is the ruined Roman fortress of Castra Martis, whose remains still stand above the town, with a little museum of finds from the site and a miniature model of the Roman settlement. Under Ottoman rule the town went by the name Adliye. It is a proper day-trip corner of the country, though be warned it is a serious cross-country drive from us: Kula's tower and Shumen's own fortress brood over opposite ends of Bulgaria.
Why this matters for British expats
Days like this are the user manual for the country you live in. Britain's First World War story starts in August 1914 and ends in the poppy appeal; Bulgaria's starts a year later, on the other side, and ends in a settlement Bulgarians still argue about, which is why the war barely registers in the memorial culture here the way it does at home. Knowing that a secret Sofia handshake in 1914 was the first step towards that difference is the kind of context that makes the country legible rather than merely picturesque.
The old-style calendar is the other quiet lesson today. Bulgaria only dropped the Julian calendar in the early twentieth century, so feast days like Kula's Transfiguration sit 13 days behind the western date, and older documents, church inscriptions and family records around Shumen still carry dates that look two weeks out. When a neighbour insists a feast falls on the nineteenth and your phone says the sixth, both of you are right. The Bulgarian cultural calendar is full of these doubles, and once you can read them, the place stops contradicting itself.
Sources and further reading
The treaty account draws on Wikipedia's entry on the Ottoman-Bulgarian alliance, which carries the substance of the seven articles and the year's worth of three-way hedging that followed; oddly, there is no Bulgarian-language version of the page. Details for Kula, the fortress and the population figure come from the town's Wikipedia entry and the standard city-holidays listings.