Most stories of Bulgaria's liberation are stories of the Russian army arriving to do the freeing. This one is a little different, and the better for it. On this date in 1877, in the fields near Stara Zagora, Bulgarians were doing the fighting themselves.
What happened on this day
The Battle of Dzhuranli was fought on 19 July 1877 near the village of the same name, today called Kalitinovo, in the plain between Stara Zagora and Nova Zagora. It was part of the summer campaign of General Iosif Gurko, whose fast-moving advance guard had punched over the Balkan mountains ahead of the main Russian army. Crucially, that advance guard included units of the newly raised Bulgarian Volunteer Corps, the опълчение (opalchenie), Bulgarian men who had taken up arms for their own country's freedom rather than waiting for someone else to win it for them.
Facing them at Dzhuranli was the Ottoman garrison of Nova Zagora under Rauf Pasha, a solid force of a dozen infantry battalions with cavalry, artillery and Circassian irregulars. Gurko's aim was blunt: stop Rauf Pasha marching west to join the far larger Ottoman army gathering under Suleiman Pasha. He managed it. The result was a Russian victory, with the Ottomans losing around twelve hundred men to Gurko's four hundred, and Rauf Pasha's battered garrison knocked out of the bigger battle brewing at Stara Zagora.
That bigger battle came days later, and it is the one every Bulgarian schoolchild knows. At Stara Zagora the same Volunteer Corps made a desperate stand around the Samara Flag, a banner sewn by nuns in the Russian city of Samara and given to the Bulgarian volunteers as their colours. Their defence of it, at terrible cost, became one of the founding legends of modern Bulgaria. Dzhuranli was the sharp, successful prelude to it.
Why this matters for British expats
Here is the thing worth carrying away. It is easy to absorb a lazy version of 1878 in which Russia simply hands Bulgaria its freedom. Dzhuranli, and the Volunteer Corps that fought there, are the correction. Thousands of Bulgarians took up arms in their own liberation, and the Samara Flag they carried is today one of the most revered objects in the country, kept as a national relic in Sofia. When a Bulgarian tells you their ancestors fought for this country, this is partly what they mean.
You will meet the winners of this story around you, too. General Gurko, whose dash across the Balkans made Dzhuranli possible, has streets named after him in towns all over Bulgaria. The fighting itself was far to the south of us, down on the Thracian plain, so there is no Dzhuranli monument in Shumen. But the Volunteer Corps belonged to the whole nation, and the story it began, of Bulgarians as authors of their own freedom rather than its grateful recipients, is one you will feel everywhere here, once you know to listen for it.
Sources and further reading
There is no English Wikipedia article on the Battle of Dzhuranli, only a Bulgarian and a Russian one, which is its own small comment on whose war this is remembered as. The Bulgarian entry sets out Gurko's advance guard, Rauf Pasha's garrison, the Bulgarian volunteers and the roughly three-to-one casualty gap.