For a little over two centuries, Tarnovo was the capital of a Bulgarian empire, a city of churches, chronicles and patriarchs that thought of itself as a second Constantinople. In the summer of 1393 that ended, and what came after it lasted almost five hundred years. If you want the single hinge on which medieval Bulgaria swings shut, this is close to it.
What happened on this day
In the spring of 1393 the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I handed the campaign to his son, Süleyman Çelebi, and pointed him at the Bulgarian capital. What followed was a three-month siege. The city held out, but the odds were never really in doubt, and the decisive blow came from the direction of Tsarevets, the fortified hill at the heart of the town.
The tsar was not there. Ivan Shishman had taken what was left of his army north to the fortress of Nikopol, leaving the defence of the capital in the hands of its churchman, Patriarch Evtimiy. Evtimiy did something quietly remarkable: he walked out to the Ottoman camp himself to plead for the city. The commander, by the accounts that survive, listened politely and then kept almost none of what he promised.
When Tarnovo fell, the reprisals were hard. Around 110 leading citizens and boyars were put to death, the churches were turned into mosques, and Tsarevets itself was resettled and renamed. Evtimiy was spared the sword but sent into exile, where he died a decade or so later, and was in time canonised as a saint. With the capital gone, the Bulgarian empire shrank to a handful of fortresses along the Danube, and the independent Bulgarian church was folded into the Patriarchate of Constantinople, where it stayed until 1870.
Why the date seems to wander
If you go looking, you will find the fall of Tarnovo dated to 17 July 1393, not the 25th, and both are right. Medieval Bulgaria kept time by the older Julian calendar, and 17 July in that reckoning slides forward about eight days onto the calendar we use now, landing here, at the end of July. So the anniversary quietly splits in two: the 17th if you count as the defenders did, a week later if you convert to modern dates.
Why this matters for British expats
This is the event that opens the long chapter Bulgarians call турско робство, the Turkish yoke, the roughly five centuries of Ottoman rule that ended only with the Liberation of 1878. If a single date underpins the whole national story of loss and eventual return, it is this one. It is, very loosely, a Bulgarian 1066: the year every schoolchild knows as the moment the old order ended, except that here the occupation ran on for close to five hundred years rather than being absorbed within a generation.
There is a northeastern footnote worth knowing. By the time the capital fell in 1393, our corner of the country had already gone: Shumen was taken by the Ottomans in 1388, five years earlier, so the fortress town up on the plateau above the city had been under new management for half a decade before Tarnovo's walls were breached.
And there is a strange consolation in the wreckage. Patriarch Evtimiy had run a celebrated school of scribes and scholars at Tarnovo, and when it scattered, his pupils carried their books and their reformed Bulgarian spelling north into Russia, Serbia and Wallachia. The state was destroyed; the manuscripts got out. If you visit Veliko Tarnovo today, the restored fortress of Tsarevets above the Yantra is the direct descendant of the citadel that fell, and it is one of the more moving couple-of-hours drives you can make from here.
Sources and further reading
The account of the siege and its aftermath draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on the siege of Tarnovo) and the standard English-language histories, with the detail on Patriarch Evtimiy resting on his well-documented life and canonisation.