📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 6 August
There is a particular kind of Bulgarian story that the country tells quietly, without the statues and the anthems, and this is one of them. A carpenter from a poor family in the Strandzha hills leads an uprising, is shot in the opening hours of it, and spends his last minutes asking his own men to finish him off. They did. They drew lots first.
What happened on this day
Georgi Kondolov was born Zhelyazko Dimitrov Kondolov in 1858, in the village of Velika near Malko Tarnovo, in the far southeastern corner of what is now Bulgaria. His family was large and poor, and he left home as a boy to earn a living as a carpenter's apprentice in Constantinople. After the Liberation he came back, settled in Haskovo, met Hristo Arnaudov, a cousin of his future wife Donka Hubenova, and the two of them opened a joinery workshop together. He fought as a volunteer in the Rhodopes and was given a bronze medal by Prince Alexander Battenberg. It is not, on the face of it, the CV of a revolutionary.
The politics came later and came hard. In 1898, a few years after marrying Donka, he moved the family to Burgas and opened another workshop, and it was there that he fell in with the organised Macedonian and Thracian societies. He had already helped found a branch of the Thracian society "Strandzha" in December 1896; he was at the first constituent congress of the Adrianople societies in February 1897, and a delegate at the Macedonian congresses of 1900 and 1901. In 1899 he took over a committee, and in early 1901 he put together a ten-man band in the village of Alankayryak, now Yasna Polyana, to work the Strandzha. He met Gotse Delchev, who trusted him with a good deal.
The night it ended
Three bands followed, each better organised than the last. The second went in during May 1902 and got as far as agreeing arms-smuggling routes with Lazar Madzharov. The third formed in May 1903 and stayed in place until the Preobrazhenie Uprising was declared, and Kondolov went with it to the congress at Petrova niva. He was made not just a band leader but chief of the insurgent forces for his sector, commanding a detachment of ninety-seven men whose job was the Ottoman garrison at Paspalovo.
They moved on the village on 5 August. Around midnight the attack went in, with Diko Dzhelebov advancing on Stoilovo at the same time. Kondolov led his men towards the barracks and was wounded trying to work around the Ottoman position from the side of a house where soldiers had been waiting in the dark. A chetnik called Serafim Stoyanov dragged him into cover. In too much pain to go on, he asked to be killed with his own rifle, named Yosif Makedoncheto as his successor, and the men drew lots. Dimitar Zhelyazkov shot him. He was forty-five. They buried him the next day, in the open, with people from the surrounding villages there.
That is not quite the end of it. In September 1925 five of his old comrades carried his bones into Malko Tarnovo in a small chest, and wrote on it the last thing he had said to them: the cause is holy, and you will be cursed if you do not continue the struggle. The remains were later moved to Petrova niva. In 1950 the village of Marzova was renamed Kondolovo. There is an ossuary and a museum collection in Malko Tarnovo, his cape and rifle are in the National Museum of Military History, and there is a peak in Antarctica with his name on it. He also got a folk song, which in this country is arguably the higher honour.
Why this matters for British expats
Kondolov's ground is the Strandzha and the Burgas coast, several hours southeast of us, so nobody in Shumen is putting on a parade today. What travels is the reading skill. Bulgaria names things after people at a rate Britain simply does not, and the names are rarely decorative: a village called Kondolovo, a street, a school, a chitalishte. When you learn that the village on the road sign was renamed for a man who was shot at his own request in 1903, the map stops being a list of places and starts being a memorial you happen to be driving through.
It is also worth knowing what the uprising was, because it comes up. The Preobrazhenie rising of 1903 sits in the same national memory as Ilinden, and it is the sort of thing your neighbour will assume you have at least heard of. You do not need the detail. Knowing there was a rising in the Strandzha that summer, and that it did not end well, is enough to follow the conversation rather than nod through it.
Worth a look if you haven't already: the Shumen.UK residency guide.
Sources and further reading
The account here, the birth year and village, the carpentry years in Constantinople, the societies and congresses, the three bands, and the night at Paspalovo, comes from Kondolov's Bulgarian Wikipedia biography, which in turn leans on Hristo Silyanov's history of the liberation struggles and on Ivan Pandaleev Ormandzhiev's 1927 study of Kondolov published in Burgas. There is no English Wikipedia entry for him, which is its own small comment on how these stories travel.