Most British expats have seen Buzludzha, the derelict flying saucer on its Stara Planina ridge, on somebody's Instagram if not from the road to Kazanlak. Rather fewer could say why that particular peak earned a monument in the first place. Today's anniversary is where that story starts.
What happened on this day
In the spring of 1868, across the river in Romania, two of Bulgaria's most experienced hajduk commanders merged their bands into one. Hadzhi Dimitar, born Dimitar Nikolov Asenov in Sliven, was a merchant's son who had carried the title hadji since a childhood pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Stefan Karadzha, born Stefan Todorov Dimov in a village near Elhovo that today bears his name, had grown up in the Bulgarian communities of the Dobruja. Their plan was not a raid; it was the spark for a national uprising.
It started going sideways at the water's edge. The band crossed the Danube by boat near the village of Vardim, close to the mouth of the Yantra, and was spotted by an Ottoman patrol almost as it landed. A hasty war council scaled the mission back: no uprising would be declared. Instead they would cut the telegraph line between Ruse and Svishtov and make for the Balkan range as fast as their legs allowed. Revolutions rarely survive first contact with a sentry.
The pursuit came quickly, roughly a thousand bashi-bozouk irregulars, and in the raid's opening days it caught them. The rebels took up positions in the vineyards above the village of Karaisen, on a height flanked on both sides by deep ravines and commanding the country around it, which is to say they chose their ground rather well. The Ottoman force encircled the hill and opened fire, and the fighting ran the whole day. Every attack was beaten back. When darkness fell the attackers regrouped towards the mountains, leaving pickets on the Danube side, and the band did the one thing nobody expected: slipped north straight through the picket line, then doubled back south and carried on towards the Balkan. As a piece of night-work it was as neat as anything the whole doomed expedition would manage.
The chronicle of the following days reads as a run of dated engagements: Karapanova Koriya on 7 July, Vishovgrad on the 8th, and on the 9th Kanladere, a name that means "bloody river" in Turkish, where the band was finally broken and a wounded Stefan Karadzha was taken prisoner. Hadzhi Dimitar led the remaining 58 men on towards the mountains and, on 18 July 1868, made a last stand at Buzludzha peak in the Shipka mountains. A note of honesty on all these dates: nineteenth-century Bulgaria ran on the Julian calendar, and the surviving accounts wobble by days depending on who was counting and by which reckoning; the villages around Vishovgrad still time their commemorations by the old calendar.
Some historians hold that Hadzhi Dimitar fell at Buzludzha that day. An eyewitness described him fighting revolver in hand until the end, and a French-language newspaper of the time reported his sabre, revolver, telescope and letters being delivered to Midhat Pasha in Ruse. He was 28. Hristo Botev's ballad "Hadzhi Dimitar" did the rest, giving Bulgaria one of the most recited lines in its poetry: Тоз, който падне в бой за свобода, той не умира. He who falls in the fight for freedom does not die.
Why this matters for British expats
Because these two names are part of the furniture of your Bulgarian life whether you have noticed or not. Nearly every town of any size has a street named for each of them, Shumen included, where the Hadji Dimitar house keeps the name on the map, and once you know the July 1868 story the blue street signs stop being wallpaper and start being a map of the national memory. Bulgaria hands its street grids to the liberation movement's dead with the seriousness Britain reserves for its wartime heroes.
And then there is the payoff at altitude. Buzludzha peak, where the band made its stand, has been officially renamed Hadzhi Dimitar peak, and it is the same summit the famous abandoned monument sits on. The next time someone shows you a photograph of the saucer, you can supply the older and considerably better story underneath it. Both voyvodas, incidentally, also have peaks named after them on the Antarctic Peninsula, which is a form of posthumous esteem few British heroes can match.
Sources and further reading
The account of the fight draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on the Battle of Karaisen and the fuller chronicle of the band's campaign, with biographical detail from the Bulgarian Wikipedia biography of Hadzhi Dimitar and its English-language counterpart.