📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Sunday 9 August
Here is one for the next time someone claims Bulgaria and Britain have nothing in common: the first prince of modern Bulgaria was Prince Philip's great-uncle. 140 years ago tonight, give or take a calendar quirk, his own officers broke into his palace in the small hours, made him sign away his throne and posted him down the Danube on his own yacht. Bulgarians call it the Devetoavgustovski prevrat (de-veh-to-av-GUS-tov-ski preh-VRAT), the 9 August coup.
What happened on this day
Bulgaria had only been back on the map for a few years, liberated in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and in 1879 the Grand National Assembly unanimously elected a 22-year-old German officer, Alexander of Battenberg, a nephew of Tsar Alexander II, as its prince. For a while the arrangement suited St Petersburg nicely. Then, in 1885, Alexander said yes to the Unification with Eastern Rumelia, which Russia had pointedly not approved, and when Serbia attacked weeks later the new Tsar, Alexander III, pulled every Russian officer out of Bulgaria's young army. The Bulgarians won anyway, at Slivnitsa that November, academy cadets filling the gaps. Victory made him a national hero at home and a problem for his cousin in St Petersburg.
It all came to a head on the night of 8 to 9 August 1886. Bulgaria still ran on the Julian calendar then (by the modern Gregorian reckoning, the night of 20 to 21 August), but the date Bulgarians keep is the old one. Pro-Russian officers seized the prince in his Sofia palace, forced him to sign a decree of abdication, rushed him north to the Danube at Oryahovo and put him aboard his own yacht, bound for Reni and the Russian authorities. Translate it into British terms and it is the army walking into Buckingham Palace at three in the morning and putting the monarch on the overnight ferry, which even by Balkan standards was a bit much. A provisional government under Kliment of Tarnovo took over in Sofia, but the plotters had misjudged the country. Stefan Stambolov, the chief of the National Assembly, refused to play along, and Sava Mutkurov organised a counter-coup from Plovdiv. Within days the conspirators were isolated, and on 17 August Alexander was back in Sofia.
It did not last. His cousin the Tsar made it unmistakably clear, in writing, that there was no way back, and on 26 August (again, Old Style) Alexander abdicated for good, leaving Bulgaria in early September 1886. The aftermath reads like one of those post-imperial family sagas: he married an actress, Johanna Loisinger, restyled himself Count von Hartenau, served as an Austrian general in Graz and died there in 1893, aged 36, of a ruptured appendix. Bulgaria, meanwhile, shopped around Europe for a replacement and in July 1887 elected Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, whose dynasty would hold the throne into the 1940s. Alexander's remains were eventually brought home to Sofia, where the Battenberg Mausoleum still stands, a short walk from the palace that lost him.
Towns celebrating today
Down in the southwest, Zemen (ZEH-men) in Pernik Province marks its city day today, tied to the feast of Saint Panteleimon, the healer saint and patron of doctors in the Orthodox calendar. Zemen is not going to trouble the big-city league tables: the 2020 count put it at 1,498 people, and it has only officially been a city since 1974. It sits on both banks of the Struma about 70 km from Sofia, where the valley narrows into the Zemen Gorge. Until 1925 it answered to the name Belovo; the new name revived the memory of Zemlengrad, the medieval fortress in the gorge that the Czech traveller Konstantin Jireček described in his Journey through Bulgaria.
The one thing worth the detour is the Zemen Monastery, a kilometre outside town, an 11th-century church whose 14th-century frescoes include rare surviving donor portraits of the Serbian despot Dejan and his wife Teodora, who paid for the redecoration in 1334. If you like your sightseeing vertical, the Polska Skakavitsa waterfall further up the gorge is counted the third highest in Bulgaria. All of this, mind you, is a good five hours' drive from us in Shumen; nobody in the northeast is closing a street for Zemen today. Worth knowing if you are anywhere near Kyustendil or Radomir with a free Sunday, though.
Why this matters for British expats
The Battenberg connection is the bit that makes this a British story, not just a Bulgarian one. Alexander's elder brother Louis built his career in the Royal Navy and settled in England; Louis's daughter Alice was Prince Philip's mother, which makes the man on the yacht the Duke of Edinburgh's great-uncle. Another brother, Henry, married Queen Victoria's youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice. When anti-German feeling peaked in 1917, the family swapped Battenberg for its literal English translation, Mountbatten. So when a Bulgarian says Battenberg, they mean the kidnapped prince, and a Sofia square still carries his name; when we hear it, we think of a cake. Same family, rather different afterlives.
Beyond the family trivia, the 9 August coup is the user manual for half the arguments you will overhear in Bulgaria about Russia. It was the moment the country, barely eight years old, chose its own course over its liberator's wishes, and the fallout, Stambolov's iron-fisted years, the long freeze with St Petersburg, the arrival of the Coburgs, shaped Bulgarian politics for generations. The drama played out in Sofia and Plovdiv, both far from us, so there is no Shumen procession to report. But days like this are what the Bulgarian cultural calendar is for: know the story, and the statues start making sense.
Sources and further reading
The coup narrative draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on the 9 August coup and the English Wikipedia biography of Alexander of Battenberg, while the Zemen details come from the town's English Wikipedia entry and regional municipal listings.