Most British expats have walked past a street sign reading Хаджи Димитър or Стефан Караджа and never once wondered who those men were. On 9 July 1868, both of them were in the same narrow ravine in north-central Bulgaria, fighting the same losing battle. Only one of them walked away, and even he did not last the month.
What happened on this day
In the spring of 1868, two of Bulgaria's best-known hajduk leaders, Hadzhi Dimitar and Stefan Karadzha, put together an armed band, a чета (CHE-ta), with the aim of crossing into Ottoman-ruled Bulgaria and raising the countryside in revolt. On 5 July they slipped over the Danube near the village of Vardim, some 120 men with rifles and a great deal of optimism.
The optimism did not survive contact with reality. By 9 July the band, thinned and exhausted, was cornered at a ravine the locals called Кандлъдере, later renamed Кървавото дере, the Bloody Creek, near the village of Vishovgrad. Waiting for them were roughly 2,000 Ottoman regulars sent by Midhat Pasha, the reforming governor of the Danube province, who had tracked the band across the hills with hunting dogs. Eighty-odd worn-out men against two thousand fresh troops is not really a battle; it is an arithmetic problem, and everyone in that ravine knew the answer.
They fought anyway. In close combat Stefan Karadzha was severely wounded and taken prisoner, and a fighter named Ivan Popkhristov was among the seventeen killed. Hadzhi Dimitar took command, pulled the survivors onto higher, better ground, held off the final assault as the light went, and got what was left of the band away toward the Balkan range. Karadzha was carried first to Tarnovo and then to Ruse, tried by Midhat Pasha's special court and sentenced to hang, but died of his wounds in the Ruse prison on 30 July, aged twenty-eight. Hadzhi Dimitar himself was killed a few weeks later on the peak of Buzludzha.
Why this matters for British expats
Here is the strange part, and the bit that actually decodes modern Bulgaria for you. Hadzhi Dimitar lost, and died, and became immortal anyway. Two years on, the poet Hristo Botev wrote a ballad called Хаджи Димитър, and its line „Тоз, който падне в бой за свобода, той не умира" (he who falls in battle for freedom does not die) is now drilled into every Bulgarian schoolchild with roughly the reverence the British reserve for Shakespeare. Ask a Bulgarian of almost any age and they can finish the line for you.
So when you notice those street names, or a stern bronze bust in a town square, you are looking at the physical residue of a poem as much as a battle. Walk through almost any Bulgarian town and you will find a ulitsa Hadzhi Dimitar and a Stefan Karadzha somewhere on the map. The fighting itself happened a good couple of hours west of us, out past Veliko Tarnovo, so there was never a chapter of this particular story in Shumen; but Shumen was one of the National Revival's strongholds in its own right, and it honours the same generation in its own street names and monuments. I have been here thirteen years and I still find it quietly remarkable that the most quoted line in the language about dying for freedom came out of a campaign that failed inside a fortnight.
Sources and further reading
The account here draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entries for the Битка при Кандлъдере, for Стефан Караджа and for Хаджи Димитър, which is the fuller of the two biographies. Botev's poem is short, and worth reading in a decent translation if you want to understand why a defeated rebel became a national touchstone.