Batak massacre

[1][2][3] The indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatant civilians at Batak shocked the general public in Western Europe and came to be known in the press as the Bulgarian Horrors and the Crime of the Century.

[10] They succeeded in eliminating part of the Ottoman leaders, but were reported to the authorities, which sent a paramilitary detachment of some 5,000 irregular soldiers (bashi-bazouk), led by Ahmet Aga from Barutin which surrounded the town.

They then took from him all the money he had, stripped off his clothes, put out his eyes and his teeth, and impaled him slowly until the stake came out of his mouth; after which they roasted him on the fire, he being then alive.

[24]Januarius MacGahan, a journalist of the New York Herald and the British Daily News wrote of the terrible happenings after his visit to Batak in the company of Eugene Schuyler.

They described the burned and destroyed city with the stench of the rot of thousands of piled dismembered corpses and skeletons of innocent victims, including young women, children and unborn babies torn out from the wombs of their pregnant mothers.

[25][8] After the Ottoman paramilitaries destroyed Batak's school, burning 200 people hidden in the basement alive, they headed to the Bulgarian Orthodox church "Sveta Nedelya", which ended up being the last keep of the residents of the village.

According to the first eyewitness on the site, American diplomat Eugene Schuyler, the number of victims at Batak stood at around 5,000, out of a population of 8,000 people in 900 households.

[8] Batak was only one out of 11 villages and 3 towns that Schuyler visited in person for the preparation of his report on the uprising, subsequently published in the Daily News.

[33] Most of all, Schuyler emphasized the extreme level of brutality demonstrated, above all, in Batak, which—given the failure of the rebellion and the quick surrender of the villager—had been completely unnecessary.

Here was the spot where the village notable Trendafil was spitted on a pike and then roasted, and where he is now buried; there was a foul hole full of decomposing bodies; here a mill dam filled with swollen corpses; here the school house, where 200 women and children had taken refuge there were burned alive, and here the church and churchyard, where fully a thousand half-decayed forms were still to be seen, filling the enclosure in a heap several feet high, arms, feet, and heads protruding from the stones which had vainly been thrown there to hide them, and poisoning all the air.

Ahmed Agha, who commanded at the massacre, has been decorated and promoted to the rank of Yuz-bashi...[35][8] Another witness to the aftermath of the Massacre was American journalist Januarius MacGahan, who described the following scene: There was not a roof left, not a whole wall standing; all was a mass of ruins... We looked again at the heap of skulls and skeletons before us, and we observed that they were all small and that the articles of clothing intermingled with them and lying about were all women's apparel.

These women had all been beheaded...and the procedure seems to have been, as follows: They would seize a woman, strip her carefully to her chemise, laying aside articles of clothing that were valuable, with any ornaments and jewels she might have about her.

An immense number of bodies had been partially burnt there and the charred and blackened remains seemed to fill it half way up to the low dark arches and make them lower and darker still, were lying in a state of putrefaction too frightful to look upon.

Baring was actually the reason why Schuyler made the trip in the first place: he was a known Turcophile, and given the British Empire's strongly pro-Ottoman position, there was fear at the American community in Constantinople that his enquiry would turn into a cover-up.

As for Batak itself, Baring reconfirmed the figure of 5,000 casualties and bluntly described the massacre "as perhaps the most heinous crime that has stained the history of the present century".

This has been criticised severely by Eastern European scholars, who have asserted that the harm their peoples have suffered under foreign imperial rule was neither lesser, nor less important just because their colonisers came on land rather than by sea or because they themselves are white rather than brown or black.

[47][48] Even the practice of devshirme, or blood tax, has been described in favourable terms, while colonised non-Muslim peoples on the Balkans have, at best, been accused of disloyalty to the Sultan (if rebelling) or blamed for complicity in Western racism and prejudice.

Millman (himself described by a fellow historian as "being irredeemably pro-Turkish"[52]) has also estimated the number of Bulgarian casualties in the entire uprising at less than 3,700[53] and has claimed that the accepted reality of the massacres is largely a myth.

[56] As the fact of the massacre is undeniable, it is usually the number of casualties that comes under fire by "playing with" the estimate for the town's pre-existing population, e.g., by using the figure of 1,441 people living in 494 households provided by Ottoman official Edib Effendi.

As a comparison with similar successful artisanal Bulgarian upland towns at the time, Karlovo had a population of 9,500 in 1877,[59] Sopot numbered 4,200 people in 1872[60] and Kalofer stood at 7,000 inhabitants in 1875.

[64] In May 2007, a public conference was scheduled in Bulgaria, aiming to present research, held by Martina Baleva and Ulf Brunnbauer, on the formation of national memory for the Batak massacre.

The project was led by Ulf Brunnbauer and Martina Baleva from the Institute of Eastern European Studies at the University of Berlin, who were also expected to read papers at the conference.

[67] There was a public outcry, widespread protests and immediate reactions on the part of the Mayor of Batak, Prime minister Sergei Stanishev, and President Georgi Parvanov.

[68] The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences rejected the possibility of providing a place for the conference, stating that there is a huge amount of material proof and documents for the massacres at Batak and Perushtitsa.

[70] They stated that their intention had been not to deny the massacre, but to critically look at some paintings and photographs related to it[71] - an issue that Baleva had published an article on a year earlier.

Naum Kaychev, assistant professor at Sofia University's Faculty of History, criticized this view in an article seeking to point out certain contradictions and factual errors in Baleva's paper that had been supposed to be read at the cancelled conference.