National awakening of Bulgaria

The Bulgarian national revival is considered to have started with the work of Saint Paisius of Hilendar, who opposed Greek domination of Bulgaria's culture and religion.

These ideas were stimulated by the work of Johann Gottfried Herder in particular, and were reinforced by Russian Slavophiles and the model Serbian nationalism under the stimulus of scholar-publicists such as Vuk Karadžić.

Levski, Karavelov, and Botev formed the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee, the first real independence organization, with a clear plan for revolution.

Many villages were pillaged and around twelve thousand people were massacred, the majority of them in the insurgent towns of Batak, Perushtitza and Bratzigovo in the area of Plovdiv.

The massacres aroused a broad public reaction led by liberal Europeans such as William Ewart Gladstone, who launched a campaign against the "Bulgarian Horrors".

The campaign was supported by a number of European intellectuals and public figures, such as Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Garibaldi.

The enormous public outcry which the April Uprising had caused in Europe gave the Russians a long-waited chance to realise their long-term objectives with regard to the Ottoman Empire.

The Russian efforts, which were concentrated on ironing out the differences and contradictions between the Great Powers, eventually led to the Conference of Constantinople held in December 1876 – January 1877 in the Ottoman capital.

The conference was attended by delegates from Russia, Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy and was supposed to bring a peaceful and lasting settlement of the Bulgarian Question.

The delegates eventually gave their consent to a compromise variant, which excluded southern Macedonia and Thrace, and denied Bulgaria access to the Aegean Sea, but otherwise incorporated all other regions in the Ottoman Empire inhabited by Bulgarians (illustration, left).

A Principality of Bulgaria was created, between the Danube and the Stara Planina range, with its seat at the old Bulgarian capital of Veliko Turnovo, and including Sofia.

Between the Stara Planina and the line of the Rhodope Range, which runs about 50 km north of the modern border between Bulgaria and Greece, the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia was created.