Batak massacre

Batak's role in the April Uprising was to take possession of Ottoman storehouses in surrounding villages and ensure that the insurgents would have provisions. Batak was also supposed to block main thoroughfares and prevent Ottoman soldiers from receiving supplies. If rebel chetas in nearby locations failed to accomplish their tasks, the survivors were supposed to gather in Batak. The only problem expected by the organisers was that Batak would have to defend itself alone against the Ottoman troops. After the April uprising was proclaimed on , part of the armed men in Batak, led by voivode Petar Goranov, attacked the Ottomans. 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. After the first battle, the insurgents from Batak decided to negotiate with Ahmet Agha. He pledged to withdraw his troops on condition that Batak disarmed. However, after the rebels laid down their weapons, the paramilitaries attacked and beheaded them. ==Massacre ==

While the leaders of the Revolutionary committee were surrendering the weapons, some of Batak's residents managed to escape the village. After that, the entire village was surrounded, and no one else was let out. The bashi-bozouk went around the houses, raiding and burning them. Many people decided to hide in the houses of the wealthy or in the church, which had a stronger structure and would protect them from fire.On , those hidden in the House of Bogdan surrendered, as Ahmet Agha had pledged to spare them. The pledge was not kept: in the end, more than 200 men, women and children were led out, stripped out of their valuables and clothes, and brutally killed. The Agha asked some of the wealthy men of Batak to go to his camp and lay down all the arms of the villagers. Amongst them was the mayor, Trendafil Toshev Kerelov, and his son, Petar Trendafilov Kerelov. They had supposedly reached an agreement that if the village disarmed, the paramilitaries would withdraw from Batak. However, once the rebels' arms had been confiscated, all of them were beheaded, burnt alive or impaled. The murder of the leader Trendafil Kerelov was particularly violent, as described by the witness—his son's wife Bosilka: One of Bosilka's children, Vladimir, who was still a baby at his mother's breast, was impaled on a sword in front of her eyes: 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. ==The church ==

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. On the morning of , the bashi-bazouk took over the yard of the church and advanced to the door, but were unable to get in—–the door was barred by the people inside. The defence of the church held for three days, with the paramilitaries shooting ceaselessly at the villagers to make them surrender. Some tried to enter the church from the roof but were unsuccessful, even though they were able to shoot some of the people inside. There was no water in the church, so the people trapped inside tried to dig into the floor with bare hands in order to find underground water. Unable to go on without water, the survivors came outside on the third day. When they opened the doors of the church, ruthless slaughter ensued, where only those who accepted to be converted to Islam were spared. The plans of the Ottoman leader were to populate the village with the converted villagers, but it turned out that there were not enough of them. Before the bashi-bozouk left the village, they tried to burn the church, yet the stone walls remained, and only the wooden furniture and the icons were destroyed. When a Russian commission went to inspect the village 3 months later, the Ottoman authorities tried to bury the bodies, but they could not hide the smell in the air. They also painted the walls of the church, but the blood stains showed up in time. After the massacre at the church, Ahmet Agha summoned all the surviving villagers outside, saying that it would be in order to make a list of the slain and the widows. The better part of the survivors gathered, since those who did not obey would be killed. They were divided in two groups of women and men; then the Ottoman commander made the women stand back and slew all the remaining 300 men. Those women who protested were also raped and killed. On the same day, another 300 people murdered on the wooden bridge beside the school; first their arms were cut off, then their ears, noses, shoulders, and only after that they were finished. == Witness accounts==

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. 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. Schuyler writes, as follows:On every side were human bones, skulls, ribs, and even complete skeletons, heads of girls still adorned with braids of long hair, bones of children, skeletons still encased in clothing. Here was a house the floor of which was white with the ashes and charred bones of thirty persons burned alive there. 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. Since my visit, by orders of the Mutessarif, the Kaimakam of Tatar Bazardjik was sent to Batak, with some lime to aid in the decomposition of the bodies, and to prevent a pestilence. Ahmed Agha, who commanded at the massacre, has been decorated and promoted to the rank of Yuz-bashi... , Bulgaria The third visitor on the site, this time in an official investigatory capacity, was British commissioner Mr. Walter Baring. 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. However, Baring, by and large, confirmed Schuyler's findings, only lowering the estimated number of Bulgarian victims to approx. 12,000. 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". According to British politician and writer Robert More, who visited the town in 1876, Batak had 680 houses (households) and a population of approx. 9,000 just prior to the uprising. Pastor J.F. Clarke, who was in charge of distributing American relief, stated in October 1876 that the surviving population of Batak at the time was around 1,700 people. Contemporary historians R.J. Crampton and Kurt Jonassohn have largely confirmed Schuyler and MacGahan's findings and figures. == Accusations of revisionism ==

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. Bulgarian media reported that the authors were denying the massacre, which raised substantial media controversy. Finally, the conference was cancelled, and several eminent Bulgarian historians (including Georgi Markov, head of the Institute of History of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Bozhidar Dimitrov, director of the National Museum of History in Sofia) qualified Baleva and Brunnbauer's research as "grandiose falsification". Other historians claimed that the principle of academic freedom is violated. Before the media controversy beginning 1889 The Batak Massacre The conference was scheduled to be held in Batak on 18 May 2007 as part of a project entitled "Feindbild Islam – Geschichte und Gegenwart antiislamischer Stereotype in Bulgarien am Beispiel des Mythos vom Massaker in Batak" ("The Image of the Islamic Enemy - the Past and Present of Anti-Islamic stereotypes in Bulgaria as exemplified by the Myth of 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. Reaction in media Bulgarian media reported that the scientists were denying that a massacre had occurred. 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. 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. Ulf Brunnbauer and Martina Baleva apologized and asserted that the outcry was based on a misunderstanding and incorrect information. They stated that their intention had been not to deny the massacre, but to critically look at some paintings and photographs related to it - an issue that Baleva had published an article on a year earlier. They also explained that the term "myth" in a culturological context does not qualify the veracity of an event, but rather refers to the way it is represented and used as a social construct. Some Bulgarian intellectuals criticized what they said was censorship and an encroachment upon the independence of scholarship and a petition was started in protest against the campaign. Kaychev-Baleva debate An important point in Baleva's paper that had been supposed to be read at the conference was that Polish artist Antoni Piotrowski's painting titled "The Batak Massacre" was an important factor for the formation of a national memory of the massacre. 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. One point of Kaychev's article was to show that national memory of the massacre existed long before Piotrowski's painting - for example, the massacre is described in a school history book in 1881, while Piotrowski's painting only appeared in 1892. In response, Baleva conceded that she had been wrong in claiming that Batak had been entirely forgotten before the painting was created. She nevertheless argued, among other things, that Piotrowski's work did have a significant influence on subsequent national memory of the massacre and on the form of the Batak memorial in particular. ==Canonization==

On 3 April 2011, the victims of the Batak massacre were canonized as saints, an act that the Church had not done for more than a century. == See also ==

• Millman, Richard. "The Bulgarian massacres reconsidered." Slavonic and East European Review 58.2 (1980): 218–231. online • • • Schuyler, Eugene, Mr. Schuyler's Preliminary Report on the Moslem Atrocities (1876) online • • • ==External links==