Batak massacre

41°56′33″N 24°13′8″E / 41.94250°N 24.21889°E / 41.94250; 24.21889

Postcard depicting human remains from the Batak massacre. Author and date of the postcard is unknown.

The Batak massacre was a massacre of Bulgarians in the town of Batak by Ottoman irregular cavalry troops in 1876, at the beginning of the Bulgarian April Uprising of 1876. The estimate for the number of casualties ranges from 1,200 to 8,000, depending on source, with the most common estimate being 5,000 casualties.[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.[4][5][6]

The scale of the atrocities caused British commissioner Walter Baring, who had been dispatched by the British embassy in Constantinople to verify the events, to describe the tragedy "as perhaps the most heinous crime that has stained the history of the present century".[7]

The events at Batak caused a public outcry across Europe, mobilized ordinary people and famous intellectuals to demand a reform of the Ottoman model of governance of the Bulgarian lands, and eventually led to the re-establishment of a separate Bulgarian state in 1878.[8][9]

  1. ^ Religion, Ethnicity and Contested Nationhood in the Former Ottoman Space, Editors J. Rgen Nielsen, Jørgen S. Nielsen, Publisher BRILL, 2011, ISBN 9004211330, p. 282.
  2. ^ Reid, James J. (2000). "Batak 1876: A massacre and its significance". Journal of Genocide Research. 2 (3): 375–409. doi:10.1080/713677621. S2CID 72201730. Retrieved 24 April 2022.
  3. ^ More, 1877, pp. 89–90
  4. ^ "The Batak Massacre (1876) | Bulgarian Horrors | J. A. MacGahan | Turkish Atrocities | The W.T. Stead Resource Site". attackingthedevil.co.uk.
  5. ^ "[W]illiam [E]wart Gladstone, "Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East" (1876) | W.T. Stead Resource Site". attackingthedevil.co.uk.
  6. ^ MacGahan, Januarius A. (1876). Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria, Letters of the Special Commissioner of the "Daily News", J.A. MacGahan, Esq. London: Bradbury Agnew and Co. pp. 22–33. Retrieved 13 May 2023.
  7. ^ Seton-Watson, Robert (1918). The Rise of Nationality in the Balkans (PDF). p. 84.
  8. ^ Schuyler, Eugene (10 August 1876). "Mr. Schuyler's Preliminary Report on the Moslem Atrocities".
  9. ^ Clarke, J.F.; O. Dwight, Henry (1977). "Reporting the Bulgarian Massacres: The Suffering in Bulgaria, by Henry O. Dwight and the Rev. J. F. Clarke (1876)". Southeastern Europe/L'Europe du Sud-Est. 4 (1): 278–279. doi:10.1163/187633377X00177.