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 April Uprising. 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]

However, all three non-Bulgarian and non-Ottoman witnesses who visited the site in the wake of the massacre agree that the brutality of the crime was unparalleled and testify to the existence of an enormous number of corpses of women and children, i.e., non-combatants, in an advanced stage of decomposition, who had been slaughtered after the rebels and the town had surrendered.^[4][5][6]

Uprising in Batak

 

Ottoman bashi-bazouk, 1877-78

Batak's role in the April Uprising was to take possession of the storehouses in the surrounding villages and to ensure that the insurgents would have provisions, as well as to block the main thoroughfares and prevent Ottoman soldiers from receiving supplies. Batak's task was also to handle the nearby Muslim villages of Chepino and Korovo if they tried to prevent the uprising.

If chetas in nearby locations failed in accomplishing their tasks, 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, but they were willing to take the risk. After the April uprising was proclaimed on 2 May [O.S. 20 April] 1876, part of the armed men in Batak, led by voivode Petar Goranov, attacked the Ottomans.^[7] 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.^{[8][9][10][11][12][13][14]}

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.^[15][16]

Massacre

 

Batak's St. Nedelya Church in the 1880s

While some of the leaders of the Revolutionary committee were surrendering the weapons, others managed to escape the village, but immediately afterwards, the entire village was surrounded, and no one else was let out. The bashi-bozouk went to the houses and raided them; many were burnt and they shot at everyone and everything. Many of the 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.^[17]

On 14 May [O.S. 2 May] 1876, those hidden in the House of Bogdan surrendered, as Ahmet Agha had pledged to spare them. More than 200 men, women and children were led out, stripped out of their valuables and clothes, in order not to stain them with their blood, and then 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, the Bulgarians were instead caught captive—once their arms had been confiscated, all of them were beheaded, burnt alive or impaled.^[18][19]

The murder of the leader Trendafil Kerelov was particularly violent, as described by the witness—his son's wife Bosilka:

My father-in-law went to meet the Bashi-Bаzouk when the village was surrounded and saw Ahmet Agha who said he required the weapons to be collected from the villagers. Trendafil went and had them collected. After they were handed in, he was shot at with a pistol, the ball from which grazed his eye. I then heard Ahmet Agha give the order with his own lips to impale and roast Trendafil. The words he used were "Shishak aor", meaning in Turkish, to put on the spit—such as the slices called kabobs (i.e., as a shish kebab). 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. He lived for half an hour during the awful event... A number of Bulgarian women were present besides myself. We were encircled by Bashi-Bazouks who hemmed us in on all sides so that we were made to see what was done to Trendafil. They thought he had more money concealed and was unwilling to give it up and therefore they tortured and killed him.^[20]

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:

At the time this was happening, Ahmet Agha's son took my child from my back and cut him to pieces, there in front of me. The burnt bones of Trendafil stood there for one month and only then they were buried.^[21]

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.^[22][4]

The church

The Bulgarian Orthodox church "Sveta Nedelya" was the last keep of the rebels. Ottoman paramilitaries destroyed the school, where 200 people were burnt alive, hidden in the basement. Then they headed straight to the church, where they dug holes into the fence of the yard and started shooting at everyone there. The most terrifying chapter of the massacre happened on the night of 14 May [O.S. 2 May] 1876 in that very yard.

 

The interior of the church in Batak two years after the bloody suppression of the April Uprising and the massacre of the inhabitants of the village. Author and exact date not known.

On the morning of 15 May [O.S. 3 May] 1876, the bashi-bazouk took over the yard and advanced to the door of the church, but were unable to get in—–the door was barred by the people inside.^[23][24] The defence of the church held for three days, with the paramilitaries shooting ceaselessly at the villagers in order to make them surrender.^[25] Some tried to enter the church from the roof but were unsuccessful, even though they were able to shoot some of the people inside.^[26] There was no water in the church, so the people trapped inside had to resort to the oil in the lamps and the blood of their own dead. They tried to dig into the floor with bare hands in order to find underground water.

On the third day, the survivors decided to go outside, as they realized their fate had been decided. When they opened the doors of the church, they found Ahmet Agha waiting for them. Ruthless slaughter ensued, where only those who accepted to be converted to Islam were spared.^[27] 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 some Russian commissions 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.^[28] 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.^[29]

Witness reports

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.^[4] 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, which was ultimately published in the Daily News. The report further estimated the total number of Bulgarian casualties, rebels and non-combatants alike, at a minimum of 15,000, versus only 155 Muslim casualties, of whom 12 women and children.^[30] Schuyler accented most of all on the extreme level of brutality demonstrated, above all, in Batak, which, in his opinion, had been completely unnecessary, given the utter failure of the rebellion and the quick surrender of the villagers.^[31] 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..."^[32][4]

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, then, were all women and girls. From my saddle I counted about a hundred skulls, not including those that were hidden beneath the others in the ghastly heap nor those that were scattered far and wide through the fields. The skulls were nearly all separated from the rest of the bones – the skeletons were nearly all headless.

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. Then as many of them as cared would violate her, and the last man would kill her or not as the humour took him....

We looked into the church which had been blackened by the burning of the woodwork, but not destroyed, nor even much injured. It was a low building with a low roof, supported by heavy irregular arches, that as we looked in seemed scarcely high enough for a tall man to stand under. What we saw there was too frightful for more than a hasty glance.

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. I had never imagined anything so horrible. We all turned away sick and faint, and staggered out of the fearful pest house glad to get into the street again.

We walked about the place and saw the same thing repeated over and over a hundred times. Skeletons of men with the clothing and flesh still hanging to and rotting together; skulls of women, with the hair dragging in the dust. bones of children and infants everywhere. Here they show us a house where twenty people were burned alive; there another where a dozen girls had taken refuge, and been slaughtered to the last one, as their bones amply testified. Everywhere horrors upon horrors..."^[33]

 

A monument of Januarius MacGahan in Elena, 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 Istanbul that his enquiry would turn into a cover-up.^[34] 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".^[6][35]

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.^[36] 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.^[37]

Contemporary historians R.J. Crampton and Kurt Jonassohn have largely confirmed Schuyler and MacGahan's findings and figures.^[38][39][40]

Revisionist assessments

Since the rise of Postcolonial Theory in the 1960s, there have been historians, in particular, from the USA, where the theory is most influential, who have tried to disparage the events at Batak. While Postcolonialism severely criticises the exploitation of colonised peoples and their lands and the impact of colonialism on their identity, it exclusively focuses on Western powers, without paying any attention to either the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire or pre-19th century China. 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.^[41][42][43]

Due to the limited self-governance given to non-Muslim believers under the millet system (not at all applicable to the Bulgarians, who were placed under the rule of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which did its best to stamp out any national identity and hellenise them), attitudes to the Ottoman Empire among postcolonial scholars have been particularly exuberant, and Ottomans have been hailed as a paragon of multiculturalism and treated as a victim of Western colonialism rather than as an oppressor in their own right.^[44][45] 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.^[44][46] This approach can be observed in, for example, Japanese scholar Tetsuya Sahara's summary of what happened in Batak:^[47]

"In light of this story, we can conclude that the people of Batak were attacked because they had started an uprising that aroused serious anxiety on the part of their Muslim neighbours. In other words, they gave the pretext for the their attack."

Thus, American historian Richard Millman has accused Schuyler of visiting personally only 11 of the villages that he reported on,^[48] even though Schuyler states that on the first page of his report. Millman (himself described by a fellow historian as "being irredeemably pro-Turkish"^[49]) has also estimated the number of Bulgarian casualties in the entire uprising at less than 3,700^[50] and has claimed that the accepted reality of the massacres is largely a myth.^[51] In true Postcolonial fashion, Millman has blamed the figures and descriptions in Schuyler and MacGahan's reports on their pre-existing bias, "othering", contempt and anti-Turkish sentiment^[52] and has stated that Baring's report had also been greatly flawed as he had merely used the lowest figure provided by Bulgarians and the American missionaries at Constantinople.^[51] Millman's figures have basically been repeated by historian Donald Quataert, who has stated that some 1,000 Muslims were killed by Christian Bulgarians and some 3,700 Christians were killed by Muslims.^[53]

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.^[54] While Schuyler has rightfully been criticised that the estimate of 8.9 members per household (8000 inhabitants in 900 households) may be too high, Edlib Effendi's estimate of 2.9 members per household is simply unrealistic. Ottoman Almanacs estimated approx. 6.8 members per Non-Muslim household in the Pazarcık kaza of the Filibe Sanjak, where Batak is located, for 1874–75.^[55] Given the number of households provided by Edlib Efendi and Schuyler, the population would have ranged between 3,400 and 6,100.

However, this does not mean that any of the two figures is right. And given how politically charged the matter is, we will probably never know for sure. As a comparison with similar successful artisanal Bulgarian upland towns at the time, Karlovo had a population of 9,500 in 1877,^[56] Sopot numbered 4,200 people in 1872^[57] and Kalofer stood at 7,000 inhabitants in 1875.^[58] All of them started haemorrhaging population as early as 1878, as people started moving to lowland areas, the capital or the coast. Tryavna had a population of approx. 4,000 in 1877,^[59] whereas Koprivshtitsa and Kotel had 5,753 and 7,481 inhabitants, respectively, but in 1880, when outmigration had already started.^[60]

Controversional, pro-Turkish American historian Justin McCarthy conflates the Batak massacre with the much smaller and unrelated "Boyadzhik massacre" (spelled "Boajic").^[61]

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".^[62] Other historians claimed that the principle of academic freedom is violated.

Before the media controversy beginning

 

Antoni Piotrowski 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.^[63]

Reaction in media

Bulgarian media reported that the scientists were denying that a massacre had occurred.^[64] 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.^[65] 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.^[66] Ulf Brunnbauer and Martina Baleva apologized and asserted that the outcry was based on a misunderstanding and incorrect information.^[67] They stated that their intention had been not to deny the massacre, but to critically look at some paintings and photographs related to it^[68] - an issue that Baleva had published an article on a year earlier.^[69] 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.^[70] Some Bulgarian intellectuals criticized what they said was censorship and an encroachment upon the independence of scholarship^[71] and a petition was started in protest against the campaign.^[72]

Kaychev-Baleva debate

 

Icon of the Saints from Batak

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.^[73]

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.^[74]

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.^[75]

See also

• Chios massacre
• Ottoman Bulgaria
• Ottoman Empire
• List of massacres in Ottoman Bulgaria
• Stara Zagora massacre

References

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. Schuyler, Eugene (10 August 1876). "Mr. Schuyler's Preliminary Report on the Moslem Atrocities".
5. 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.
6. Seton-Watson, Robert (1918). The Rise of Nationality in the Balkans (PDF). p. 84.
7. Бойчо (Ангел П. Горанов), "Въстанието и клането в Батак". София, 1892 (repr. София, 1991)
8. At that time the massacre on Christians in Batak took place, when Bulgarian speaking Muslims from Barutin murdered Christians. Region, Regional Identity and Regionalism in Southeastern Europe, Klaus Roth, Ulf Brunnbauer, LIT Verlag Münster, 2010, ISBN 3-8258-1387-8, p. 186.
9. The slaughter at Batak by the Pomak Bashi-Bazouks under the command of Ahmed Agha Barutin has been variously estimated to be between 2000 and 5000 persons of both sexes. "Accounts and papers of the House of Commons", Great Britain. Parliament. Ordered to be printed, 1877, p. 50.
10. Прочутото Баташко клане е извършено от среднородопските помаци под водачеството на Ахмед ага Барутанлията. "Време за разхвърляне на камъни" Николай Хайтов, Издателство "Хр. Ботев", 1994, стр. 64.
11. Ахмед ага Барутанлията – палачът на Батак, изклал там 8000 българи, също помак. Че въпросните палачи на българите са помаци, сиреч българи мохамедани, споменавам чак сега... Български хроники. 1878–1943, Том 3, Стефан Цанев, TRUD Publishers, 2008, ISBN 954-528-861-2, стр. 30.
12. "През време на Перущенското и Баташкото клане никое друго село в Рупчоската околия не беше изложено на същата опасност освен с. Широка лъка. Това село като най-събудено и богато башибозукът от околните помашки села, които бяха заели участие в Перущица и Батак, дошли в с. Широка лъка...Исторически преглед, Том 28, Българско историческо дружество, Институт за история (Българска академия на науките), 1972, стр. 106.
13. Some Pomaks aided in the suppression by the Turks, perhaps participating in a massacre of Bulgarians in the mountain village of Batak. Encyclopedia of European peoples, Catherine Mason, Carl Waldman, Infobase Publishing, 2006, ISBN 0-8160-4964-5, p. 607.
14. ... and the Pomak Ahmet Agha Barutanlijata was at any event responsible for the mascare of Batak... "The Turks of Bulgaria: the history, culture and political fate of a minority, Kemal H. Karpat, Isis Press, 1990, ISBN 975-428-017-7, p. 192.
15. Stoyanov, 1884, Chap. VIII The Rebellion in Batak.
16. More, 1877, p. 105
17. More, 1877, p. 111
18. Stoyanov, 1884, Chap. VIII The Rebellion in Batak.
19. More, 1877, p. 111
20. More, 1877, pp. 107–108
21. More, 1877, p. 108
22. 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. 9–88. Retrieved 13 May 2023.
23. More, 1877, pp. 82–119
24. Stoyanov, 1884, pp. 703–705
25. More, 1877, p. 111
26. More, 1877, p. 112
27. More, 1877, p. 89, quote: From 200 to 300 men and women accepted this alternative and by that means escaped slaughter.
28. Stoyanov, 1884, Chap. VIII The Rebellion in Batak.
29. Stoyanov, 1884, Chap. VIII The Rebellion in Batak.
30. MacGahan, 1876, p. 91, 94
31. MacGahan, 1876, p. 95–96
32. MacGahan, Januarius A. (1876). "Mr. Schuyler's Preliminary Report". Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria, Letters of the Special Commissioner of the "Daily News," J.A. MacGahan, Esq. London: Bradbury Agnew and Co. p. 93. Retrieved 13 May 2023.
33. MacGahan, Januarius (22 August 1876). "The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria: Horrible Scenes at Batak". Daily News. pp. 5–6.
34. Larkin, Brendan (2009), The Times and the Bulgarian Massacres, p. 75
35. More, 1877, pp. 89–90
36. More, 1877, p. 93
37. More, 1877, p. 90
38. Crampton, Richard (2005), "The struggle for political independence and the liberation of 1878", A Concise History of Bulgaria, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 75–85, ISBN 0-521-85085-1
39. Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bulgaria: History" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
40. Genocide and gross human rights violations: in comparative perspective, Kurt Jonassohn, 1999, p.210
41. Ștefănescu, Bogdan (2022). . American, British and Canadian Studies Journal. 38: 139–162. doi:10.2478/abcsj-2022-0008. S2CID 253239191. Archived from the original on 6 November 2022. Retrieved 13 May 2023.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
42. Skórczewski, Dariusz (2014). "Post-colonial Poland – (Im)possible Project" (PDF). Teksty Drugie. 1: 82–95.
43. Alexiev, Alex (28 February 2019). "The Ottomans Were a True Colonial Empire". Bulgaria Analytica.
44. Freitag, Jason. "Empires and Diversity: Inclusion and Control in Roman, Mughal and Ottoman Polity" (PDF).
45. Eraslan, Cezmi (December 2021). "On the Similarity of Colonialist Policies Implemented Against the Ottoman Empire and the Far East: The Bargains Over Korea After the Shimonoseki Agreement". Belleten Türk Tarih Kurumu. 85 (304).
46. Detrez, Raymond (14–15 December 2001). "Historic Realities and Contemporary Perceptions". Antwerp.
47. Sahara, Tetsuya (2011). M. Hakan Yavuz (ed.). "Two Different Images. Bulgarian and English Sources on the Batak Massacre". War and Diplomacy. The University of Utah Press. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the Treaty of Berlin: 494. ISBN 978-1-60781-185-5.
48. Millman, 1980, p. 230
49. Shannon, Richard (1981). "Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875-1878 [Review]". The English Historical Review. XCVI (CCCLXXVIII): 170. doi:10.1093/ehr/XCVIII.CCCLXXXIX.721.
50. Millman, 1980, pp. 230-231
51. Millman, 1980, pp. 218
52. Millman, 1980, p. 229
53. Quataert, Donald. "The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 ", Cambridge University Press 2005, pp. 69
54. Larkin, Brendan (2009). "The Times and the Bulgarian Massacres". Middletown, Connecticut. p. 78.
55. Koyuncu, Aşkın (1 December 2013). "1877-1878 Osmanlı-Rus Harbi Öncesinde Şarkî Rumeli Nüfusu" [The Population of Eastern Rumelia Before the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War]. Avrasya Etüdleri (in Turkish). 19 (44): 188.
56. Muchinov, 2019, p. 16
57. Muchinov, 2019, p. 23
58. Muchinov, 2019, p. 28
59. "Град Трявна – Българският Нюрнберг от Възраждането" [Tryavna, the Bulgarian Nurenberg from the Revival]. Българка (in Bulgarian). 27 December 2015.
60. "Непризнатите преброявания в историята на българската статистика" (PDF). Статистика (in Bulgarian). National Statistical Institute (2): 167. 2014.
61. McCarthy, Justin. Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 The Darwin Press Inc., Princeton, Sixth Printing 2008, p. 62-63
62. "The Batak Massacre is fact, not myth" Letter from 26 bulgarian historians on Baleva and Brunnbauer's work 24 July 2012 at the Wayback Machine (Bulgarian)
63. Batak als bulgarischer Erinnerungsort 11 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine (in German)
64. German Scientists Deny 5 Centuries of Bulgaria's History Sofia News Agency, 24 April 2007
65. Batak massacre: Provocation Against Bulgarian National History by Olga Yoncheva, news.bg website, 25 April 2007
66. Bulgarian Academy of Science: "The Myth of Batak" is a pseudo-scientific show by Olga Yoncheva, news.bg website, 26 April 2007
67. "The Batak massacre: a sacred subject", The Sofia Echo by Petar Kostadinov, 7 May 2007
68. Monitor: The funding comes from Turkey 6 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine by Dessislava Todorova, monitor.bg website, 25 April 2007 (in Bulgarian)
69. Балева, Мартина. 2006. Кой (по)каза истината за Батак. В.Култура, Брой 17 (2412), 03 май 2006 г. 26 December 2007 at the Wayback Machine (in Bulgarian)
70. Bulgarien: Umstrittene Mythen by Marina Liptcheva-Weiss, Deutsche Welle website, 26 April 2007 (in German)
71. Der bulgarische Bilderstreit by Ivaylo Ditchev, die tageszeitung, 30 April 2007 (in German)
72. Петиция от група историци по повод кампанията срещу проекта "Батак като място на българската памет" 5 June 2009 at the Wayback Machine (in Bulgarian)
73. Как Батак влезе в българския национален разказ Наум Кайчев, в. "Култура", 21 юни 2006 г
74. http://www.mediapool.bg/show/?storyid=128167 Хиатусът Батак. Мартина Балева, в. "Култура", 7 септември 2006 г.
75. [Victims in Batak and Apriltsi to Be Canonised]. Archived from the original on 31 August 2011. Retrieved 3 April 2011.

Primary sources

• Millman, Richard. "The Bulgarian massacres reconsidered." Slavonic and East European Review 58.2 (1980): 218–231. online
• 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. 9–88. Retrieved 13 May 2023.
• More, Robert (1877). Under the Balkans: Notes of a Visit to the District of Philippopolis in 1876. ISBN 1376517965.
• Schuyler, Eugene, Mr. Schuyler's Preliminary Report on the Moslem Atrocities (1876) online
• Stoyanoff, Zahary (1913). Pages from the Autobiography of a Bulgarian Insurgent. Translated by Potter, M.W. London: Edward Arnold. Retrieved 15 July 2018 – via Internet Archive.
• Stoyanov, Zahary (1884). Записки по българските въстания [Pages from the Autobiography of a Bulgarian Insurgent] (in Bulgarian).
• Muchinov, Ventsislav (2019). "Демографско развитие на Карлово, Сопот, Калофер и Аджар през Възраждането" [Demographic Development of Karlovo, Sopot, Kalofer and Adzhar during the Bulgarian Revival] (PDF). Анамнеза (in Bulgarian). 1: 13–41. ISSN 1312-9295.

External links

• , The Bronx Times