Boyadzhik massacre

The Boyadzhik massacre (Bulgarian: Бояджишко клане) was the massacre of 145 Bulgarian civilians committed by irregular Ottoman troops in the Bulgarian village of Boyadzhik on and after 24 May [O.S. 11 May] 1876.[1][2][3][4]

The massacre took place in the wake of the Bulgarian April Uprising, even though Boyadzhik did not participate in the insurrection and was located hundreds of kilometres away from the scene of any hostilities. The grandfather of the inventor of the first electronic digital computer, John Vincent Atanasoff, was among the victims.[5][6][7][2][3]

Massacre

The massacre took place on and after 11 May, when the villagers gathered to celebrate the Bulgarian Education and Culture and Slavonic Literature Day. A rumour made believe the local Ottoman administrator, Şefket paşa, that the villagers were going to rebel, and he dispatched a band of Circassian bashi-bazouk to Boyadzhik.

Ottoman bashi-bazouk, mid-1870s

The paramilitaries attacked the village from all sides. Unable to escape, they gathered in the local church, but were forced to come out after the bashi-bazouk started firing shells against it. An indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children ensued afterwards.[1][2]

The village was subsequently sacked and torched, and the Circassian paramilitaries divided the villagers' possessions amongst themselves. The surviving villagers eventually received relief from the American Protestant mission in Plovdiv.[8]

The grandfather of John Atanasoff was one of the victims. In his memoirs, John Atanasoff writes:[3]

My grandmother ran, while the child (my father) was in the hands of my grandfather ... a shot sounded ... one of the Turkish soldiers shot my grandfather right in the chest, he fell dead, a ricocheted bullet hurt my father and left a scar for the rest of his life, as a terrible reminder of those events.

There is a list of a total of 145 confirmed victims; men, women and children and two Orthodox priests.[2][1]

A fundraising campaign for a memorial to the victims was launched in 2019.[4]

In his description of the April Uprising, American writer Justin McCarthy confuses the much smaller and unrelated "Boyadzhik massacre" (spelled "Boajic") with the biggest Ottoman atrocity committed at Batak,[9] which caused an enormous public outcry in Europe (dubbed "The Bulgarian Horrors"[10][11][12][13]) and led to the Bulgarian autonomy proposal of 1876.

McCarthy is an Armenian Genocide denialist and a recipient of grants from the Institute of Turkish Studies.[14] He has been criticised by many of his colleagues for attempting to whitewash Ottoman history.[15][16][17][18]

Plan to Attack Yambol

The nearby town of Yambol narrowly avoided the same fate on 24 May [O.S. 19 May] 1876, when it was encircled by the same band of bashi-bazouk led by Şefket paşa.[19][20]

The town was saved by local Ottoman dignitary İsmail Hakkı Paşa, who ordered the paralimitaris to stand down and disband. İsmail Hakkı was of Crimean Tatar descent and hailed from the nearby village of Kabile.

One of his sons, Ahmet Tevfik Pasha, eventually went on to become the last Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. When İsmail Hakkı Paşa passed away, he was buried in Yambol's mosque and had a monument built in honour of him. A street in Yambol bore his name until Bulgaria's occupation by the Soviet Union in 1944.

See also

References
  1. "135 години от Бояджишкото клане през 1876 г." [135th Anniversary of the Boyadzhik Massacre]. Bulgarian Patriarchate. 18 May 2011.
  2. "The first electronic computer with a binary number system. Forgotten ABC Project". Sudo Null company. 2019.
  3. Atanasoff, John V. (1985). "The Beginning". Sofia: Narodna Mladezh Publishers. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) (Bulgarian version of his 1984 paper).
  4. "Дарителска кампания събира средства за мемориал на жертвите на Бояджишкото клане" [Fundraising Campaign for a Memorial of the Victims of the Boyadzhik Massacre]. BTA. 8 November 2021.
  5. "ATANASOFF, JOHN VINCENT". Who's Who in America 1995. Vol. 1 (A-K) (49th ed.). New Providence, NJ: Marquis Who's Who. 1994. p. 129. ISBN 0837901596. Retrieved January 22, 2020 – via Internet Archive.
  6. The first electronic digital computer working on a binary code and using mathematical logic had been created in 1937-1942 by the American physicist of the Irish-Bulgarian origin John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995.) For more see: Mikhail Mikhailov (2005) Key to the Vedas, Belarusian Information Center, p. 62, ISBN 9856701872.
  7. My mother (she is still alive, at 89 years of age) is a typical American with a mixture of Irish, English and French blood, so that the Bulgarian language was never spoken in our house. For more see: Blagovest Sendov (2003) John Atanasoff: The Electronic Prometheus, St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, Sofia, p. 57, ISBN 954071849X.
  8. Clark, James F. The Pen and the Sword. p. 438
  9. McCarthy, Justin. Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 The Darwin Press Inc., Princeton, Sixth Printing 2008, p. 62-63
  10. 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. Retrieved 29 September 2013.
  11. "No. 24365". The London Gazette. 19 September 1876. pp. 5140–5144.
  12. "[W]illiam [E]wart Gladstone, "Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East" (1876) | W.T. Stead Resource Site". attackingthedevil.co.uk.
  13. "Gladstone, Disraeli and the Bulgarian Horrors".
  14. Edward Tabor Linenthal (2001) Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum. New York: Viking, 1995.
  15. Auron, Yair. The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003, p. 248.
  16. Charny, Israel W. Encyclopedia of Genocide, Vol. 2. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 1999, p. 163.
  17. Dadrian, Vahakn N. "Ottoman Archives and the Armenian Genocide" in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics. Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.) New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1992, p. 284.
  18. Hovannisian, Richard G. "Denial of the Armenian Genocide in Comparison with Holocaust Denial" in Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.) Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999, p. 210.
  19. "Кой спаси Ямбол от кланета и опожаряване?" [Who Prevented the Torching and Slaughter of Yambol?]. Yambol Life. 20 May 2015.
  20. "Ески Джамия "Ебу Бекир"" [Ebu Bekir Eski Mosque]. Visit Yambol. 2014.

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