Boyko Vassilev on the April Uprising: The Important Thing Is to Ask Ourselves Questions About Bulgaria

The conversation about Bulgaria and love for Bulgaria is not just to boast, to fall in love with ourselves, but also to understand what is not working for us, what is limping, and what we can fix. This was said by Boyko Vasilev - executive producer and host of the program "Panorama" on Bulgarian National Television. He participated in a conference in the BTA press club in Ruse on the topic "150 years since the April Uprising - 1876, and the commemoration of the decision made in December 1875 to declare an uprising by the Giurgevo Revolutionary Committee". The forum is organized by BTA.

The conference is part of the initiative of BNT, BTA and BNR "14 centuries Bulgaria in Europe" - for the commemoration of anniversaries in Bulgarian history with significance for the common European history until 2032, when 1400 years will be celebrated since the creation in 632 of the first Bulgarian state formation on European territory - Old Great Bulgaria. 

Earlier today, the places where the Giurgevo Revolutionary Committee met and the Romanian port from which Hristo Botev's detachment boarded the ship "Radetzky", as well as the Pantheon of the Revivalists and the tomb of Zahari Stoyanov in Ruse, were honored as part of the initiative of Bulgarian National Television, the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency and the Bulgarian National Radio "14 centuries Bulgaria in Europe".

"Today's journey is very personal for me. For the first time in my life, I saw the place in Giurgevo where these boys gathered and decided to risk everything to save Bulgaria," Vasilev said at the conference in Ruse.

According to him, these events and Zahari Stoyanov's great story about them set the framework not just for a life, but for a way of thinking. 

I will be very happy if these conversations of ours, which begin today, reach the big topics that April 1876 puts before us. The big topics, said Vasilev.

"Imagine who these boys are who are gathering from Giurgevo. Stefan Stambolov, who became one of the first among them, is 21 years old. Panayot Volov and Zahari Stoyanov are only 25 years old. And these are not people who want to participate. They want to lead. Not just want to lead, they want to convince much older, much more mature people to charge everything, to die, to sacrifice their children, their families, their properties, to achieve what? What to achieve? These people were relatively rich. They had the opportunity to prosper and accumulate money. But they say that there is something much more important than that. This is not even formal freedom, because with reforms in the Ottoman Empire there could have been formal freedom," Boyko Vasilev commented. According to him, the revolutionaries wanted to achieve the greatest freedom – "to say that you can decide for yourself autonomously".

"Zahari Stoyanov in "Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings" also raises other questions – what can really motivate Bulgarians to go into revolt, what makes them do their common cause? And what then leads them to greatness and to failure? We must ask ourselves these questions. Not to rush to answer them, because they are not very simple. But what is the path to greatness and the path to failure for us Bulgarians? What is the logic of the Bulgarian common cause? Do we revolt because we are sure that someone from outside will help us or the opposite? Do we revolt because we believe in the miracle that lies in this prophecy, used by the apostles in 1876, that "Turkey will fall"? Or do we have the full consciousness that we will sacrifice something, but we will achieve much more? But what we will sacrifice is ourselves. Not others. Ourselves," the journalist added.

According to him, these are very difficult questions, the answers to which we will probably not be able to find. But it was from "Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings" that I learned that questions are important, sometimes much more important than answers, Vasilev also pointed out.