Vasil Levski

Vasil Levski born Vasil Ivanov Kunchev (July 18 [O.S. July 6] 1837, Karlovo, Ottoman Empire—February 19 [O.S. February 6] 1873, near Sofia, Ottoman Empire) was a Bulgarian revolutionary, ideologist, strategist and theoretician of the Bulgarian national revolution and leader of the struggle for liberation from Ottoman rule.

Due to his major significance for the liberation of Bulgaria, Vasil Levski is hailed as a national hero and often referred to as "The Apostle of Freedom" by the Bulgarian people.

Levski was born in 1837 in Karlovo, Ottoman Empire. He took the vows of a deacon at the age of twenty four (for which reason he was often nicknamed "The Deacon") and while never abandoning religion (he always referred to God in his writings), he joined the liberation movement.

At the end of the 1860s, Levski developed a revolutionary theory which saw the national liberation revolution as an armed rising of all Bulgarians in the Ottoman Empire. The insurrection was to be prepared, controlled and co-ordinated by a central revolutionary organisation.

Levski also determined the future form of government in liberated Bulgaria - a democratic republic. Levski held that all religious and ethnic groups in free Bulgaria—Bulgarians, Turks, Jews, and others—should enjoy equal rights. He reiterated that Bulgarian revolutionaries fought against the sultan's government, not against the Turkish people and their religion.

From 1869 to 1872 he had succeeded in establishing a strong network of committees in a number of Bulgarian towns and villages. The committees provided weapons, organised combat detachments, and engaged in punitive actions against heavy-handed Ottoman officials and Bulgarian traitors.

In the autumn of 1872 the Ottoman police followed in the trail of several committees in northeastern Bulgaria, including the organisation's headquarters in Lovech. The numerous arrests of revolutionaries threatened to destroy the organisation. In an attempt to save its documentation, Levski set off to a risky journey but was captured, brought to trial, convicted and hanged by the Ottoman authorities in Sofia on 19 February 1873.

The large national-wide network of revolutionary committees he set up continued to function even after his death and was essential in the April Uprising of 1876. The uprising itself failed but it paved the way for the Russo-Turkish War, 1877-1878 which ultimately led to Bulgaria regaining its independence after almost five centuries of Ottoman rule.