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Vassil Levski
1837 - 1873
 Vassil Ivanov Kunchev, Levski, whom
the present-day Bulgarians consider their greatest national hero of all times and
epochs, was born in Karlovo, a prosperous center of craft-industry in 1837.
At the age of twenty four he took the vows of a deacon. The lot in store for
the young Bulgarian was obviously not the one of a monk living in resignation to
the world. In 1862 he fled to Serbia and enlisted as a volunteer in the Bulgarian
legion raised by Rakovski. The legion took part in the Serbo-Turkish hostilities.
Between 1862-1868 Levski participated in almost all Bulgarian armed assaults against
the Ottoman empire.
The revolutionary theory which took form in Vassil Levski's mind towards the end
of the 60s, turned out to be a leap forward for the Bulgarian liberation movement.
Levski viewed the national liberation revolution as a concomitant armed upheaval
of the whole Bulgarian population in the Ottoman empire. It followed that
this uprising had to be well-prepared in advance, with all adequate military training
and proper coordination on the part of an internal revolutionary organization branching
out into committees in each living area. That organization was supposed to
operate independent from the plans or the political combinations of any foreign
powers which, as known by previous experience, had brought only trouble and failure
to the national revolutionary cause.
 Levski also determined the future
form of government in liberated Bulgaria - a democratic republic, standing on the
principles of the Human and Citizen Rights Charter of the Great French Revolution.
That was the only document hitherto known to guarantee the individual freedom of
expression, speech, and association. In their essence Levski's ideas tallied
with the most radical ideas of the European bourgeois-democratic revolution.
In more practical terms, in
1869 Levski addressed himself to the task of setting up local committees.
By the middle of 1872 he had scoured the Bulgarian lands with the dedication of
an apostle, and succeeded in establishing a strong network of committees in hundreds
of Bulgarian towns and villages which were in constant contact with and subordination
to the clandestine government in the town of Lovech. They provided weapons,
organized combat detachments, and got traitors and Turkish officials punished.
 In May 1872, the Bulgarian Revolutionary
Central Committee and the Internal Revolutionary Organization, convinced that a
coordination of the efforts would be for the general good, merged into one organization.
Revolutionary uplift overwhelmed the whole country.
This enthusiasm was short-lived as
only a few months on, in the autumn of that year, during a robbery of a Turkish
post-office meant to procure money for weapons, the Turkish police picked up the
trail of some committees in northeast Bulgaria including the organization headquarters
in Lovech. Numerous arrests of revolutionaries followed, threatening the organization
to fall through. Karavelov demanded that Levski should immediately rise the
Bulgarians in revolt. Levski, who was in Bulgaria at that time and was well-aware
that the population was yet unprepared, refused to fulfill the order and tried to
take into his charge all documentation belonging to the organization - a safety
precaution against its getting into Turkish hand, which could destroy the movement
completely. Unfortunately, he himself fell in the hands of the Turkish authorities
who put him on trial and sentenced him to death by hanging. Levski was sent
to the gallows in Sofia in February 1873. The death of Vassil Levski
- a generally recognized leader of the national revolutionary movement, caused temporary
crisis. The Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee was groping for new
ways and means. A number of revolutionaries undertook actions without coordinating
them with the underground headquarters, while others sank into apathy.
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