During a commemoration marking 150 years since the April Uprising, Evelina Slavcheva, President of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), stated that the 1876 uprising must be established in global historiography as the decisive beginning of the Bulgarian national revolution. Speaking at the All-Bulgarian Solemn Assembly, the BAS President emphasized the Academy’s duty, as the oldest modern Bulgarian institution, to preserve national memory. She stated that the Academy committed itself to uniting the efforts of the scientific community, local authorities, and state institutions for this purpose.
Slavcheva framed the 1876 events as the crucial starting point of the Bulgarian national revolution, supporting the interpretation put forth by historian Prof. Nikolay Genchev. This view characterizes the uprising as a radical act of state-building.
According to this perspective, the subsequent Russo-Turkish War was viewed by Bulgarians not solely as an imperial conflict, but as a direct response to the massacres of April 1876. She noted that this struggle allowed the Bulgarian state to reappear on the European map after a period of five centuries. The President highlighted the deep connection between the BAS and the legacy of the uprising, pointing out that members of the Bulgarian Literary Society—the BAS’s predecessor—were both spiritual inspirations and active participants.
She also acknowledged prominent chroniclers, including Stoyan Zaimov and Zahari Stoyanov, whose documentation proved that the path to freedom was achieved through both intellectual effort and armed action. Concluding her remarks, the president appealed to contemporary Bulgarian historians to follow Genchev’s scholarly testament,
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What evidence supports the claim that the April Uprising was the definitive starting point of the Bulgarian national revolution?