2 June 1876
Hristo Botev, 28-year-old poet and fabled figure in the national liberation movement against the Ottoman Empire, died in a battle near Vratsa, northwestern Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian radical revolutionary, who was living in exile in Bucharest at the time, and 200 other rebels planned to encourage a mini-revolt in the north part of Bulgaria, although they knew about the failure of the April Uprising. Dressed as gardeners, they boarded an Austro-Hungarian ship, the Radetzky, in Giurgiu, Romania, and forced the captain to land on the Bulgarian shore of the Danube. The hijacking was successful but the mini-revolution was not. The Ottoman army hunted down and killed most of the insurgents.
9 June 2000
Michael Cherney, the Israeli owner of Levski Football Club, Ivan Slavkov, president of the Bulgarian Football Union, and Vladimir Grashnov, president of Levski Football Club celebrated the end of the national championship. Levski had won the cup after defeating its eternal rival CSKA with a last-minute goal. Little did the three men know what they were in for. Two months later, in August 2000, Cherney was declared a threat to national security and banned from entering Bulgaria for 10 years. In 2004, Ivan Slavkov, nicknamed Bateto, or the Elder Brother, son-in-law to Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov and president of the Bulgarian Olympic Committee, was expelled from the International Olympic Committee as a result of a BBC documentary, Buying the Games. He suggested he would be willing to support London as a candidate for the 2012 Olympics in exchange for a bribe. Grashnov died of leukaemia at the age of 49 in 2001.
11 June 2005
Opera diva Ghena Dimitrova died at the age of 64 in Milan. Born in the village of Beglezh near Pleven, the Bulgarian soprano graduated from the Sofia Conservatory, studied at La Scala and sang on all major world stages. Ghena Dimitrova worked with Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, Herbert von Karajan and Ricardo Mutti and became famous for her roles in Verdi's operas. At the end of her career she also taught master classes in the conservatories of Athens, Rome and Sofia.
15 June 2004
At 12:30 am Bulgaria officially concluded the negotiations for accession to the EU – nine years after applying to join the union. The negotiation process began on 15 February 2000. A year later, the European Commission invited Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to join the second wave enlargement of the EU. The Baltic republics acceded in 2004, while Romania and Bulgaria did so in 2007.
29 June 1989
Queues of Bulgarian Muslims leaving for Turkey formed at the Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint. In the summer of 1989, 360,000 Bulgarian Turks embarked on the so-called Big Excursion and left Bulgaria. They chose the uncertainty of starting a new life in Turkey to the forcible assimilation undertaken by the Bulgarian regime in 1984–1985. The Revival Process, as the Communist Party called its ethnic cleansing policy, claimed that the 850,000 ethnic Turks in the country were actually Bulgarians who had been forcibly Islamised under Ottoman rule. The sometimes violent "return to their Bulgarian roots" included the change of their Turkish names for Bulgarian ones and a complete ban on their language and traditions, including Muslim-style funerals.