Boyadzhik massacre

Massacre

On and after 11 May, villagers in Boyadzhik celebrating Bulgarian Education and Culture and Slavonic Literature Day became the target of a deadly attack. A false rumor convinced the local Ottoman administrator, Şefket paşa, that they planned to rebel, so he sent Circassian bashi-bazouk against them. The paramilitaries surrounded the village, forcing residents to take shelter in the church. When shells were fired at the building, the people came out and were slaughtered without distinction—men, women, and children.

The village was then looted and burned, with the Circassians dividing the property among themselves. Survivors later received aid from the American Protestant mission in Plovdiv. A list records 145 confirmed victims, including two Orthodox priests. A fundraising campaign for a memorial was launched in 2019.

Writer Justin McCarthy, an Armenian Genocide denialist criticized for whitewashing Ottoman history, mistakenly confused this event with the larger Batak atrocity in his account of the April Uprising, spelling the name "Boajic."

Plan to Attack Yambol

The same bashi-bazouk unit commanded by Şefket paşa surrounded Yambol on 24 May 1876. A local Ottoman official, İsmail Hakkı Paşa, prevented disaster by ordering the paramilitaries to withdraw and disband. He was a Crimean Tatar from the nearby village of Kabile. His son, Ahmet Tevfik Pasha, served as the final Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. İsmail Hakkı Paşa was interred in Yambol’s mosque, and a street there carried his name until 1944.