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Vassil Levski: A portrait

Born in 1837 to Gina, a dark haired beauty and to Ivan Kinchev, a maker of woollen braid and skilled dyer, Vassil inherited his father's fair hair and bright blue eyes. The family home was at Karlovo, on the southern slopes of the Balkan Mountains. It lay on a busy route between Sofia and the northern plains. The Ottomans had been established for over 450 years as an occupying power: resistance was in its infancy, with the occasional young man going to the mountains to become a haiduti under an elected voivodo or chieftain. It was a life full of danger but at least there must have been some compensation in taking on the Turkish authorities in the occasional skirmish.

As a young man, Vassil went to live with his uncle, an alms collector for monasteries, at Sveti Boyardtsa. This led to enrolment as a prospective priest and subsequently Vassil was ordained as Father Ignati. Restless with his lot, he left for Belgrade in 1862, past the gruesome tower at Nish where the Turks had set 18,000 skulls of those they had beheaded the 1816 uprising.

In Belgrade he joined Rakovsky's Bulgarian Legion, training hard as a soldier and seeing some action in local streetfighting. It was during this time that he acquired the nickname Levsky; it referred to a prodigious jump he had made on a training exercise, a lion's leap or Levsky skok.

At the end of 1862, the Legion was disbanded and like many young men of his generation who were determined to break the fetters of occupation, he had to spend a miserable winter in exile. It was hard to know what to do, so he returned to Karlovo, threw off his cassock and shaved his beard and became a schoolteacher. But the Turkish authorities were now interested in him so he went on the run until the spring of 1867, when he went back into exile, this time in Romania. At the age of thirty, Vassil Levski had made his final choice to be a professional revolutionary.

That summer, he crossed into Bulgaria in a cheta of thirty armed fellow revolutionaries. The aim of this infiltration was to make for the high mountains from where it was planned that they should harass and kill the Ottoman army and police. It was a high-risk strategy; the cheta was always on the move, living on a diet of nettles and salt, always hungry and thirsty. They had to have a rule of "no prisoners" for it was only too easy for a Turkish official or sympathiser to send for the Zaptiahs. The cheta never left their wounded or dying: they were given the choice – kill yourself or be killed by us. They took their heads with them to make it harder for the Turkish authorities to identify the body.

Vassil proved a brave and tireless member of the cheta but when he returned to Belgrade that autumn, he conceived the idea of setting up an organisation of secret societies as the most effective way to undermine the foundations of the Turkish empire. Cheta tactics were too limited to make any meaningful impression. In his view, the key to Bulgaria's freedom was within the country, not from without with bands of exiled soldiers. From this point on, the legend of Vassil Levski moves into overdrive.

Now the most wanted man in Bulgaria, Levski moved from one hiding place to another, often in monasteries. In April 1869, he issued a proclamation from The Provisional Government in the Balkans and distributed copies of it from village to village. His mastery of disguise was incredible; on one famous occasion, he hobbled past a group of Turkish soldiers as a badly bandaged shepherd on primitive crutches. When it dawned on them that there might have well been something amiss with this sickly herdsman, they charged off down the road and asked a prosperous looking Turk where the man had gone. The Turkish merchant was of course Levski! On another occasion, he disguised himself as a missionary from the American Bible Society and so keen was the local governor to make a good impression with the Americans, he gave him an escort of Zaptiahs to see him safe passage.

In the spring of 1870, Levski based himself at Lovech, the limestone town that lies between Pleven to the north and Troyan to the south. It was a good crossroads from which to set up an organisation. Levski realised that if any progress was to be made, the movement would need discipline and so he published the "Regulation for Workers for the Liberation of the Bulgarian People". It is a remarkable document, setting out the aims and objectives, the means and the ends. Every layer of the organisation had its duties and a strict need-to-know rule was paramount for security. The Chapter on punishment for breaking the rules of the organisation is draconian; most offences were punishable by death. Yet it was the only realistic option at that time if Levski was to succeed in creating an underground terrorist force, capable of withstanding treachery, betrayal, bribery, torture and all the other black arts of the Turkish intelligence services.

Vassil Levsky was caught by the Turkish authorities on Boxing Day 1873, not far from Lovech. He had known that there was a breakdown of security but had recognised that he had no option other than to sort it out himself. He was taken to Turnovo for interrogation, then to Sofia for trial and hung on 19th February 1873. This broad browed fair-haired man, with twinkling blue eyes, had many facets to him: a devoted son to his mother; a young priest with a strikingly beautiful voice; a non-smoking, non-drinking tough mountain guerrilla; a sophisticated urban terrorist; a loyal and staunch friend to many. His greatest legacy to the twentieth century was his organisational flair as a revolutionary.

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