The leader of the Bulgarian national revolution behaved with dignity and courage before the Turkish court in Sofia. He never betrayed a single name, took all the responsibility on himself and defended the right of the Bulgarian people to fight for their national liberation. The Apostle of Freedom rejected on several occasions the demand of the court to tell about his activities and to beg for mercy from the padishah. On February 6 (19) 1873, he was hanged near Sofia, but he has remained for ever in his people's memory.

Levski's death was a severe blow to the Bulgarian national revolutionary movement, but soon another prominent figure stood out in this movement — that of the poet of genius and revolutionary Hristo Botev. Botev was born in 1847 in the town of Kalofer at the foot of the Balkan Range. He was the son of a well-known teacher and functionary of the National Revival period Botyu Petkov. He studied in Odessa, Russia, as a scholarship student of the Odessa Society — a society set up by rich Bulgarian merchants.

He moved in progressive circles and studied avidly the world of the Russian revolutionary democrats. The rich merchants from the Odessa Society did not like this and in the second year at school they took his scholarship away. He stayed in Russia for another year as teacher in the Bessarabian village of Zadunaevka and returned to his native Kalofer in 1867. There he taught while his father was away, but the speech he made on the Day of Bulgarian Letters forced him to leave Bulgaria immediately, for otherwise he would have been arrested. Thus he joined the Bulgarian emigrants in Bucharest and devoted himself entirely to his people's liberation.

Dumana Bulgarskite

In 1871 in the town of BraHa Botev began to publish the newspaper Dumana Bulgarskite emigranti{The Word of the Bulgarian Emigrants), in which he displayed his brilliant qualities of a publicist and revolutionary. In 1872 he moved to Bucharest and together with Lyuben Karavelov worked in the organ of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee. He published on his own the satirical newspaper Budilnik (The Clarion Call). The genius of Hristo Botev soon placed him on top of Bulgarian national-revolutionary and revolutionary- democratic thought. He shared the utopian socialist ideas of the Russian revolutionary democrats, but he was also aware and pointed out the growing role of the social forces which the development of capitalism was pushing to the fore.

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