Georgi Stoikov Rakovski

The first ideologist and leader of the Bulgarian national-liberation movement during the Ottoman yoke – Georgi Stoikov Rakovski, was born in 1821 in the town of Kotel under the name Sava Stoikov Popovich. He studied at the local monastery school, later in Karlovo at Rayno Popovich’s school. At the end of 1837 he started studying at a Greek school in Constantinople. In 1841 he traveled to Athens where a secret Macedonian society for the preparation of common uprising was founded. From the beginning of the 1840s it was some 30 years in which he took active participation in the Bulgarian church and political liberation movements. As a leader of the Braila rebellion in 1842 he was sentenced to death, but as he had Greek passport the sentence should have been implemented in Greece. Protected by Greek figures he was liberated and sent to France. After 1847 he settled in Constantinople and participated in the struggles for independent Bulgarian church. During the excitement caused by the Crimean War, Rakovski organized the Secret Society – a political organization to prepare Bulgarians for uprising. In the same year the organization had already 3,600 Bulgarians organized in detachments and ready to fight. Rakovski also had a great publicist activity – he published the Bulgarian Day paper, Predvestnik Gorskogo Patnika (Forerunner of the Wood Traveler), and finished the poem Gorski Patnik (Wood Traveler). He made his First Plan for Bulgarian Liberation, later published Dunvaski Lebed paper (Danubian Swan), which was the first printed issue of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Movement. He made a new Plan for Bulgarian Liberation in 1861. In 1862 he organized the First Bulgarian Legion, traveled to Athens and Bucharest to unite the Balkan Christians against the Ottoman Empire. He died of tuberculosis in Bucharest in October 1867.