site.bta100 Years since "Bloody Holy Thursday", Bulgaria’s Deadliest Terrorist Act

One hundred years ago on Wednesday, Bulgaria experienced its worst ever mass assassination: a terrorist bombing of the St Nedelya Church in Sofia on April 16, 1925, which came to be known as "Bloody Holy Thursday".

At the funeral service for a retired general, Sofia's metropolitan cathedral was packed with more than 1,000 mourners. Metropolitan Stefan of Sofia was handed the Gospel and commenced a reading from John 5:24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life."

At that very moment, 3:23 p.m., a deafening explosion shook the cathedral. The main dome caved in and the ceiling of the nave collapsed, burying part of the congregation in heaps of bricks, mortar and beams and filling the air with dust and smoke. The shock wave in the enclosed space aggravated the carnage.

The scene was infernal: crushed corpses, body parts, pools of blood and pieces of human flesh amidst the ruins of the church. In ghastly darkness and hush, the dazed survivors stampeded to the exits while marauders ransacked the site.

The Victims

A total of 134 people were killed on the spot and 79 of the 500 or so injured in the blast succumbed to their wounds later on, bringing the death toll to 213 (including 25 women and children). The St Nedelya bombing thus ranks as the worst terrorist act in Bulgaria’s history and Europe's deadliest for 60 years until June 1985, when a bomb blew up an Air India passenger flight in Irish airspace, claiming 329 lives.

The fatalities in Sofia included twelve generals, fifteen colonels, seven lieutenant colonels, three majors and nine captains (more senior-officer casualties than in all four wars waged by Bulgaria that far), three members of Parliament, the Sofia mayor, district governor and police chief, journalists, teachers, lawyers, architects, engineers, doctors, merchants, clerks, policemen, students and pupils.

The Background

The April 16, 1925 terrorist act came as a high point in a nearly two-year-old confrontation, triggered by a military coup that overthrew Alexander Stamboliiski's Agrarian government in June 1923. Alexander Tsankov's cabinet, which was appointed after the coup, cracked down on Communists and left-wing Agrarians. Their parties were outlawed, and they were persecuted by legal and extra-legal means. The Left responded to what they called the "White Terror" by radicalizing and adopting a "course towards armed struggle on a massive scale". After two severely suppressed revolts, in June and September 1923, they changed their strategy and tactic. The Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) gradually transformed itself into an elaborate countrywide network of terrorist cells carrying out punitive, guerrilla and sabotage actions.

The Perpetrators

The St Nedelya bombing was conceived, organized and carried out by a group of Communist militants and their aiders. The idea to wipe out the King and the country's political and military elite at one stroke came from the head of the party's Military Organization, Major Kosta Yankov (Ret.). First, a prominent politician or officer had to be murdered, so that their funeral would bring together the actual targets of the attack. Accordingly, retired General Konstantin Georgiev, an MP of the ruling Democratic Entente party, was shot in Sofia on the evening of April 14.

The conspirators had one more reason to choose a church for their assault: there, the attack would deal the most painful blow to society and its institutions and beliefs without harming fellow Communists who were avowed atheists.

The leader of the terrorist cell in Sofia, Petar Abadzhiev, recruited church janitor Petar Zadgorski, who helped smuggle 25 kg of explosive in portions into the attic of the cathedral. Ivan Minkov, a trained military engineer, prepared and planted the infernal machine professionally so as to maximize its lethal impact. It was attached to a central pillar together with a bottle of fuming sulphuric acid, intended to suffocate the wounded. Acting on Zadgorski's cue, terrorist Nikola Petrov ignited the safety fuses, giving the bombers several minutes to leave the building before the detonation.

Ironically, the attack missed its principal targets. King Boris III narrowly escaped as he was a couple of minutes late for the service, having attended another funeral before that. The government ministers survived unscathed or with minor injuries by a stroke of luck: as the church was crowded, the Metropolitan had the coffin of the deceased moved forward from its usual position. So when the bomb exploded, most of the VIP mourners were out of its kill range. 

Trial and Punishment

Between May 1 and 11, 1925, the Sofia Drumhead Court-Martial tried ten persons (of whom five in absentia) for their involvement in the attack. Two (Military Organization section chief Marco Friedman and Zadgorski) were charged as perpetrators, and the rest (including Georgi Koev, who had sheltered Minkov) were held responsible as members of a terrorist organization or harbourers. Eight defendants were sentenced to death, but only three of them were in custody: Friedman and Koev, who had been arrested, and Zadgorski, who had given himself up to the police. Three had already been killed extrajudicially, and two had absconded. The remaining two defendants received prison sentences of six and three years, respectively.

None of the other conspirators was brought to justice. Yankov was killed in a shootout with police. Minkov shot himself to avoid capture. Petrov and the Military Organization’s weapons chief Dimitar Zlatarev found refuge in the USSR, where they perished in Stalin’s purges. Abadzhiev, who also escaped to the Soviet Union, was killed in a car crash two years after returning to Bulgaria in 1944.

On the morning of May 27, 1925, the three condemned men were hanged on separate white gallows in an empty field on the then southwestern outskirts of Sofia. Koev was the first to die, then Zadgorski, and lastly Friedman (his plea to be shot like an officer had been denied). As one last act of torture, the procedure was successive rather than simultaneous.

This was Bulgaria’s (and Europe’s) last public execution, watched by a crowd of 30,000–40,000. It was extensively reported, photographed and filmed, and the footage was screened in newsreels.

The Masterminds

The police claimed that they had seized a secret instruction from the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) ordering BCP, which was a Comintern section, to start an armed uprising on April 15. The bombing was supposed to clear the way for this action by decapitating the country's political and military leadership. Recent research has established that the instruction in question was a crude fake allegedly ordered by Prime Minister Tsankov himself to a couple of White Guard counterfeiters based in Berlin. This chimes in with the official version consistently maintained by left-leaning historians that the attack was a provocation used by the government as a pretext to unleash a wave of anti-Communist reprisals. Another theory is that the authorities were aware of the preparations for the cathedral outrage but did nothing to prevent it – again for the same purpose.

Ever since April 16, the BCP leadership has vehemently denied its and the Comintern's responsibility for the bombing, insisting that it was a grave error committed by "ultra-leftist deviationists" and "adventurers" who acted in despair on their own, without authorization from above and in defiance of superior orders. The proponents of this version argue that on the eve of the attack the ECCI explicitly directed the BCP to abandon terrorism and switch to legal forms of struggle.

The ten members of the party's political leadership have left conflicting accounts of their wavering position on the planned attack.

On April 13, 1995, in a declaration circulated by its parliamentary group, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) assumed responsibility for the St Nedelya bombing "even though it was the doing of activists of the Military Organization and was not an expression of the policy line of the [BSP's predecessor] BCP at that time."

Documentary evidence suggests that the operational plan for the bombing was prepared either in Moscow or at the Vienna Centre of the Red Army Intelligence Directorate and was coordinated in Sofia by a Soviet intelligence agent. Bulgarian police experts concluded that the explosive used at St Nedelya's was made in the USSR. Moscow supplied weapons and generously financed the Military Organization. Over 400,000 leva passed through Friedman’s hands within less than 30 days. Zadgorski was paid 11,000 leva for his contribution.

According to further unconfirmed theories, three other foreign powers had a role in the conspiracy: Yugoslavia (the bombing was organized by Agrarian émigrés on money from Belgrade, the plan was made in Nis, and the explosive was delivered from the military depots there with the assistance of the Serbian intelligence chief); Great Britain (having been in contact with the bombers, the Secret Intelligence Service was all the time in the know about the arrangements for the attack, and the British Legation's Rolls-Royce was supposed to serve as a getaway car for Zadgorski after the blast); and France (French national Eugene Leger harboured conspirators Yankov and Minkov but was released and deported under strong pressure from Paris).

The Backlash

After the St Nedelya bombing, the government took bloody, merciless, and effective measures against the Communists and their allies.

Martial law was declared on the evening of April 16 and remained in effect until October 24. Suspects started to be detained, working from lists that were allegedly compiled in advance: mainly Communists and left-wing Agrarians, but also anarchists, workers, peasants, left-wing military and progressive intellectuals. The estimated number of arrests varies by source from 13,000 to 30,000. According to official figures released by the War Ministry, they topped 27,000 in Sofia, Plovdiv and Varna alone. The detainees were interrogated under torture. Afterwards, thousands were listed as "missing". Between 400 and 6,000 were garrotted, shot, bludgeoned or hacked to death without charge or trial. Among them, there were former Agrarian MPs, ministers, mayors and officers, poets (including Geo Milev, Sergei Rumyantsev and Hristo Yasenov), journalists (including Yosif Herbst, the first director of the Press Directorate in which BTA was a division), lawyers, doctors, tradeunionists, teachers and students. In Sofia alone, the victims outnumbered 500. The death squads consisted of officers of the War Ministry's Third Section, police officers and paramilitaries of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. The bodies were dumped, burnt in central heating furnaces, or buried in mass graves.

In 1953–1954, General Ivan Valkov (War Minister between 1923 and 1930) and 12 former officers of the Third Section stood trial for their part in the atrocities of 1925. On September 2, 1954, the Supreme Court of the People's Republic of Bulgaria sentenced Valkov and another six defendants to death (later commuted to 20 years' imprisonment) and four defendants to 15 years in prison.

Media Coverage

In the wake of the St Nedelya bombing in 1925, BTA's Foreign Press Review bulletin selected and translated reports and comments from newspapers abroad:

Belgrade, April 17, Belgrader Zeitung: "Political fanatics perpetrated an attack in Sofia yesterday that is unparalleled in its brutality and number of victims in the endless string of political attacks in world history."

Vienna, April 18, Neue Freie Presse: "The instigators of this attack should be sought in the ranks of the Communists and the Agrarian emigration which after the fall of Stamboliiski have used every means to regain power. […] The most striking fact is that the series of attacks in recent days coincided precisely with the scheduled start of the onslaught by the Agrarian-Communist combat cells, as they are called Moscow-style."

Paris, April 18, La Victoire: "What is the goal of these terrorists? To avenge Stamboliiski, some say. To abolish the monarchy, say others, and to proclaim a communist regime similar to the Russian one."

London, April 20, The Daily Telegraph: "The ghastly tragedy in Sofia has for the moment riveted the attention of Europe upon Bulgaria. Europe is not easily shocked at news of violence from a quarter where for thirty years political assassination has been more common than in any other country in the world – outside Russia – whether civilised or uncivilised. A crime of that magnitude could not be allowed anywhere to go unpunished and unavenged. The outrage was planned with diabolical cunning. It was intended to be a wholesale act of destruction. The conspirators, indeed, planned a coup in the Guy Fawkes model, but with far deadlier explosives, and they came perilously near to complete success. It is a new thing, we believe, in the history of assassination thus to follow up the first murderous stroke and scale death among the victim’s friends while they are attending the last rites over his body in church. That limit at least was recognised to the ‘rights’ of assassins. But at Sofia even that restraining sense of decency and humanity has been ruthlessly ignored."

London, April 21, The Daily Telegraph: "This Sofia explosion sounds very loud in our ears. Why? Because the same arch-conspirators are at work against the peace of this country also. Moscow sends its emissaries to London as well as to Sofia. We do not suggest that a repetition of the Cathedral outrage is to be apprehended. The missionaries of Communism suit their doctrines and their methods to those whom they seek to convert. Even the foolish British trade union leaders who admire the ‘miracle of achievement’ wrought by the Bolsheviks in Russia would hardly approve of a plan for bringing down the dome of St. Paul’s on the heads of the principal Ministers of State and Army Chiefs assembled at a public funeral."

London, April 21, The Morning Post: "The Bolshevik project aims to bring about a revolution not only in Bulgaria, but in all the Balkan countries, and to replace the governments established in these countries today by Soviet republics. The Bolshevik modus operandi consists in accusing the future victims of monstrous atrocities. […] Statesmen should better consider the question of measures to be taken in Europe against Bolshevik agitation.”

Geneva, April 21, Le Journal de Genève: "The horrible attack that took place in the Sofia cathedral is an indication of the satanic way in which communist agitation is conducted in Bulgaria. […] No one doubts that this attack can be traced to the communists. It is well known that the Third International has picked Bulgaria as a field for experimental action in order to establish there, above all, a major centre of activity in the Balkans and, then, if circumstances permit, Soviet rule. […] But not everything can be blamed on communist agitation; rather, it by itself is an effect. If communism spreads seeds in Bulgaria, it is because they fall on fertile ground there. Communism alone does not account for the turmoil in Bulgaria. On the contrary, the turmoil could account for communism. Bulgaria is a country exhausted, morally and economically, because of the long wars."