94rd Аnniversary of St. Nedelya Church Assault

Today, Bulgaria marks 94 years since the bloody assassination in Bulgarian history and also one of the most bloody in the world. 

 It was carried out on 16 April 1925, when a group of the Bulgarian Communist Party blew up the church's roof during the funeral service of General Konstantin Georgiev, who had been killed in a previous communist assault on 14 April.

200 people, mainly from the country's political and military elite, were killed in the attack and around 500 were injured.

After the failure of the September Uprising in 1923 and the prohibition of the BCP by the Bulgarian Supreme Court of Appeal on 2 April 1924, the Communist Party found itself in a difficult situation. The government arrested many activists and the organization's very existence was under threat. A Special Punitive Group was established as part of the Central Committee of the BCP, including Yako Dorosiev, Captain Ivan Minkov and Vulko (or Valko) Chervenkov. The Military Organization (MO) of the BCP, led by Minkov and Major Kosta Yankov, set up small isolated groups, that carried out individual attacks. This, however, did not prevent the police from discovering and destroying the illegal structures of the BCP with relative ease.

Later, in December 1924, the organization recruited Petar Zadgorski, a sexton at the church. Dimitar Hadzhidimitrov and Dimitar Zlatarev, head of the MO armaments section, suggested that Police Director Vladimir Nachev be assassinated and a large-scale assault be carried out during his funeral service. In this way they hoped to eliminate a large number of key figures in the police hierarchy and thus lessen the pressure that the authorities exerted on the BCP. The idea was welcomed by Stanke Dimitrov, Secretary of the Central Committee,...