Radetzky

Worth a detour

On 29 May 1876 Hristo Botev and his band boarded an Austrian Danube steamer in small groups at different ports, dressed as market gardeners, then took the bridge and had the captain put them ashore at Kozloduy. Botev was dead within the week. The original ship was scrapped in 1924; what is moored here is a reconstruction paid for by a nationwide children's collection in the mid-1960s.

Story

Background

The Radetzky was built in 1851 at Óbuda and worked the lower Danube for the Austrian steamship company, between Orșova and Galați. Botev's men embarked in ones and twos as gardeners heading for work in Romania. Once aboard they declared themselves; Botev sent the captain, Dagobert Engländer, a courteous note explaining what was happening and why, and Engländer complied and afterwards refused to condemn them — which is why a Habsburg ship's master has a place in Bulgarian national memory.

The landing at Kozloduy is one of the fixed images of Bulgarian history: two hundred-odd men kneeling to kiss the ground, and then a short, hopeless campaign into the Vratsa hills. Botev was killed at Okolchitsa within days.

The ship itself was retired in 1918 and broken up in 1924, with a few pieces saved and given to Tsar Boris III. Between 1964 and 1966, after a campaign begun by the journalist Lilyana Lozanova, Bulgarian schoolchildren raised the money to rebuild her: the hull of a 1953 Soviet paddle tug, reworked to the old lines and incorporating the surviving fragments. She is about fifty-seven metres long, moored at Kozloduy, and holds an exhibition about the crossing.