Shipka memorial

Worth a detour

A stone tower on the ridge where a heavily outnumbered defence held the pass through the summer of 1877 and kept the Ottoman army from relieving the north. Inside are seven floors of museum and a sarcophagus holding the defenders' remains. The climb is the point, and there is no lift.

Story

Background

In the summer of 1877 a force of Russian troops and Bulgarian volunteers held this pass against repeated Ottoman assaults from the south. They were badly outnumbered and, at the worst of it, out of ammunition; the fighting here and at Sheynovo below decided whether the Russian advance across the Balkan range could be sustained. Bulgarians treat the outcome as the moment the country's liberation stopped being a possibility and became a fact.

The monument came much later, and slowly. The cornerstone was laid in August 1922, the structure was finished in 1930, and it was unveiled on 26 August 1934. It is a truncated stone tower thirty-one and a half metres high with a bronze lion at its foot, and the names of Shipka, Sheynovo and Stara Zagora cut into its walls. On the ground floor a marble sarcophagus holds the remains of the defenders, flanked by figures of a Bulgarian volunteer and a Russian soldier. Seven floors above it hold weapons, documents, photographs and personal effects, and a copy of the Samara flag the volunteers carried — none of which can be seen at the moment, and none of which is expected back before 2029.

Getting to it means 890 steps from the road at the pass. They are steady rather than brutal but there are a great deal of them, and the ridge is exposed to whatever the weather is doing. On a clear day the view runs both ways off the Balkan range, north over the plain and south down into the Valley of the Roses, and that view is most of the reason the pass mattered — and it is the part of the visit the closure does not touch.