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Veterans’ Tales by Vassar Bushmills

Creating Modern State of Bulgaria under first Tsar, Alexander the First, of Battenberg (Germany)

       1877 Treaty of San Stefano – 1884 Plovdiv Accords —-$9,700.00

There were reportedly seven (7) of these made in Vienna, to commemorate the breaking away of Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke with the Treaty of San Stefano in 1877, ending the Russo-Turk War, which gained Bulgaria’s freedom from Turkey.

San Stefano split Bulgaria in two, giving the Bulgarians only the western half, but then, in 1884, with the Plovdiv Accords, the Battenbergs and Bulgaria took the remaining eastern half, making up the current state of Bulgaria.

Both events are commemorated on this tapestry, in Cyrillic.

The Battenbergs, Alexander the first Tsar of Bulgaria, was from a royal German house in Hesse, and were placed there by the major powers of Europe, in keeping with the terms of the San Stefano Treaty between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. 

The European powers placed a German family there to check Russian ambitions in the reagion as well as keep the Ottomans quiet. (They would meet again in WWI, thirty years later.)

Alexander, a maverick in his own right, and related to Queen Victoria, then expanded Bulgaria in 1885 with the Plovdiv Accords, causing him to be deposed in 1887.

The Battenbergs returned to their estates in Hesse.

Related to Queen Victoria, Alexander was not a favorite of Kaiser Wilhelm. When WWI broke out, the Battenbergs sided with the English and moved to England, and became the Mountbattens, of Lord Mountbatten fame, last Viceroy of India, Supreme Allied Commander of Southeast Asia in World War, and murdered by an IRA bomb in 1979…

…and Prince Philip Mounbatten, royal consort to Queen Elizabeth since 1947[…]

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