Battle of Shipka Pass

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Battle of Shipka Pass was not a single engagement but four separate battles fought across nearly six months, from July 1877 to January 1878. At its center was a mountain crossing through the main ridge of the Balkan Mountains, a road stretching from north to south and linking Zistovi through Tirnovo and Eski Zagra all the way to Adrianople. Whoever held that pass held the spine of Bulgaria.

  The Russian Empire and its Bulgarian volunteer allies, known as opalchentsi, needed that pass to push south. The Ottoman Empire needed it back to avoid being cut in two. What followed was one of the most grueling defensive stands of the Russo-Turkish War. At one point, defenders ran out of ammunition entirely and turned to throwing rocks and the bodies of fallen comrades at an attacking force many times their size. The questions the pass raised were simple and brutal: could a few thousand men hold a mountain against tens of thousands? And what would the answer mean for the fate of an entire war?

• 2. Taking the Pass

  ›

  On the 17th of July 1877, Nikolay Svyatopolk-Mirsky led his 2,000 men from the 36th Orlovsky Infantry Regiment, alongside Cossacks and artillery, toward the Shipka Pass from the south. He had been ordered to attack simultaneously with Iosif Gurko, who was advancing from a different direction. Gurko's column ran into Ottoman skirmishers and arrived late, so Mirsky attacked alone. The Ottoman garrison of 4,000 soldiers and 12 guns pushed him back.

  Gurko arrived on the 18th with two infantry battalions and two companies of Cossacks and tried again. That second assault failed as well. Yet something shifted overnight. The Ottoman commanders read the situation clearly: two Russian attacks in two days meant more were coming, and they could not hold. On the morning of the 19th, while pretending to discuss surrender terms, the garrison slipped away westward in small groups, leaving behind a large cache of explosives, ammunition, and artillery. The Russians occupied the position without a third fight.

  Gurko then settled in with around 5,000 men, placing them across three points: St. Nicholas (a peak later known as Peak Stoletov), Central Hill, and reserves in between. He had captured the pass with relative ease, but holding it would prove a different kind of test entirely.

• 3. The August Siege

  ›

  Süleyman Hüsnü Pasha had been ordered to relieve Osman Pasha at Pleven, but the land route was impassable. His solution was remarkable in its scale. Süleyman loaded his 25,000 troops onto transport ships at the Montenegrin port of Bar, sailed them through the Adriatic, around Morea, and through the Aegean Sea, landing them at Dedeagac on the coast of Thrace. From there, trains carried them to Filibe, and from Filibe they marched toward the southern slopes of Shipka. By the time another 15 battalions under Reouf Pasha joined him, Süleyman commanded around 30,000 soldiers.

  On the 21st of August, Ottoman forces opened with a bombardment of Russian positions and then drove at St. Nicholas. The attack failed. The next day, Ottoman artillery was hauled up the mountainside to shell from above while infantry moved around the Russian flank. On the 23rd, the Ottomans attacked all Russian positions at once, concentrating on St. Nicholas where most defenders were Bulgarian volunteers. Ottoman commanders assumed those positions would fall quickly. They were wrong. The first unit to break was actually Russian, on Central Hill, though the arrival of the 4th Rifle Brigade under Fyodor Radetsky steadied the line and all attacks were driven off.

  On the 26th, an Ottoman assault on St. Nicholas, the position the defenders called "the Eagle's Nest," reached the Russian trenches before a Bulgarian bayonet charge threw it back. By that point the defenders, having exhausted their ammunition, were throwing rocks and the bodies of their dead at the attacking Ottomans. Reinforcements arrived the same day and a Russian counter-attack went out but was pushed back to Central Hill, effectively ending the battle. Russian losses came close to 4,000 men. Süleyman's losses approached 10,000 killed or wounded.

• 4. September and Stalemate

  ›

  In September 1877, Süleyman Pasha tried a third time. Russian defenses had been strengthened since August, but the siege of Pleven continued to drain troops away from the pass, limiting how many reinforcements could be sent. On the 13th of September, Süleyman opened with artillery and kept up the bombardment until the 17th, when he launched a frontal assault straight at the St. Nicholas position.

  Ottoman forces broke into the first line of Russian trenches and pushed toward the peak. General Fyodor Radetzky, now commanding the entire defense, committed reinforcements and a Russian counter-attack drove the Ottomans from every trench they had captured. Secondary assaults to the north were also turned back. The outcome was the same as in August. The pass stayed in Russian and Bulgarian hands, and Süleyman's army remained entrenched in a semi-circle around the southern end of the Russian position, unable to advance, unwilling to withdraw.

• 5. The Final Blow

  ›

  The fortress of Pleven surrendered to the Russian Army on the 10th of December 1877. That single event transformed the situation at Shipka entirely. General Gourko suddenly had as many as 65,000 soldiers available. He forced the Araba Konak Pass, took Sofia, and then turned south through the Balkan Mountains to cut off Ottoman access to Shipka from behind.

  The fourth and final battle opened on the 5th of January 1878. General Radetzky prepared to push out of the pass while Gourko brought two columns under Generals Mikhail Skobelev and Nikolai Mirskii to seal off any Ottoman retreat. Radetzky attacked on the 8th of January, but Skobelev met unexpectedly heavy resistance and stalled. Mirskii attacked without support and made little headway. On the 9th, Mirskii faced an Ottoman counter-attack, and only then did Skobelev break through to support him. Together they closed the trap. The remaining Ottoman forces under Veissel Pasha were completely surrounded and surrendered the same day.

  Veissel Pasha's surrender on the 9th of January 1878 ended the contest for Shipka. What had begun as a desperate holding action by a small Russian and Bulgarian force against an army six times its size concluded as a decisive encirclement.

• 6. Consequences and Legacy

  ›

  The Bulgarian volunteers, the opalchentsi, carried a weight far beyond their numbers at Shipka. Their role was recognized by the Bulgarian poet and writer Ivan Vazov, who dramatized the defense in his ode The Volunteers at Shipka. The strategic consequences ran deeper still. Had the pass fallen in August, Ottoman forces would have been positioned to threaten Russian and Romanian supply lines in northern Bulgaria and potentially relieve Pleven. The war would have been pushed back into northern Bulgaria and possibly into a stalemate that would have strengthened the Ottoman hand in any peace negotiations.

  Instead, the fall of Pleven on the 10th of December 1877, made possible in part by the Russian and Bulgarian hold on Shipka, opened the road through Sofia and set up the Russian advance into Thrace. Gourko used that advance to crush Süleyman Pasha's army at the Battle of Philippopolis, bringing Russian forces within striking distance of Constantinople. The victory at Shipka also gave Russia a foothold in the Eastern Balkans, an outcome significant within the broader contest for influence known as the Great Game.

  For Süleyman Pasha, the consequences were personal and severe. He was court-martialed for the failures at Shipka, despite the fact that the pass had already been lost before he arrived. Judges found his repeated frontal assaults, his waste of men and materiel, and his failure to protect his remaining troops too costly to excuse. He was sentenced to death, but Sultan Abdulhamid II commuted the sentence to exile in Baghdad. Today the Shipka Pass lies within the Bulgarka Nature Park, and a monument stands there to commemorate the soldiers who died in the fighting.