Botev Route

There is no Bulgarian who has not learnt as a child the song "Silent white Danube", the march by the text of Ivan Vazov. Some of its lines are regarding the moment when the Kozloduy shore is seen, and from which the Botev Detachment headed towards its Golgotha in the Vratsa Balkan. We keep in our historic memory the path from boarding the "Radetski" steamship till the getting off on the Kozloduy shore, but the long way from there through the Danube Plain remains a little aside from the general public knowledge. That is why the route of the Botev Detachment was chosen as part of our initiative in order to make it more popular and to keep it cleaner. In the next line follows its story.

120 км - this is the distance between the point where the "Radetski" steamship stopped and Yolkovitsa, the place of death of Hristo Botev in the Vratsa Balkan. 120 km full of self sacrifice, agitation, heroism, sometimes even despair. The first research on the Botev Detachment and its route date back to 1901, but at that time they had been primarily focused on the last battles in the Vratsa Balkan. This was when the first attempt to establish the exact place of death of Hristo Botev was made as well by a small commission led by the Botev revolutionary Stefanaki Savov. They are to be "blamed" for rejecting what Zahari Stoyanov wrote that the poet was killed at the Vola Peak. The commission suggested that the Botev memorial is to be elected on Okolchitsa Peak (where the cross is now), in order for it to be "visible, personal and accessible as close as possible to the place of the last fight".

On 2 June 1927 a commission with the participation of Nikola Obretenov a member of the headquarters of the Botev Detachment , and the last remaining alive witness of the death of the poet researches and establishes the whole region of the last fight of Hristo Botev and concludes that Botev was killed in the late afternoon of 1 June 1876 under the Kamara Peak in the Yolkovitsa Valley.

The first detailed research of the whole road of the Botev Detachment was in 1946 when in the eve of the 100th anniversary of Hristo Botev, two writers - Pavel Deliradev and Dimitar Osinin together with the historian phD Ivan Velkov, based on the collected historical data, drew the road of the Botev Detachment from the Kozloduy shore to the Kamara and Okolchitsa. It was Osinin whose idea is to creat the monument in honour of the feat of the Botev detachment - the memorial alley "Botev Route" from Kozloduy to the Vratsa Balkan. In 1949 Dimitar Osinin organized the marking of the historic path with 54 stone signs , and in 1953 they were continued from the foot of the Vratsa Balkan to the place of death of Botev, increasing their number to 68.

On the next year, 1954, the community of Vratsa stated the idea along the route to be formed an alley trees, decorative trees and bushes. Two decades had to pass, and in 1971 was finally formed the unique monument, along the 120-km alley from Kozoloduy to the place of death of Hristo Botev.