An official and extremely accurate copy of the San Stefano Peace Treaty was donated to the Military History Museum in Pleven and has been in its possession since 2019. The donor is Prince Nikita Lobanov Rostovsky, heir to the oldest princely Russian family.
The copy is kept in the basements of the Panorama “Pleven Epic”, which is part of the Military History Museum, writes bTV.
“This priceless document was given to us for March 3 by Prince Nikita Rostovsky. He is the heir to the princely family, whose origins date back to Prince Rurik. His relative Alexei Rostovsky participated in the signing of the Treaty of Constantinople in 1879, which finally settled the peaceful relations between the Russian and Turkish Empires. The copy was made at his request specifically for the Regional Military History Museum. He only asked us to keep it“, says Daniela Dereshka, head of the “Scientific Exhibition Funds and Scientific Archives” department at the Military History Museum in Pleven.
The treaty is in French, the official diplomatic language at the time. Two high-ranking representatives from the Russian and Turkish sides put their signatures under it.
“We have 27 pages of this treaty. On the last page you can see the signatures of Count Ignatiev, Nelidov, Safet Pasha, who was the Foreign Minister of Turkey, and Sadullah Bey, ambassador to Germany. Through this treaty, the Bulgarian state was established, 170 thousand square kilometers, and independence was also granted to Serbia, Montenegro and Romania“, explains Dereshka.
The treaty did not guarantee full independence for our country. Bulgaria was intended to be a tributary, or vassal, principality. However, it was to rest on two seas and almost entirely cover the ethnic Bulgarian territories, and its territory was to be even larger than the current one.
„The name of the treaty shows that it is not final, since this is a preliminary treaty, which means preliminary. Bulgaria also has the right to choose its own prince, which must be approved by the Sublime Porte. According to this treaty, Bulgaria must pay an annual tax to Turkey, and the Russian army remains in our country until it builds its own militia“, adds the representative of the Military History Museum in Pleven.
The clauses of the Treaty of San Stefano were revised to the detriment of Bulgaria by the Treaty of Berlin a year later. Thus, the dream of unification of the ancestral Bulgarian lands continued to live long after the Liberation.