Batak massacre

The Batak massacre was the killing of a substantial part of the Bulgarian Christian population of Batak, in the Peshtera region, during the suppression of the April Uprising. Ottoman bashi-bazouks from neighbouring Pomak villages carried it out under Ahmed Agha Barutanli. Ahmed Agha was convicted and exiled to Diyarbakır but later pardoned by Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Estimates of the villagers killed range from 1,400 to 5,000.

Before the uprising, following the Islamisation of the Chepino valley in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, Batak remained one of the few Christian 'islands' in the Rhodopes. A revolutionary committee was founded there on 21 February 1876. Its chairman, Petar Goranov, attended the Oborishte assembly. Suspecting revolutionary activity, the Ottoman authorities sent police commissioner Chitak Ahmed and gendarmes to search Goranov's house. Villagers protected him by exploiting his membership of the Kavlakov family: they directed the searchers to Goryo Kavlakov's house instead, where nothing was found.