Dimitar Obshti

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Dimitar Obshti (Bulgarian: Димитър Общи) was a 19th century Bulgarian revolutionary who fought not only for the liberation of his motherland from the Ottoman Empire but also for the freedom of Serbia and Crete, and for the unification of Italy.

Obshti was born around 1835 in Djakovica, now in Kosovo. He joined the first Bulgarian Legion in Belgrade in 1862. There he received military training and met Vasil Levski who became his lifetime comrade in arms. They fought together against the invading Ottomans. After the Constantinople conference the Serbian authorities disbanded the Bulgarian legion and expelled its participants from the country. Obshti subsequently joined the forces of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and took part in the 1866-1868 Cretan Uprising.^[1] In 1869 he became one of the founders of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee (BRCK) in Bucharest, Romania. In June 1871 Obshti was sent to Ottoman-occupied Bulgaria to serve as Levski's first deputy but compromised his superior's efforts by his adventurous endeavours. He led an assassination attempt against Deacon Paissy, Vicar to the Lovech Bishop, who was suspected of collaboration and treason. Against the opinion of Levski, in September 1872 Obshti organized the robbery of the Ottoman postal convoy in the Arabakonak Pass in order to fund the BRCK activities.^[2] The Ottoman authorities reacted harshly and managed to arrest a number of BRCK militants, including Obshti and Levski.^[3] Obshti grasped at the chance to publicize the BRCK activities in order to arouse the Great Powers' interest in liberating Bulgaria. He made some revealing statements in court which led to a great number of arrests and the effective ruin of the clandestine network. He was sentenced to death and hanged in Sofia on January 10, 1873. A month later, the same fate fell on Levski.

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