The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 had spent half a year frozen at the fortress of Plevna, where Osman Pasha's Ottoman garrison held off Russian and Romanian armies through three brutal assaults and a long siege. Mikhail Skobelev's counterattack finally broke the deadlock. Osman Pasha, wounded trying to break out, surrendered on 10 December 1877 after 143 days. He had bought the Ottomans time, but at a cost neither side could fully count. With Plevna gone, the road south lay open. Russian command faced a choice: settle into winter quarters, or push through the Balkan passes in deep snow before the empire could rebuild its line. General Iosif Gurko chose the snow.

The Balkan Mountains in January are not a place armies belong. Gurko marched anyway, three columns moving across icy passes with cannon that had to be lowered down slopes by ropes. The Ottomans had not believed it possible. Sofia fell in early January with almost no resistance. At Shipka Pass, Russian troops and Bulgarian volunteers - peasant militia from villages that had paid in blood for centuries of Ottoman rule - inflicted four thousand casualties and took twenty-six thousand prisoners. The Ottoman line buckled, and Suleiman Pasha pulled his men back from Trajan's Gate, the same pass where Bulgarian troops had ambushed a Byzantine emperor in 986. History keeps its grudges in these mountains.

By mid-January Suleiman Pasha had perhaps fifty thousand to sixty thousand men spread across southern Bulgaria, but they were tired, hungry, and walking backward toward Plovdiv. Faud Pasha, with about thirty-five thousand, took up positions on the Topolnitsa river and the Dermendere mountains to slow the Russian advance while Suleiman hurried east. Count Shuvalov's Russian column caught up to him at the village of Adakioi on 15 January. Gurko ordered a flanking maneuver - the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards regiments hitting the Turkish center, the Finland regiments rolling up the right, Wilhelminov's column closing along the railroad. Faud counter-attacked three times that day. Each attack failed, and the Ottomans lost roughly six hundred men against sixty Russian. The line finally broke on 16 January, and the survivors streamed east toward Plovdiv with Russian cavalry harrying their rear.

What happened the next morning has become local legend. Captain Burago, ordered out before dawn on a reconnaissance, looked at the situation - a panicked garrison, fleeing officers, civilians waiting for someone to enter the city - and decided to make a different report. He took his sixty-three dragoons through the streets at a trot. The defenders, expecting an army to follow, gave way. Burago held the city until Gurko brought the main force up the next morning. There were celebrations and there were also funerals. Suleiman Pasha's losses across the campaign came to about five thousand killed or wounded, two thousand prisoners, and 114 guns abandoned to the snow. Russian casualties were around 1,300. Behind those numbers were men - Russian soldiers from villages near the Volga, Ottoman conscripts from Anatolia and the Levant, Bulgarian volunteers fighting for a country that did not yet exist.

Skobelev was sent with the Caucasian brigade to chase what was left of the Ottoman army toward Adrianople. The Russians very nearly took Constantinople. Britain rushed warships to the Bosphorus, Austria-Hungary made warning noises, and on 3 March 1878 the Treaty of San Stefano was signed - so generous to Bulgaria that the other great powers tore it up at the Congress of Berlin a few months later and drew a smaller country instead. Even that smaller Bulgaria was, after five centuries, a country. In Plovdiv today, on a hill above the old town, a monument to Captain Burago and his sixty-three men still marks the road they came in on. 16 January remains a city holiday: Liberation Day.