Abdication of Ferdinand

On 3 October 1918, four days after the signing of the Armistice of Salonica, Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria renounced the throne in favour of his eldest son, the 24-year-old heir to the throne Boris, Prince of Tarnovo, who became tsar as Boris III. A British chronology of the war records the abdication under 4 October. On that day the Bulgarian official gazette announced it and the news went round Europe, and in some translations of the time the manifesto bears the date 4 October. The original, kept in the Bulgarian Central State Archives, is however dated Sofia, 3 October, and this date is given both by Bulgarian historians and by Cyril Falls’s British official history.

The tsar who lost the war

Ferdinand of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha had ruled Bulgaria since 1887, first as prince and from 1908 as tsar. It was he who in 1915 decided Bulgaria’s entry into the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, hoping to regain Macedonia. In September 1918 the Vardar offensive shattered the Bulgarian army, and mutinous soldiers proclaimed a republic at Radomir and marched on Sofia. The revolt was crushed, and on 2 October government troops recaptured Radomir, but the tsar’s authority was destroyed. In the eyes of many Bulgarians he bore the blame for the second national catastrophe in five years.

According to the Bulgarian historian Georgi Markov, on 1 October the delegate to the negotiations at Salonica, Finance Minister Andrey Lyapchev, told the tsar that General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey expected his abdication. The text of the armistice convention said not a word about it, but Bulgarian historians speak of an unwritten Allied condition. Ferdinand still tried to save the situation. According to the same author he urged General Aleksandar Protogerov to stage a coup and continue the war, but Protogerov refused. On 2 October the tsar received the leaders of the political parties and discussed a possible abdication with them.

The manifesto

On 3 October at 6 p.m. Ferdinand received Prime Minister Aleksandar Malinov, told him that he was abdicating, and signed a manifesto to the Bulgarian nation. Markov relates a scene in which the prime minister quickly read the act and put it in the pocket of his frock coat, and the tsar remarked bitterly that once he had received his prime ministers’ resignations in this study, and now a prime minister was receiving his. The manifesto, written out by hand by Ferdinand himself and countersigned by Malinov, was short. The tsar wrote that circumstances demanded sacrifices of every citizen, and he wished to set the first example. Despite the ties that had bound him to the country for 32 years, he renounced the throne in favour of his son and called on his subjects to rally round Tsar Boris and lead the fatherland out of its grave situation.

Departure

Ferdinand left Bulgaria at once by train. He wanted to live on his estates in Hungary, but Emperor Charles I would not allow him to stay in Austria-Hungary. The former tsar therefore went to his family’s Coburg in Germany, where according to Bulgarian accounts he settled on 7 October. He lived there for another 30 years and died in 1948.

The monarchy saved

Boris, who during the retreat had gone from regiment to regiment to keep up the army’s spirits, enjoyed a popularity among the soldiers that his father had never had. According to Falls it was thanks to this, and in the first days also to the presence in Sofia of troops of the German 217th Division, that Bulgaria escaped an anti-dynastic revolution. Malinov’s government remained in power. Of all the states defeated in the Great War, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Turkey and Bulgaria, only in Bulgaria did the monarchy survive, and Boris III reigned until his death in 1943. Ferdinand was the first of the monarchs of the Central Powers to lose his throne. A few weeks later the same fate befell the emperors of Germany and Austria.