The Bulgarians take Tutrakan

On the afternoon of 6 September 1916 the Romanian fortress of Turtucaia on the Danube, today the Bulgarian town of Tutrakan, capitulated. It was taken by troops of the Bulgarian Third Army of General Stefan Toshev and a small German detachment, part of Field Marshal August von Mackensen’s army group. Five days had passed since the declaration of war on Romania. In Romania, which still used the Julian calendar, it was 24 August.

The last day

The previous day the Bulgarians had broken through the main line of forts and during the night reached the Danube east of the town, closing the encirclement. There were by now more than thirty battalions in the fortress, because since 4 September the Romanian 15th Division had been crossing the river from Oltenița, but the units were intermingled and disorganised. At dawn on 6 September the Romanians attempted a counter-attack from the second, weakly fortified line of defence. They were counting on relief arriving from Silistra in the east, but the column of the 9th Division sent from there was routed by the Bulgarians the same day near the village of Sarsânlar, about 18 kilometres from the fortress. The counter-attacks broke down under Bulgarian artillery fire. When Bulgarian columns appeared in the east instead of the expected relief, the defenders began to flee towards the town and the river.

The commandant of the fortress, General Constantin Teodorescu, left it before the fighting was over. According to the Romanian historian Constantin Kirițescu, around noon the general’s car drove through the crowd of fugitives to the bank, where a boat of the flotilla picked him up; according to Glenn Torrey this happened at 1.40 p.m. Thousands of soldiers gathered on the Danube. There was no bridge, and the few pontoons and barges had already left for the other bank with the wounded. Men threw themselves into the water to swim, clung to beams and doors, fought over leaky boats. Many drowned or were killed by shrapnel bursting over the water. The crews of Romanian monitors and patrol boats rescued whom they could and suffered losses themselves. Some soldiers tried to fight their way along the riverbank towards Silistra. Some artillery officers held out by their guns on the western edge of the town until their ammunition ran out.

In the afternoon Colonel Mărășescu, who had taken command after Teodorescu’s flight, decided together with the garrison’s officers to surrender. A note of unconditional capitulation was written in German and sent out to several sectors. According to Torrey, before 5.30 p.m. it reached the commander of the Bulgarian troops before the fortress, General Panteley Kiselov. He accepted the capitulation on condition that by 6.30 p.m. all the soldiers assembled on the plateau south of the barracks. Kirițescu, relying on Romanian accounts, wrote that in the last hours Bulgarian soldiers and some of the local population looted and even killed disarmed prisoners. This is one side’s account, which cannot be precisely verified today.

The toll

According to the Austrian official history, of the 39,000 defenders 28,500 were taken prisoner. Kirițescu gives 480 officers and 28,000 men; press reports of the time spoke of 20,000–25,000. About 2,000 men escaped across the Danube, and about 3,500 reached Silistra. The victors captured more than a hundred guns, including two Bulgarian batteries the Romanians had taken as booty in 1913. Among those captured was the poet George Topîrceanu, who returned from Bulgarian captivity only in 1918.

Shock in Bucharest

That same day the Romanian command placed all troops south of the Danube under the Russian General Andrei Zayonchkovsky and ordered him to retake Turtucaia. Zayonchkovsky, who was fighting the Bulgarians at Dobrich that day, on hearing of the fall of the fortress first ordered the battle broken off and a retreat, then countermanded the order, and the next day, instead of marching on Turtucaia, attacked Dobrich again. The Austrian official history writes that the fall of the fortress caused enormous dismay in Romania, because no one had believed that a carefully developed bridgehead could fall so quickly. The Romanians had in practice lost two divisions. The search for culprits began: Teodorescu was relieved of command of his division, and the commander of the Third Army, General Mihail Aslan, was soon recalled. The Romanian command also began moving divisions south from the front in Transylvania, where the advance was already slowing. Turtucaia long remained in Romania a symbol of the incompetence of its commanders. The Bulgarians, by contrast, celebrated it as the “Tutrakan epic”, their first great victory over the neighbour that had taken Dobruja from them in 1913.