The Unification of Northern and Southern Bulgaria

The event was barely a year old. In September 1885 the Principality of Bulgaria and the Ottoman province to its south, Eastern Rumelia, joined into one country, and Pavlovich made this print in 1886 to mark it. He did not draw the politicians. Instead he used three women, because in Bulgarian the names of the regions are feminine. Bulgaria and Thrace stand in front, crowned with wreaths and wrapped together in a single royal mantle, their feet on a torn Serbian flag, a reference to the short war Serbia had just lost against the new union. Behind them sits the third sister, Macedonia, left out of the unification, chained to the rocks with a Turkish flag above her, still under Ottoman rule.