A high point in the history of Perushtitsa is the participation of the entire population in the April Uprising. It was raised on April 23, 1876. The people of Perushtitsa withstood the incessant attacks of the enemy, who were many times superior in numbers and armament, for 7 days.
They were attacked by 5,500 men, the bashibozuk of Adil aga the Darkness, and on April 29, a regular Turkish army with artillery led by Reshid Pasha arrived. Only when the cannons destroyed the roof of the rebel fortress - the church of “St. Archangels Gabriel and Michael“, in which about 600 old men, women and children were gathered, the rebels ended the resistance.
347 people died in the church, led by Father Tilev, Dr. Vasil Sokolski and the leader of the uprising in the city Petar Bonev - a comrade and associate of Rakovski and Levski in the Belgrade Legion. The self-sacrifice of Spas Ginev, Kocho Chestimenski, Ivan Hadzhitliev and twenty-three other people from Perušte was tragic. In the church of “St. Archangel Michael“ the most powerful voice for freedom that humanity has ever heard is raised - fathers sacrifice their wives and children, and then themselves, so that they would not be slaves and not be Turkified.
In July 1876 Perushtitsa was visited by the French journalist Ivan de Vestin, who reported that after the brutal Turkish massacre during the suppression of the uprising, carried out by regular troops and paramilitary Muslim units in the city, 150 "old men and children" remained from the previous population of over 2,000 people.
Subsequently, the bones of the Bulgarian martyrs were collected and buried in this same church to remember what happened.
Zahari Stoyanov tells about the heroic events in "Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings" how "...a Frenchman, who was coming from Plovdiv on horseback, began to shout in Turkish: "Do not be afraid, the Tsar's army is coming". The Bashibazouks, not realizing that he was a Frank Gyaur, knocked him off his horse and hacked him to pieces with their knives...
About 300-400 people, mostly women, children and disabled men, managed to surrender to the Bashibazouks at the Gypsy Mound, in which surrender nothing special followed. Suddenly, however, the beastly voice of their leader Adil Agha commanded his subordinates the wild Bashibazouks "Dyon Geri!" and the long scimitars flashed in the air.
A terrible moment came for the defenseless Perushteni, who were surrounded on all sides by the wild horde. Their desperate cries, their pleas, which they uttered, kneeling before the enraged Turk, the hoarse voices of the little children reached the heavens.
The picture was one of the most heartbreaking. There the white-bearded old man collapsed at the feet of the predatory bashibozuk to spare him, who emptied his gun into his chest and ran forward to look for other victims, without even deigning to look at the corpse lying in its blood.
Furthermore, a young mother kissed the handle of the bloodied knife to let go of her little child, but the inhuman turban, under which only a human figure was visible, cut down both mothers and children in succession...".
Januarius McGahan also describes apocalyptic pictures after the brutal massacres with savage cruelty against the Bulgarians.
„…………..Perushtitsa was a settlement of 350-400 houses and about 3500-4000 inhabitants. This is the only town that offered real resistance to the Turks. The people here, no matter how unprepared they were, defended themselves with all their might and to the death.
The people claim, and I have no reason to doubt their words, that until they heard about the massacres in other villages and saw the flames of other burning villages from the hills, they had neither the thought of an uprising nor the thought of armed defense.
On April 29, a Tuesday morning, one day before the massacre in Batak, a message was received in Perushtitsa that the Bashi-bazouks were coming from the direction of Ustina. Everyone - women, children, as well as men - immediately left their homes and hid in the church.
A few people lost courage and decided to surrender, but after handing over their weapons, they were slaughtered. This deterred others from following their example.
For Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the Bashi-Bazouks amused themselves by looting and burning the houses in the town, occasionally firing from a long distance at the people in the church, while all this time the unfortunate Bulgarians sat in the churchyard and looked with despairing eyes at their burning homes.
They could do nothing. There were no more than 200 armed men among them, while the Bashi-Bazouks numbered almost 6,000.
I spoke with an Armenian girl who remained in the church throughout the siege. She describes the nights spent in the church as a terrible nightmare. The people were so crowded that people slept standing up.
On Thursday afternoon, Aziz Pasha arrived in Perushtitsa at the head of regular troops and an artillery battery and, without warning, began shelling the church.
The imagination can hardly conceive the effect of a shell falling through one of the high front windows of the church and exploding with a monstrous thunder among the screaming women and children.
If anyone appeared at the door to escape, the bashibazouks who guarded outside would immediately cut him down.
The Armenian girl's account of the events that took place on Friday and Saturday is strange, incoherent, insane. What she has told is beyond all human imagination.
I can only present this part of her story on the assumption that she has gone completely mad.
On Friday, she says, the men hiding in the church decided to commit suicide, but their wives intervened and begged them to be killed as well.
Two of the men carried out their decision. Through tears and groans, tearing their hair, banging their heads on the stone wall of the church, they actually killed their wives and children, and then killed themselves.
The girl says that the women knelt on the ground, gathered their children in their arms, and prayed in tears and sobs while the husband and father shot or stabbed them in turn.
The fact that these two men had to stab or shoot a bullet into weak, tender, and small human beings who turned to them for love and protection shows the despair they had been driven to…
But the Armenian woman goes on. Many young girls and married women whose husbands had been killed or had fled also begged to be killed in order to avoid falling into the hands of the bashi-bazouks. And their wish was fulfilled.
More than two hundred people were killed at their own request. The floor of the church was soaked to the ankles in blood.
The situation I described in Batak, Panagyurishte and Perushtitsa is the same in more than a hundred Bulgarian villages…
…In the regions of Plovdiv and Pazardzhik alone, there are about 50 burned villages, not counting those that were looted, and 40,000 people were brutally slaughtered by the monstrosities.
The Turks determine the number of those killed in Bulgaria at 15,000, but they are much more than even the official version of 40,000 people. Some of the investigators believe that there are even 100,000.
The disaster is so great that it cannot be spoken about calmly. The cries, the heart-rending sobs, and the complaints of the unfortunate women and children still ring in my ears.
They haunt me day and night – wherever I go, when I sleep or wake. They inhabit me like an infinite number of ghosts. I think that is enough………………
Forgive me, reader, if you have had the misfortune to read this!