Qualla: 1928 Chirpan-Plovdiv Earthquakes

1928 Chirpan-Plovdiv Earthquakes: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. On the morning of 14 April 1928 - Holy Saturday by the Orthodox calendar - the people of Chirpan, Parvomay, and Plovdiv were not inside their houses. They were in churches, in courtyards, on the roads between villages bringing bread and lamb and eggs to relatives, doing the slow social work of the day before Easter. When the ground heaved at magnitude 7.1, that ordinary religious observance became the difference between a tragedy and an annihilation. Tens of thousands of buildings collapsed. More than 264,000 people lost their homes. And yet the death toll, by the standards of an earthquake that flattened nearly every structure in two cities, stayed remarkably low - around 127 dead - because the holiday had emptied the buildings before the buildings came down.

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

1928 Chirpan-Plovdiv Earthquakes: Two Earthquakes, Four Days Apart

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. The first quake struck south of the Sredna Gora, the long east-west range that runs across central Bulgaria. Then, four days later on 18 April, the ground broke again. The second mainshock was geologically tied to the first - the Coulomb stress released by the April 14 rupture ha...

Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

1928 Chirpan-Plovdiv Earthquakes: What Was Lost

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The numbers are blunt. At least 74,570 buildings obliterated. Another 21,000 partially destroyed. 240 towns and villages affected. In Chirpan and Parvomay, nearly every building came down. Railway tracks bent and snapped where the earth lurched sideways underneath them. In Plovdi...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

1928 Chirpan-Plovdiv Earthquakes: The Tsar Who Showed Up

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bulgaria_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Tsar Boris III was at Vrana Palace, his country residence outside Sofia, when the first quake hit. He was twenty-eight years old, only ten years into his reign, and Bulgaria - a country still recovering from the catastrophe of the Balkan Wars and the First World War - did not hav...

Image: Bulgaria_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

1928 Chirpan-Plovdiv Earthquakes: The Quiet Country

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Bulgaria does not rank in most lists of earthquake-prone nations the way Turkey or Greece do, and that itself is part of why 1928 was so devastating: nobody had built for this. The country sits on a complex tectonic margin where the African plate is slowly grinding the Aegean and...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain