Meeting in the old capital of Tarnovo, Bulgaria's first Grand National Assembly adopted a remarkably liberal constitution on April 1 (Old Style, per the Julian calendar then in use), just months after the country gained autonomy from Ottoman rule following the Russo-Turkish War. The document established a unicameral parliament, broad civil liberties, and universal male suffrage, making Bulgaria one of the more progressive constitutional monarchies in contemporary Europe.
Bulgaria's emergence from five centuries of Ottoman rule was sudden and largely externally engineered: the Treaty of San Stefano and then the Congress of Berlin in 1878 carved out an autonomous Bulgarian principality still nominally under Ottoman suzerainty but functionally independent. Delegates gathered in Tarnovo, a town chosen for its symbolic association with the medieval Bulgarian kingdom, to draft a founding legal document for the reborn state.
The Tarnovo Constitution surprised European observers with its liberalism. It guaranteed freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and an elected National Assembly with real power to check the monarch, modeled partly on Belgian constitutional principles. Universal male suffrage was unusually generous for the era, at a time when many established European states still restricted voting by property or class.
The constitution would be suspended and amended repeatedly over the following decades as Bulgaria's princes, especially Alexander of Battenberg, chafed against its restraints on royal power. Still, the Tarnovo Constitution remained the symbolic legal foundation of the Bulgarian state until 1947, and its liberal-democratic aspirations are still invoked in Bulgarian political memory.