site.btaObservances: July 17

On this date in Bulgarian history:

813: Khan Krum lays siege to Constantinople.   

1393: Bulgaria falls under Ottoman rule. Sultan Bayezid I's army takes Turnovo, capital of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, liquidating all Bulgarian institutions.

1877: Advance detachment of Russian army crosses Balkan Range to liberate town of Kazanluk from Ottoman rule during 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War.

1879: Ministry of War is set up.

1932: Aquarium in Varna is unveiled.

1942: Speaking on Hristo Botev Radio, communist leader Georgi Dimitrov announces the programme of the Fatherland Front, a Bulgarian political resistance movement during World War II. 

1998: Bulgaria signs Central European Free Trade Agreement to become its seventh member state.

2007: The High Judicial Council of Libya commutes the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to life imprisonment. The medics are found guilty of deliberately causing an AIDS outbreak in the Libyan city of Benghazi.