eeks joined the patriotic organization Filiki Eteria. ?t the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence (1821) revolutionary activity was recorded in Varna. As a result local notables that participated in the Greek national movement where executed by the Ottoman authorities, while others managed to escape to Greece and continue their struggle.
The British and French campaigning against Russia in the Crimean War (1854�1856) used Varna as headquarters and principal naval base; many soldiers died of cholera and the city was devastated by a fire. A British and a French monument mark the cemeteries where cholera victims were interred. In 1866, the first railroad in Bulgaria connected Varna with the Rousse on the Danube, linking the Ottoman capital Constantinople with Central Europe; for a few years, the Orient Express ran through that route. The port of Varna developed as a major supplier of food�notably wheat from the adjacent breadbasket Southern Dobruja�to Constantinople and a busy hub for European imports to the capital; 12 foreign consulates opened in the city. Local Bulgarians took part in the National Revival; Vasil Levskiset up a secret revolutionary committee.
Third Bulgarian State
With the national liberation in 1878, the city, which numbered 26 thousand inhabitants, was ceded to Bulgaria by the Treaty of Berlin; Russian troops entered on 27 July. Varna became a front city in the First Balkan War and the First World War; its economy was badly affected by the temporary loss of its agrarian hinterland of Southern Dobruja to Romania (1913�16 and 1919�40). In the Second World War, the Red Army occupied the city in September 1944, helping cement communist rule in Bulgaria.
Over the first decades after liberation, with the departure of most ethnic Turks and Greeks and the arrival of Bulgarians from inland, Northern Dobruja, Bessarabia, and Asia Minor, and later, of refugees from Macedonia, Eastern Thrace and Southern Dobruja
