Today: Headlines from April 17, 1925

Today 100 Years Ago

On this morning in 1925, newspapers from London to Los Angeles screamed the same shocking headline coming out of the Balkans. A single, devastating blast in Sofia, Bulgaria, had shaken an already-restive Europe and rewritten security manuals across the continent overnight.

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The St Nedelya Church Bombing (Sofia, Bulgaria – 16 April 1925)

Bulgaria’s capital was in mourning—literally—when political violence reached a grim new extreme. A funeral mass for General Konstantin Georgiev had drawn the nation’s top brass, clerics, and politicians to the landmark St Nedelya (Holy Sunday) Cathedral. Hidden high in the roof trusses was a powerful charge laid by the Military Organization of the outlawed Bulgarian Communist Party.

At precisely 3:20 p.m., as the choir’s solemn hymn echoed through the vaulted nave, the bomb detonated. The explosion tore open the central dome, showering pews with masonry. Casualty figures fluctuated as rescuers clawed through rubble, but by sunrise on the 17th the official toll stood at 150 dead and more than 500 wounded—one of the deadliest single acts of terror in inter-war Europe.

Bulgaria’s young monarch, Tsar Boris III, survived only because traffic delays made him late to the service. In the chaos that followed, martial law was declared; hundreds of suspected radicals were rounded up, tried by drumhead court, and many executed. The bombing became a chilling prelude to the polarized political atmosphere that would grip Europe throughout the 1930s.

Why It Mattered

• Birth of modern terror tactics: Coordinated, high-yield bombing in a civilian setting signaled a shift toward large-scale political violence that states had not yet learned to counter.
• Security overhaul: Governments from Paris to Belgrade issued emergency directives on public-building inspections and crowd-control—the embryonic form of what we now call counter-terrorism protocols.
• Propaganda battleground: Both communist and monarchist factions raced to control the narrative, foreshadowing the information wars of our digital age.

Looking Back from 2025

Today, metal detectors, CCTV, and AI-enabled behavior analytics guard most major public venues—tools unimaginable to Bulgarians in 1925. Yet the essential dilemma remains: how to protect open societies without eroding the freedoms that define them. A century on, St Nedelya reminds us that the debate over security versus liberty is hardly new; the stakes, however, have only grown with technology’s reach.