A narrow, winding road connected Mostar, the main town of Herzegovina, to Nevesinje. On July 5, 1875, a Turkish caravan moving along it was shelled by a small rebel detachment near Bishiny Mountain1 . Four days later, near Nevesinje, the first battle broke out between the Haiduks and two Turkish battalions. Soon, the entire Southern and then Western Herzegovina was engulfed in flames of the uprising... In battles with regular troops, the advantage was almost invariably on the side of the rebels. On July 28, in the battle of Dabra, they defeated and put to flight a large detachment of the Sultan's army. Special Port commissioners who visited Nevesinje and tried to persuade the "rebels" to lay down their arms reported the failure of their efforts on July 16. Only with the help of force can you "end this case," they believed. Grand Vizier Essad fully accepted this point of view .2 The Turkish authorities initially tried to play down the scale of the "unrest" in Herzegovina; they assured diplomats that "calm" was about to be restored .3 The uprising "tried to portray a very innocent misunderstanding of a purely local nature," the St. Petersburg weekly noted, but it "flares up more and more every day and takes on serious dimensions." 4 In August, "riots" also began in Bosnia, on August 13 there were clashes with Turkish police near Prijedor and Kostajnica, and a week later almost all of Northern Bosnia took up arms .5The events in Herzegovina at first did not attract much attention in the European press and diplomacy. It would seem that there was nothing new here - even in the 60s of the XIX century. the inhabitants of this suburb of the Ottoman Empire repeatedly rose up to fight. In addition, since the end of 1874, relations between Turkey and Montenegro have again become complicated (and previously tense). There were many border disputes between these states. Clashes in the Podgorica area "make up, as it were, the daily existence of the population," said Charge d'affai ... Read more