BULGARIA IN WORLD WAR I

Yerotey Sirmanov was born on June 22, 1868 in Sirmanov Huts (Kolibi Sirmanovi), nowadays a district of the town of Gabrovo. He was a volunteer during the Serbo-Bulgarian War in 1885 and enlisted in the Student Legion. In 1887 he graduated from the Military School in Sofia as in the course of the next 32 years he served in the Bulgarian army and was promoted to the rank of general. He consequently worked in every artillery unit in Bulgaria and took part in all the three wars of national unification. In 1890 he went into photography and devoted his next 30 years to this passion. He was a member of the Photographic Society in Sofia since 1897. Yerotey Sirmanov showed himself as a chronicler of the wars of national unification in the period 1912 - 1918. During the Balkan War and the war between the former allies that followed as a commander of the Eleventh Artillery Regiment he was extremely busy, and yet succeeded to take phenomenal pictures which he dated by time, place and object. During the First World War he was at the head of an artillery brigade, the coast artillery of the White Sea defense, the artillery of the Fourth Army, and the artillery of the Second Military Inspection. As he himself acknowledged, due to a lack of time, his passion to photography remained far in the background. After his discharge in 1919 as stipulated by the concluded Treaty of Neuilly, Yerotey Sirmanov devoted himself to public activities. In 1920s he was a chairman of the Plovdiv Philatelist Society. In the period 1934 - 1943 he presided at the Red Cross Society in Plovdiv and the control  committee of Dimitar P. Kudoglou. He died on September 15, 1954 in Plovdiv.