... But a revolutionary committee, composed of educated men, had existed for several years at Bucharest, and had extended its branches across the Danube.  Despite the heroism of Vasil Levski, an ex-deacon, who was the chief of these itinerant "Apostles" and died on the gallows at Sofia, where a monument still preserves his memory, the efforts of these intellectual leaders had exercised little influence on their stolid and unimaginative countrymen, till the Serbs of the Herzegonvina gave them the example of another Slavonic nationality struggling to be free... (Cambridge Modern History, v.12, 1910)