After the rout of the April Uprising in the Second Revolutionary District of Sliven, the population of Yambol experienced hard times. The city was one of the places that the International Investigation Committee visited. The Committee’s reports which shortly after that reached the European courts, reflected the real situation – thousands of killed, homes reduced to ashes and plundered. The Bulgarian national issue became priority of the European policy.

On twelfth of April, eighteen seventy seven Emperor Alexander the Second announced with a manifest the start of the thirteenth war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire which for us, Bulgarians, was a Liberation was.

During the preparation for the war, about thirty seven Yambolers joined the Bulgarian volunteers’ army, among which colonel Georgi Yankov, general major Georgi Ivanov and captain Stefan Liubomski – one of the future fathers of the New Bulgarian army.

The Fourth Volunteers’ battalion received the flag made by Stiliyana, the daughter of Ivan Paraskevov, an immigrant from Yambol who lived in Braila. That flag went down in history as the Flag from Braila and after the Liberation served as a prototype of the Bulgarian national tricolor.
During the fighting Yambol somewhat remained aside of military actions. No military fortifications were constructed in the city, though it became a strategic base of the Turkish army.  They turned the mosques and the Bezisten in military storehouses for arms and munitions.

As early as in July eighteen seventy seven a large part of the Muslim population quitted Yambol. The same time Bulgarians formed a detachment of about hundred and twenty men led by Stavri Drazhev, whose main task was to protect the city from deserters and irregular Turkish troops.  After general Gurko returned to Shipka the detachment was dissolved and some wealthier Yambolers were sent in exile to Edirne.
Then, after the fall of Pleven and the battles near Shipka, the Russians vigorously made their way into Thrace. General Radetski headed from Kazanluk to Nova Zagora and Yambol. Gripped with panic Turks, Gypsies and Jewish, in the course of three days were running from Yambol towards Edirne and Lozengrad. In the following two months columns of Turkish armies retreating from North Bulgaria, crossed the city. The city of Yambol was left in the lurch of the irregular Turkish troops, Tatars and Circassians. During the following five days the Bulgarian population had been subject to plundering, outrage and slaughtering.

The Turkish commandment realized that they were losing the war and decided to destroy the military depots of ammunition and food in the city.

In such an atmosphere of fear and terror the citizens of Yambol spent the last days of slavery, which they called further on: The five days of horror. That started on thirteenth of January when frozen soldiers from the Turkish columns devastated gardens and wine-yards near the present hill of Borovets. On the following day, fourteenth of January they burned down the church of Saint George and the building of the railway station. On fifteenth of January they plundered the Bulgarian small shops, workshops and houses. Kargona neighborhood – the Bulgarian part of the city, was almost totally demolished. Fully destroyed were also the Bulgarian and the Jewish neighborhoods in the center of the city. The rest of people who had survived sought shelter at Zaichi vruh and in Ormana and also in the homes of some wealthy Turks.

On sixteenth of January eighteen seventy nine the last column of ten thousand Turkish soldiers passed through Yambol. On that day Russians conquered Nova Zagora and liberated Sliven.

In the morning on seventeenth of January the residents of Yambol sent a message to Nova Zagora that the city was free of regular Turkish army. The Twenty third regiment of Donskoy-Cossack quickly set off to Yambol. Thus, on seventeenth of January eighteen seventy eight, about five P.M. the regiment units, led by Colonel Nikolay Yakovlevich Baklanov, entered the deserted town. On that day Yambol was liberated from slavery and a new life began under the conditions of a Temporary Russian government.

After the end of military actions and signing the Peace Treaty of San Stefano, the troops of General Skobelev were deployed around Yambol. At his proposal Russians and Bulgarians from Yambol and the surrounding villages began construction of the first temple of the Bulgarian-Russian military comradeship Saint Spas and Alexander Nevski. A list with the names of four hundred ninety nine Bulgarian volunteers and four hundred sixty two Russian soldiers, who sacrificed their lives to the Bulgarian freedom, is kept even today there, as a real relic.

That was how Yambol got its freedom.