April 18th, 1928, Easter day – at 11.01 AM, the small town of Chirpan got shaken by 6.8 on the Richter scale earthquake…. Houses collapsed, church bells were ripped off their ropes. The only good news for the day was that God had gathered people in the church backyards, and the churches were the sturdiest buildings at the time – that saved the lives of hundreds of people that day.
That day, according to Dimiter Dimitrov, senior research expert at the Central Geodesy Laboratory of the BG Academy of Sciences, the plate of the Thracian Valley got ruptured in two places with fearsome might. The noise was similar to a large explosion – that was the sound of the ground breaking off… The displacement of terrestrial levels reached 20 km in depth.
Although the earthquake caused destruction to larger number of the houses in Chirpan and the nearby Purvomay with 28 people losing their lives, Plovdiv did not suffer from it. It caused only panic and destruction of several shabby buildings….