WHO ARE THE BULGARIANS?
Less than a hundred years ago a small Russian army, campaigning against
the Turks between the Balkans and the Danube, discovered a race of
people who spoke a language almost identical with their own, and who
possessed Slavonic features and customs. This discovery was made in a
region which for centuries was believed to be given over to Greeks and
Turks. It came as a shock to the Russians to find that the supposed
extinct race of the Bulgars had survived through the five hundred years
that separated them from any historical mention.
Then was revived the story of ancient Bulgaria and its ambitious Czars,
who threatened the Greeks at the very gates of Byzantium a century
before the Turk came to Europe. The newly-discovered race was descended
from the very desperadoes of the old one; from the brigands who had
fled to the sternest hills and there preserved their racial
characteristics from the onslaught of the proselytizing Ottoman.
Five hundred years had left them just five hundred years behind in
civilization. They were the same barbarians who had gouged out their
enemies’ eyes and hamstrung their own wives for barrenness when the
Turks broke through the walls of Constantinople. They were rude,
primitive peasants, a dour, disagreeable race that inhabited the
gloomiest portion of Europe, and had never learned how to smile.
When Bulgaria was one of the great Powers of central Europe the
inhabitants had the custom, when a child was born, of gathering around
the cradle and moaning in unison. It was their way of expressing
sympathy with the new arrival for the hard luck of being born into
Bulgaria.
The story of their wars with the Byzantine Greeks is one long record of
nameless horrors. One of the best-remembered incidents is that of the
punishment inflicted upon a captured host of Bulgars by the Byzantine
Emperor, Basil II. He put out both eyes of all except every hundredth
man, and to him he left one eye, so that he might lead his blind
fellows back to their defeated Czar.
Time after time the Bulgar Czars organized the Balkan Slavs into a
composite band, with the object of wresting Byzantium from the Greeks
and founding a new Slavonic Empire of the Orient. Time after time they
were checked in their forward sweep at those very lines of Chatalja
where Ferdinand and his modern Bulgarians were brought to a standstill
by the stubborn Turk in 1913.
Then came the Turk, and swept aside both Greek and Bulgar. In the
fastnesses of the stern mountains the scum of the Bulgarian population
hid and multiplied, in time to return to the tilling of the land. All
that had been fine in the old race had disappeared. It had either been
absorbed by the Turk and his demand for janissaries and harem women, or
it had found its way to self-extinction in the monasteries with which
the gloomy land was well furnished.
There remained only a race of peasants, without a history or
traditions; a race over which five hundred years passed without
altering or softening one feature or one barbarous custom. It was a
race without a nobility or even a landed gentry; a race without a
literature except a string of homicidal folk-songs which embody the
spirit in which the Emperor Basil treated the conquered and captive
Bulgars.
The Russians found them and recognized them as fellow-Slavs—Slavs with
much the same original habits and characteristics, but with none of the
refining influences common even to the Russians of the reign of Ivan
the Terrible. It was natural that Russia, with her hatred of Turkey,
should sympathize with this race, near of kin, but suffering sorely
from arrested development. Thenceforward Bulgaria had an abettor in her
struggle against the domination of the Turk.
The methods by which the Bulgarians resisted Turkish tyranny and
rapacity were no better and no worse than their way of striving for a
new Empire of the Orient five hundred years before. Their conspiracies,
their incursions into non-Bulgarian territory, their skirmishes with
the infidel at their gates, were simply a revival of the old
eye-gouging methods of their mighty Czars of the Middle Age.
But they had the knack of getting sympathy. In England, which followed
Russia in her discovery of this race, reputedly extinct, there was no
credit given to the thought that a Bulgarian could do anything wrong.
When the London newspapers wrote of Bulgarian atrocities, they meant
atrocities committed by Turks in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian reprisals were
known only to the rare travellers who had penetrated into the heart of
the Balkans, and who, after making close acquaintance with the habits
of the natives, failed to discriminate between a throat-cutting
executed by a Christian Slav and a similar bit of work by a heathen
Turk.
Very slowly indeed has recognition been forced of the fact that while
the perpetrators of Bulgarian atrocities were hireling Turks of the
lowest class, and not to be compared with the brave soldiers who
compose the bulk of the Turkish Army, the Bulgarian comitadjis, with
their cowardly cruelties, were fairly representative of the average
Bulgarian soldier when at war.
What more evidence is required than the telegram sent by King
Constantine from the field of battle to his Prime Minister, instructing
him to protest against the atrocities of the Bulgarian soldiery. It is
dated July, 1913, and reads:—“Protest in my name to the representatives
of the civilized Powers against these monsters in human form, and
declare before the whole civilized world that I shall be compelled to
take vengeance in order to inspire terror into these monsters, and to
make them reflect before they commit any more such crimes.”
Thus Tino the Undecided on his quondam Allies, who from time immemorial
were held by the Greeks to be barbarians pure and simple. The taxes of
Stambuloff and the sophistication of Ferdinand may have sufficed to
convert Sofia from a city of sewers and filthy mosques to a modern
capital with electric light and tramways, gardens, museums and broad
boulevards, but a quarter of a century has not changed the heart or the
outlook of a single Bulgarian peasant.
The whole of Bulgarian literature, until the last twenty years, was
comprised in those folk-songs which have perpetuated the Bulgarian
spirit and nationality. Chief among them are the lays of the heroes,
and upon these heroes the character of the Bulgarian peasant of to-day
is modelled. One of these heroes, having been bantered by his drinking
companions on account of an unnoticed blemish on the fairness of his
lady, goes home and kills her for the fault. Another drags his mother
round the house by the hair of the head because he came home
unexpectedly and found no meal prepared for him. A third, who had
killed his paramour because she was losing her beauty, was gently
chidden by his mother, who represented that the victim would have done
good work in the scullery.
In short these heroes, whose exploits are sung in every village of
Bulgaria to-day, are as unmitigated a lot of cruel scoundrels as ever
constituted a comitadji band. Foremost among them is the national hero
Marko, whose extensive drinking bouts are the only stories that can
make a Bulgarian smile. Among his nobler exploits are the abduction of
a Turkish princess, who bores him so unutterably that he has her killed
by his band. She had contrived his escape from captivity, and upon this
charming legend is built up the Bulgarian tradition of gratitude.
Such legends are “the gems of our literature,” says Slaveikoff, the
Bulgarian poet. The fact that for five hundred years they have been the
only Bulgarian literature accounts for the circumstance that Ferdinand
was called to rule over a race whose ethics were those of the
fourteenth century, and fairly barbarous ones at that.
The land inhabited by this survival of mediæval barbarity is the
ancient Scythia, the Siberia of the Roman Empire. From time immemorial
it has been the cockpit of Eastern Europe, a land given over to
slaughter and an infinite succession of dark deeds. It has taken on the
aspect of its history, and the traveller through its gloomy plains and
forbidding mountains can well sympathize with the culprits of ancient
Rome, who were banished from smiling Italy to this frowning solitude.
The liberation by Russia of the Bulgarians from the Turkish yoke and
from Ottoman exactions gave a stimulus to the primary producing
industries. Land which had never been scratched since the earliest
times was put to the plough, and proved fertile as the cornland on the
borders of the Black Sea is fertile. The Bulgarians have improved their
long-deferred opportunity, and prosperity has followed the act of
liberation. It is a primitive prosperity, and a prosperity upon which
the ambition of Bulgarian rulers has cast a heavy tax.
At the present time the Bulgarian is emerging from the peasant stage.
The leading men of the country are the educated sons of peasants, with
the habits of peasants. The traditional simplicity of their class is a
convenience to such men, and they have made a fetish of it. Among them
has rapidly grown up a military caste, and a bureaucratic caste as
well. Both have thriven in the hot-house atmosphere created by
Ferdinand, with his ostentatious Court and his extensive secret service.
But the soul of Bulgaria is a peasant soul, brutalized by 500 years of
repression and stagnation. The Bulgarians are a race apart, even among
the Balkan peoples. They have a significant phrase when they talk of a
journey beyond their own confines; they say they are going “into
Europe.”
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FERDINAND AND HIS CREATURES
“_When I went to Bulgaria, I decided that if there were to be
assassinations, I should be on the side of the assassins._”—FERDINAND
OF BULGARIA.
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