And now, as the matter is in dispute, it is necessary to examine the
origin of the Bulgarian people. A band of Turanian or Bulgarian
warriors, probably not over 10,000 in number and led by one Asperouch
or Isperich, had crossed the Danube in the year 679, had subdued the
Slav tribes in those parts--for the newcomers reaped the advantage of
being a well-disciplined people--and by the end of the eighth century
had settled down in their tents of felt along the banks of the Danube.
Then, after another hundred years, in the district bounded by Varna,
Rustchuk and the Balkans, one may say that the original Turanians, a
branch of the Huns, had been absorbed by the Slavs. "The forefathers
of the Bulgars," says the great Slavist, Dr. Constantine Jire[vc]ek of
Prague, in his _History of the Bulgars_, "are not the handful of
Bulgars who conquered in 679 a part of Moesia along the Danube, but
the Slavs who much earlier had settled in Moesia, as well as in
Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus and almost the whole Peninsula." With regard
to the retention of the name there is an analogy in France, where the
Gauls came under the subjection of German Franks, who ultimately
disappeared, but left their name to the country. So, too, the Greeks
in Turkey who call themselves Romei, the name of their former rulers,
and their language Romeica, though they are not Romans and do not
speak Latin. To such an extent have the original Bulgars been absorbed
by the Yugoslavs that even the most ancient known form of the
Bulgarian language, dating from the ninth century, retains hardly any
relics of the original Bulgarian tongue; and this tongue has in our
time, with the exception of a word or two, been entirely lost: there
is a celebrated old MS. in Moscow[11] which orientalists and
historians have pondered over and which has now been explained by the
Finnish professor Mikola and the Bulgarian professor Zlatarski to be a
chronology of Bulgarian pagan princes, of whom the first are rather
fabulous. Here and there, amid the old Slav, are strange words which
are supposed to signify Turanian chronology, cycles of lunar years.
And in a village between [vS]umen and Prjeslav there was found an
inscription of the Bulgarian prince Omortag (?802-830), where in the
Greek language, for the Bulgars had at that period no writing of their
own, he says that he built something; and amid the Greek there is the
word [Greek: sigor-alem], which occurs also in the above-mentioned
document and is regarded as Turanian.... What we do know about this
race is by no means so discreditable; it is true that they are reputed
to have had no great esteem for the aged, and, according to a Chinese
chronicle of the year 545, "the characters of their writing are like
those of the barbarians." They held it to be glorious to die in
battle, shameful to die of sickness. For the violation of a married
woman, as well as for the hatching of plots and rebellion, the penalty
was death, and if you seduced a girl you were compelled to pay a fine
and also to marry her. Their sense of discipline, which served them so
well in their contact with other people, was remarkably applied to
their social life; thus a stepson was under an obligation to marry his
father's widow, a nephew the widow of his uncle, and a younger brother
the widow of an elder. It may be that the two much-quoted writers who
claim that the modern Bulgars are of this race were moved more by
their admiration of such customs than by scientific scrutiny. One of
them, Christoff, who assumed the name of Tartaro-Bulgar to show that
he believed in his theories, is usually thought nowadays to have been
more of a poet than a devotee of erudition; if he had been still more
of a poet, approaching, say, Pencho Slaveikoff, we would take less
objection to his waywardness. The other champion of that ancestry is
Theodore Paneff, who showed himself a brilliant and courageous officer
during the war of 1912-1913. The fact that he was himself of Armenian
origin--he changed his name--would, of course, not invalidate his
Bulgarian studies; but even as he spoke Bulgarian with a Russian
accent, so is he looked upon as writing like certain Russians; and his
other literary work, such as that on the psychology of crowds, is held
to be of more value. At all events in 1916 when a number of Bulgarian
deputies made a joyous progress to the capitals of their allies, under
the leadership of the Vice-President of the Sobranje, Dr. Momchiloff,
renowned at the time as a Germanophil, they were welcomed with great
pomp at Buda-Pest and declared in ceremonial orations to be brothers
of the Turanian Magyars; but Momchiloff deprecated this idea. "We are
brothers," he said, "of the Russians, and see what we have done to
them!" It was also during the War that Dr. Georgov, Professor of
Philosophy and Rector of Sofia University, wrote a dissertation in a
Buda-Pest newspaper,[12] which demonstrated very clearly to the
Hungarians that the Bulgars are Slavs; the Professor points out that
the Turanians had so rapidly been absorbed that Prince Omortag
bestowed Slav names upon his sons, and this complete mingling of the
radically different peoples was assisted, says the Professor, by the
fact that those Bulgarian hordes in the days before they crossed the
Danube were already partly mixed with Slavs, since they had been
wandering for decades to the north of the Danube, around Bessarabia,
in which country the Slavs were members of the same Slovene race as
those whom they were afterwards to meet. So thoroughly were the
original Bulgars submerged in the Slavs that when their sons set out
from the district between Varna, Rustchuk and the Balkans, proceeding
west and south, they met with no resistance from the unorganized Slavs
of Moesia and Thrace, owing to the circumstance that these latter
did not feel that the new arrivals were strangers. In fact, says the
Professor, there are in the present Bulgarian people far fewer and far
fainter traces of the original Bulgars than there are of the old
Thracians, as also of the Greeks and of the different people who in
the course of the great migrations probably left here and there some
stragglers. Sir Charles Eliot says of the Bulgars that "though not
originally Slavs they have been completely Slavized, and all the ties
arising from language, religion and politics connect them with the
Slavs and not with Turkey or even Hungary." Professor Cviji['c], by
the way, who in 1920 received the Patron's Medal of the Royal
Geographical Society for his researches into Balkan ethnology, regards
the author of _Turkey in Europe_ as a greater authority in this field
than himself.... It is not easy, away from Montenegro and a few remote
valleys, to find communities on the Balkan mainland that are
altogether free from alien blood; Turks have come and gone, Crusaders
of all nationalities have passed this way, with their hangers-on, here
was the road from Europe to Asia, and here amid the ruin of empires
lay much that was worth gathering. No doubt the Serbs, whose land was
not so much a thoroughfare, have in their veins some Illyrian and
other, but on the whole much less non-Slav blood than the Bulgars;
still, when we consider some subsequent invasions of Bulgaria, we must
ascertain how far they spread. For example, the Kumani who arrived in
the thirteenth century were, according to Leon Cahun,[13] Turks of the
Kiptchak nation, speaking a pure Turkish dialect; they--that is to
say, the Gagaous who are supposed to be their descendants--are now
Christians, they speak modern Turkish and inhabit the shores of the
Black Sea and the region of Adrianople; they have kept much to
themselves and are recognizable by their dark faces, large teeth and
hirsute appearance. There are people who assert that all Bulgars have
a physical divergence from other Yugoslavs, but, except if they
happened to come across one of these Gagaous or some such person, it
appears more likely that they saw what they went out to see.
Naturally, if not very logically, those who regard the Bulgars in a
hostile fashion have often brandished the arguments of Messrs.
Tartaro-Bulgar and Paneff; if they will be so good as to accept what I
honestly believe is the truth with regard to this people, they may
have the pleasure of denouncing the Bulgar even more, seeing that his
Yugoslav blood gives him less excuse for being what he has been. We
shall have occasion, later on, to discuss his primitive as well as his
more refined vices, endeavouring to ascertain how far they are not
shared by his neighbours and whether he has any virtues peculiar to
himself.