O Mechmed,[23] my beloved son,
Have you come wounded back to me?
Where is your pipe and your heiduk garb?
--Ask me not, ask me not.
Ask me rather where are my comrades.
With six hundred I went to the mountains--
Six of them live and brought me hither,
Brought me though themselves were wounded.
A little time and I must die,--
Call everyone of those I love,
For I would take my leave of them.
When all were come young Mechmed said:
Mother, how long will you mourn for me?
--Till I step down to you in darkness.
Father, how long will you mourn for me?
--Till the raven's wing is white
And I see grapes on the willow-tree.
Sisters, how long will you mourn for me?
--Till we have babes to sing asleep.
How long will you mourn, my beloved?
--Till I go down among the flowers
And bring a nosegay back for him.
The Turk had thrown aside any toleration he started with. The
Patriarchate of Pe['c], which they had for a time left intact, was now
abolished and was not again permitted until 1557, when its
re-establishment was due to the efforts of Mehemet Sokolovi['c], the
grand vizier from Bosnia, who raised to the Patriarchate his brother
the monk Macarius. Every school in Serbia and Bulgaria was closed, so
that no teaching could be given anywhere save in the monasteries; it
is said to be a fact--I have it from Dr. Zmejanovi['c], lately Bishop
of Ver[vs]ac--that when Kara George, the beloved and illiterate
heiduk, made his first insurrection, there were, in addition to the
monks, precisely eight individuals in Serbia--their names are
recorded--who could read and write. Thus the absence of
printing-presses was not greatly felt: in Bulgaria there was now no
press at all, in Serbia a few prayer-books were roughly printed in the
monasteries; but in the sixteenth century the monks, for the copying
of these books, had reverted to the use of pen and ink.
There had been in the bygone days, in the empires of Simeon and
Du[vs]an, for example, a privileged class, commonly called an
aristocracy, which as elsewhere had arisen from the people having been
obliged to submit themselves to military discipline.... And it was in
those dreary days when all the raia felt themselves as brothers[24]
that the Serb and Bulgar planted that democracy which flourishes among
them now. They saw what dangers threatened in the towns. Vuk
Karaji[vc], the reformer of the Serbian language, tells of certain
merchants there who, by assuming Turkish apparel and customs, came to
be no longer counted as Serbs. And more numerous by far were the
townsfolk, nobles and merchants and others, who went to live among the
countryfolk and intermarried with them, and produced a people which is
better described not as a democracy, but as an aristocracy.