While the Serbs were flourishing, ecclesiastically, in the Banat, the
Bulgars had been painfully keeping alive, until 1767, their lonely
Patriarchate at Ochrida. Time and again the Greek Patriarch at
Constantinople had tried to suppress it, at first on account of
cupidity and afterwards, say the Bulgars, for fear lest it should help
to arouse the Bulgarian national spirit; but that spirit had fallen to
such a depth that the second edition of a comparative lexicon of the
Slav languages, which was issued, at the behest of the Empress
Catharine in 1791, makes no mention of Bulgarian, and in 1814 the
Slavist Dobrovsky regarded Bulgarian as a form of Serbian. And yet,
say the Bulgars, the national spirit survived so wonderfully by those
far waters of Macedonia that even when the Greek language was
introduced into the offices and the Church administration, and when
Greeks had usurped the throne of St. Clement, they still found it
possible to stand out for the independence of their Church, which
handed on the memories of the Bulgarian past. We must be allowed to be
sceptical--the town of Ochrida in the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries is said by contemporary writers to be now in
Serbian, now in Bulgarian, now in Macedonian territory. And the very
observant Patriarch Brki['c] of the eighteenth century tells us, in a
calm, passionless description of the diocese, which he wrote in
exile--he was the last Patriarch of Pe['c]--that the inhabitants of a
place called Rekalije, in the district of Djakovica, are not Albanians
but Serbs and Bulgars who had been, a short time before, converted to
Islam. It seems probable that the sharp divisions of Serb, Bulgar, and
so on, did not then exist, and that the Greek Patriarch at
Constantinople did himself not know what variety of reprehensible Slav
it was that lived in those parts.... The last Patriarch of Ochrida,
whose name was likewise Arsenius, spent the remainder of his life in
exile at Mt. Athos, and there, in another monastery, was a pale,
sickly monk, poring over crabbed MSS. This Paissu, a Bulgar, had
entered, like his elder brother, the great Serbian monastery of
Hilendar. We know from him that while the various Orthodox monks of
Mt. Athos--Greeks, Bulgars, Russians, Serbs and Vlachs--were
frequently at loggerheads, yet the others even more frequently
combined to fall upon the Bulgars and to upbraid them because their
history had not been glorious and because they had an insufficient
number of saints. The Bulgar was nothing but a servant of the Greek;
Bulgarian was no doubt written in a monastery here and there, but as
for the spoken language, were not the townsfolk often ashamed of it?
Did they not prefer to talk Greek? "I was filled with sadness," says
Paissu, "on account of my race." There happened to be at Hilendar the
monk Obradovi['c], who was less enthusiastic about Glagolitic than
about the songs sung by the peasant. With the fundamental thought of
working for the whole people, including the women, he clung to the
idea of a literature in the popular, rather than in the old Church
language. He was to set out, in pursuit of Western science, to France
and Italy and England--he spent six months in London. The whole people
was dear to him; he looked beyond their differences of religion, their
other differences, and saw the brotherhood, in race and speech, of all
the Southern Slav countries. He was to become one of the great
inspirers of modern Serbia and her first Minister of Education.[33] He
urged young Paissu to travel among his countrymen in search of
manuscripts and legends. If only he could find the buried splendour of
his people and call it into life again. And before he died--he
suffered from continual headaches and an internal malady--he had
finished, in 1762, his book, _Slav-Bulgarian History of the Bulgarian
People and Rulers and Saints_. This naif, imperfect book, more lyric
than scientific, but sincere and impassioned, has played a part in
reminding the Bulgars of their story; it is the fountain-head of the
Bulgarian Renascence.
In Serbia the gallant Captain Kot[vc]a also tried to begin for his
country a Renascence. Russia and Austria declared war against the
Turks in 1787. The Serbian volunteers, who included Kara George,
crossed the Danube and fought with great courage. Yet the Austrians
were beaten and Kot[vc]a was captured, by treachery, in the Banat; he
was brought back to Serbia and impaled with sixty of his comrades. But
in the treaty of 1791 the Turks undertook to give autonomy to the
Serbs of the Pashalik of Belgrade, and to keep from their lands in
future the janissaries who had wrought so much mischief.