Between Serbs and Roumanians of the Banat an ecclesiastical dispute
was on the horizon. The Roumanian Orthodox body had suffered a severe
loss through the Uniate Church, which captured many of the old
Orthodox places of worship. Thus the famous little church of
Huniadora, whose frescoes have been so glowingly described by Mr.
Walter Crane, fell into their hands. This occurred in many cases at
the wish of a small part of the congregation--and this part might
consist of gipsies--whereupon the majority would be obliged to build
themselves another church. The Greek Catholic Uniate Church was apt to
lose its national Roumanian colouring and admit the Magyar language,
which was occasionally resented by the faithful. Thus, as the Bishop
of Caransebes (now the Metropolitan of Roumania) told me, there came
into a church at Tergul, near Moros-Varshahel, a woman with a basket
of eggs. When she perceived that she could not understand the language
that was being used she put down her basket and uttered a loud curse,
"May thunder and lightning strike this church!" she cried. And after
the service had begun in a church near Grosswardein the wife of a
clergyman pulled the priest's beard, while other ladies tore off his
robes. Nevertheless this Uniate Church continued to exist and it was
natural that the Orthodox Roumanians should seek in some way to
compensate themselves for their losses. They had, as we have mentioned
above,[59] been given hospitality by the Serbian Church and given the
use of a monastery for the education of their priests. They now
suggested that it would be well if the Serbs handed over to them a
number of the Banat monasteries, and when the Serbs declined they
started a great lawsuit at Buda-Pest. Professor Iorga, the historian,
told me that he thought his countrymen were justified in that these
monasteries were originally neither Serbian nor Roumanian, but Roman
Catholic, being erected, in pursuance of their propaganda, by the
French dynasty which the Hungarians had over them in the fourteenth
century. Their nomenclature, said the Professor, is neither Serb nor
Roumanian, they had no privileges from Serb or Roumanian princes and
he believed that they only passed to the Serbs after having been
abandoned by the Catholics. A line on p. 145, vol. i., of the
_Monumenta Vaticana Hungariae_ (Buda-Pest, 1887):
"Item Stephanus Sacerdos de Beesd solvit I fertonem"
appeared to lend colour to this view, for the name Beesd might have
been slavized into Besdin and this might be the record of a payment
made, between 1332 and 1337, to the Pope. It is only fair to say that
the learned Magyar Jesuit who presides over the episcopal library at
Gjula Fehervar (Alba Julia in Roumanian) did no more than say that
these surmises were possible. He was, as a matter of fact, much more
interested in the political situation and in another book, the oldest
printed Bible in Roumanian (of 1582 and in Slav characters) which, as
he pointed out with half a sigh, was published by one Magyar through
the liberality of another. The charming Bishop of Caransebes, as he
sat with me one Sunday morning in his rose garden, did not receive
Professor Iorga's idea with approbation. The Professor, he thought,
was too fond of originality and he himself preferred to claim some of
the monasteries on equitable instead of on historical grounds. They
were founded after all, he said, for the people of the Banat and of
those a majority were now Roumanian. (But in Caras-Severin, the chief
stronghold of his countrymen, there are no ancient monasteries with
the exception of some ruins. The Roumanians are not ostentatiously
religious; they do not take kindly to the building of churches and in
their portion of the Banat one usually finds churches of wood, some of
these being 150 years old.) But another librarian, this time a German
at Ver[vs]ac, poured cold water on Professor Iorga. Only one Roman
Catholic religious house, he said, was founded by that French dynasty
in the Banat and this was at Egres, near the Maro[vs], where the wife
of Louis of Anjou built a church which remained Catholic and is now in
ruins. The monastery of Besdin was founded in 1539 and a Serb-Slav
psaltery which is kept there has, on p. 270, the following words: "In
the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. So that all people shall
know when a beginning was made to build the monastery of Besdin. It
was begun in the year 7058 from the creation of the world, that is
1539 from the Birth of Christ ... Joseph Milutinovi['c],
archimandrate, built it, and his monks and the Christians helped him.
Written by me: Leontic Bogojevi['c], administrator and monk." Beesd
and Besdin, said the librarian, are from the same root, signifying
that which has no bottom, an abyss, and the marshes in the Banat are
numerous. The Beesd of the above citation is, said the librarian, a
place between the rivers Temes and Berzava; Catholics were there in
the fourteenth century, but the founders were Slavs. The burly
archimandrate of Besdin, whose constitution had withstood
twenty-seven years of marshes and mosquitoes, was extremely scornful
of his adversaries' pretensions. "They wanted to prove that they built
it! Not one stone, not a single stone! Then they argued that something
was due to them as they had paid a part of the church taxes. We had
invited them!" ... Most of the Serbs acknowledge that their
monasteries in the Voivodina, as elsewhere, are not under present
conditions as meritorious as in the Middle Ages when the people from
twenty or thirty villages would meet there and listen to the blind
guslar-player. Sometimes one of their few monks is a man of erudition,
such as the well-known Bishop Nicholai Velimirovi['c] or Ruvarac the
great historian, who in thirty years freed his monastery from debt and
left large sums for charities. On the other hand we have the
archimandrate Radi['c], who ruled several monasteries in succession;
he never drove with less than four horses in his carriage and he drove
so recklessly that between eight and sixteen horses were rendered
worthless every year. The Radical party desired, after paying fixed
salaries to the archimandrates and monks, to give two-thirds of the
rest to clerical funds and one-third to schools. But the
Austro-Hungarian Government had an understanding with the clerical
party and prevented the public from exercising any control over these
funds. The twenty-seven monasteries in the Voivodina, Syrmia and
Croatia could have supported three Universities, so richly endowed are
they with lands; the Roumanians did in fact with some of the revenues
of their one monastery of Hodosh maintain the Arad seminary. There is
no knowing what other monasteries the Roumanians would have secured if
the Great War had not intervened, for the Pest judges knew every
morning which of the two litigant countries their own country happened
to prefer.
What the Serbs of the Banat had, in the political world, to contend
against may be illustrated by some incidents of the career of Dr.
Svetozar Mileti['c], who after having been a deputy for twenty-five
years was charged with high treason for having sent volunteers into
Serbia at the time of the Serbo-Turkish War; even if this was true it
can scarcely be said to have constituted high treason against Hungary.
The witnesses against him were two forgers, released _ad hoc_ from
prison, his own witnesses were hundreds. He was condemned to six
years' imprisonment, at the expiration of which he was in such a state
that he had to be transferred to an asylum, where he died. The pitiful
dodges of the dominating Magyar minority are by this time well enough
known; it was their argument that certain villages, say ten miles from
a town, had to give their votes in that town, while intervening
villages of other nationalities were obliged to present themselves at
a booth twenty miles in another direction, because if such methods had
not been employed then the more ancient and more reputable Magyar
culture would have been entirely swamped by the wicked non-Magyars.
Thus the three million Slovaks in Hungary were represented at
Buda-Pest by three deputies.[60] "Hungary," says the delicious Aubrey
Herbert, M.P., in the _Oxford Hungarian Review_ (June 1922), "Hungary
was situated amongst reactionary neighbours, and any loosening of her
hold upon the non-Magyar population threatened her very existence. The
path of spectacular liberalism was closed to her...." The ballot was
supposed to be secret in the towns, where the Magyars could hope to
exercise an appropriate control; but even in the towns they thought it
more advisable to take no risks. Some of the dead were permitted to
vote; but only if they were faithful Magyar dead. And in Dr.
Mileti['c]'s constituency no arrangements were made to ferry the
living--on the large lake of Mutniatsa the boats were hidden and the
voters were compelled to swim across.
* * * * *
Although a great many of his subjects charged Prince Milan with
preferring his own and the dynasty's interests to those of the State,
they should have taken into account that the Berlin Congress had left
their country in a more than difficult economic and political
situation. Not only were Serbia and Montenegro kept apart, but in the
intervening territory, the Sandjak of Novi Bazar, permission was given
to Austria-Hungary, of which she soon availed herself, to establish
garrisons. Serbia was now almost encircled by the Austrians and there
remained only two inconvenient routes for the exportation of her
products to other countries: down the Danube, with the very high
tariffs imposed by the Berlin Congress, or by the line to Salonica,
which was in the hands of Austrian capitalists and ran through Turkish
territory. Therefore Serbia's independence, political and economic,
existed at Austria's pleasure; and this must be remembered in
extenuation of the secret Treaty[61] (June 23, 1881) whereby the Serbs
bound themselves for ten years to abstain from any propaganda or other
activity against the Habsburgs and to make no political treaties with
other Powers without the knowledge and consent of Vienna. Nor were any
foreign troops or volunteers to be allowed into Serbian territory. In
return for this the Emperor undertook to recognize Prince Milan as
King whensoever he might be pleased to assume that dignity (as he did
on March 6, 1882), to protect his dynasty from the Karageorgevi['c]
and to favour his acquisition of as much as possible of the valley of
the Vardar. The grateful Prince affirmed this Treaty (on October 24,
1881) by a still more emphatic declaration by which he appears to have
constituted himself a vassal of the Emperor. This infuriated the young
politicians whose radical ideas, mostly imbibed at Paris and Geneva,
were not balanced by the moral and social discipline which is the
fruit of an advanced civilization. As a result Serbia was given over
to chaos.... When Prince Alexander of Battenberg aquiesced in his
Bulgars annexing eastern Roumelia it was said that he was violating
the Berlin Treaty, but it is now known[62] that, in spite of the 1879
Treaty, this union had been foreseen and approved by Germany, Russia
and Austria-Hungary in 1881. Nevertheless Austria, which hoped to
embroil and enfeeble the two Slav States, urged Milan to declare war
against the Bulgars, and this he did the more willingly as he fancied
that it would divert from him the enmity of so many of his subjects;
but this war was such an unpopular enterprise that the King did not
dare to mobilize fully, and with his available forces indifferently
equipped and badly led, the upshot was that the Bulgars were
victorious. While Austria had thus been the Serb's evil genius,
Russia, by withdrawing all her officers from Bulgaria, again acted in
a manner which seemed scarcely to allow her and others, in 1915, to
denounce the Bulgars for their ingratitude. (The Russians, as a
subsequent Russian Minister at Sofia relates,[63] so completely
mishandled the situation in the early days of Bulgaria's freedom that
they had only themselves to blame for the invitation to Ferdinand of
Coburg which was made with the express purpose of thwarting Russian
aggression.)