Balkans

“ In the present catastrophe the curse of the Balkans has descended upon the whole of Europe, and laid bare unsuspected depths of chaotic hatred; yet Balkan antagonisms still remain more ineradicable than ours. The cure for nationality is forgetfulness, but Balkan nationalism is rooted altogether in the past. The Balkan peoples have suffered one shattering experience in common—the Turk, and the waters of Ottoman oppression that have gone over their souls have not been waters of Lethe. ”

“ Again and again, during that period, it seemed that in the Balkan mountains might be kindled a blaze which might set the world afire. Balkan politics is a labyrinth in which one might easily be lost. The inhabitants of the Balkans represent many races, each with its own ambition, and, for the most part, military. There were Serbs, and Bulgarians, and Turks, and Roumanians, and Greeks, and their territorial divisions did not correspond to their nationalities. ”

“ But they fell into slavery in the same way as Serbia, Greece, Roumania and Croatia. The only country in the Balkans which surrendered without any resistance was Bulgaria. The only country in the Balkans that never was conquered by the Turks was Montenegro. Poor Montenegro, a skeleton of rocky mountains, has shown during five hundred years more heroic beauty and idealistic enthusiasm than many great empires in Asiatic and European history, which fought their selfish battles for power and comfort, and have been respected and adored merely because of their numbers and dimensions. ”

“ In the tangle of mountains, races, and religions which made up the Balkans the people needed peace above every other thing—a breathing space in which to develop themselves and their resources, and to get a truer perspective on their position in Europe. ”

“ The Balkan situation was always burning; it was the Etna and Vesuvius of the diplomatic world; wise men might predict eruptions, but they were always unexpected. To most people in the United States the Balkans seemed very far off; Bulgaria with her eyes on Macedonia, the Tsar Ferdinand and his attempt to put his son, Boris, under the greater Tsar, him of Russia; Rumania and her ambitions for more freedom and more territory; Serbia, with her fears and aspirations, appeared to be of no importance—of less interest, perhaps, than other petty kingdoms. ”

“ Go to the Balkans, and you will see what I have seen. You will then realise the clever, subtle influence of Austrian agents in Montenegro—where they persuade the pride of the country to emigrate, themselves paying the expenses, and thus sap the nation of its future population; in Northern Albania, where the priests in Austrian pay never cease to descant upon the benefits of Austrian rule; in Servia, where they are ever stirring strife; in Bulgaria, where their spies are ever active; and in Macedonia, where they secretly encourage the Greek bands to massacre the Bulgars. ”

“ What the Balkan peninsula has been in our own time, the Apennine peninsula was after the fall of Rome, and also before the rise of Rome: a job-lot of race-fragments driven into that extremity of Europe by the alarms and excursions of empires in dissolution whose history time has hidden. The end of a manvantara, the break-up of a great civilization and the confusion that followed, made the Balkans what they are now, and Italy what she was in the Middle Ages. ”

“ Prostituting their unique position in semi-literate, village-tribal societies – intellectuals in the Balkans sold out en masse. They are the inertial power – rather than the counterfist of reform. They are involved in politics of the wrong and doomed kind. The Balkan would have been better off had they decided to remain aloof, detached in their archipelago of universities.
There is no real fire in Balkan intellectuals. Oh, they get excited and they shout and blush and wave their hands ever so vigorously. ”

“ The Balkan lands are especially interesting to us in these rapidly-moving days because they afford us the last remaining glimpse of a vanishing period of European history. When I was a child one of the earliest events of the outside world that forced itself coherently under my notice was a war in the Balkans; I remember a sunburnt, soldierly man putting little pin-flags in a war-map, red flags for the Turkish forces and yellow flags for the Russians. ”

“ In all that concerned the Balkans the Great Powers were in truth les Grandes Impuissances.8 Blinded by ignorance, greed and prejudice, they were laying the foundations of a pyramid, whose blocks would be errors piled on errors through seven succeeding years. The Great Powers were the master-builders, and the Balkan States their pupils. ”

“ The entire chain of the Balkans had to be shifted considerably to the south, in consequence of explorations carried on within the last few years. Men of science have hardly ventured yet to explore the plateaux of Albania or Mount Pindus, and much remains yet to {89} be done before our knowledge of the topography of the Balkan peninsula can be called even moderately complete. ”

“ Montenegro, which alone of the Balkan States kept its head unbowed before the Turk, was a busy centre of literary effort in the 16th century. Under the stress of constant war, however, the arts of peace died down almost completely in the Balkans until the Liberation of the peoples in the 19th century. ”

“ The impression I have got from seeing picture collections in the Balkans is that the local artists have learned foreign methods without adding any national bent of their own, and contrive to give a native character to their pictures only when they make the choice of some particularly horrible subject. Yet there should come a vigorous art as well as a vigorous literature one day from these Balkan States. There the mysticism, the melancholy, the transcendentalism of the Slav is mixed with the fatalism of the Turk, and the vivacity of the Greek and the Roumanian in the national types. ”

“ The true Balkan States are Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania. Roumania is proud to consider herself a Western State rather than a semi-Eastern Balkan State, though both her position and her diplomacy link her closely with Balkan developments. Turkey, of course, cannot be considered in any sense as a Balkan State though she still holds the foot of the Balkan Peninsula. Greece has prouder aspirations than to be considered one of the struggling nationalities of the Balkans and dreams of a revival of [viii] the Hellenic Empire. ”

“ Except for the strife between the Eastern and Roman Catholic Churches for supremacy in Serbia, the nation was at peace within her own borders, and enjoyed not only a military but an economic predominance in the Balkans. Mining and handicrafts were developed, education encouraged, and the national organisation reached fully to the average standard of European civilisation at the time. By 1275 the Serbs were the chief power in the Balkans. ”

“ South-Eastern Europe forms no unity in the common sense of the word, as a peninsula of the Balkans. Bulgaria is the only true Balkan country because it is geographically connected with the chain of Haemus, called by the Turks, Balkan, the Rhodope being purely Thracian. All the western part of the peninsula is linked to a much more important range, the Pindus. Greece, with its islands, is a Mediterranean State. ”

“ Consider conditions in the Balkans today: fathers, mothers, children in grief and lamentation, the foundations of life overturned, cities laid waste and fertile lands made desolate by the ravages of war. ”

“ Slav type, whilst the Bulgars approached nearer to the Turk type.
There may be traced, then, in the racial history of the Balkans these race types: a Mediterranean people inhabiting the sea-coast and possessing a fairly high civilisation, the records of which are being explored now in the Cretan excavations; an aboriginal people occupying the hinterland of the coast, not so highly cultivated as the coast dwellers (who had probably been civilised by Egyptian influences) but racially akin to them ”

“ The Vlachs beyond the new Rumania, in the centre of the Balkan Peninsula, illustrate for us a noteworthy problem of that troubled region. Whereas if we wish to get a picture of the early stages of the settled life of cultivation in Europe we naturally look to Russia, we may go to the Balkans for glimpses of the remnants of the still earlier scheme of society when kinship groups moved from place to place with flocks and herds. ”

“ And—to make this explanation complete—I may add that I came back from the Balkans not a pro-Bulgarian in the sense that I was anti-Greek or anti-Servian or even anti-Turk; but with a feeling of general liking for all the peasant peoples whom a cruel fate has cast into the Balkans to fight out there national and racial issues, some of which are older than the Christian era. ”

“ But the acute disease from which Europe suffers is more or less chronic in the Balkans, where elemental human nature has never been thoroughly disciplined and chastened in the school of peaceful political life and experience. Each for himself without regard to others or even without thought of a future day of reckoning seems to be the maxim of national conduct among the Balkan peoples. ”

“ The land south of the Balkans, from the Black Sea to the frontier of Macedonia, is divided into small holdings, which belong to and are farmed by a peasant population of an essentially agricultural nature. ”

“ We hope we have dealt fairly with all these peoples. Mediaeval history, whether of the East or the West, is mostly a record of bloodshedding and cruelty; and the Middle Age has been prolonged to our own time in most parts of the Balkans, and is not yet over in some parts. ”

“ The Balkans have long been the last surviving shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous, a playground for passions that are fast becoming atrophied for want of exercise. In old bygone days we had the wars in the Low Countries always at our doors, as it were ”

“ As you know, the Christians of the Balkans are Slavs, and are akin to the Russians both by race and religion. Russia has always been their friend and champion, and Serbia and Montenegro have stood by their benefactor during the present war. Rumania had, so far, determined to remain neutral ”

“ When the Southern Slavs first settled in the Balkans, they formed a great, undifferentiated mass, stretching from the Alps and the Adriatic to the Aegean and the Black Sea—a mass of ethnographic raw material out of which almost any number of ‘nations’ and ‘languages’ might have been developed in accordance with the accidents of history. ”

“ These countries have been the adopted children of the great European powers during generations of rulers. Russia assumed guardianship of the nations having a preponderance of Slavic blood; Roumania with its Latin consanguinities was close to France and Italy; Bulgaria, Greece, and Balkan Turkey were debatable regions wherein the diplomats of the rival nations secured temporary victories by devious methods.
[42] The Balkans have fierce hatreds and have been the site of sudden historic wars. ”

“ She can retort to Greece concerning Salonica—We have no need of that port now, for we no longer aspire to be a power on the Aegean, we are a Central-European people. Jugo-Slavia is not a Balkan country. She is ashamed of the Balkans and of the Balkan past. She will loyally look to Geneva or any other capital of the League of Nations. She will cling to the centre. All seems well. Perhaps Bulgaria will cease to be an enemy, and Greece will cease to be a rival. Serbia moves northward, but in the North she comes face to face with a worse potential enemy than either—the Magyar. ”

“ The chief strength of the anti-German solution was this, that it satisfied local interests, and stood in perfect harmony with the national aspirations of the awakening Christian populations of the Balkans. Looking backwards at the events, we may say that all diplomatic designs, however farseeing they seemed at the time, have miserably failed in case they were inconsistent with local national needs, and that, on the contrary, small Balkan nations, steadily growing in consciousness and cohesion, have always found their way, mostly taking by surprise diplomatic wisdom. ”

“ Whichever side lost it would deserve to have lost, and whatever reduction in the population of the Balkan Peninsula was caused by the war would be ultimately a benefit to Europe. In parts of America where the race feeling is strongest, they say that the only good nigger is a dead nigger. So I felt about the Balkan populations. The feelings of a man with some interest in flocks of sheep on hearing that war had broken out between the wolves and the jackals would represent fairly well the attitude of mind in which I packed my kit for the Balkans. ”

“ It may be well to state that the sections on Serbia and Bulgaria were finished before the decisive Balkan developments of the past two months. Those on Greece and Rumania represent only a little later stage of the evolution. That on Turkey, compiled between one mission abroad and another, was the latest to be finished.
If our sympathies are not all the same, or given equally to friends and foes, none of us would find it possible to indite a Hymn of Hate about any Balkan people. ”

“ If no arrangement on a principle of give and take is made between them, the road to the East, which from the point of view of the Germanic powers lies through Serbia, will sooner or later inevitably be forced open, and the independence, first of Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania, and later of Bulgaria and Greece, will disappear, de facto if not in appearance, and both materially and morally they will become the slaves of the central empires. If the Balkan League could be reconstituted, Germany and Austria would never reach Salonika or Constantinople. ”