Bulgarian

“ Radoslavoff—But now we may not, neither in Chataldja nor in Cavalla nor in Dobrudja. The Bulgarian Government is pursuing the absolute preservation of peace and is watching developments. The friends that we have, notwithstanding all evil machinations, have not deserted us. Bulgaria still has friends, but friends and enemies tell us, Keep quiet, Bulgarians! ”

“ The diplomacy of Bulgaria under these difficult circumstances was deplorable. Her statesmen seemed bemused with the intoxication of Bulgarian military victories, and unable to forget the glowing calculations of the future Bulgarian Empire which they had made during the course of the war. Those calculations I gathered from gossip with all classes in Bulgaria at different times, speaking not only with politicians but with bankers, trading people, and others. ”

“ They should know the millennium-old history of our wonderful, small country that has preserved the memory of the hope and faith of the people’s enlighteners who carried in their hearts the Bulgarian spirit. ”

“ Black Bulgaria on the Danube became Christian and Slavonic. ♦Use of the Bulgarian name.♦ The modern Bulgarians bear the Bulgarian name only in the way in which the Romanized Celts of Gaul bear the name of their Frankish masters from Germany, in which the Slaves of Kief and Moscow bear the name of their Russian masters from Scandinavia. In all three cases, the power formed by the union of conquerors and conquered has taken the name of the conquerors and has kept the speech of the conquered. ”

“ The Bulgarian artist shows us a land in which civilisation is evident and art not unknown. The Australian author (who was with the Bulgarian Army as correspondent for the London Morning Post during the former Balkan War) writes of a people whom he found usually courteous, gentle, and worthy. His personal experiences of the Bulgarian peasantry are vividly interesting, and hardly less interesting is the brief sketch of the early history of Bulgaria, the country where the Roman Empire met its doom. ”

“ In every Bulgarian house I've ever been in there is the picture of the Czar liberator. A Bulgarian regards a Russian as of his own blood. Bulgaria gave Russia her alphabet, and the languages are much the same: only the Russian is richer in words and expressions. Why, there is a Bulgarian, General Dimitrief, holding a high command in the Russian army. When I left Bulgaria there was no talk of her going with Germany. 'We will never go with Germany,' I've heard over and over. ”

“ They formed a community of considerable strength and importance, known as Great or White Bulgaria. These Bulgars fused with later Tartar immigrants from Asia and eventually were consolidated into the powerful kingdom of Kazan, which was only crushed by the Tsar Ivan IV in 1552. According to Bulgarian historians, the basins of the rivers Volga and Don and the steppes of eastern Russia proved too confined a space for the legitimate development of Bulgarian energy, and expansion to the west was decided on. ”

“ Two newspaper correspondents of the more or less continuous string that were filing from one Bulgarian leader to another to find out what Bulgaria was going to do, amiably permitted me to trail about with them, and thus to see and talk a little with some of those who are steering Bulgaria's exceedingly delicate course—men whose grandfathers very likely wore those sheepskin coats with the wool turned in. ”

“ The Bulgarian people in Bulgaria consisted entirely of peasants; there was no Bulgarian upper or middle or ‘intelligent’ or professional class; those enlightened Bulgars who existed were domiciled in other countries; the Church was in the hands of the Greeks, who vied with the Turks in suppressing Bulgarian nationality.
The two committees of Odessa and Bucarest which promoted the enlightenment and emancipation of Bulgaria were dissimilar in composition and in aim ”

“ But in his city of Sofia, "the little Paris," as he likes to hear it called, and in his towns the Bulgarian has become keen and bustling. He rather aspires to be thought Parisian in manner. A "middle class" begins to grow up. The Bulgarian prospers mightily as a trader, and when he makes money he devotes his son to a profession, to the staff of the army, the law, to public life. Also the Bulgarian is keen to add manufacturing industries to his agricultural resources, and there are cotton mills and other factories springing up in different places. The Bulgarian has a great faith in himself. ”

“ The respect the Bulgarian entertains for the clergy and for the enlightened portion of his fellow-countrymen is so great that he allows himself to be entirely guided by them, evincing in small things as well as great the feeling of harmony and union that binds the whole people together. But the reverse of this disposition is manifested by the Bulgarians, more especially the peasants, towards any foreign element, and particularly towards the Turkish authorities. ”

“ It was in this period that Bulgaria reached the peak of its territorial expansion, penetrating deep into the Byzantine Empire. Macedonia and Albania became Bulgaria's new frontiers; in 924 Serbia fell under Bulgarian rule. With these victories Simeon claimed the title tsar of all the Bulgarians and the Greeks.
With the territorial expansion came a domestic flourishing in the arts and an increase in trade. The arts and architecture of the period were significant for their beauty and vitality. Preslav, then the capital city, became the center of culture. ”

“ Generalising, the "leading men" in Bulgaria are of a poor type (there are exceptions) , the leading priests of a still poorer type; the people themselves are a sound people, and when the ambitious among them contrive to [180] preserve their peasant virtues through the ordeal of education they will become a great people.
The Bulgarian did not seem to me naturally cruel. All the time that I was with the main army I saw no trace of outrage or cruelty. ”

“ Many of these are in Greek and Yugoslav Macedonia and are, in fact, Macedonians who may or may not prefer to be called Bulgarians. Other Bulgarians are in Greek Thrace, and a few are in Romanian Dobrudzha and in Soviet Bessarabia. A scattering are settled in other Eastern European countries, Australia, and North and South America. There are only a few in the United States.
When The Macedonians and Gypsies in the country—whom Bulgarian official sources include as fully integrated into the Bulgarian population—are not counted separately, Bulgarians constitute about 91 percent of the population. ”

“ It has always been the ambition of each of these three nationalities to dominate the whole, an ambition which has caused endless waste of blood and money and untold misery. If the question were to be settled purely on ethnical considerations, Bulgaria would acquire the greater part of the interior of Macedonia, the most numerous of the dozen nationalities of which is Bulgarian in sentiment if not in origin, and would thus undoubtedly attain the hegemony of the peninsula, while the centre of gravity of the Serbian nation would, as is ethnically just, move north-westwards. ”

“ The most important neighbour of the Empire in this quarter was the Bulgarian kingdom, which covered all the Balkan hinterland from the Danube and the Black Sea to the barrier-fortresses of Adrianople and Salonika. It had been founded by a conquering caste of non-Slavonic nomads from the trans-Danubian steppes, but these were completely absorbed in the Slavonic population which they had endowed with their name and had preserved by political consolidation from the fate of their brethren further south. ”

“ As time goes on, however, Bulgaria is seen to absorb wanderers proceeding from more and more distant districts in the southern belts of the steppeland which forms the continuation of Europe into Asia. Slavic culture and speech preserved by the Bulgarians seem but the veil that hides their strong Asiatic affinity.
The fundamental difference between the temper of the Serbian and the Bulgarian is apparent to travelers in Balkan lands. The former are true Slavs. They are lighthearted and always ready [210] to make merry. Their mountains re-echo with folk songs of the genuine Slavic type. ”

“ No Bulgarian could understand a Greek, and vice versa, and a Russian peasant could not converse with a Bulgarian peasant any more readily than a Highlander could talk with a costermonger from Whitechapel, because each has his local idioms; but educated Russians and Bulgarians can understand each other even if each talks in his own language. ”

“ The greatest of all Bulgarian rulers was Ivan Asên II. (1218–1241) , a man of humane and enlightened character. After a series of victorious campaigns he established his sway over Albania, Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace, and governed his wide dominions with justice, wisdom and moderation. In his time the nation attained a prosperity hitherto unknown: commerce, the arts and literature flourished; Trnovo, the capital, was enlarged and embellished; and great numbers of churches and monasteries were founded or endowed. ”

“ Knowledge of Slavic literature became widespread, and writers treated such varied topics as religion, grammar, logic, and patriotism.
By the end of the tenth century A.D., however, the First Bulgarian Kingdom was beginning to decline. Internally, the local population was weary from continual warring and from the oppression of feudalism. The boyars continued to struggle against the king and his council for their own autonomy. Because of the internal weakness of the country, Bulgaria's neighbors began to encroach on her borders. ”

“ When, in the memory of men still living, Bulgaria for the first time woke from its lethargy of more than four hundred years, it had no traditions, no literature, in fact no language ready for literary use, for during that period the idiom had passed through strange vicissitudes. The Bulgarian language, rich in inflections, uncontaminated by foreign influence, except through the Greek, had been used by the protoapostles of the Slays, Cyril and Methodius, in the translation of the New Testament and other works. ”

“ These authorities agree in describing the liturgical language as “Old Bulgarian.” A different view, however, is maintained by Miklosich, Kopitar and some others, who regard it as “Old Slovene.” According to the more generally accepted theory, the dialect spoken by the Bulgarian population in the neighbourhood of Salonica, the birthplace of SS. Cyril and Methodius, was employed by the Slavonic apostles in their translations from the Greek, which formed the model for subsequent ecclesiastical literature. ”

“ Art. VI. Bulgaria is constituted an autonomous tributary Principality, with a Christian Government and a national militia.
The definitive frontiers of the Bulgarian Principality will be traced by a special Russo-Turkish Commission before the evacuation of Roumelia by the Imperial Russian army. ”

“ Under his rule the Bulgarian realm extended from the Carpathians to the neighbourhood of Adrianople; Serdica (the present Sofia) was taken, and the valley of the Struma conquered. Prêslav, the Bulgarian capital, was attacked and burned by the emperor Nicephorus, but the Greek army on its return was annihilated in one of the Balkan passes; the emperor was slain, and his skull was converted by Krum into a goblet. The reign of Boris (852–884) is memorable for the introduction of Christianity into Bulgaria. ”

“ The Bulgarian attitude towards the Entente Powers was always a little difficult to determine; the mass of the Bulgarian people is by no means cordial to either [Pg 52] Germany or Turkey. The politicians most likely became nervous, and German gold did the rest. Nevertheless, I failed to find any evidence of Bulgarian affection for Great Britain. The people in general know hardly anything about this country. ”

“ At no epoch of the history of the Bulgarians does their dormant intellect appear to have produced any works of art or genius. This conclusion is arrived at by the absence of any proof of an anterior Bulgarian civilization in the form of literature or monuments. Without personal traditions, they know nothing of their past; and to learn something of it, are forced to consult the Byzantine and Slavonic authors. What civilization they possessed was also borrowed from the Slavs and Byzantines, with whom they lived in close contact. ”

“ On October 5, 1908, Prince Ferdinand sprang on an astonished continent the news that he renounced the Turkish suzerainty (ever since 1878 the Bulgarian principality had been a tributary and vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, and therefore, with all its astonishingly rapid progress and material prosperity, a subject for commiseration in the kingdoms of Serbia and Greece) and proclaimed the independence of Bulgaria, with himself, as Tsar of the Bulgars, at its head. Europe had not recovered from this shock, still less Belgrade and Athens, when, two days later. ”

“ This is practically what happened in Bulgaria, and it is only by taking into account the exceptionally difficult conditions in which the Principality found itself on the morrow of its liberation that one will be able to appreciate the efforts displayed and the result obtained."
In one particular there is to a British observer a marked failing in the Bulgarian character: the Bulgars are very nervous to "keep up appearances" and that makes them appear snobbish and deceitful at times. They are ashamed of poverty, a little ashamed, too, of their natural manners. ”