Bulgarians

“ Thus much is certain, that the inhabitants of Bulgaria must now be looked upon as members of the Slavonian family of nations. Together with the Servians, Croats, and Herzegovinians, they are the most numerous people of European Turkey; and, if the succession to the dominion of the Turks is to be decided by numbers alone, it belongs to the Servo-Bulgarians, and not to the Greeks.
The Bulgarians, as a rule, are not so tall as their neighbours the Servians; they are squat, strongly built, with a large head on broad shoulders. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The liberation by Russia of the Bulgarians from the Turkish yoke and from Ottoman exactions gave a stimulus to the primary producing industries. Land which had never been scratched since the earliest times was put to the plough, and proved fertile as the cornland on the borders of the Black Sea is fertile. The Bulgarians have improved their long-deferred opportunity, and prosperity has followed the act of liberation. It is a primitive prosperity, and a prosperity upon which the ambition of Bulgarian rulers has cast a heavy tax. ”

“ These Bulgarians, wise in their day and generation beyond their emancipated brethren, advocated the intervention of Bulgarian arms, not to secure independence, but autonomy. They felt that by the creation, for a period of years, of an autonomous province of Macedonia under the suzerainty of the Sultan, the felicitous history of Eastern Rumelia would repeat itself. ”

“ The Bulgarians, peaceable, patient, and industrious as they are, are beginning to grow tired of the subjection in which they are held. They certainly do not as yet dream of a national rising, for the isolated revolts which have taken place amongst them were confined to a few mountaineers, or brought about by young men whom a residence in Servia or Rumania had imbued with an enthusiasm for liberty. ”

“ When we come to judge dispassionately the folly of Bulgaria in provoking a war with her comrades in arms, and the seemingly amazing greed for land which it revealed, we must remember that the Bulgarians felt that they had accomplished everything {322} to receive nothing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This fresh mixture with the Slav element constituted the Bulgarians a separate race, with no original title to belong to the Slavonic family beyond that derived from the fusion of blood that followed the long intercourse of centuries, by which the primitive Bulgarians became blended with the former inhabitants of the country. It is evident that they were superior to the Slavs in military science and power, but inferior as regards civilization, and thus naturally yielded to the influence of the more advanced and better organized people. ”

“ The Bulgarians, whatever the origin and the ingredients of their nationality, are by language a purely Slavonic people; their ancestors were the pioneers of Slavonic civilization as expressed in its monuments of theological literature. Nevertheless, they have never been enthusiastic Pan-Slavists, any more than the Dutch have ever been ardent Pan-Germans; it is as unreasonable to expect such a thing of the one people as it is of the other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That in cases of Balkan massacres and outrages the Bulgarian people have not been always the victims, and have not been always blameless, I know. It is impossible to shut one's eyes to the fact that something survives of the traditions of cruelty and reprisal existing in the Balkans of the Middle Ages. In this Balkan peninsula there is always a smell of blood in the nostrils, a mist of blood in the eyes. The Bulgarians have taken their part in many incidents which seem to deny the existence of Christian civilisation. ”

“ In the midst of this homogeneous Rumanian population we meet with Bulgarian colonists, whose number has increased recently in consequence of the persecutions of Turks and Greeks. The character of the Bulgarians born in the country has undergone considerable modifications. They are at present the most industrious tillers of the soil, and in the vicinity of large towns they occupy themselves principally with horticulture. Many of these Bulgarians live in that {164} portion of Bessarabia which was ceded by Russia in 1855. ”

“ The largest minority group, which numbered about 0.7 million people, was Turkish. The few Greeks, Romanians, Armenians, and Jews in the population collectively accounted for only about 1 percent of the total. These modern Bulgarians live in a country that is almost rectangular in shape and covers roughly 42,800 square miles of the lower Balkan Peninsula. Their country is bounded on the east by the Black Sea, on the south by Greece and the part of Turkey that is in Europe, on the west by Yugoslavia, and on the north by Romania. ”

“ Ethnology.—The Bulgarians, who constitute 77.14% of the inhabitants of the kingdom, are found in their purest type in the mountain districts, the Ottoman conquest and subsequent colonization having introduced a mixed population into the plains.
The devastation of the country which followed the Turkish invasion resulted in the extirpation or flight of a large proportion of the Bulgarian inhabitants of the lowlands, who were replaced by Turkish colonists. The mountainous districts, however, retained their original population and sheltered large numbers of the fugitives. ”

“ And even these, born and educated on the borders of Europe, in the midst of divers Christian races, must form a character different from that of the Asiatic Turks in other parts of the empire.
Of the various races in European Turkey, the Bulgarians, properly so called, who are estimated at four millions, speaking the Bulgarian language, claim our first attention. They inhabit not only Bulgaria proper, extending from the Danube to the Balkan Mountains, but also an extensive region south of these mountains, reaching to the Bosphorus, the Marmora, and Albania ”

“ The Bulgarians, and especially those of the plains, are a peaceable people, recalling in no respect the fierce hordes who devastated the Byzantine empire. They are not warlike, like their neighbours the Servians, and do not keep alive in their national poetry the memory of former struggles. Their songs relate to the events of every-day life, or to the sufferings of the oppressed; and the “gentle zaptieh,” as the representative of authority, is one of the characters most frequently represented in them. The average Bulgarian is a quiet, hard-working peasant, a good husband and father ”

“ The Bulgarians indeed think themselves superior to the Slavs by reason of the warlike and glorious traditions of the Tartar tribe that gave them their name and infused the Asiatic element into their race, thus endowing them with greater stability, energy, and consistency than is possessed by purely Slav peoples. ”

“ The Bulgarians were malicious enough to pray for the long life of Isaac Angelus, the surest pledge of their freedom and prosperity. Yet their chiefs could involve in the same indiscriminate contempt the family and nation of the emperor. “In all the Greeks,” said Asan to his troops, “the same climate, and character, and education, will be productive of the same fruits. ”

“ Since the revolt of Eastern Roumelia, Bulgaria has been treated by Dame Europa as a naughty child. But the Bulgarians have been shrewd enough to see that the Central Powers and England have an interest in their national independence and consolidation; they have recognised the truth that fortune favours those who help themselves, and they have boldly taken their own course, while carefully avoiding any breach of the proprieties such as might again bring them under the censure of the European Areopagus. ”

“ I have briefly touched upon Bulgarian relations with Russia and Serbia in order to give a brief sketch of the only too frequent mistakes made by Bulgaria’s official Government. The Bulgarians possess many excellent qualities, and, as a nation, have a distinct claim on our respect; but they have one drawback: they are not independent in politics, and their policy is not the outcome of the requirements of the times,—as a rule it is not even suited to them, but is93 merely the mouthpiece of foreign influences. ”

“ The young Bulgarians in the mixed colleges of Constantinople invariably make the most satisfactory progress in their studies. This revival of learning is a most hopeful sign of vitality. If persevered in, the Bulgarian race, which has been dead, as it were, for so many centuries, may again play its part in the world’s history. ”

“ The Bulgarian peasant is an exceedingly good fellow; physically very active,79 mentally rather stolid, he pursues his calling in a calm deliberate way, and is not easily ruffled. His food is most simple; he takes practically no alcohol and, owing to his temperate mode of life, lives to a very great age. The entire population numbers about four millions and shows a greater percentage of centenarians than any other nation. The Bulgarians are very fond of music and dancing, but they have no music or poetry of their own, and what they do possess has been borrowed from the Turks or other Orientals. ”

“ A little later in the days of her freedom, when to her Roman Catholic ruler, King Ferdinand, was born a son (named Boris after the first Christian king of Bulgaria) , the Bulgarians had him transferred in 1896 from the Roman to the Greek Church as a matter of national policy.
The controversy to-day between "Patriarchate" adherents of the Orthodox Church—i.e. Greeks, and the Exarchate adherents—i.e. Bulgarians, is perhaps the most bitter of all Balkan controversies. ”

“ The hardy peasants tramped impossibly long distances in their longing to meet the Servians. The arrangements were carried through with a success which seems miraculous in an inexperienced race. The explanation was afterwards rightly discerned by an English visitor to Bulgaria. "This is the secret of Bulgarian independence--everybody is in grim earnest. The Bulgarians do not care about amusements [206] ." In that remark there is food for thought. Inefficiency has no place among a people that looks to the welfare of the State as all in all. ”

“ According to the census of 1893, and there has been very little change since, the population of Bulgaria is 3,310,713, and is composed of 2,505,326 Bulgarians, 569,728 Turks, 58,518 Greeks, 13,260 gypsies, 27,531 Spanish-speaking Jews, 16,298 Tartars and representatives of nearly every other race on earth. The national faith is that of the Orthodox Greek Church, although in 1870 the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated the entire Bulgarian people in consequence of their persistent demands for religious independence and autonomy. ”