There remained only a race of peasants, without a history or traditions; a race over which five hundred years passed without altering or softening one feature or one barbarous custom. It was a race without a nobility or even a landed gentry; a race without a literature except a string of homicidal folk-songs which embody the spirit in which the Emperor Basil treated the conquered and captive Bulgars.
The Russians found them and recognized them as fellow-Slavs—Slavs with much the same original habits and characteristics, but with none of the refining influences common even to the Russians of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It was natural that Russia, with her hatred of Turkey, should sympathize with this race, near of kin, but suffering sorely from arrested development. Thenceforward Bulgaria had an abettor in her struggle against the domination of the Turk.
The methods by which the Bulgarians resisted Turkish tyranny and rapacity were no better and no worse than their way of striving for a new Empire of the Orient five hundred years before. Their conspiracies, their incursions into non-Bulgarian territory, their skirmishes with the infidel at their gates, were simply a revival of the old eye-gouging methods of their mighty Czars of the Middle Age.
But they had the knack of getting sympathy. In England, which followed Russia in her discovery of this race, reputedly extinct, there was no credit given to the thought that a Bulgarian could do anything wrong. When the London newspapers wrote of Bulgarian atrocities, they meant atrocities committed by Turks in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian reprisals were known only to the rare travellers who had penetrated into the heart of the Balkans, and who, after making close acquaintance with the habits of the natives, failed to discriminate between a throat-cutting executed by a Christian Slav and a similar bit of work by a heathen Turk.
Very slowly indeed has recognition been forced of the fact that while the perpetrators of Bulgarian atrocities were hireling Turks of the lowest class, and not to be compared with the brave soldiers who compose the bulk of the Turkish Army, the Bulgarian comitadjis, with their cowardly cruelties, were fairly representative of the average Bulgarian soldier when at war.
What more evidence is required than the telegram sent by King Constantine from the field of battle to his Prime Minister, instructing him to protest against the atrocities of the Bulgarian soldiery. It is dated July, 1913, and reads:—“Protest in my name to the representatives of the civilized Powers against these monsters in human form, and declare before the whole civilized world that I shall be compelled to take vengeance in order to inspire terror into these monsters, and to make them reflect before they commit any more such crimes.”
Thus Tino the Undecided on his quondam Allies, who from time immemorial were held by the Greeks to be barbarians pure and simple. The taxes of Stambuloff and the sophistication of Ferdinand may have sufficed to convert Sofia from a city of sewers and filthy mosques to a modern capital with electric light and tramways, gardens, museums and broad boulevards, but a quarter of a century has not changed the heart or the outlook of a single Bulgarian peasant.
The whole of Bulgarian literature, until the last twenty years, was comprised in those folk-songs which have perpetuated the Bulgarian spirit and nationality. Chief among them are the lays of the heroes, and upon these heroes the character of the Bulgarian peasant of to-day is modelled. One of these heroes, having been bantered by his drinking companions on account of an unnoticed blemish on the fairness of his lady, goes home and kills her for the fault. Another drags his mother round the house by the hair of the head because he came home unexpectedly and found no meal prepared for him. A third, who had killed his paramour because she was losing her beauty, was gently chidden by his mother, who represented that the victim would have done good work in the scullery.
In short these heroes, whose exploits are sung in every village of Bulgaria to-day, are as unmitigated a lot of cruel scoundrels as ever constituted a comitadji band. Foremost among them is the national hero Marko, whose extensive drinking bouts are the only stories that can make a Bulgarian smile. Among his nobler exploits are the abduction of a Turkish princess, who bores him so unutterably that he has her killed by his band. She had contrived his escape from captivity, and upon this charming legend is built up the Bulgarian tradition of gratitude.
Such legends are “the gems of our literature,” says Slaveikoff, the Bulgarian poet. The fact that for five hundred years they have been the only Bulgarian literature accounts for the circumstance that Ferdinand was called to rule over a race whose ethics were those of the fourteenth century, and fairly barbarous ones at that.