The Gate to Constantinople
Only the Danube separates Rumania from Bulgaria, yet the people—of the two capitals, at least—are as different as the French and Scotch. The train leaves Bucarest after breakfast; you are ferried over the river at Rustchuk at noon, and, after trailing over the shoulders of long, rolling plateaus, are up in the mountains in Sofia that evening. The change is almost as sharp as that between Ostend and Folkestone.
You leave French, or the half-Latin Rumanian language, for a Slavic speech, and the Cyrillic, or Russian, alphabet; names ending in "sco" or "ano" (Ionesco, Filipesco, Bratiano) for names ending in "off" (Radoslavoff, Malinoff, Ghenadieff, Antinoff, and the like), and all the show and vivacity, the cafes and cocottes of Bucarest, for a clean little mountain capital as determined and serious as some new town out West.
It seemed, though of course such impressions are mostly chance, that the difference began at the border. In Rumania, at the Hungarian border, they took away my passport, which in times like these is like taking away one's clothes, and, though I assured the customs inspector that I was on my way to Constantinople, and in a hurry, it required four days' wait in Bucarest, and innumerable visits to the police before the paper was returned. Every one, apparently, on the train had the same experience—the Austrian drummers looked wise and muttered "baksheesh," and in Bucarest an evil-eyed hotel porter kept pulling me into corners, saying that this taking of passports was a regular "commerce," and that for five francs he would have it back again.
There is a popular legend that the clerks in Bucarest hotels are supposed to offer incoming guests all the choices of a Mohammedan paradise, and the occasional misogynist, who prefers a room to himself, is received with sympathy, and the wish politely expressed that monsieur will soon be himself again. My own experience was less ornate, but prices were absurdly high, the waiter's check frequently needed revision, and one had a vague but more or less continual sense of swimming among sharks.
These symptoms were absent in Bulgaria. The border officials seemed sensible men who would "listen to reason"; the porters, coachmen, waiters, and the like, crude rather than cleverly depraved, and the air of Sofia clear and clean, in more senses than one.
Modern Bulgaria is only a couple of generations old, and though all this part of the world has been invaded and reinvaded and fought over since the beginning of things, the little kingdom (it seems more like a republic) has the air of a new country.
The aristocracy had been wiped out before Bulgaria got her autonomy in 1878, and, unlike Rumania, where the greater portion of the land is in the hand of large proprietors, Bulgaria is a country of small farmers, of shepherds, peasants, each with his little piece of land. The men who now direct its fortunes are the sons and grandsons of very simple people. Possibly it is because we Americans are also a new people, with still some of the prejudices of pioneers, that we are likely to feel something in common with the people of this "peasant state." They seemed to me, at any rate, the most "American" of the Balkan peoples.
There is, of course, one concrete reason for this: Robert College and the American School for Girls (Constantinople College) at Constantinople. It was men educated at Robert College who became the leaders of modern Bulgaria. The only Bulgarian I had known before—I met him on the steamer—had gone from a little village near Sofia to Harvard. His married sister had learned English at the American School for Girls; her husband, a Macedonian Bulgar, had worked his way through Yale. The amiable old general, who was always in the library at the Sofia Club at tea time, ready to tell how the Dardanelles and Constantinople could be taken, had learned English at Robert College and had a son there; the photographer who developed my films also had a son there—and so on.
Snow-capped mountains rise just behind Sofia, and the brown hills thereabout, like the rolling plateaus along the shoulders of which the train crawls on the way down from Rumania, are speckled with sheep. Sometimes even in Sofia you will meet a shepherd patiently urging his little flock up a modern concrete sidewalk and stopping now and then for some passer-by to pick up a lamb, "heft" it, poke it, and feel its wool before deciding whether or not he should take it home for dinner.