Twenty Years' Residence among the People of Turkey: Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Turks, and Armenians

by Fanny Janet Sandison Blunt

The laws promulgated in the reign of Sultan Abdul-Medjid with respect to the amelioration of the condition of the rayahs were gradually introduced into Bulgaria, and their beneficial influence tended greatly to remove some of the most crying wrongs that had so long oppressed the people. These reforms apparently satisfied the Bulgarians—always easily contented and peacefully disposed. They were thankful for the slight protection thus thrown over their life and property. They welcomed the reforms with gratitude as the signs of better days, and, stimulated by written laws, as well as by the better system of government that had succeeded the old one and had deprived their Mohammedan neighbors of some of their power of molesting and injuring them, they redoubled their activity and endeavored by industry to improve their condition. Such changes can be only gradual among an oppressed people in the absence of good government and easy communication with the outer world.

The Bulgarians, inwardly, perhaps, still dissatisfied, seemed outwardly content and attached to the Porte in the midst of the revolutionary movements that alternately convulsed the Servian, Greek, and Albanian populations. A very small section alone yielded to the influence of the foreign agents or comitats, who were using every means to create a general rising in Bulgaria, or was at any time in the Bulgarian troubles enticed to raise its voice against the Ottoman Government and throw off its allegiance. The late movement is said to have received encouragement from the Bulgarian clergy acting under Russian influence, and from the young schoolmasters, whose more advanced ideas naturally led them to instil notions of independence among the people. But these views were by no means entertained by the more thoughtful and important members of the community, and no organized disaffection existed in Bulgaria at the time the so-called revolt began. The action of a few hot-headed patriots, followed by some discontented peasants, started the revolt which, if it had been judiciously dealt with, might have been suppressed without one drop of blood. The Bulgarians would probably have continued plodding on as faithful subjects of the Porte, instead of being made—as will apparently be the case—a portion of the Slav group. Whether this fresh arrangement will succeed remains to be seen; but according to my experience of Bulgarian character, there is very little sympathy between it and the Slav. The Bulgarians have ever kept aloof from their Slavonic neighbors, and will continue a separate people even when possessed of independence.

The limits of Bulgaria, which must be drawn from an ethnological standpoint, are not very easily determined. The right of conquest and long possession no doubt entitles the Bulgarians to call their own the country extending from the Danube to the Balkans. South of that range and of Mount Scardos, however, i.e., in the northern part of Thrace and Macedonia, their settlement was never permanent, and their capital, originally established in Lychnidos (the modern Ochrida), had to be removed north of the Balkans to Tirnova. The colonies they established were never very important, since they were scattered in the open country as better adapted to the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of the nation. These settlements, forming into large and small villages, took Bulgarian names, but the names of the towns remained Greek.

The Bulgarians south of the Balkans are a mixed race, neither purely Greek nor purely Bulgarian; but their manners and customs and physical features identify them more closely with the Greeks than with the Bulgarians north of the Balkans. There the Finnish type is clearly marked by the projecting cheek-bones, the short upturned nose, the small eyes, and thickly-set but rather small build of the people.

In Thrace and Macedonia, where Hellenic blood and features predominate, and Hellenic influence is more strongly felt, the people call themselves Thracians and Macedonians, rather than Bulgarians; the Greek language, in schools, churches, and in correspondence, is used by the majority in preference to the Bulgarian, and even in the late church question in many places the people showed themselves lukewarm about the separation, and the bulk remained faithful to the Church of Constantinople.

The sandjak of Philippopolis, esteemed almost entirely Bulgarian by some writers, is claimed for the Greeks by others upon the argument that Stanimacho, with its fifteen villages, is Greek with regard to language and predilection, and Didymotichon, with its forty-five villages, is a mixture of Greeks and Bulgarians. As a matter of fact, however, in this sandjak, in consequence of its proximity to Bulgaria proper, and to its developed and prosperous condition, the Bulgarian element has taken the lead.

The revival of the church question and the educational movement have stayed and almost nullified Greek influence, which is limited to certain localities like Stanimacho and other places, where the people hold as staunchly to their Greek nationality as the Bulgarians of other localities do to their own. While dispute waxed hot in the town of Philippopolis between the parties of Greeks and Bulgarians, each in defence of its rights, no spirit of the kind was ever evinced in Adrianople, where the population is principally Greek and Turkish, with a small number of Armenians and Bulgarians. In Macedonia the sandjak of Salonika, comprising Cassandra, Verria, and Serres, numbering in all about 250.000 souls, is, with few exceptions, Greek, or so far Hellenized as to be so to all intents and purposes. The inhabitants of Vodena and Janitza, and the majority in Doïran and Stromnitza, and a considerable portion of the population of Avrat Hissar, on the right bank of the Vardar, claim Greek nationality. The Greeks in this part of the country have worked with the same tenacity of purpose and consequent success in Hellenizing the people, as the Bulgarians of the kaza of Philippopolis in promoting the feeling of Bulgarian nationality there. This mission of the Greeks here has not been a very difficult one, as the national feeling of the bulk of the population is naturally Greek.

Notwithstanding the marked tendency of the people towards Hellenism, the language in Vodena and other places is Bulgarian; but the features of the people, together with their ideas, manners, and customs, are essentially Greek; even the dress of the Bulgarian-speaking peasant is marked by the absence of the typical potour and the gougla or cap worn in Bulgaria.

Most of the authors who have written on the populations of these regions have, either through Panslavistic views or misled by the prevalence of the Bulgarian language in the rural districts, put down the whole of the population as Bulgarian, a mistake easily corrected by a summary of the number of Greeks and Bulgarians conjointly occupying those districts, separating the purely Greek from the purely Bulgarian element, and taking into consideration at the same time the number of mixed Greeks and Bulgarians.

If the wide geographical limits projected by Russia for Bulgaria be carried out, there will be a recurrence of all the horrors of the recent war in a strife between the Greeks and Bulgarians, in consequence of the encroachment of the future Bulgaria upon territory justly laid claim to by the Greeks as ethnologically their own and as a heritage from past ages. The question would be greatly simplified and the danger of future contests between the two peoples much lessened, if not entirely removed, by the Bulgarian autonomy being limited to the country north of the Balkans.