Let me suggest a few typical Balkan tours.
Take train to Belgrade: then go by Danube steamer to Widdin. From Widdin to Sofia go by rail, and then back to Belgrade on horseback, sending on heavy luggage by rail, but making at Nish on the way a depot of provisions and linen.
Take train to Bucharest. Go from there to Stara Zagora on horseback, crossing the Roumanian frontier at Roustchouk, going over the trail of the Russian Army of Liberation and seeing the Balkan mountain passes.
Take train to Sofia, and from there to Yamboli. At Yamboli go on horseback (in the track of the Bulgarian Third Army of 1912) to Kirk Kilisse, Lule Burgas, Chorlu, Silivri (on the Sea of Marmora), and Constantinople. A somewhat wild trip this would be, but quite practicable. The most comfortable way to travel would be to take ox wagons for the luggage and the camping outfit. That would restrict the day's march to twenty miles. The horses—(diverging to look at scenery and battle-fields)—would do about thirty miles a day.
Take train to Constantinople, and from there boat to Salonica. Go on horseback from Salonica to Belgrade. This would show the most disturbed part of the Balkan Peninsula and some of its wildest scenery.
Take train to Philippopolis, and from there go on horseback and with ox wagons for a tour of the Rhodope mountains.
Of course it is possible to take much tamer tours of the Balkans. Practically all the big towns are connected with the European railway systems. But you would see, thus, towns and not the country. The Balkan towns are to my eye very dreary. There are practically no fine old buildings, for in the Turkish occupation the greater number of these were destroyed. The modern buildings have rarely any character. The churches, usually of the Slav school of architecture, alone relieve the monotony of economical imitations of French and British buildings. In Belgrade, it is true, there has been an effort to carry the Slav note farther, and some of the commercial and public buildings show a Moscow influence.
Mr. Noel Buxton, M.P., that most enthusiastic admirer of the Bulgarians, can carry his enthusiasm so far as to admire Sofia. He wrote recently (With the Bulgarian Staff):
Few sights can be more inspiring to the lover of liberty and national progress than a view of Sofia from the hill where the great seminary of the national church overlooks the plain. There at your feet is spread out the unpretentious seat of a government which stands for the advance of European order in lands long blighted with barbarism. Here resides, and is centred, the virile force of a people which has advanced the bounds of liberty. From here, symbolised by the rivers and roads running down on each side, has extended, and will further extend, the power of modern education, of unhampered ideas, of science, and of humanity. From this magnificent view-point Sofia stretches along the low hill with the dark background of the Balkan beyond. Against that background now stands out the new embodiment of Bulgarian and Slavonic energy, genius, and freedom of mind, the great cathedral, with its vast golden domes brilliantly standing out from the shade behind them. In no other capital is a great church shown to such effect, viewed from one range of hills against the mountainous slopes of another. It is a building which, with its marvellous mural paintings, would in any capital form an object of world interest, but which, in the capital of a tiny peasant State, supremely embodies that breadth of mind which
... rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more.
But I think that that is a too kindly view. What makes the Balkan capitals additionally dreary is that there is no "society" in the European sense. The Turkish idea of keeping the womenfolk in the harem survives to the extent that woman is not supposed to frequent places of entertainment, to receive or to pay visits. In Bulgaria the women are secluded with an almost Turkish strictness: in Serbia, not quite so strictly, but still strictly.