The troops who destroyed Armensko were commanded by Khairreddin Bey, a man already notorious for his methods. According to a report of the committee, the Turks had met a body of 400 insurgents at Ezertze and been defeated. At any rate, the Turks turned back towards Florina, and on their way passed through Armensko, a village of about 160 houses. Without warning they fell upon the inhabitants, slaughtered about 130 men, women, and children, and plundered and burned the houses. Some Roman Catholic sisters of charity, who conduct a free dispensary at Monastir, secured permission from the Governor-General to proceed to Armensko and relieve the wounded. They arrived a week after the affair, and found as many as sixty living creatures huddled together in the two churches, the Greek and the Bulgarian, which, though plundered, had not been destroyed. The human bodies had all been buried, but the carcases of burned pigs, horses, and cows were still lying among the ruins, decomposing and befouling the atmosphere. The sisters, whom we saw after their return, said that some revolting crimes had been committed upon the women. They gave the foreign Consuls at Monastir details of the affair, and the Governor-General was indignant, and permitted them to go to the relief of no more massacred villages.
The sisters brought the survivors to Florina, and those severely wounded they took on to Monastir. The peasants were all the same people; the same blood coursed through their veins, and they spoke the same language, a corrupted Bulgarian, their vocabularies containing some Greek and many Turkish words; but some were ‘Greeks,’ and some were ‘Bulgarians.’ The ‘Greeks’ were received by the Greek hospital, but admittance was refused those who had rejected the offer of the Metropolitan of Florina to become ‘Greeks,’ and there was nowhere else to take them but to the Turkish hospital.
The subjects of the Sultan do not love one another.
The rivalry between the racial parties—they cannot be defined as races—works death and disaster among the Macedonian peasants. Bulgarian and Greek bands commit upon communities of hostile politics atrocities less only in extent than the atrocities of the Turks. Sometimes Servian bands enter the field.
But the propagandas also greatly benefit the people. The Bulgarian, Greek, Servian, and Rumanian schools—tolerated by the Government because they divide the Macedonians—give the peasants an education which they would not acquire at the hands of the Turkish Government. In the large centres the ‘gymnasiums’ offer the inducements of higher education, and in some cases music and art, for which professors are brought from Budapest and Vienna. Children are often supplied with clothes, boarded, and lodged without charge.
All this effort is to possess the greatest share of the community when the division of the country comes. As far as the peasants are concerned, I believe it would make very little difference whom the country goes to, as long as the Government is liberal and equitable. Indeed, I found sympathy with the Bulgarian cause among many Greeks, Vlachs, and Servians, simply because the Bulgarians are fighting the Turks.
The Greek clergy and other propagandists worked hard to influence us. They brought documents to prove their contentions. But figures lie in Turkey. A little thing like figures never bothers one of the ‘elect’; a Turk can supply official documents proving anything—a map coloured red as far as Vienna, or a census of the population showing more Mohamedans in the land than there are inhabitants. And the other races to some extent copy the Turk. Some of the Greek partisans contended that the major part of the country was peopled by Greeks, but wiser men explained that many members of the Greek community spoke Slav languages and Vlach, but that they are Greeks, nevertheless, because their sympathies are Greek.
‘The inhabitants of Normandy are not British,’ they said.
‘But is not this sympathy unnatural—the work of your clergy, by means not wholly righteous?’
They said the adhesion of the other races to the Patriarchate was entirely natural; the Bulgarians converted artificially with brigand bands.