The Balkan Trail

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

We discovered early that our escort were very poor horsemen. They did not seem to understand their animals; for though the ponies they rode could have been managed without any bit at all, yet they all kept a heavy hand on a cruel curb. The ponies were small, and had none but natural gaits, and the short trot was most uncomfortable unless one rose in the saddle. This the Zaptiehs were unable to do. In consequence the horse suffered. Two at a time they took turns at riding with us at a steady trot, while the others galloped and walked alternately, thereby covering the same distances we did in the same time.

A ride across Macedonia affords a wealth of interest. Your escort is a study in Turk; every peasant you meet is a new picture; the mud-brick houses of the Christians and the Mohamedan chiflics are curious and picturesque, and you must stop at times and absorb the scenery. You can sympathise on a journey like this with the small boy who cried because he had so many sweets he could not eat them all. Our route the first day lay through open country, and our escort was therefore quite small. We traversed the length of the Monastir valley and stayed the night at Prelip. It should be a happy, prosperous valley, for Nature smiles on it, but it is desolate and almost deserted. The cornfields hug the towns, and the villages hide themselves in obscure corners of the mountains. The ‘high road,’ a waggon-track, which we followed, skirted one village and passed through another, but they were made up of such huts as brigands would not stoop to enter. A sheep-dog, big framed and thick coated—but a bread-fed, skinny animal, with an uncertain lope and an unsound bark—came at us. One of the Zaptiehs drew his sword and gave it a trial swing at a low bush near his horse’s feet; but a peasant came crying after the dog, and called the brute off before it got within reach of the Turk’s blade. This was a Turk of less religious fervour than his fellows.

The Zaptiehs smoked continually as they rode, and rolled cigarettes for us. They gave us lights from their cigarettes, but only the irreligious fellow would accept the same favour from us, for which I asked the reason. ‘They will not take fire from a giaour,’ he said.

The insurgents had boasted that the crops would not be harvested this year, but the corn and the tobacco were already on their way to market. We passed Christian caravans which took the fields to give us the road, and Mohamedan carts which made us give them the right of way. The former were unarmed and most meek, doffing their dejected fezzes and standing abject with hands clasped on their stomachs as we passed. The others, down to the half-grown boys, carried pistols and guns, and bore themselves like a ruling race. The Turks, however, appeared to be as poor as the Christians, and once two veiled women, gathering their faded rags about them, even to covering their henna-tipped fingers, came up to our horses to beg. Nevertheless, their husband, riding a dwarfed donkey, carried a revolver.

The lot of the animals in Macedonia is similar to that of the people. The one survives on grass as the other lives ‘by bread alone.’ The peasant lies down to sleep at night in his clothes, and the heavy-saddled pack-animals are relieved only of their loads. The long, latticed saddle, reaching from before the animal’s shoulders to his haunches, is seldom removed. It becomes in time an integral part of the animal, it conforms somewhat to his shape, and he gives way in places to its lines; and when it does leave a back it often brings hair, and sometimes skin, with it. The animals are not pegged out or tied together when the caravan halts. The system practised is to lock their fore feet with short-chained iron cuffs, or else to tie them with a bit of rope. There are various means of propelling the beasts of burden, but only the carriage-driver uses the Western lash. A donkey is generally sat upon sideways, not astride, and continually beaten with the heels; the horseman wears heavy spurs; the driver of pack-trains, oxen and buffalo teams, carries a pointed stick or a staff with a nail in the end. These last instruments are gently pressed against the hind quarters, and the pressure is kept on till the animal attains the required speed.

The buffalo, which is a heavy creature and unable to acquire speed rapidly, lifts his long, snake-like tail and veritably twists it about the tantalising stick. These pitiful-eyed, straight-necked, knock-kneed creatures are larger and more powerful than the ox, and the buffalo cow gives considerably more and richer milk than the domestic variety. But the buffalo is an exceedingly delicate creature, and requires constant care. His hair is long, but thin and scant, and he is addicted to early baldness on the back. In this condition his skin resembles the hide of a rhinoceros. When the weather is warm he drags his slow way along the roads, covered with soft, slimy mud. The driver walks beside him with a crude, long-handled dipper, and at every puddle replenishes the supply of cooling mud. In the winter the black beast maintains the same measured pace, but then he wears a different covering. His thick, coarse blanket protects him from the cold—a thing of broad stripes, brown and white, made of the same material of which his master’s cloak is woven, spun by the peasant wife, probably in the same piece of cloth.

At several places at which we stopped the peasants came to us to ask medical advice for themselves and their animals, and we were exceedingly sorry that we could not prescribe for either; for their own ideas of doctoring border on superstition, and seem to follow the plan of killing pain by pain. At one village we witnessed (and protested against) the treatment of an unfortunate horse which had, by strange mishap, swollen to an abnormal size. A stout cord was put around its tail close to the root and twisted with a stick until all circulation in the tail was stopped. Then, when the appendage had become numb, a wire nail was driven into it in four places. The horse died of complications, including lockjaw. A horse which, at a stage of the journey, carried our luggage, possessed but one ear. We asked what had become of the other, and were told that it had been cut off piece by piece to cure repeated fits.

There is often to be seen in Macedonia, especially in the Monastir district, a thing resembling a big bird’s-nest built on stilts. The nestling wears a soldier’s costume and carries a gun. He is a field guard, an institution of the Government designed to ‘protect’ Christian peasants from ‘brigands,’ Albanian and Bulgarian. This he often accomplishes by becoming a member of a band of the former. The Governor-General will show you yard-long petitions stamped with many tiny seals, the marks of the peasants, pleading that no Christians be put to guard them, as the Austro-Russian reform scheme provides. The signatures to these petitions are not secured in the general way, by a Turk with a loaded gun; they are bona fide. The peasants really do not want the protection of a half-hearted Christian, who has probably never before handled a gun, and who will only bring disaster upon them. The Turkish guard is a contemptuously tolerant creature. His band is strong enough to defend the peasants from other marauders, and so long as they pay the annual tribute of so many sheep or goats, and so much grain, there is no other call upon them—except for the needs of the bird in the nest. The committee’s agents, when laying their cause before Europeans, will designate this bird a vulture, and tell you how he exacts maidens of the peasants; but the Greeks, who claim to be the enlightened people of the country, explain that this, to a Macedonian peasant, is not what it is to an Englishman or an American. There are always two sides to a question.

Albanians. Bulgarians.
CAPTIVES.