The Balkan Trail

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

The sacking of Krushevo made a deep impression in Monastir, where the news soon arrived, and instructions came back to the Turkish commander to secure a paper signed by all the townsfolk declaring that the work had been done by the insurgents. A few of the inhabitants signed from fright, but most of the Vlachs were not intimidated. The Governor-General concocted a story to tell foreign consuls and correspondents.

A strange fact which puzzled many was that, with the exception of the Bulgarian church, no section of the Bulgarian quarter was plundered. It was said by the Greeks—who tried by every means to incriminate the insurgents—that the leaders of the bands bought immunity for the Bulgarian inhabitants by a payment to Bakhtiar Pasha of the money they had collected from the Vlachs. But this widely circulated statement, which went out from Athens, could hardly be true. That such a negotiation could have been conducted at such a moment is hardly probable. The ranks of the insurgents were largely filled by Wallachians; the insurgents had lost two hundred men in resisting the Turks; it is doubtful that the leaders could have got alive to close quarters with Bakhtiar Pasha; and most doubtful of all is that the Turk would have respected any terms made with the committajis. The reason that the Bulgarian houses were not entered is either that the Turks dreaded dynamite or that the poorer Bulgarian quarter was not worth plundering; perhaps both these reasons applied. It was well known to the Turks that the Bulgarians, who are small farmers, sheep raisers, and labourers, were miserably poor; while the Wallachs, who travelled as far as Salonica, were mostly merchants and comparatively well to do.

The soldiers, having captured no insurgents, made prisoners of 116 innocent Vlachs, chained them together, two by two, and marched them to Monastir, taking along a wooden cannon as evidence of their guilt. On the road they brained five men. The surviving prisoners were at once released, through consular intervention, I think.

After remaining in the woods for two days the terror-stricken people who had escaped from the town began to return. They found bodies of their relatives and friends lying about the streets, Turkish dogs, I was told, gorging upon them. The people sought to bury their dead, but that was not generally permitted. With some exceptions the bodies were gathered by the soldiers and thrown into shallow trenches in the streets. But this was done with no thoroughness, and three weeks after the recapture I saw in a dry canal, which ran through the town under many of the houses, thigh bones and backbones, ribs, and skulls, picked clean. Many of the inhabitants had hidden in this partly covered ‘hell hole,’ and some, driven out by chills and the pangs of hunger, had been shot on emerging.

‘HELL HOLE,’ KRUSHEVO.

The drug store of the town had been sacked and burned, and the doctor who owned it had been killed. A young and less efficient medical man was left alone to care for 150 wounded. The Roman Catholic sisters at Monastir applied to Hilmi Pasha for permission to go to the relief of Krushevo and take medicines. But they had told foreign consuls and correspondents what they had seen at Armensko, and Hilmi replied, in Mohamedan fashion, ‘Those who will die, will die, and those who will live, will live.’

I attempted to enter some of the Bulgarian homes at Krushevo, but they were still tightly barred. The inmates pleaded with me to pass on lest the Turks should come after me and punish them for telling tales. But the Vlachs were bolder; they besought me to enter and see the havoc the Turks had wrought, to see the wounded women, children, and infants lying on the floors, their injuries barely tended, the wounds of many mortifying, as the stench told too well. And men, women, and children died from wounds not vital.

Each evening at sundown the awful stillness of Krushevo was shocked by three long-drawn, triumphant shouts from a thousand throats. They were Turkish cheers at evening prayer for Abdul Hamid, the Padisha.

We were mounted ready to leave Krushevo when a native woman came out of the crowd bringing a small boy. She went up to the interpreter and spoke to him in a whisper.