To shoot one of these dogs is at the peril of your life, for the Albanian law of vendetta seems to extend to avenging their dogs. There is a strong suspicion that an Englishman, who made the ascent of Olympus some twenty years ago, was murdered by these shepherds for shooting one of these creatures in self-defence. On another occasion the captain of one of our ironclads, while shooting in that neighbourhood, had occasion to kill a dog which attacked him, whereupon he was himself felled to the ground by the axe of the shepherd.
Turkish shepherd-dogs, though savage and powerful, have none of the finer instincts of our collies; they will not bring round the sheep in accordance with the shepherd's directions; they are only fighters, and often turn and rend their masters.
It is interesting to watch, as I have done, the yearly migrations of the Albanian shepherds to and from Olympus. My home lay at the foot of the mountain, and one summer's night, when the moon was full, I was waked by the sound of sonorous voices, and the barking of dogs, and bleating of rams. Gradually the sounds became louder, and I could hear the tinkling of bells and finally the tramp of thousands of little feet pattering past my door. To the bleating of the rams was added the shriller cry of the ewes and the feebler notes of the lambs, and, rushing to the window, I could see the whole procession—sheep and shepherd—winding its way upwards. It was a weird sight, those shepherds in their heavy capotes of sheepskin, and their shadows reflected on the mountain, and gave one the impression of so many spectres gliding in the moonlight. The procession passed along, the bleating, the tinkling, the barking, the shouting became fainter, and finally the mountain returned to its silence primeval, and when I awoke in the morning I could not help wondering if it had not all been a dream.
A SIMITDJI.
Bordering on Albania and Epirus, and east of them, you will find a district marked on the map as Macedonia. It is inhabited principally by Tartars, Bulgarians, and Greeks, with a large sprinkling of Jews in its seaport towns, specially in Salonica, the Thessalonica of Scripture. The Bulgarians belong to the Slav family, and are mostly Christians. Some, however, have turned Moslems, and are generally known under the name of Pomaks. The Pomaks have intermarried and fused with Tartars, who migrated to Macedonia, as well as to other parts of Turkey, in large numbers when their native lands—the Crimea, Bessarabia, Roumania, and Bulgaria—passed under the sovereignty of Christian rulers. They have high cheekbones, broad flat faces, globular noses, and sunken eyes. They are fanatical, ignorant, and naturally embittered against Christians, and many, as the authors of the so-called Bulgarian atrocities, have fled to escape the punishment they deserved.
During the time of the Russo-Turkish War in 1879, I remember witnessing the wholesale flight of thousands of them to Constantinople. Many arrived in ox-drawn waggons laden with their families, their goods and chattels, and driving before them their cattle, which they disposed of for a mere song in the market. Others were conveyed in railway-trucks, packed close like sheep in a pen, and seemed as bewildered. A peculiar sight was a truck-load of children packed among sacks and bedding, from which they emerged on the arrival of the train, like ants issuing from an ant-hill. The city swarmed with these immigrants, the courts of the mosques were converted into refuge houses, and the utmost misery prevailed until Government had quartered them in different villages in Asiatic Turkey. There they still may be found, and their location recognized by their wretched wooden shanties and their squalor. But in many cases change of environment has not occasioned change of disposition, and I am assured that during the time of the Armenian massacres (1896) Pomaks quartered in Brusa sharpened their knives and armed themselves to a man to kill and plunder the Christians, and they were only prevented from carrying out this nefarious deed by the armed interposition of the humane Turkish Governor.