26.Bulgaria, the Soundest of All Balkan Countries, Whose Butterfly-Collecting King Bet on the Wrong Horse during the Great War and Suffered the Consequences

THIS is the last of the little principalities that grew out of the great Slavic invasion of some twenty centuries ago. It would be more important in size and number of inhabitants if during the World War it had not taken what ultimately proved to be the wrong side.But such things will happen even in the best regulated nations.Better luck next time.On the Balkan peninsula, the“next time”,when speaking of war, means a dozen or half a dozen years hence.We are apt to speak in a slightly contemptuous manner of these half-civilized Balkan people who are forever fighting among each other.But do we ever realize with what sort of an inheritance of strife and cruelty and bloodshed and slavery and plunder and rape and arson the average Serbian or Bulgarian boy starts out upon his career through life?

Of the earliest inhabitants of Bulgaria we know nothing. We have found their skeletons, but skulls do not talk.Were they perhaps related to those mysterious Albanians, the Illyrians of Greek history, compatriots of the long-suffering Odysseus, that mysterious race which speaks a tongue unlike that of any other people on earth, who ever since the beginning of history have maintained themselves among the Dinaric Alps along the coast of the Adriatic and who today form an independent state, ruled over by a native tribal leader who made himself their legitimate sovereign as soon as a Vienna tailor had provided him with a nice, new uniform in which to hold court at Tirano, the new capital of a nation of 98%analphabets?Or is this the home country of the Romania, who were also known as the Wlachs and who must have spread all over Europe as they also bestowed their name upon Wales and the Welsh and the Walloons of Belgium?We had better leave the solution of that puzzle to the philologists and confess that we do not know.

But when we reach the era of the written chronicles, what endless invasions, wars and calamities!There were, as I have already told you, two main routes leading from the gap between the Urals and the Caspian Sea to the west. One went northward of the Carpathians and led to the impenetrable forests of the northern European plain.The other followed the Danube and by means of the Brenner Pass carried the hungry savages to the heart of Italy.The Romans knew this and they therefore used the Balkans as their first line of defence against that“foreign scum”,as they were pleased to call those despised barbarians who eventually were to destroy them.Lack of soldiers gradually forced them to retreat to their own peninsula and leave the Balkan peoples to their fate.When the great migrations had come to an end, not a trace remained of the original Bulgarians.The Slavs had assimilated them so completely that not a single word of the ancient Bulgarian tongue survives in the Slavic dialect spoken by the so-called Bulgarians of today.

The position however of the new conquerors was exceedingly precarious. In the south they had to deal with Byzantium, that eastern remnant of the Roman Empire which was Roman in name only but Greek in purpose and structure.From the north and the west they were forever threatened by raids on the part of the Hungarians and the Albanians.Next the Crusaders passed through their territory, an unholy army of holy men, the disinherited from all nations, ready to plunder Turk or Slav with equal ferocity.Finally the threat of an all-overpowering Turkish invasion and those last desperate appeals to Europe to come and protect the common soil of Christendom against the degrading touch of the infidel.And the sudden hush that spread through the land when fugitives from the Bosporus told how the Moslem Sultan had ridden his horse up the steps of Saint Sofia to desecrate the most holy of all the holy shrines of the Greek church.Followed by the panic when the reddening sky of burning villages told of the steady advance of Turkish troops, marching westward through the blood-soaked valley of the Maritza.And thereafter four entire centuries of Turkish misrule.And then, at last, during the beginning of the last century, a first faint stirring of hope.A swineherd in Serbia started a rebellion that was to make him a king.Next that terrible war of extermination between Greek and Ottoman, turned into a major European issue by an English poet who hobbled to his welcome death in the pestiferous village of Missolonghi.And then the beginning of that great struggle for liberty which was to last for another hundred years.Let us be lenient in judging our Balkan friends.They have been the leading actors in the tragedy of man's martyrdom.

Among the modern Balkan states, Bulgaria is one of the most important. It is composed of two very fertile regions, both of them excellently suited to all sorts of agriculture:the plain in the north between the high ridge of the Balkan Mountains and the Danube, and the plain of Philippopolis in the south between the Balkans and the Rhodope Mountains.This valley, protected on both sides, enjoys a mild Mediterranean climate.It exports its products through the harbor of Burgas, just as the sterner products of the northern plain, grain and corn, are sent abroad by way of Varna.

Otherwise there are very few towns, for the Bulgarians are essentially a peasant people. Sofia, the present capital, lies on the old trade-routes from north to south and east to west.For almost four hundred years it was the residence of the Turkish governors who, from their fortified palace on the Struma River, ruled the whole of the Balkan peninsula, with the exception of Bosnia and Greece.

When Europe finally became conscious of the plight of its fellow-Christians, delivered to the mercies of the Moslem invaders, Mr. Gladstone's constituents did a great deal of talking about the Bulgarian atrocities;but the Russians were the first to take action.Twice their armies crossed the Balkan Mountains.The fighting to force the Shipka Pass and to subdue the fortress of Plevna will be remembered as long as people realize that there have been a few wars which were absolutely unavoidable, if the world was ever to progress from slavery to comparative freedom.

As a result of the last of these Slavic relief-expeditions, the great Russo-Turkish conflict of 1877—1878,Bulgaria was made an independent princi-pality under a ruler of German origin. This meant that the patient and intelli-gent Bulgarian peasants got trained by people with a Teutonic sense of order.That may be responsible for the fact that today Bulgaria has the best schools of all the different Balkan states.The large land-owners have completely disap-peared.The peasant owns his own land as he does in Denmark and in France.The illiteracy percentage has been sharply reduced and everybody works.It is a simple country of farmers and lumbermen.It is a veritable reservoir of phy-sical endurance and energy.Like Serbia, it may never be able to compete with the industrialized states of western Europe.But it may still be there when the others are gone.