Less than a hundred years ago a small Russian army, campaigning against the Turks between the Balkans and the Danube, discovered a race of people who spoke a language almost identical with their own, and who possessed Slavonic features and customs. This discovery was made in a region which for centuries was believed to be given over to Greeks and Turks. It came as a shock to the Russians to find that the supposed extinct race of the Bulgars had survived through the five hundred years that separated them from any historical mention.

Then was revived the story of ancient Bulgaria and its ambitious Czars, who threatened the Greeks at the very gates of Byzantium a century before the Turk came to Europe. The newly-discovered race was descended from the very desperadoes of the old one; from the brigands who had fled to the sternest hills and there preserved their racial characteristics from the onslaught of the proselytizing Ottoman.

Five hundred years had left them just five hundred years behind in civilization. They were the same barbarians who had gouged out their enemies’ eyes and hamstrung their own wives for barrenness when the Turks broke through the walls of Constantinople. They were rude, primitive peasants, a dour, disagreeable race that inhabited the gloomiest portion of Europe, and had never learned how to smile.

When Bulgaria was one of the great Powers of central Europe the inhabitants had the custom, when a child was born, of gathering around the cradle and moaning in unison. It was their way of expressing sympathy with the new arrival for the hard luck of being born into Bulgaria.

The story of their wars with the Byzantine Greeks is one long record of nameless horrors. One of the best-remembered incidents is that of the punishment inflicted upon a captured host of Bulgars by the Byzantine Emperor, Basil II. He put out both eyes of all except every hundredth man, and to him he left one eye, so that he might lead his blind fellows back to their defeated Czar.

Time after time the Bulgar Czars organized the Balkan Slavs into a composite band, with the object of wresting Byzantium from the Greeks and founding a new Slavonic Empire of the Orient. Time after time they were checked in their forward sweep at those very lines of Chatalja where Ferdinand and his modern Bulgarians were brought to a standstill by the stubborn Turk in 1913.

Then came the Turk, and swept aside both Greek and Bulgar. In the fastnesses of the stern mountains the scum of the Bulgarian population hid and multiplied, in time to return to the tilling of the land. All that had been fine in the old race had disappeared. It had either been absorbed by the Turk and his demand for janissaries and harem women, or it had found its way to self-extinction in the monasteries with which the gloomy land was well furnished.

There remained only a race of peasants, without a history or traditions; a race over which five hundred years passed without altering or softening one feature or one barbarous custom. It was a race without a nobility or even a landed gentry; a race without a literature except a string of homicidal folk-songs which embody the spirit in which the Emperor Basil treated the conquered and captive Bulgars.

The Russians found them and recognized them as fellow-Slavs—Slavs with much the same original habits and characteristics, but with none of the refining influences common even to the Russians of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It was natural that Russia, with her hatred of Turkey, should sympathize with this race, near of kin, but suffering sorely from arrested development. Thenceforward Bulgaria had an abettor in her struggle against the domination of the Turk.

The methods by which the Bulgarians resisted Turkish tyranny and rapacity were no better and no worse than their way of striving for a new Empire of the Orient five hundred years before. Their conspiracies, their incursions into non-Bulgarian territory, their skirmishes with the infidel at their gates, were simply a revival of the old eye-gouging methods of their mighty Czars of the Middle Age.

But they had the knack of getting sympathy. In England, which followed Russia in her discovery of this race, reputedly extinct, there was no credit given to the thought that a Bulgarian could do anything wrong. When the London newspapers wrote of Bulgarian atrocities, they meant atrocities committed by Turks in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian reprisals were known only to the rare travellers who had penetrated into the heart of the Balkans, and who, after making close acquaintance with the habits of the natives, failed to discriminate between a throat-cutting executed by a Christian Slav and a similar bit of work by a heathen Turk.

Very slowly indeed has recognition been forced of the fact that while the perpetrators of Bulgarian atrocities were hireling Turks of the lowest class, and not to be compared with the brave soldiers who compose the bulk of the Turkish Army, the Bulgarian comitadjis, with their cowardly cruelties, were fairly representative of the average Bulgarian soldier when at war.

What more evidence is required than the telegram sent by King Constantine from the field of battle to his Prime Minister, instructing him to protest against the atrocities of the Bulgarian soldiery. It is dated July, 1913, and reads:—“Protest in my name to the representatives of the civilized Powers against these monsters in human form, and declare before the whole civilized world that I shall be compelled to take vengeance in order to inspire terror into these monsters, and to make them reflect before they commit any more such crimes.”

Thus Tino the Undecided on his quondam Allies, who from time immemorial were held by the Greeks to be barbarians pure and simple. The taxes of Stambuloff and the sophistication of Ferdinand may have sufficed to convert Sofia from a city of sewers and filthy mosques to a modern capital with electric light and tramways, gardens, museums and broad boulevards, but a quarter of a century has not changed the heart or the outlook of a single Bulgarian peasant.

The whole of Bulgarian literature, until the last twenty years, was comprised in those folk-songs which have perpetuated the Bulgarian spirit and nationality. Chief among them are the lays of the heroes, and upon these heroes the character of the Bulgarian peasant of to-day is modelled. One of these heroes, having been bantered by his drinking companions on account of an unnoticed blemish on the fairness of his lady, goes home and kills her for the fault. Another drags his mother round the house by the hair of the head because he came home unexpectedly and found no meal prepared for him. A third, who had killed his paramour because she was losing her beauty, was gently chidden by his mother, who represented that the victim would have done good work in the scullery.

In short these heroes, whose exploits are sung in every village of Bulgaria to-day, are as unmitigated a lot of cruel scoundrels as ever constituted a comitadji band. Foremost among them is the national hero Marko, whose extensive drinking bouts are the only stories that can make a Bulgarian smile. Among his nobler exploits are the abduction of a Turkish princess, who bores him so unutterably that he has her killed by his band. She had contrived his escape from captivity, and upon this charming legend is built up the Bulgarian tradition of gratitude.

Such legends are “the gems of our literature,” says Slaveikoff, the Bulgarian poet. The fact that for five hundred years they have been the only Bulgarian literature accounts for the circumstance that Ferdinand was called to rule over a race whose ethics were those of the fourteenth century, and fairly barbarous ones at that.

The land inhabited by this survival of mediÆval barbarity is the ancient Scythia, the Siberia of the Roman Empire. From time immemorial it has been the cockpit of Eastern Europe, a land given over to slaughter and an infinite succession of dark deeds. It has taken on the aspect of its history, and the traveller through its gloomy plains and forbidding mountains can well sympathize with the culprits of ancient Rome, who were banished from smiling Italy to this frowning solitude.

The liberation by Russia of the Bulgarians from the Turkish yoke and from Ottoman exactions gave a stimulus to the primary producing industries. Land which had never been scratched since the earliest times was put to the plough, and proved fertile as the cornland on the borders of the Black Sea is fertile. The Bulgarians have improved their long-deferred opportunity, and prosperity has followed the act of liberation. It is a primitive prosperity, and a prosperity upon which the ambition of Bulgarian rulers has cast a heavy tax.

At the present time the Bulgarian is emerging from the peasant stage. The leading men of the country are the educated sons of peasants, with the habits of peasants. The traditional simplicity of their class is a convenience to such men, and they have made a fetish of it. Among them has rapidly grown up a military caste, and a bureaucratic caste as well. Both have thriven in the hot-house atmosphere created by Ferdinand, with his ostentatious Court and his extensive secret service.

But the soul of Bulgaria is a peasant soul, brutalized by 500 years of repression and stagnation. The Bulgarians are a race apart, even among the Balkan peoples. They have a significant phrase when they talk of a journey beyond their own confines; they say they are going “into Europe.”