It is difficult to dissociate the Balkans with bloodshed and disorder. Insensibly the mind is tempted at every turn to direct attention to the last battle or the future campaign which can be seen threatening. But if the storm-racked peninsula could be granted a term of peaceful development, there is no doubt at all but that it would be much favoured by voyagers seeking picturesque beauty and wishing to go over the fields which have been the scenes of some of the greatest events in history. Mountain resorts to rival those of Switzerland, spas to match those of Germany and Austria, autumn and winter seaside beaches of great beauty and fine sunny climate—all these exist in the Balkan Peninsula, and need only to be known, and to be known as peaceful, to attract tourists. The Adriatic coast has charms of rugged coast-lines and bright waters; the Black Sea littoral, though flat and sandy, has a warm sunny summer or autumn climate; the Aegean is a sea of brilliant purples and rosy mists, in which air, rock, and water mingle to greet the eye with a great opal jewel. A November sunset on the Sea of Marmora gave to my eyes such a feast of suffused colour as I had not seen since I left the shores of the southern Pacific. The rocky hills had the rich red of the Jersey cliffs, but the sea and sky were incomparably warmer and deeper in tone. Across the sea the shores of distant Asia shone dimly through two veils of mist, one of the tenderest rose, the other of the palest gold. The greater part of the Greek coast has the same deliciousness of colour in autumn and in summer.

A few travellers bolder than the ordinary search out nowadays the shores of the Adriatic, the beautiful coast of Greece, and even the margin of the Sea of Marmora in quest of beauty and relief from the tedium of civilisation. But they must face poor means of communication (though to Constantinople and to Trieste there is an excellent train service) and scanty accommodation of any kind—almost none of good quality. Within a very few years, if the Balkans could settle down to peace and the legalised plunder of foreign visitors—a pursuit which is as profitable as brigandage and far more comfortable,—the seaside resorts that would spring up within Balkan territories would of themselves provide a handsome revenue. The shores of the Aegean and of the Sea of Marmora in particular would attract tourists wearied of the air of hackneyed sameness which comes after a while to pervade seaside haunts in Italy and France.

From another attraction the Balkan States could hope for a great tourist traffic. I have caught but fleeting glimpses of the Balkan range and of the Rhodopes and the Serbian mountains, but have seen enough to know that they offer boundless delights to the climber, to the seeker after winter sports, and to the lover of the picturesque; and the Swiss Alps in these days are overcrowded, and the Tyrolean mountains and the Carpathians begin to receive a big overflow of people who have a taste for heights that are not covered with hotels and funicular railways. But the mountains of the Balkan Peninsula offer prospects, I believe, of greater beauty, certainly of greater wildness, than any other ranges of Europe. Of the Rhodope mountains, in particular, one gets the most alluring accounts from the rare travellers who have explored them. Seen by the passing voyager as they stand guard with their farthest spurs over Philippopolis, they suggest that no account of their charm could be too glowing. I have promised myself one autumn or summer a month in this range, exploring its flower-filled valleys and its wild cliffs, shining through an air which seems now of rose and now of violet.

For winter sports the Serbian, Montenegrin, and Albanian mountains, as well as the chief Balkan range, promise well. I believe that it was part of the plan of Bulgarian reorganisation after the war, which King Ferdinand had in his mind, to set up great winter hotels in the mountains of his kingdom. The other Balkan States could with advantage give hospitality to similar plans. Provided that security is assured—and the Balkan peasant is in my experience the gentlest-mannered kind who ever cut throats in a wholesale way at the call of a mischief-maker—visitors to the mountains of the Balkan Peninsula would find the wildness, the uncouthness of the surrounding national life, very attractive. The picturesque national costumes, the national music, wild and uncanny, the strange national dances, all add to the fascination of the savage scenery. In an age when a fog of dreary sameness comes over all the civilised world, the Balkans have a great asset in their primitivism. Theirs is not a wholly European civilisation; indeed, except in the capital cities, it is not chiefly a European civilisation. Everywhere there is a touch of the mystery, the fatalism, the desert-bred wildness of the Asiatic steppes. For centuries the hand of the Turk has been heavy on the land, and a strong stream of his blood courses still through the veins of most of the Balkan peoples. It is not the East this Balkan Peninsula, but it is not the West, nor will be for some generations.

There is yet another possible means of attracting great streams of visitors to the Balkan regions. Throughout the mountains there are numberless medicinal springs. In Serbia and Bulgaria the water of two springs is being exploited for table use, and in Bulgaria the warm medicinal springs are being developed for bathing resorts. At Sofia there are now in course of erection great public baths which will be equal to any in Europe when they are completed. In the mountains above Sofia warm springs are being utilised, and quite a large spa village has grown up. King Ferdinand, who has a fine commercial instinct whatever the failures of his war diplomacy, has done good service to his kingdom by developing its baths and springs.

The plain country of the Balkan Peninsula is but little attractive. Under the Turkish rule nearly all plantations of trees were destroyed, and a general air of desolation was maintained. Since the Turk left, cultivation and development have been on strictly utilitarian lines, and there has been little chance for gardens or woods. The eye of the voyager misses them, and misses also the sight of castles, churches, or great buildings. The dreariness of the plain is unrelieved by forests. The rivers flow sullenly along without a bordering of trees. The Thracian plain—the greater part of which has now gone back to Turkey and thus lost hope of a redemption of its really fertile soil—is in particular desolate and forbidding. But even there, and more frequently in the plain country of Bulgaria and Serbia, there is now and again a charming village in some dell with adornment of trees and gardens. The average village, however, is a collection of hovels, their roofs lying so close to the ground that they seem to be rather burrows than huts, their aspect suggesting that they are hiding themselves and their inhabitants from the eye of a possible ravager.

Desolate as this plain country is, it has its attractions at dawn and sunset in the clear colourfull air of the Balkan Peninsula; and where the hill slopes, denuded of their forests, have been covered over by a dense oak scrub the autumn aspect of the plain at sunset is incomparably lovely. The scrub, when the first of the autumn frosts come, blazes out in such scarlet and gold as cannot be imagined in the moist and soft climate of England. With the setting of the sun and the coming of the violet night the earth's carpet seems to be here smouldering, there burning, a sea of lambent fire so bright that you look to see its burgeoning reflected in the sky.

I should advise the tourist wishing to see the Balkan Peninsula at its best to choose the fall of the year for a visit. In the summer there is great heat and dust and plague of flies. In the winter travel is impossible with any comfort except along the railway lines, and the whole Peninsula is frost-bound. The spring is a beautiful season at its later end, but not at the time of the thaw.

As to the route for a voyage there are several alternatives. One may take the Oriental Express through to Constantinople and work a way up the Balkan Peninsula from there: or take train to Trieste and approach the Balkans by the Adriatic side: or, taking the Oriental Express, leave it at Bucharest and journey from there to Sofia: or, taking the Oriental Express, leave it at Belgrade, making that the starting-point for a riding trip. Certainly to enjoy the country one must leave the railways and journey on horseback or by cart over the wilder tracks. An interpreter who speaks English can be engaged in any one of the capitals. The hire of horses, oxen, and carts is very cheap, if you are properly advised by your interpreter and pay the local rates only. Forage, too, is cheap: and so is "the food of the country," i.e. bread, cheese, bacon, and goat and sheep flesh. Most civilised luxuries of food can be obtained in the capitals and bigger towns, but they are dear.

Let me suggest a few typical Balkan tours.

Take train to Belgrade: then go by Danube steamer to Widdin. From Widdin to Sofia go by rail, and then back to Belgrade on horseback, sending on heavy luggage by rail, but making at Nish on the way a depot of provisions and linen.

Take train to Bucharest. Go from there to Stara Zagora on horseback, crossing the Roumanian frontier at Roustchouk, going over the trail of the Russian Army of Liberation and seeing the Balkan mountain passes.

Take train to Sofia, and from there to Yamboli. At Yamboli go on horseback (in the track of the Bulgarian Third Army of 1912) to Kirk Kilisse, Lule Burgas, Chorlu, Silivri (on the Sea of Marmora), and Constantinople. A somewhat wild trip this would be, but quite practicable. The most comfortable way to travel would be to take ox wagons for the luggage and the camping outfit. That would restrict the day's march to twenty miles. The horses—(diverging to look at scenery and battle-fields)—would do about thirty miles a day.

Take train to Constantinople, and from there boat to Salonica. Go on horseback from Salonica to Belgrade. This would show the most disturbed part of the Balkan Peninsula and some of its wildest scenery.

Take train to Philippopolis, and from there go on horseback and with ox wagons for a tour of the Rhodope mountains.

Of course it is possible to take much tamer tours of the Balkans. Practically all the big towns are connected with the European railway systems. But you would see, thus, towns and not the country. The Balkan towns are to my eye very dreary. There are practically no fine old buildings, for in the Turkish occupation the greater number of these were destroyed. The modern buildings have rarely any character. The churches, usually of the Slav school of architecture, alone relieve the monotony of economical imitations of French and British buildings. In Belgrade, it is true, there has been an effort to carry the Slav note farther, and some of the commercial and public buildings show a Moscow influence.

Mr. Noel Buxton, M.P., that most enthusiastic admirer of the Bulgarians, can carry his enthusiasm so far as to admire Sofia. He wrote recently (With the Bulgarian Staff):

Few sights can be more inspiring to the lover of liberty and national progress than a view of Sofia from the hill where the great seminary of the national church overlooks the plain. There at your feet is spread out the unpretentious seat of a government which stands for the advance of European order in lands long blighted with barbarism. Here resides, and is centred, the virile force of a people which has advanced the bounds of liberty. From here, symbolised by the rivers and roads running down on each side, has extended, and will further extend, the power of modern education, of unhampered ideas, of science, and of humanity. From this magnificent view-point Sofia stretches along the low hill with the dark background of the Balkan beyond. Against that background now stands out the new embodiment of Bulgarian and Slavonic energy, genius, and freedom of mind, the great cathedral, with its vast golden domes brilliantly standing out from the shade behind them. In no other capital is a great church shown to such effect, viewed from one range of hills against the mountainous slopes of another. It is a building which, with its marvellous mural paintings, would in any capital form an object of world interest, but which, in the capital of a tiny peasant State, supremely embodies that breadth of mind which

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But I think that that is a too kindly view. What makes the Balkan capitals additionally dreary is that there is no "society" in the European sense. The Turkish idea of keeping the womenfolk in the harem survives to the extent that woman is not supposed to frequent places of entertainment, to receive or to pay visits. In Bulgaria the women are secluded with an almost Turkish strictness: in Serbia, not quite so strictly, but still strictly.

Bucharest is quite another story; but Bucharest would rather resent being called a Balkan city. There is no seclusion of the very charming Roumanian women, and the atmosphere of the city is a little more than gay. Plant a section of Paris, a section including Montmartre, into the middle of an enlargement of the old quarter of Belgrade, and that is Bucharest. It is the one Balkan city which has a luxurious and to an extent polished aristocracy.

Some of the smaller towns are slightly more interesting—Philippopolis, for instance, in a position of great natural beauty—but the average Balkan town must be set down as squalid. Its centres of social interest are the cafÉs, where men who have the leisure assemble to drink coffee made in the Turkish fashion, tea made in the Russian fashion, and occasionally vodka, which is the usual alcoholic stimulant. Tobacco is smoked mostly in the form of cigarettes. Excellent (and cheap) cigarettes are supplied by the government RÉgies in Serbia and Bulgaria.

The wise tourist will keep clear of the Balkan towns apart from the actual capitals, and will carry his food and lodging with him. Under these circumstances a good standard of ease can be maintained if a train of ox wagons sufficient to the size of the party is enlisted. Ladies can travel with fair comfort in an ox wagon. As regards the danger of Balkan travel, in my experience—and that was during war-time—there is none. Serbian peasant, Bulgarian peasant, Greek peasant, Turkish peasant, alike are amiable and obliging fellows, if they do not feel in duty bound to cut your throat on some theological or political point. Being strangers, tourists would have no theology and no politics. So much for the inhabitants. The officials, provided passports are clear and the precaution is taken of getting letters at the capital from the authorities of the country you are travelling through, will be helpful. The one district that might be a little dangerous is that corner of Macedonia where Greek and Bulgar are always playing against one another the old game of massacre.