VLACHS.

The flames spread, and a dozen private houses and stores were burned with the Turkish buildings. Some, I believe, were set afire to light the Konak and make certain the death of the Turks.

In the morning the insurgents placed red flags about the town and formed a provisional Government, appointing a commission of the inhabitants, consisting of two Bulgarians and three Wallachians, ‘to provide for the needs of the day and current affairs.’ Without instruction all the inhabitants discarded the fez.

Three chiefs of bands were appointed, a military commission, whose duties were drastic. Their first act was to condemn to death two ardent Patriarchists who had spied for the Turks on the organisation and preparations of the local committee for insurrection in the district. The men were made prisoners, taken into the woods, and slain.

On the first day the insurgents made a house-to-house visitation and requested donations of food, and later required any lead that could be moulded into rifle balls. More bands arrived, and a number of Bulgarians and Wallachs of the town joined the insurgent ranks, altogether augmenting the number to over six hundred. They began at once to raise fortifications, and made two wooden cannon such as had been used in the Bulgarian revolt of the ’seventies. The cannon were worthless, and were left to the Turks, who brought one of them into Monastir.

On the second day the men of the town who possessed wealth were summoned to appear before the military commission. A list had been made (the information given by members of the organisation whose homes were in Krushevo) of the standing and approximate wealth of each ‘notable’ in the community. As these headmen appeared before the triumvirate a sum in proportion to his means was demanded from each. No protests and no pleading affected the commission, and in every instance the money was forthcoming within the time limit. More than 1,000l. was collected in this way, and in exchange was given printed paper money, redeemable at the liberation of Macedonia.

On the following Sunday the priests of both the Greek and the Bulgarian churches were ordered to hold a requiem for the repose of the souls of the committajis who had fallen in the capture of Krushevo. Detachments of insurgents were present, in arms, and gave the service a strange military tone. Open-air meetings were held on the same day, and the people were addressed by the leaders of the bands.

During the ten days of the insurgent occupation sentinels and patrols saw to the order and tranquillity of the town, and no cruelties were committed. Business, however, was paralysed. The market place was closed and provisions diminished; and attempts to introduce flour failed, the emissaries to the neighbouring villages being stopped by Turkish soldiers and bashi-bazouks, who were gathering about the town.

The news of the capture of Krushevo reached Monastir August 3, but not until nine days later was an attempt made to retake the place. By that time three thousand soldiers, with eighteen cannon, had been assembled. About the town, also, were three or four thousand bashi-bazouks from Turkish villages in the neighbourhood.

When the guns were in position on favourable heights above the town, Bakhtiar Pasha, the commander of the troops, sent down a written message asking the insurgents to surrender. The insurgents refused, and an artillery fire was begun. Most of the insurgents then escaped through a thick wood which appeared to have been left open for them, but some took up favourable positions on the mountain roads leading into the town, others occupied barricaded buildings in the outskirts, and resisted the Turks for awhile. Two of the leaders, Peto and Ivanoff, died fighting.

Peto-the-Vlach was a picturesque character. He was thirty-five years of age, a native of Krushevo. He had been fighting the Turks for seventeen years. He was made prisoner in 1886 and exiled to Asia Minor. But benefiting by one of the frequent general amnesties he returned to Macedonia, rejoined the insurrectionary movement, and led the organisation of Krushevo and the neighbouring district.

At a conference of the leaders immediately prior to the Turkish attack, Peto declared that he would never surrender his town back to the oppressor; the others could escape if they would, the Turks could not again enter Krushevo except over his dead body. With eighteen men who elected to die with him, he took up a position by the main road and held it for five hours. It is said that he shot himself with his last cartridge, rather than fall into the hands of the Turks.

The natives put on their fezzes again, and a delegation of notables bearing a white flag went out to the camp of Bakhtiar Pasha to surrender the town. On their way they were stopped by the soldiers and bashi-bazouks and made to empty their pockets. Further on more Turks, whose rapacity had been less satisfied, demanded the clothes and shoes they wore. Arriving at headquarters of the general, situated on an eminence from which there was a full view of the proceedings, the representative citizens, left with barely cloth to cover their loins, offered a protest along with the surrender. Bakhtiar had their clothes returned to them, and told them he could do nothing with ‘those bashi-bazouks’—though beside him sat Adam Aga, a notorious scoundrel of Prelip, who had brought up the largest detachment of bashi-bazouks, and with whom, subsequently, Bakhtiar is said to have shared the proceeds of the loot.

The Turks entered the town in droves ready for their work, rushing, shouting, and shooting. The bashi-bazouks knew the town, its richest stores and wealthiest houses; they had dealt with the Vlachs on market day for years. They knew that the Patriarchist church was the richest in Macedonia. The carving on the altar was particularly costly, and there were rich silk vestments and robes, silver candlesticks and Communion service, and fine bronze crosses. They went to this church first. Its doors were battered down in a mad rush, and in a few minutes it was stripped by the frenzied creatures to the very crucifixes. Then a barrel of oil was emptied into it and squirted upon its walls; the torch was applied, and the first flames in the sack of Krushevo burst forth.

The Greek church was on the market place among the shops. The Turks who were not fortunate enough to get into the church went to work on the stores. Door after door was cut through with adzes, the shops rifled of their contents, and then ignited as the church had been. Two hundred and three shops and three hundred and sixty-six private houses were pillaged and burned, and six hundred others were simply rifled—because the petroleum gave out.

Some of the inhabitants escaped from their homes and fled into the woods. Turks outside the town met them and took from them any money or valuables they had, and good clothes were taken from their backs. A few pretty girls are said to have been carried off to the camps of the soldiers. But the Turks were mostly bent on loot. The people who remained in their homes were threatened with death unless they revealed where they had hidden their treasure. Infants were snatched from their mothers’ breasts, held at arm’s length, and threatened with the sword.

Krushevo, with its thrifty Wallachian population, was the wealthiest city in Macedonia. It was not many hours’ ride from the railway terminus at Monastir, and, for the purpose of making this journey, many of the Vlachs possessed private carriages. There were pack and draught animals and cattle to the number of many thousands. The Turks appropriated these, drove off the cattle in herds, and loaded the spoils from the stores and homes in the carriages and carts, and on the backs of the Vlachs’ pack-animals. Seven thousand animals were taken by the Turks—and not one went back.

This work went on for forty-eight hours. The first night was demoniacal. Three hundred houses were in flames, and dashing in and out among them were yelling fiends, firing rifles, slashing Christians who happened to be in their way, fighting among themselves, breaking in doors, splashing oil and firing houses, loading waggons and pack-animals. Money, jewellery, silver plate, linen, furniture, bedding, clothes, carpets went away to the Turkish villages in the neighbourhood.

Vlachs are rich and thrifty, Turks indolent and poor. They are pleased when the Sultan issues orders to suppress giaours.

Krushevo was built on rock in a slight depression in the top of a range of mountains. The houses were constructed solidly of stone, with thick slate roofs all cut from the mountain-side. Hilmi Pasha had explained to me that the ‘unfortunate’ conflagration was caused by the explosion of shells, which, he argued, any civilised nation would have employed in capturing the town. Every house in Krushevo was ignited individually. The gates of six hundred houses which suffered only pillage bore the hacks of adzes and axes. Soldiers and bashi-bazouks, holding hands—as Turks do—still lurked about with their adzes in their belts. On the walls, most of which still stood, stains of petroleum trailed down. I entered one house through which two cannon balls had passed. But there was not a mark of flame as a result.

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.