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The Burden of the Balkans by M. Edith Durham

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The Burden of the Balkans by M. Edith Durham THE BURDEN OF THE BALKANS BY M. EDITH DURHAM PREFACE The diplomat, the geographer, the archæeologist, I do not pretend to beable to teach. My aim is a far humbler one. I wish to give the general reader a somewhat truer idea of the position of affairs in the Balkan Peninsula than he usually possesses. If he be interested in the affairs of Turkey-in-Europe at all, he almost always believes in a spot inhabited by Turks (all Moslems and bad) and ´Macedonians´ (all Christians and virtuous). He believes that the horrors of which he hears are caused by the rising of these same Christians against the tyranny of their Moslem rulers, and, thus believing, he hastens to offer them his sympathy and help, and to beg the British Government to intervene on their behalf. I hope in the following pages to show him that these troubles are largely of racial, not religious, origin. The Christians who have revolted did not rise, as he fondly believes, on behalf of Christianity. Nor do they represent by any means the Christian population of the country. The revolt was purely political, and part of a long and complicated scheme to obtain a large additional territory for Bulgaria. The truth of this is proved by the fact that the revolutionary party directs its attacks not only upon Moslems, but murders Christians of all the other Balkan races when opportunity occurs. I have been begged by persons of these other races to tell all that I have seen and heard, to remind the British public that there are other peoples besides Bulgars whose interests should be considered, and to point out that the money given by well-meaning people, as they think, to support Christianity is likely to cause the Bulgar party to believe that it has England's support, and to encourage it to commit fresh outrages upon other Christians. I have been begged by others not to tell all that I have seen and heard. It is impossible to please everyone. Want of space naturally prevents my giving the details of this, my sixth, tour in the Balkan Peninsula, but I have tried to tell a plain tale of the main facts. Such success as I met with I owe entirely to the kindness of those who helped me on my way. The mistakes are all my own. M. E. DURHAM. PART I THE STORY OF THE PEOPLE CHAPTER I 'For thrones and peoples are but waifs that swing And float or fall in endless ebb and flow.' ´You like our country. Will you do something for us ?´ said a Balkan man to me the first time I met him. I inquired cautiously what this odd job might be. ´Explain us,´ he said, ´to the new Consul. He does not underetand us;´ and he made this request as if the ´explaining´ of a nation were an ordinaryeveryday affair. Its comprehensiveness staggered me. ´But I do not understand you myself,´ I said. ´Our language not well perhaps yet, but us—the spirit of the people—yes. Everyone says so. Now, if you would explain it to the Consul. We do not like him,´ he added. ´Why don't you like him?´ said I. ´Because he does not like us,´ was the prompt reply; ´and he does not understand.´ ´When he has been here longer and knows you,´ I said, ´he will doubtless like you. You have very little to do with him. Why trouble about him? It is surely not necessary to like all the foreign Consuls.´ Then he gazed at me with surprise. ´One must either like or hate,´ he said simply; and he wanted me to ´understand´ and ´explain´ him. And he is but one example of many, for thus it is with the Balkan man, be he Greek, Serb, Bulgar, or Albanian, Christian or Moslem. ´If Europe only understood,´ he says (and it should be remarked that he rarely, if ever, classes himself as European) —´if Europe only understood´ the golden dreams of his nation would be realized, and, as in the fairy-tales, there would be happiness ever afterwards. He is often pathetically like a child, who tells you what fine things he is going to do when he is grown up. That Europe cares no jot for his hopes, fears, sorrows, and aspirations so long as they are not likely to jolt that tittupy concern ´the Balance of Power´ never seems to occur to him. Now, to ´understand´ him it would be necessary not merely to view things from his window, but to see them with his eyes (for what is seen in the landscape depends largely on the spectator), and this is impossible. It is doubtful, indeed, whether one race ever will understand another. It has certainly never done so yet. But the story of the past that has set him at that particular window and coloured his view is more easily arrived at, andexplains many things. Without some knowledge of it, travel in the Near East is but dull work, for us in the West to realize. It is a land strewn with the wreckage of dead empires; peoples follow one another, intertangle, rise and fall, through dim barbaric ages bloodstained and glittering with old-world splendour, striving, each for itself, in a wild struggle for existence, until the all-conquering Ottoman sweeps down upon them, and for four centuries they are blotted out from the world´s history. When after that long night they awoke—the Rip Van Winkles of Europe, animated only with the desire of going on from the point at which they had left off— they found the face of the world had changed and new Powers had arisen. Internally, there were the problems of the fourteenth century still unsolved. Externally, they were faced with those of the twentieth century, Western and insistent. It is the fashion just now to attempt to simplify the problem of the Balkan Peninsula by limiting it to the ´Macedonian Question,´ and representing the miseries of the land as the result of a struggle between Moslem and Christian. But in truth it is nothing so simple. It is the question of the slow waning of Ottoman might and the consequent resurrection of, and struggle for supremacy between the subject peoples which began at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and has yet to be fought to its close. And the problem is not limited to any one spot; it extends not only over the whole of that part of the Balkan Peninsula which is still under the Sultan, but also over lands ruled by other nations. When we first know it, the peninsula was inhabited by Thracians, Macedonians, and Illyrians—wild folk, not Greek: a mass of savage tribes each led by its chieftain. They appear to have been closely allied in race. Their form of speech is unknown. ´If the Thracians,´ says Herodotus, ´were either under the government of an individual or united among themselves, their strength would, in my opinion, render them invincible; but this is a thing impossible.´ And his estimate of these people was a just one. Philip of Macedon welded the wild tribes into a power, and Thracians, Macedonians, and Illyrians formed the foundation of Alexander the Great´s all-conquering armies. The Balkan Peninsula is a land of ´one-man empires.´Alexander´s did not long survive him. He died in the year 303 B.C., but he is still the talk of the town in his native land. There is a surprising amount of excitement about him, for the blood of the oldest inhabitants of the land is still with us. That the modern Albanian is the more or less direct descendant of the primitive savage people of the Balkans is a fact which, I believe, no one now disputes. Alexander the Great was a Macedonian, and Olympias, his mother, a Princess of Epirus (South Albania); therefore Alexander was clearly an Albanian. So far so good; but on his father´s side, according to tradition, he was of Greek origin— remote, it is true, but the Greeks admitted it. To-day Greek and Albanian alike claim him enthusiastically, and along with him, of course, his Macedonian lands. Nor are they the sole claimants. There is no theory too wild to flourish in the Balkans, but this, perhaps, is the maddest of all. The Bulgarians, too, claim to be Alexander´s sons. Alexander, I have been told quite seriously, commanded his men, ´according to a well-known classical author´ (name not given), ´in a tongue that was not Greek, and was therefore undoubtedly Bulgarian!´ A song was sung during the late Macedonian insurrection, in which an eagle, who is soaring over the land, asks what is the cause of so much excitement, and is told that the sons of Alexander are arising. This annoyed the Greeks and the Albanians extremely, for the insurrection was being worked solely for Bulgarian ends. ´Georgie,´ we asked one of our hospital patients, ´do you know about Alexander the Great?´ Georgie cheered up; Alexander was clearly an ´old pal.´ Georgie believed himself to be a Bulgar and a son of Alexander beyond any doubt. ´We all are,´ he said. Poor Georgie! he spoke a Slav dialect, and was possibly a mixture of all the races that have ever ruled the peninsula, and all he had gained was a Mauser ball through his right hand in the name of Alexander the Great. Alexander died, but the aborigines had one other burst of glory. Pyrrhus (Burri = the Valiant, Alb.), King of Epirus, is all their own; no other nations claim him.
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