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.