Balkan Peninsula -- History; Eastern question (Balkan)
_Bulgaria._--By 1366 weakness in the field and civil dissensions had
brought Bulgaria to the humiliation of becoming the vassal of the Turk.
In 1393 the Turks, not content with mere suzerainty, occupied Bulgaria
and converted it into a Turkish province. In 1398 the Hungarians and the
Wallachians (Roumanians) made a gallant attempt to free Bulgaria from
the Turkish yoke, but failed. Some of the Bulgarians joined in with
their Turkish conquerors, abandoned the Christian religion for that of
Islam, and were the ancestors of what are known to-day as the Pomaks.
The rest of the people gave a reluctant obedience to the Turkish
conqueror, preserving their Christian faith, their Slav tongue, and
their sense of separate nationality. The Greeks, who had come to some
kind of terms with the Turkish invaders, assisted to bring the Bulgarian
people under subjection. The Greek church and the Greek tongue rather
than the Turkish were sought to be imposed upon the Bulgarians. The
subject people accepted the situation with occasional revolts, but more
tamely than some other Balkan nations. It was not a general meek
acquiescence, though it was--possibly by chance, possibly because of the
fact that a racial relationship existed between conqueror and
conquered--not so fierce in protest as that of the Serbians. In writing
that, I do not follow exactly the Bulgarian modern view, which
represents as much more vivid the sufferings and the protests of the
Bulgarian people, and ignores altogether the racial relationship which
existed between Bulgarian and Turk, and enabled a section of the
Bulgarian nation to fall into line with the conqueror and embrace his
religion and his habits of life, a relationship which to this day shows
its traces in the Bulgarian national life. But in Balkan history as
written locally, there is usually a certain amount of political
deflection from the facts. A modern Balkan historian, giving what may be
called the official national account of the times of the Turkish
domination, says (_Bulgaria of To-day_):
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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