Balkan Peninsula -- History; Eastern question (Balkan)
The Greeks live side by side with the Turks in Turkey with fair comfort.
At Kirk Kilisse, after the Bulgarian occupation, a deputation came to me
from the Greeks to assure me that they would much prefer to live under
the Turk than under the Bulgar: and asking that England should be urged
to support autonomy for Thrace. Well, the Turks are back at Kirk
Kilisse, and I suppose my Greek friends are happy. Eloquent, courteous,
kind folk they were. I stayed in the house of one for some days, and
will remember always the gracious kindness of the man and his wife. I
had to leave one morning at four to catch a troop train which would
carry me a few miles towards the front. The couple were up and had a
fire and tea ready for me. As I had a fever at the time, and a long
laborious journey ahead, the whole Greek race seemed good that morning.
Later at Chorlu after I had got permission from the military commandant
to go forward to Chatalja, and he had helped me to hire a cart and
horses and to stock up my provisions, the permission was withdrawn
because Bashi-Bazouks were raiding along the line of communication. I
might go later, he said, when a body of troops was moving. I objected
that time was precious; and I had my revolver, and there was the driver.
"Ah," he said sweetly, "he is a Greek. He will run away."
After that manner the Bulgarians always spoke of the Greeks. In this
case the Bulgarian was possibly right. I finally coaxed permission to go
forward, on condition that I took a patrol of one Bulgarian soldier, and
I was allowed to borrow a rifle and some ammunition. We met no
Bashi-Bazouks: but whilst the Bulgarian palpably was quite content to
enter into a plan to give the Bashi-Bazouks a chance of showing
themselves at nightfall, the Greek liked the adventure not at all.
(Perhaps on the whole he was justified. But I was desperately eager for
a "story," and with the Turkish regulars running away so consistently,
to encounter irregulars suggested no real danger.)
On that journey, at a little village which I cannot name between Silivri
and Chatalja, the population was largely Greek. Some of the Greeks,
after the Turks had fled before the Bulgarians, had discarded the fez
and were wearing Bulgarian caps. Others held to the fez, but had marked
on it with white chalk a cross. I formed the opinion that if by the
fortune of war the Turks came back, those crosses would be rubbed out.
The Greek can be very pliant undoubtedly, when he is in contact with a
dominant people. The other side to his character--that of a hot-headed,
argumentative, boisterous Donnybrook Fair patriotism--is developed in
his own country where it is fed with memories of the historic greatness
of his race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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