The Greeks, next to the Turks, are the most important element of the population of Bulgaria. They are not very numerous to the north of the Balkan, where their influence hardly exceeds that of the Germans and Armenians established in the towns. To the south of the Balkan, though not numerous relatively, they are much more widely distributed. One or two Greeks are met with in every village, carrying on trade or exercising some handicraft. They make themselves indispensable to the locality, their advice is sought for by all, and they impart their own spirit to the whole of the population. Where two or three of these Greeks meet they at once constitute themselves into a sort of community, and throughout the country they form a kind of masonic brotherhood. Their influence is thus far greater than could be expected from their numbers. There are a few important Greek colonies amongst the Bulgarians, as at Philippopoli and Bazarjik, and in a valley of the Rhodope they occupy the populous town of Stanimako, to the exclusion of Turks and Bulgarians. The ruins of ancient buildings, as well as the dialect of the inhabitants, which contains over two hundred Greek words not known to modern Greek, prove that Stanimako has existed as a Greek town for upwards of twenty centuries, and M. Dumont thinks that it is one of the old colonies of Eubœa. The initiatory part played by the Greeks in Southern Bulgaria is played in the north by the Rumanians. The right bank of the Danube, from Chernavoda to the Black Sea, is for the most part inhabited by Wallachians, who are gradually gaining upon the Turks. Other colonists are attracted by the fertility of the plains at the northern foot of the Balkan. The Bulgarians are careful cultivators of the soil themselves, but the Rumanians nevertheless gain a footing amongst them, as they do with the Servians, the Magyars, and the Germans. They are more active and intelligent than the Bulgarians, their families are more numerous, and in the course of a generation they generally succeed in “Rumanising” a village in which they have settled. Bulgarians and Turks, Greeks and Wallachians, isolated colonies of Servians and Albanians, communities of Armenians and of Spanish Jews, colonies of Zinzares and wandering tribes of Mohammedan Tsigani, have converted the {142} countries of the Balkan into a veritable ethnological chaos; but the confusion is greater still in the small district of Dobruja, between the Lower Danube and the Black Sea. In addition to the races enumerated, we there meet with Nogai Tartars, who are of purer blood than their kinsmen the Osmanli, and exhibit the Asiatic type in greater purity. Although they cultivate the soil, they have not altogether abandoned their nomad habits, for they wander with their herds over hill and dale. They are governed by an hereditary khan, as at the time when they dwelt in tents.