The cruelties practised by the insurgents on the Turks were also beyond all doubt. They were, moreover, in strict conformity with the practice and instructions of the insurgents in all similar risings. On 12th May, Mr Dupuis informs Sir H. Elliot: “The burning of Bellowa seems to have been attended with horrible cruelties to the small Turkish guard in charge of the place, which, being overpowered, was hacked to pieces by the Bulgarians. My informant adds that, shortly after this occurrence, a party of about a hundred and fifty well‐mounted and equipped insurgents, led by the priests, presented itself in the village, declaring, with crucifixes in hand, that that was the way to exterminate Islamism.”[93] Mr Sandison, the first dragoman of the English Embassy, writing to Sir H. Elliot on 11th July 1876, says, _à propos_ of these cruelties: “I may here quote the testimony of the artist employed by the _Illustrated London News_, who in his travels through Bulgaria came across the body of a Turk who had been impaled and roasted by Bulgarians. Such acts could not but lead to reprisals, and to the consequent destruction of many thousand lives, as well as of a large number of villages, amongst which must also be included a good many Mussulman ones.”[94] Consul Reade reports from Rustchuk on 19th July (1876) that “Some Bulgarian insurgents one day seized two Mussulman women, whose breasts they cut off _and then put_ them to death.”[95] Vice‐Consul Calvert, writing from Philippopolis on 29th August 1876, says; “The Christian Commissioners, one of whom, Yovantcho Effendi, is himself a Bulgarian, state themselves to be satisfied that deeds of great atrocity on the part of the insurgents marked the commencement of the rising in May last, and that _cruelties were designedly committed by the insurgents as being the means best calculated to bring on a general revolution in Bulgaria_, by rendering the situation of the Christians, however peaceably inclined, so intolerable under the indiscriminate retaliation which the governing race was sure to attempt, as to force them in self‐defence to rise. Among other instances of this Blacque Bey mentioned to me that the Christian inhabitants of a village near Tirnovo related to him, how, at the beginning of the revolt, the insurgents had seized a wealthy Turk of the locality, beloved by Christians and Moslems alike, for his justice and benevolence, had buried him up to the waist in the earth, and then stoned him to death.”[96]