Twenty Years of Balkan TangleDurham, M. E. (Mary Edith)
History
Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle
Durham, M. E. (Mary Edith)
Balkan Peninsula -- Description and travel; Balkan Peninsula -- History; Eastern question (Balkan)
Bulgars came to me at night and begged poison with which to kill
Greeks. Greeks betrayed Bulgar komitadjis to the Turkish
authorities. The Serbs sided with the Greeks. They had not then the
smallest desire "to liberate their Slav brethren in Macedonia." No.
They were doing all they could to prevent the Bulgars liberating
them. Of Serb conduct a vivid picture is given by F. Wilson in a
recently published book on the Serbs she looked after as refugees
during the late war. She gives details taken down from the lips of a
Serbian schoolmaster, who describes how he began Serb propaganda in
Macedonia in 1900. "We got the children. We made them realize they
were Serbs. We taught them their history. . . . Masters and
children, we were like secret conspirators." When the Bulgars
resisted this propaganda he describes how a gang of thirty Serbs
"met in a darkened room and swore for each Serb killed to kill two
Bulgars." Lots were drawn for who should go forth to assassinate.
"We broke a loaf in two and each ate a piece. It was our sacrament.
Our wine was the blood of the Bulgarians."
A small Serb school had recently been opened in Ochrida, and I was
invited there to the Feast of St. Sava. The whole Serb population of
Ochrida assembled. We were photographed together. Counting the Greek
priest, the schoolmaster and his family, who were from Serbia, and
myself, we were a party of some fifty people. Ochrida had a very
mixed population. More than half were Moslems, most of them
Albanians. Of the Christians the Bulgars formed the largest unit,
but there were many Vlachs. These were reckoned as Greeks by the
Greeks, but were already showing signs of claiming their own
nationality. The Serbs were by far the smallest group, so small in
fact as to be then negligible.
The Kaimmakam was an Albanian Moslem, Mehdi Bey, who kept the
balance well under very difficult circumstances, and to-day is one
of the leading Albanian Nationalists. He asserted always that
Ochrida should, of right, belong to Albania. Albanian it was indeed
considered until the rise of the Russo-Bulgar movement. As late as
1860 we find the Lakes of Ochrida and Presba referred to as the
Albanian Lakes by English travellers.
Through the winter of 1903-4 trouble simmered, arrests were made,
murders occurred. I learnt the ethics of murder, which, in
Macedonia, were simply: "When a Moslem kills a Moslem so much the
better. When a Christian kills a Christian it is better not talked
about, because people at home would not understand it; when a
Christian kills a Moslem it is a holy and righteous act. When a
Moslem kills a Christian it is an atrocity and should be telegraphed
to all the papers."
In February 1904 the Russo-Japanese quarrel, which had been for some
time growing hotter, burst into sudden war, and the whole complexion
of Balkan affairs changed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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