XI -- [March 31, 1903] 

 THROUGH MACEDONIA

NEW REFORMS USELESS

DISARM THE TURK

MY TURKISH ESCORT

 Bansko (Macedonia) March 21.

His Excellency the Lieutenant-Governor of Serres became prodigally generous the moment he saw that his objections to my passing into the interior were overruled. "For your escort,: said he, "you may have as many Zaptiehs as you please." I suggested two. He shook his head. He smiled skeptically. Let it be four then. Toe which suggestion his Excellency graciously assented. And now, said he, "it will be a great pleasure to me to give you, as a compliment to yourself, as also for your safety's sake, a military escort as well, say, ten cavalry men. If you like I can now send the order to the Commandant. You might be captured by these brigands, the Bulgarian Komitadjis. That would be bad for you. It would be bad for us. I would be held responsible. When accidents of the kind happen, the newspapers abuse us poor Turks." Ten cavalry men, and four Zaptiehs (gendarmes)! The very sight of such a force would scare the villagers I intended to examine. I shall have to take my keepers in hand.

"There is danger," his Excellency remarked, trifling with his rosary. "But," said I, "Macedonia is tranquil. The Governor-General has said it. So has your Excellency. And your soldiers have chased the Komitadjis into the mountains; they have scattered them as chaff before the wind." "True," replied his Excellency, "they are dispersed. But if they see a chance they may steal again. You never can tell." Now there is a risk in travelling through Macedonia. So great is it that two million Christian peasants are afraid to venture beyond their respective villages. A foreigner is safe, but only with an escort. And in ordinary circumstances an escort of two is as effectual as one of two hundred. For the small escort, no less than the large one, represents the Turkish government. And the only brigands in Macedonia are Turks. They are Arnauts. They are Pomacks (Mahommedans of Bulgarian origin). They are Zaptiehs. They are village guards and rural guards. And sometimes they are soldiers of the Imperial Army. The men whom the Turkish Government calls "brigands" are merely revolutionary patriots. Not a single "brigand" is there among them. Nor are they Bulgarians, but native Macedonians--with perhaps, a small Bulgarian element. Nor are they in the field. No more than three or four hundred of them are "out" at a time. The others, in their tens of thousands, live in their villages, ready, when the signal is given, to spring to arms.

MY GALLANT CAVALRY ESCORT

I was more amused than surprised when, on the morning of our departure from Seres, the cavalry escort, following the mounted gendarmes, came clattering over the stones of the street with a jangling of reins and clanking of sabres, and halted in front of our inn. Every man also carried a rifle, and a belt stuck full of cartridges. His Excellency could have done nor more for the International Commissioners, who ought to have been appointed to inquire into the condition of Macedonia; but who were not. With the sunlight flashing on the steel scabbards of our escort, we made a gallant show as we rode out of Serres on the road over the mountains to Nevrocop, ten hours distant. But in less than an hour our glory was eclipsed, for as we ascended, higher and ever higher towards cloudland, down crept the mists, followed by the driving rain, blotting out the red and white town of Serres and its minarets and the wide, beautiful plain of Serres, which some day, when Macedonia is free, will teem with the wealth whose natural sources are now perforce neglected.

After eight drenching hours in the saddle, and of scrambling in the mud and among the boulders of narrow passes, which half-a-dozen of "those Komitadji rascals" could hold against a battalion, we decide upon halting at Vrodi, a little village almost wholly Bulgarian, and occupied by a detachment of Turkish troops to keep it "tranquil." The few inhabitants whom we saw in the streets vanished like shadows at our approach. A few days earlier a fight had taken place at a neighbouring village of the same name--Upper Vrodi--and the villagers here were scared. Our landlady's son, a young athletic Bulgar-Macedonian, with frank eyes and his mother's alert, intelligent expression, had seen the fight. He described how the Turks, surrounding the outhouses wherein the cattle, donkeys, and mules were kept, and where they imagined the bandmen had taken refuge, fired "whenever they saw anything stirring," so that they shot some dumb animals, and burnt others by setting the premises on fire. Of this affair, wherein some two hundred Turks (according to an official account) besieged a small group of "Komitadjis," and from which the latter escaped with one man wounded, you may have heard by telegraph.

In the course of the evening and during the early part of the following morning I was visited by a large number of villagers. They had heard of the Russo-Austrian scheme of reform. They had no faith whatever in it. It left the Turkish authority as strong and irresponsible as it was before. "The Turks will go on as before; few though they are in this village, they will still be our masters; they will take the produce of our fields and the goods in our shops without paying for them; of we resist the will maltreat us, for they are armed and we are not; and if we complain to the Kaimakam we shall not profit thereby." I was told that the older of two men who stood in the doorway of the Khan when we were dismounting was one of two murderers--Turks--who had been imprisoned for robbing and killing a villager last spring. They were detained for a few weeks, and then liberated. A schoolmaster, who was one of the group sitting cross-legged on the floor of our room in the Khan, remarked that if the villager, in self-defence, had killed the Turk, a blood feud would have followed. In my village, said he, a Christian three years ago killed a Turk whom he surprised in the act of stealing, and against whom he was forced to defend himself. The Turk's son slew the slayer's son. The feud spread, until fifteen Christian families left, one after the other, for Bulgaria; if they had been armed they would have been safe at home." Wherever I go this terrible grievance of their disarmed condition is one of the first which the villagers bring forward. "Equality between us and the Turks there cannot be so long as they are armed and we are not." The Macedonian question presents itself in several forms. The shortest is this--disarm the Turk.

QUESTIONING THE VILLAGERS

Among the many villagers whom I questioned in Vrodi there were some shopkeepers and inn-keepers. They all complained that zaptiehs and other officials took goods without paying for them. "We dare not refuse," said the owner of a khan. "I planted some vines, intending to start a regular business. The Turks in the next village took the fruit; they then plucked the trees. I have given it up." Another witness said that the zaptiehs and soldiers never paid him for the rooms they occupied in his premises. "We are only Giaours," another in the group remarked; "we know that the word of the new regulation opens the gendarmerie to Christians; but we know, too, that we Christians have been told we are not wanted. We must keep aloof, the armed Turk warns us." In Vrodi, as elsewhere, the Turk may trespass upon the Christian field, may ride over it, drive his waggon over it; but woe to the Christian who should attempt to do so as he had been done by. At the season for irrigation the Turk must be served first. Let the Christian protest, and a cut of the yataghan may be his reward.

Nevrocop, the headquarters of the Caza (administrative district of the third class), is a large village, almost wholly Turkish. The road to it from Vrodi traverses the plain, in which there is a series of perfectly preserved mounds, barrows, or tumuli, relics of a long forgotten race--Pelasgic, perhaps--that overran Macedonia and Greece ages before the rise of the Hellenic people known to us in history. Nevrocop is beautifully situated in one of the finest of the many plains or valleys, separated from each other by mountain ranges, which, running generally from west to east, fill Macedonia from north to south. The number of its white minarets proclaims the character of the dominant religion and numerical superiority of the dominant race. Guides in front, military cavalcade in rear, we rode into the town on the eve of the Kourban-Bairam, the Festival of the Sacrifice, a festival older than Mohammed himself, older than Abraham and his son Isaac, with whose story it is connected. At street corners, in the gateways of the inns, in open spaces, were gathered little flocks of sheep and lambs, on sale for the sacrifice, tended by their Wallach shepherds.

The four days of the Kourban-Bairam are days of feasting and the slaying of lambs and sheep. The neediest Turk saves his piastres for the Kourban-Bairam. Rich Turks come cheerfully to the relief of the impecunious faithful. It is curious to watch a Turk purchaser and a Wallach shepherd in the act of bargaining, the one prodding, thumping, fumbling, muttering a tentative bid; the other a despairing protest. They are an interesting people, these Wallachs, or Vlachs, whose Rumanian origin and speech are supposed to link them with the Romans of old.

A DELIGHTFUL RETREAT

Hardly had I reached our Khan in Nevrocop when there came in a messenger with a hospitable Oriental welcome from the local Governor, Ali Felim Effendi. A delightful retreat is mine inn in Nevrocop--this medley of wood and hard mud, straggling any whither, up stairs, down stairs; here into cosy corners with divans round the walls and thick rugs on the floor; there upon a projecting balcony overlooking the little shops in a crooked bazaar; or into dusky horse-boxes and the domiciles of cattle, pigs, and poultry. Through the chinks in the floor of our dining room I look down upon our horses. I hear the stamping of their hoofs, and their drowsy crunching of oats and hay. The one bond of connection between the parts of this fortuitous edifice is the wooden verandah, an uneven, shaky thing, from which I have a fine view of the near mountains, grey and brown in their lower reaches, white-streaked and dappled with the sombre dark green of the pines midway, pure white thence to the sharp edges of their peaks. An alluring place is this verandah when night steals upon the world, and a shrill voice from a minaret calls the faithful to the last prayers of the day. Another voice, faint but clear, sounds as if it issued from within the opposite hill, now recognisable as a vague, vast shape. The "horns of elf-land" are blowing. It is but the Turkish bugler's call in barracks, practised by night the enchantress. "Wake up from your reverie," mine host exclaims; "Come to prayers," says the Hodja; "Come and dine," say I. And forthwith he launches into praises of his own cookery, which praises, we soon discover, are well deserved. A loquacious, hilarious, attitudinising Albanian is mine host, brimming over with legends of Scanderbeg and Ali Pasha of Yanina.

Our waiter is a lively, small boy, aged twelve, nephew of mine host, who is proud of the youngster's achievements in the Greek school hard by. The small boy's history is an epitome of his unfortunate country's. Eight months ago, his father, a peasant, dwelling here in Nevrocop, went upon business to a neighboring village. "He said he would be back in time for dinner." He has not been seen since. Everybody believes he was murdered. He had fallen out with a Pomack of Nevrocop, who, live others of his class, was (and still is) accustomed to plundering, with impunity, his Giaour neighbors' property. The unarmed man would have been helpless before his armed Pomack enemy. In Nevrocop, as elsewhere, there are numbers of women whose husbands, and sons, have emigrated into Bulgaria, and are at work there. The men have emigrated from choice, or from fear of the fate which always threatens those who, with or without reason, are suspects. So many of them, when returning home with their earnings, have been robbed by marauding Arnauts, by the Pomacks, and even by the Zaptiehs, and other servants of the Ottoman State, that the rest are chary of abandoning their Bulgarian shelter. They contrive, however, to send money to their wives, mothers, and sisters in Macedonia. "Out lives have been wasted here," said an old man, one of a number of people who have come to visit us. Finding life intolerable in the Macedonia of the Turks, hundreds of thousands of Macedonians are scattered over the Balkan States, chiefly in Bulgaria, waiting for the day of their return to their own, beautiful, richly endowed land.

SUSPENSE, SUSPICION, AND FEAR

But Ali Fehim Effendi, Kaimakam of Nevrocop, in whose official residence I spent an hour or two, assures me that all is well in Macedonia. The new regulations approved of by Russia and Austria? There was no harm in them, perhaps. The country was getting on well enough without them. But, no doubt, it would be well for the country if more capital were invested in it. Tramways, connecting the hundred and seventeen villages of the district would develop traffic, etc. etc. All this rattled off smilingly, fluently, in up-to-date, vague generalisations, such as Ali Fehim Effendi might have taken from the newspapers,. In his vision of tramways the Kaimakam had overlooked the immemorial condition of the roads uniting his own town of Nevrocop with Vrodi and scores of other villages. For the most part they are mere ruts, these so-called roads, impassable in wet weather except on horseback. Here and there are bits of paved road that years ago were made by the villagers themselves without any help from the State, but which they were unable to finish. And from every house the Turk collector exacts his road tax. But, though the tax is paid, the roads are never made. Nevrocop, which under a civilised government will become one of the most prosperous and attractive spots in the Balkans, is a piteous exhibition of anarchy. It is weedy, seedy, and needy. The mountain torrent which traverses it from the direction of the Turkish barracks is a brawling sewer, chocked with rotten straw, house and stable refuse, bones of horses and cattle, dead cats and dogs. Round about Nevrocop trade can scarcely be said to exist. Suspense, suspicion, fear seem to pervade the very air of this Macedonian interior. On the route from Serres to Nevrocop we met but one merchant and three drivers, or carriers. The only movement worth speaking of is the movement of troops. The centre of Nevrocop, round Government house, swarms with soldiers. The reserves are in force. Large squads of raw material, with satchels on their backs and bundles of all sorts in their hands, come squashing through the mire in their thick-soled stockings. The recruits are watched by admiring crowds. They are paraded. The Commandant addresses them. They respond with loyal shouts for the Padishah. From the frontier of Bulgaria, round by Adrianople, Constantinople, through Thrace, to Salonika, on to Serres and the Macedonian interior, this movement of troops goes on steadily. It looks like the spasmodic effort of a baleful Power whose day is over.