XIX -- [April 14, 1903] 

THROUGH MACEDONIA

A TYPICAL VILLAGE

AT DINNER WITH THE TURK

In my last letter I left the fate of Mr. Stephanoff, my dragoman, in the balance. The Kaimakam of Mekhomia, whose guest I was for the [night] hinted that, pending instructions from his superiors at Salonica, Mr. Stephanoff would have to go back to his native village, Bansko. But I stood up for my dragoman's freedom, and the Kaimakam sought orders by telegraph. He had found out that having run short of "hard" money (the paper in my possession not being negotiable in a Macedonian village), I had borrowed some from Mr. Stephanoff. From which harmless transaction a fresh brood of suspicions appear to have sprung up. Why should one borrow from his dragoman? A moneyed dragoman might be an agent in disguise, engaged in "financing" the revolution. And so, some strategical inquiries--just out of mere curiosity--were addressed to me concerning my "compromised friend's financial resources; and also concerning the cost of our trip from Bulgaria round by Constantinople. I have good reason to believe that this trifling matter also was the subject of telegraphic communication to the highest authorities.

Very young for a post of such importance, the Kaimakam, Hassan Tahsin Bey, is a hard worker, and ambitious. All day long, from early morning till late in the night, he sits in his brass-studded armchair, with one leg tucked under him, opening dispatches, signing, or affixing his seal to papers sent up to him from the police and other departments. Occasionally, that is, when the "mejliss" meets, he sits with it in the Council room at the end of the passage immediately outside. The "mejliss" is the assembly of four or five deputies, or representatives, whose duty it is to say "yes" to the Kaimakam. His Excellency prefers to work in this small private room into which I have already introduced the reader. Each document is brought into him by a Zaptieh, or gendarme, or some nondescript man in uniform, who puts his boots off outside and enters in his stockings, salutes, or salaams, and walks backwards and then sideways when he goes away.

I was greatly impressed by one of this men-at-arms. So was the Kaimakam, but in a different way. The man came in bare-footed. He salaamed down to his gnarled toes. He wore a dirty white turban round his fez; baggy, ragged trousers reaching to his calves; a blood-red jacket with used up ornamental tags of sorts; and a huge blood-red waistband stuck full of knives. He was unwashed. His cheeks were stubbled with a week's unshaven black beard. His little dark eyes glanced viciously. He was, on the whole, the most blood-curdly looking ruffian I had seen in the course of my peregrinations. I noticed that when the apparition came in, his Excellency the Kaimakam frowned. He muttered something to his usual attendant, and became absorbed in his papers. I could guess what he said: "Never again let that dreadful object come into this room when there's a foreigner in it."

FATHER AND SON MEET

While the Kaimakam is engaged in his routine we take a stroll--Mr. Stephanoff, the Inspector-General, some of our escort, and myself--through the streets of Mekhomia. Like very other village in the land, Mekhomia is stagnant, dull, silent, seemingly apprehensive of impending calamity. It is less so than Eleshnitza and Godlevo, and one or two more of the villages mention in these letters, but dreary and depressing enough for all that. Under any Government but the Turks' it would become a paradise in a year or two. "Alush varush," as even the Turks themselves sometimes say; which may be roughly translated, "There is nothing doing here." At a turning in the street my friend Stephanoff looks up with a start. For, on the opposite side his father is standing, having come from Bansko on the chance of catching a glimpse of his son. They meet in the middle of the street, press each other's hands, and speak a word or two. No more; for they are "compromised," they might discuss secrets about komitadjis; and the stealthy Achmet, of the catlike tread, is already at their elbows. If there be anything in the Buddhist doctrine, Achmet must have been a crafty mouser in some one of his past existences; or he may be one in his next. The life and movement of this village capital are confined to the Orthodox school, where there are over three hundred pupils; the military club, a shoddy little place, where uniformed idlers play cards, and drowse in tobacco smoke, with their legs tucked up, most of the day; and the barracks, with their several companies of infantry. Soldiers in possession of an exhausted country, terrorizing peasants ground down to their last piastre--such is the melancholy spectacle which Macedonia presents. It is as if the ruling race were absorbed in a scramble for the last scraps of spoil before clearing out of the country, "bag and baggage."

"Alush varush"--nothing doing; nothing but movements of troops, and stray scuffles with the komitadjis, and now with the Albanians. Why the Albanians? I said in a former letter that the Sultan, even if he wishes it (which he does not), dares neither arm the Christians nor disarm the Turks. But if Christians are to enter the gendarmerie, they will have to be armed! An insufferable insults, that is, to your Albanian Moslem (that pillar of the Ottoman Empire) and your rascal Arnaut, who swaggers about the streets, with his yataghans and pistols in his scarlet sash, and waylays travellers in remote places. There will be trouble over this matter of armed Giaours, otherwise Christian gendarmes. "Nothing doing." How can it be otherwise?

INDUSTRY KILLED BY EXTORTION

In the Kaimakam's own district, hundred so peasants have told me how their agriculture and their industries are killed by the Government's extortions, and its senseless restrictions upon enterprise. Says one villager: If I wish to take a load of timber to sell in Serres, I must first go all the way to Mekhomia for my "kochan," which means a permit to export and sell. The cost of the "Kochan," the lost of time in waiting for it--hanging about for it; days it may be--may more than counterbalance any profit he might have made by the transaction. The tax-collector, whose reward is proportionate to the extent of his takings, and who will not give a receipt if he can help it, is always prowling about, with his armed assistant. From the "moreef," or school tax, the Christians derive no good whatever; they support their own schools; heroically they endure privations for the education of their children. The "yel parasi" is the road tax, but until Macedonia is freed there will be no roads. Every male pays it, from the age of twenty to the age of sixty. It amounts to about sixteen piastres. The value of a piastre is about two pence halfpenny. The capitation tax--the hated "bedell"-- weighs heavily on the harassed Christian peasant. Its legal amount is forty piastres. But it is always higher, sometimes as high as eighty; for the deficits caused by absenteeism, or even by deaths, and by the descent of taxpayers into beggary, have to be made good by the village. As soon as a boy attains the age of fifteen, he must pay the "bedell," or his father will have to pay it for him. The "tejeret," though a "professional" tax, often falls upon the pettiest farmer. Even beggars are subject to it. The peasant also pays a yearly tax, the "beglick," of about six piastres on every sheep, pig, goat, or other beast his owns, and a further tax on every one of them which he sells. The "emlak," or house tax, falls upon the paltriest cabin. The "errazi," or field tax, is not lowered when, as often happens in this land of mountain torrents, the field may be damaged after the melting of the snows.

A TALE OF TITHES

Then comes the "ushoor," otherwise the tithe levied upon wheat, corn, barley, beans, cabbage, etc. etc. The "ushoor" has at all times been the prolific cause of extortion. The Russo-Austrian Note abolishes payment in kind, as also the "farming" of the "ushoor." Of all the provisions of that ridiculously timid and inadequate manifesto this is the least unsatisfactory. No way of escape is there from the clutch of the tribute-grabbing Turk. For tribute it is; not tax. In the imposition, levying, and destination of the taxes they pay, the Macedonians have no voice. Theirs is to obey; the Turks to command. Of government, of the State, as a thing evolved from the people, existing for the good of the people, responsible to the people, the Turk does not possess even a rudimentary conception. In Turkey there are, as it were, two antagonistic camps; in the one are the dominant Caste, a minority, armed; in the other, the subject people, unarmed and helpless.

To the notables gathered round his Excellency's little table all this seems quite natural and right. Returning from our stroll--Mr. Stephanoff, the Military Inspector, and myself--we find them ready for dinner, a regular Turkish dinner. The jovial old Major is there, and his more sedate Junior. Also, the Cadi, that light of Islam, in his long robe and white turban. We all attack one and the same smoking dish of heaped-up pillau. The acidulated milk, the recipe for which came centuries ago from Central Asia, is most refreshing. London would appreciate it in the summer season. I praise, not diplomatically, but honestly, his Excellencies sherbet. After dinner, the Cadi leading, we started a religious discussion. I ventured a remark or two on certain resemblances between the spirit of Calvinism and the spirit of Islam; to which the Cadi graciously and gravely signified his more or less qualified assent. The jolly old Major, fighting shy of theology, invited me to try his Excellency's narghileh. The narghileh is the huge tobacco pipe, with reservoir of water, in which the smoke is purified and cooled before transmission through the long, coiled tube, to the smoker's mouth. They all became merry over the word "hubble-bubble," which, as I told them, was an Indian name for smoking apparatus of the sort. The old Major laughed and chuckled at the oddity of the word. Even the Cadi betrayed symptoms of a smile lurking in his black beard. "Hubble-bubble" was repeated a hundred times before midnight. "Hubble-bubble," I make no doubt, has now passed into the society speech of Raslog district, northern Macedonia. The Indian hookah led to the subject of India itself, a subject in which every Turk whom I have met feels a huge interest, and some allusions to Indian names gave the Major and opportunity for sporting his Persian. India led to Afghanistan, and Afghanistan led to Russia, and Russia to the Crimea, and the fine old time when England and Turkey together formed a rampart against Russian aggression. "England is no longer our friend," the Major moralised. Never mind. Turkey can hold her own if the Powers give her fair play. We do not need foreigners to teach us our business. And the Major laughed, as he did the night before, at the bare thought of European officers for the gendarmerie. "Why are you so silent?" said he to my friend Stephanoff. And without waiting for a reply he became lost in reflection. A sharp glance or two at Mr. Stephanoff (about whom the Telegraphic Department of the Ottoman Empire was still exercised) clearly suggested that the Major was still wondering whether my friend and companion was a Komitadji, and Plato a Bulgarian bandit, and "the footsteps of Plato" and allusion to a secret path for the smuggling of rifles. "I give it up," he seemed to say, as he chucked aside the stump of his cigarette, buttoned his coat, and strode off to his barracks. The Cadi glided out with his stately bow. The brisk little Inspector-General vanished. Mr. Stephanoff departed to the chamber where he was supposed to be "interned."

THE DECISION

Just then arrived a telegram from the Vali of Salonica. "Mr. Stephanoff," said the Kaimakam, "will not be imprisoned. The Vali merely wishes him to return to Bansko for a few days, while inquiries are made about the portraits and Angelos the daskol. He will live in his own house, but under surveillance. He will then be free to return to Bulgaria." I accepted his Excellency's assurance. Like all the Turkish governors I have met, the Kaimakam of Raslog was profusely generous in his offers of all sorts of assistance. "Whatever we can do for you so long as you remain in the country, shall be done." "Where do you propose to go next?" Djumaia. "Ah, there you will pass through the country where the Komitadjis have been most dangerous. There, there are always risks, for the Bulgarian frontier is so near. These Bulgarian invaders are so unscrupulous, and inhuman, that they have sometimes murdered men of their own side, and then laid blame on the Turks, so as to excite Europe against his Imperial Majesty. The Macedonian refugees in Dubnitza were driven forth by the Komitadjis, just to get us into trouble. The European papers said they ran away because we beat them, tortured them, and burnt their houses. All lies--mensonges--I assure you." And so says every Turk. Nevertheless, those of his Excellency's victims whom I have questioned in the villages of Raslog, and who have given me the circumstantial details of their sufferings, are more than I can number. The Turk's inability to admit any charge against the character of their rule is an evidence of the ease with which the existing truce--only partial at best--may be broken, and the country driven into the fifth act of massacre and war.