XXIII -- [April 28, 1903] 

SOFIA OLD AND NEW

PROGRESS IN 25 YEARS

Sofia, April 21.

As the Sofia of Christmas Day, 1877, is to the Sofia of Eastertide, 1903, so is the Bulgaria of the Turks to the Bulgaria of the Bulgarians. The history of free Bulgaria might be summed up in the contrast between the filthy little village, as the Bulgarian capital then was, and the cleanly, populous town it now is. It was on Christmas Day, 1877, that the Russians, under General Gourko, entered Sofia, to find that all the able-bodied Turks had run away, leaving their old men, women, and children behind, and that the Bulgar inhabitants were looting the Turkish huts right and left. An officer of Gourko's, my friend Baron Reath, who fought at Schipka and Plevna, and in nearly all the other big battles of the war, and who now lives on his pretty estate, among the hills, at Karilo village, near Sofia--this old soldier, ex-captain of Engineers, is but one among many who have given me their reminiscences of Sofia of the Turks.. For that matter, the Sofians who have such recollections to impart may be counted by the ten thousand. Any Sofian, now over thirty-three, or so, who lived here in 1877, is old enough for interesting memories of the place. The Sofia of the Turkish days and the war of Liberation was exactly like any one of the sordid, silent, terror-struck, little Macedonian villages of which I have given you some account in previous letters. What Sofia now is, Serres in Macedonia, or even a village like Nevrocop, or even like Bansko, may become in less than a quarter of a century, under any government but the Turk's.

IN THE DAYS OF THE TURK

Sofia of the Turks was a disorderly crown of crumpled-up torturous, unpaved lanes chiefly of wood-and-mud cabins; which an hour's rain turned into open sewers; and so narrow as to be blocked by a bullock-cart. In Sofia of the Turks, no Christian woman dared leave her house after dark, or walk far from it--as out into the fields--in the day time. They were afraid of the Turkish soldiers, still more afraid of the gendarmes, and most of all of the bashi-bazouks, who then infested the land. The bashi-bazouks, who still flourished in Macedonia, was a sort of loafing, armed irregular, who was always at hand to undertake jobs of a specially vile character. His name explains him. Bashi means head; and bazouk may variously be translated wild, unruly, frantic, reckless, anarchic, savage. To hear the women of Bulgarian Sofia talk of the risks in Turkish Sofia a quarter of a century ago is like listening to the complaint of Macedonian village women in 1903. In Turkish Sofia there were not street lamps, no lighting of any sort. No many went out of doors after dark without his lantern. Or, if any man did, he was arrested by the night watch, by whom--whether he could or could not give any account of himself--he ran a good chance of being soundly beaten. So it now in Macedonia. In Sofia of the Turks there was hardly any business, next to none, between it and the villages of the district; industry, like a clock run down, had come to a stop: "alush varush," nothing doing, as even the Turks themselves are saying, regretfully, in the Macedonia of the Turks.

One can imagine, or, rather one can not, the amazement of a Rip Van Winkle who, falling asleep in Sofia at Eastertide, 1876, should wake up at the same season in 1903. The picturesque costumes of the Sofian country he would have recognized at a glance. But those vast crowds--who and what were they? Where had they come from? And no restraint upon their movements, or their mirth! No zaptiehs, no bashi-bazouks to scatter them, drive them indoors, as they would have done to a crowd of six in the olden time! But Sofia--what had become of it? If Rip Van Winkle, rubbing his eyes, had searched the town, he would have found scarcely a trace of the Turkish village. Such traces as he might find would only astonish him by their incongruity with their surroundings. The spectacle of passenger-laden carriages running spontaneously along the highways, and of street lamps burning of their own accord into light brilliant as the sun's, might induce the belated Sofian to seek relief in a second slumber. The Bulgarian capital is a place of curious contrasts--particularly on Friday, which is market day, and most of all on Good Friday, when the religious and the mercantile attributes of the period are combined. The barbaric and the civilized jostle each other in the streets and market-places of new Sofia. The electric car just misses the long, horizontal horns and the shiny black muzzle of the buffalo, as he drags his creaking wooden cart, the fashion of which has remained unchanged these two thousand years and more.

SPACE, AIR AND LIGHT

"No sooner were the Turks cleared out," a citizen tells me, "than we began to create a new Sofia." But the man who did most was Stambouloff, about whose character the most violently contradictory opinions are still held by the Sofians--some regarding him as an unselfish patriot, others as a Tiberius, but of restless, inexhaustible energy, fighting on the "throngs of men." My friend, the Russian officer of Engineers, describes him as a cross between a Tiberius and a Baron Haussmann. "Sofia is his monument," the old soldier exclaims, "there it is"--with a comprehensive sweep of his arm. Wide streets, solidly built, many of them decorated with trees, have replaced the squalid alleys of the Turkish days. In this upstart capital there are public buildings that would do credit to any European city. No none, however, will say that the street architecture of Sofia betrays originality of any kind. It is merely a copy of respectable European commonplace. But, on the other hand, it manifests a wholesome appreciation of the supreme values of space, air, and light. In their liberal expenditure of space the Sofians appear to have planned their town with any eye to future no less than to immediate requirement: and the long, straight, unfinished "boulevards" and streets that extend from all sides into their mountain-girdled plain suggest guesses respecting the town's achievement and rank among State capitals within another quarter of a century. The planting of trees in the streets, the institution of public gardens, forest conservation (in which Prince Ferdinand is an enthusiast and expert), were undertaken at the earliest possible moment after the Turk was gone. Within the town, the public garden in front of the Palace is a pleasant place of resort. The public park, which lies outside the town, will one day be one of the finest in Europe. On Mount Vitosh, which overtops Sofia, and on whose summit the snow lies all the year round, new forests are spreading, and are tended with a care that would have astonished and puzzled the Turkish rulers of twenty-six years ago. For the Turk has no notion whatever of the art of forest conservancy. When he wants wood he simple butchers a tree and takes what he needs of it. He would stay that preservation was "God's business," and that trees were made by God for man's use. Or, rather, he does say it; he will say it to you, the reader, if you ask him, and he will consider that in saying it he is doing something religiously meritorious.