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TWENTY-FOUR LETTERS FROM MACEDONIA In late winter and early spring of 1903, John MacDonald, a British journalist employed by the London Daily News, toured Macedonia as a "Special Commissioner" to view the dangerous political and military situation which was developing there.  The events he witnessed later became known as the Ilinden (St. Elias Day) Uprising. The Macedonians who sought to shake off the yoke of their Ottoman overlords were among the last of the Turkish subjects in Europe to make this attempt. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 freed Bulgaria but ultimately did not create the large political entity originally planned. The Great Powers sought to limit Russia's influence in the region by insisting, under the terms of the Treaty of Berlin, that Macedonia and Thrace remain under Turkish rule. MacDonald's sympathies were clearly with the aspiring Macedonians. A generation earlier, the newspaper he worked for employed Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, the American journalist who covered the Russo-Turkish War in a series of spectacular articles revealing the "Bulgarian Horrors". Shortly after his arrival in the Balkans, MacDonald met a native Macedonian, Constantine Stephanove. Stephanove had recently returned to his homeland after an extended stay in the United States (where he earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Yale University) and Germany, where he had done post-graduate work at the University of Berlin. The two apparently hit it off well. For MacDonald, the meeting was doubly valuable. Not only was Stephanove an able translator ("dragoman") and familiar with the area, he was also the younger brother of Madame Tsilka (Katarina Stephanova Tsilka) who had been taken hostage by Macedonian revolutionaries with an American missionary, Ellen Maria Stone in September 1901. The Stone-Tsilka story was a very prominent one in the British and American press; hundreds of newspapers followed the six month ordeal of the two women. Madame Tsilka's pregnancy and birth of a baby girl, Elenche, in January 1902 only added to the drama. Following payment of a $66,000 ransom, the incident ended, but the memory remained. Both men would go on to other projects. MacDonald later wrote one of the earliest historical surveys of Bulgaria - Czar Ferdinand and His People, which appeared in 1913, while Stephanove produced the first English-Bulgarian and Bulgarian-English dictionary (in several editions) along with many articles and translations. For many years Stephanove was a Professor of Philology at the University of Sofia. He died in Sofia in 1940. Follow the progress of John MacDonald and his dragoman in the first twenty-four letters he published in the Daily News in 1903 by clicking on the number on the left hand side of your screen. I transcribed them in their entirety from photocopies of microfilmed copies of the newspaper.