Bulgaria e-book - iMedia

I can hardly call them, but rather—shapeless black collops of flesh,
with little points instead of eyes. No hair on their cheeks or chins gives
grace to adolescence or dignity to age, but deep furrowed scars instead,
down the sides of their faces, show the impress of the iron which with
characteristic ferocity they apply to every male child that is born among
them, drawing blood from its cheeks before it is allowed its first taste of
milk. They are little in stature, but lithe and active in their motions, and
especially skilful in riding, broad-shouldered, good at the use of the bow
and arrows, with sinewy necks, and always holding their heads high
in their pride. To sum up, these beings under the form of man hide the
fierce nature of the beast.
That was a view very much coloured by race prejudice and the
superstitious fears of the time. It suggests that at a very early period
of Balkan history the different races there had learned how to abuse
one another. English readers might contrast it with Matthew Arnold’s
picture of a Tartar camp in Sohrab and Rustum:
The sun by this had risen, and clear’d the fog
From the broad Oxus and the glittering sands.
And from their tents the Tartar horsemen filed
Into the open plain; so Haman bade—
Haman, who next to Peran-Wisa ruled
The host, and still was in his lusty prime.
From their black tents, long files of horse, they stream’d;
As when some grey November morn the files,
In marching order spread, of long-neck’d cranes
Stream over Casbin and the southern slopes
Of Elburz, from the Aralian estuaries,
Or some frore Caspian reed-bed, southward bound
For the warm Persian sea-board—so they stream’d.
The Tartars of the Oxus, the King’s guard,
First, with black sheep-skin caps and with long spears;
Large men, large steeds; who from Bokhara come
And Khiva, and ferment the milk of mares.
Next, the more temperate Toorkmuns of the south,
The Tukas, and the lances of Salore,
And those from Attruck and the Caspian sands;
Light men and on light steeds, who only drink
The acrid milk of camels, and their wells.
And then a swarm of wandering horse, who came
From far, and a more doubtful service own’d;
The Tartars of Ferghana, from the banks
Of the Jaxartes, men with scanty beards
And close-set skull-caps; and those wilder hordes
Who roam o’er Kipchak and the northern waste,
Kalmucks and unkempt Kuzzaks, tribes who stray
Nearest the Pole, and wandering Kirghizzes,
Who come on shaggy ponies from Pamere;
These all filed out from camp into the plain.
Matthew Arnold gives to the Tartar camp tents of lattice-work,
thick-piled carpets; to the Tartar leaders woollen coats, sandals,
and the sheep-skin cap which is still the national head-dress of the
Bulgarians. More important, in proof of his idea of their civilisation,
he credits them with a high sense of chivalry and a faithful regard
for facts. Sohrab and Rustum is, of course, a flight of poetic fancy; but
its “local colour” is founded on good evidence. Probably the Huns,
despite the terrors of their name, the echoes of which still come down
the corridors of time; despite the awful titles which their leaders
won (such as Attila, “the Scourge of God”), were not on a very much
lower plane of civilisation than the Goths with whom they fought,
or with the other barbarians who tore at the prostrate body of the
Roman Empire. One may see people of very much the same type
to-day on the outer edges of Islam in some desert quarters; one may
see and, if one has such taste for the wild and the free in life as has
Cunninghame Graham, one may admire:
There in the Sahara the wild old life, the life in which man and the
animals seem to be nearer to each other than in the countries where
we have changed beasts into meat-producing engines deprived of
individuality, still takes its course, as it has done from immemorial time.
Children respect their parents, wives look at their husbands almost as
gods, and at the tent door elders administer what they imagine justice,
stroking their long white beards, and as impressed with their judicial
functions as if their dirty turbans or ropes of camels’ hair bound round
their heads, were horse-hair wigs, and the torn mat on which they sit
a woolsack or a judge’s bench, with a carved wooden canopy above it,
decked with the royal arms.
Thus, when the blue baft-clad, thin, wiry desert-dweller on his lean
horse or mangy camel comes into a town, the townsmen look on him as
we should look on one of Cromwell’s Ironsides, or on a Highlander, of
those who marched to Derby and set King George’s teeth, in pudding
time, on edge.
The Huns’ movement from the north-east was the first Asiatic
invasion of Europe since the fall of the Persian Empire. Almost
simultaneously with it the Saracen first entered from the south, as the
ally of the Christian Emperor against the Goths; and another Gothic
chronicler, Ammianus, tells how the Saracen warriors inspired also a
lively horror in the Gothic mind. They came into battle almost naked,