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as centres to keep alive the national feeling. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, when Russia declared war against Turkey (1827),
Bulgaria awoke.”
From 1366 to 1827 Bulgaria had been enslaved by the Turk. Now
within the space of a few days and with hardly an effort on her own
behalf, she was suddenly to be restored to independence.
Roustchouk, on the Danube
Chapter V
The Liberation of Bulgaria
Significantly enough, the first sign of a renaissance of Bulgarian
national feeling was an agitation not against the Turks but the
Greeks. Patriotic Bulgarians, under the Sublime Porte, sought to
re-establish their old National Church and shake it free from its
subjection to the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople. The Sublime
Porte was induced to look upon this demand with favour. A step
which promised to emphasise the divisions between the Christians
evidently should be of advantage to the Turks. The Greek Patriarch
was urged to consent to the appointment of a Bulgarian bishop. He
refused. In the face of that refusal Turkey acted as the creator of a
new Christian Church, and in 1870 a firman of the Sultan created the
Bulgarian Exarchate, and Bulgaria had again a national ecclesiastical
organisation. Two years later the first Exarch was elected by the
Bulgarian clergy. But gratitude for this religious concession did not
extinguish the longings for political independence of the Bulgarian
people. When a Christian insurrection broke out in Herzegovina
against Turkey in 1875, the Bulgarian patriots rose in arms in
different parts of their country. The massacres of Batak were the
Turkish response, those “Bulgarian atrocities” which sent a shudder
through all Europe and set a term to Turkish rule over the Christian
populations in her European provinces.
I have been recently in the Balkans with the veteran war artist,
Mr. Frederick Villiers, who has personal recollections of those times
of massacre and atrocity. Speaking with him, an eye-witness of the
devastation then wrought, it was possible to understand the fierce
indignation with which the English-speaking world was stirred as the
details of the horrors in the Balkans were unveiled. In all about 12,000
Bulgarian people perished, mostly butchered in cold blood. Turkish
anger, it seems, was inflamed against the Bulgarians, because, in spite
of the recent church concession, some of them had dared to strike for
freedom; and this display of Turkish anger made the full freedom of
Bulgaria certain.
At first an attempt had been made by the Powers to exert peaceful
pressure upon Turkey, so that her Christian provinces should be
granted local autonomy. The project of the Powers for Bulgaria
proposed that the districts inhabited by Bulgarians should be divided