The first element of Balkan discontent is the mutual hatred of Greek and Slav. It is now far more active than their old enmity against the Turk. Indeed, both sides are always appealing to the Turk against each other.[1] A further complication is that Bulgars, Serbs, and Roumans hate each other only less than they all hate Greeks. It would be a fundamental mistake to confuse these races with the States set up during the last century. When they rose against the Turks, the Great Powers felt they must give them some result for their fighting: on the other hand, if they had all been made free there would have been no Turkey left. So bits were cut off where these populations were supposed to be thickest and made into the kingdoms of Greece, Servia, Roumania, and the princedom of Bulgaria. The people of Montenegro, who have always been free, are Serbs. But these four races went on as before, scattered all over the Balkans and overflowing into Hungary. A Serb of Turkey, for instance, is just as much a Serb as his brother in the kingdom of Servia. So in Turkey, in Macedonia especially, these four nations all live together in great confusion, while the Turkish regiments march up and down, keeping order by plundering and murdering all impartially.
All their bad feelings are reflected in the affairs of their Church.[2]
- ↑ Quite lately, since the Bulgars have become the strongest element in Macedonia, the situation has become that of an alliance between Turks and Greeks against them. The war of 1897 is forgotten, the Sultan showers his decorations on Greek statesmen, and during the Macedonian insurrection of 1903, officers from Free Greece were not ashamed to offer their swords to the Turk (with the full consent of their Government) against the Bulgars. Pending the day when it shall all become Greek they would rather see Macedonia under the Turk than free and Bulgarian.
- ↑ The accounts of the way in which the Patriarchist (Greek) metropolitans in Macedonia carry on their campaign against the other races sound like the most lurid stories of a frankly savage age. Mr. Brailsford tells of a bishop who hired assassins to murder a wounded Bulgarian chief and then kept a photograph of the blood-dripping head as a pleasant souvenir (p. 193), who is believed to have been responsible for a massacre of sixty Bulgars on April 6, 1905 (p. 217). They convert Bulgars by threats of massacre (p. 215) and by denouncing them to the Turks (p. 211). Another bishop refused to admit any wounded Bulgars to his hospital for the simple reason: "They are our enemies" (pp. 199–200). "They can all come in," said he, "if they will only acknowledge the Patriarch" (p. 201).
