who has a nationality to oppose to their dream of a great Hellas covering all the Balkan peninsula, but they hate a Bulgar far the most of all. The Bulgars are the most numerous, active and generally dangerous of their rivals. During the horrors of the insurrection of 1903 any sort of sympathy for the unhappy Bulgarian insurgents on the part of a European State was met by shrieks of indignation at Athens against such Philobulgarism.[1] Until 1870, the Phanariot Greeks then systematically ignored the Bulgars. They appointed Greek bishops for every diocese, including Ochrida, which had become an ordinary metropolis; they allowed only Greek as a liturgical language; the very name Bulgar was proscribed and almost forgotten.[2] At last, in 1860, the Bulgars determined to bear the treatment of the Phanar no longer. As with all the Balkan Rayahs, the only real issue was the political one: they wanted to be a people, and the only way to be a people under the Turk was to have a national Church, a millet, in fact. The vital thing was to have nothing more to do with the Phanar. At first they thought of joining the Catholic Church. They applied to the Uniate Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, and were assured by him that the Holy See would allow them to be a Uniate Church, keeping their own Canon Law, and using the Byzantine liturgy in their own tongue. Napoleon III was to be their patron and defender. A large number of them then abjured schism, and a certain Archimandrite Sokolski was consecrated Archbishop of the Bulgars by Pius IX himself in 1861. It was Russia who put a stop to this movement. Catholicism in the Balkans would not suit her plans at all. So the Russian Government tried very hard to persuade the Phanar to allow a national Orthodox Bulgarian Church to
- ↑ During all that time there were endless examples of this race-hatred. Here is one that made some noise at the time. In August, 1903, two Greeks treacherously betrayed the Bulgarian leader, Thomas Saef, with ninety-eight men into the hands of a whole regiment of Turks. The Bulgars were all killed. Afterwards the Bulgars caught the two Greeks, and the Revolutionary Committee sentenced them to be slowly cut in small pieces in the marketplaces of two towns. This was done in September.
- ↑ Voltaire, in Candide, wrote of an imaginary "Bulgarian" army that did "Bulgarian" exercises as one would write of fairyland or the Utopians. He had no idea that there was a real Bulgaria. See Brailsford, Macedonia, p. 100.
