fact that they are neither Hellenes nor Bulgars nor Serbs, but children of the same stock as the free Roumans. The Government of Bucharest has eagerly taken up a national propaganda among them, and spends large sums of money on building Vlach schools, paying Vlach priests, and—say the Greeks—bribing peasants to learn Roumanian and call themselves Vlachs. The famous Apostol Margariti († 1903) was the leader of this Roumanizing movement; and the Roumanian Minister at Constantinople, M. Alexander Lahovary, jealously watches over its interests. So the Greeks, the Patriarchists, are steadily losing their supporters in Macedonia, and numbers of peasants who used to call themselves Hellenes are now becoming as bitter enemies of the "Great Idea" as the Bulgars and Serbs. Naturally, as soon as these Macedonian Vlachs awoke to the fact that they were a separate race, they too, like every one else, wanted to be a millet and to have the only special organization possible under the Turk—an ecclesiastical one. Many of them were so anxious to break away from the Patriarch and his Rum millet that they joined the Bulgars and turned Exarchist.[1] But that only caused the Turkish authorities, who are nothing if not consistent to their scheme, to take the names of these Vlachs off the register of the Roman nation and to add them to that of the Bulgarians. Whereas what they want is to be a Vlach nation. So a number of those who remained Patriarchists began to assert their national feeling in the usual, obvious, and, indeed, only way. Their priests said the Holy Liturgy in Roumanian. The Phanar knows that if all the Vlachs go there will be, indeed, nothing but a slender remnant of its Roman nation left to work for the "Great Idea" in Macedonia. So it has set its face desperately against the Roumanian movement, as it does against all national feeling among the Christians that it will pretend to think Greeks. For years there has been a regular persecution of these Vlachs; every priest who spoke Roumanian in church was promptly excommunicated; the Greek papers never ceased heaping abuse on Margaritis and his work, and there has been a long chain of nationalistic squabbles under pretence of ecclesi-
- ↑ Gelzer counts 430 Exarchist Vlach families in Macedonia, Geistliches u. Weltliches, p. 125.
