Читать книгу The Birth of Yugoslavia - Henry Baerlein - Страница 15

And now, as the matter is in dispute, it is necessary to examine the origin of the Bulgarian people. A band of Turanian or Bulgarian warriors, probably not over 10,000 in number and led by one Asperouch or Isperich, had crossed the Danube in the year 679, had subdued the Slav tribes in those parts—for the newcomers reaped the advantage of being a well-disciplined people—and by the end of the eighth century had settled down in their tents of felt along the banks of the Danube. Then, after another hundred years, in the district bounded by Varna, Rustchuk and the Balkans, one may say that the original Turanians, a branch of the Huns, had been absorbed by the Slavs. "The forefathers of the Bulgars," says the great Slavist, Dr. Constantine Jireček of Prague, in his History of the Bulgars, "are not the handful of Bulgars who conquered in 679 a part of Mœsia along the Danube, but the Slavs who much earlier had settled in Mœsia, as well as in Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus and almost the whole Peninsula." With regard to the retention of the name there is an analogy in France, where the Gauls came under the subjection of German Franks, who ultimately disappeared, but left their name to the country. So, too, the Greeks in Turkey who call themselves Romei, the name of their former rulers, and their language Romeica, though they are not Romans and do not speak Latin. To such an extent have the original Bulgars been absorbed by the Yugoslavs that even the most ancient known form of the Bulgarian language, dating from the ninth century, retains hardly any relics of the original Bulgarian tongue; and this tongue has in our time, with the exception of a word or two, been entirely lost: there is a celebrated old MS. in Moscow[11] which orientalists and historians have pondered over and which has now been explained by the Finnish professor Mikola and the Bulgarian professor Zlatarski to be a chronology of Bulgarian pagan princes, of whom the first are rather fabulous. Here and there, amid the old Slav, are strange words which are supposed to signify Turanian chronology, cycles of lunar years. And in a village between Šumen and Prjeslav there was found an inscription of the Bulgarian prince Omortag (?802–830), where in the Greek language, for the Bulgars had at that period no writing of their own, he says that he built something; and amid the Greek there is the word σιγορ-αλεμ, which occurs also in the above-mentioned document and is regarded as Turanian. … What we do know about this race is by no means so discreditable; it is true that they are reputed to have had no great esteem for the aged, and, according to a Chinese chronicle of the year 545, "the characters of their writing are like those of the barbarians." They held it to be glorious to die in battle, shameful to die of sickness. For the violation of a married woman, as well as for the hatching of plots and rebellion, the penalty was death, and if you seduced a girl you were compelled to pay a fine and also to marry her. Their sense of discipline, which served them so well in their contact with other people, was remarkably applied to their social life; thus a stepson was under an obligation to marry his father's widow, a nephew the widow of his uncle, and a younger brother the widow of an elder. It may be that the two much-quoted writers who claim that the modern Bulgars are of this race were moved more by their admiration of such customs than by scientific scrutiny. One of them, Christoff, who assumed the name of Tartaro-Bulgar to show that he believed in his theories, is usually thought nowadays to have been more of a poet than a devotee of erudition; if he had been still more of a poet, approaching, say, Pencho Slaveikoff, we would take less objection to his waywardness. The other champion of that ancestry is Theodore Paneff, who showed himself a brilliant and courageous officer during the war of 1912–1913. The fact that he was himself of Armenian origin—he changed his name—would, of course, not invalidate his Bulgarian studies; but even as he spoke Bulgarian with a Russian accent, so is he looked upon as writing like certain Russians; and his other literary work, such as that on the psychology of crowds, is held to be of more value. At all events in 1916 when a number of Bulgarian deputies made a joyous progress to the capitals of their allies, under the leadership of the Vice-President of the Sobranje, Dr. Momchiloff, renowned at the time as a Germanophil, they were welcomed with great pomp at Buda-Pest and declared in ceremonial orations to be brothers of the Turanian Magyars; but Momchiloff deprecated this idea. "We are brothers," he said, "of the Russians, and see what we have done to them!" It was also during the War that Dr. Georgov, Professor of Philosophy and Rector of Sofia University, wrote a dissertation in a Buda-Pest newspaper,[12] which demonstrated very clearly to the Hungarians that the Bulgars are Slavs; the Professor points out that the Turanians had so rapidly been absorbed that Prince Omortag bestowed Slav names upon his sons, and this complete mingling of the radically different peoples was assisted, says the Professor, by the fact that those Bulgarian hordes in the days before they crossed the Danube were already partly mixed with Slavs, since they had been wandering for decades to the north of the Danube, around Bessarabia, in which country the Slavs were members of the same Slovene race as those whom they were afterwards to meet. So thoroughly were the original Bulgars submerged in the Slavs that when their sons set out from the district between Varna, Rustchuk and the Balkans, proceeding west and south, they met with no resistance from the unorganized Slavs of Mœsia and Thrace, owing to the circumstance that these latter did not feel that the new arrivals were strangers. In fact, says the Professor, there are in the present Bulgarian people far fewer and far fainter traces of the original Bulgars than there are of the old Thracians, as also of the Greeks and of the different people who in the course of the great migrations probably left here and there some stragglers. Sir Charles Eliot says of the Bulgars that "though not originally Slavs they have been completely Slavized, and all the ties arising from language, religion and politics connect them with the Slavs and not with Turkey or even Hungary." Professor Cvijić, by the way, who in 1920 received the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his researches into Balkan ethnology, regards the author of Turkey in Europe as a greater authority in this field than himself. … It is not easy, away from Montenegro and a few remote valleys, to find communities on the Balkan mainland that are altogether free from alien blood; Turks have come and gone, Crusaders of all nationalities have passed this way, with their hangers-on, here was the road from Europe to Asia, and here amid the ruin of empires lay much that was worth gathering. No doubt the Serbs, whose land was not so much a thoroughfare, have in their veins some Illyrian and other, but on the whole much less non-Slav blood than the Bulgars; still, when we consider some subsequent invasions of Bulgaria, we must ascertain how far they spread. For example, the Kumani who arrived in the thirteenth century were, according to Leon Cahun,[13] Turks of the Kiptchak nation, speaking a pure Turkish dialect; they—that is to say, the Gagaous who are supposed to be their descendants—are now Christians, they speak modern Turkish and inhabit the shores of the Black Sea and the region of Adrianople; they have kept much to themselves and are recognizable by their dark faces, large teeth and hirsute appearance. There are people who assert that all Bulgars have a physical divergence from other Yugoslavs, but, except if they happened to come across one of these Gagaous or some such person, it appears more likely that they saw what they went out to see. Naturally, if not very logically, those who regard the Bulgars in a hostile fashion have often brandished the arguments of Messrs. Tartaro-Bulgar and Paneff; if they will be so good as to accept what I honestly believe is the truth with regard to this people, they may have the pleasure of denouncing the Bulgar even more, seeing that his Yugoslav blood gives him less excuse for being what he has been. We shall have occasion, later on, to discuss his primitive as well as his more refined vices, endeavouring to ascertain how far they are not shared by his neighbours and whether he has any virtues peculiar to himself.