Part 18

In the Middle Ages, when frontiers in the Balkans were, if possible, even more fluid than they have been in recent times, Macedonia was most frequently under the rule of the Greeks. It was, however, held by Bulgaria from about 860 to 1018 and again for some years in the thirteenth century; and from about 1260 down to the Turkish conquest in 1389 it belonged to the Serbian empire. From these rather brief periods of tenure both nations draw their claims to ‘historic rights’ over Macedonia today, and a fund of proud historic memories which lend warmth and passion to those claims. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria promoted himself to be ‘Tsar’ in imitation of the Bulgarian tsars of the Middle Ages who ruled over Macedonia. The Prince Regent of Serbia today addresses the Macedonians as “sons of Stephen Dushan,” in allusion to the great Serbian emperor of the fourteenth century whose capital was Üsküb in Macedonia. It seems undeniable that the period of Serbian rule made a much deeper impression on the country than did the Bulgarian. Not only is Macedonia strewn with churches, monasteries, and works of art recalling the great days of Serbia, while similar Bulgarian monuments are almost totally lacking; but the wonderfully rich ballad literature, through which alone the Macedonian Slavs express whatever historic memories they have, dwells exclusively upon the heroes of the Serbian past, with never the mention of a Bulgarian.

At any rate, the ensuing five hundred years of stagnation and isolation under Turkish rule afforded the Macedonians ample time to forget which of their kinsmen they preferred to be associated with, and to lose whatever national consciousness they had possessed. When the Serb and Bulgarian national revivals began in the early nineteenth century, Macedonia was more or less no-man’s-land; and either movement might sweep the field, provided it got started early enough. Fortune seemed for a while to be with the Bulgarians. For many years all of Russia’s powerful influence was cast in their favor, since Russia regarded the Serbs as Austria’s protégés. The Turks also thought it very clever to favor the Bulgarians, who seldom or never revolted, against the Serbs who never did anything else but rebel. Hence the Bulgarians got the start, and for some decades they could conduct religious, educational, and nationalist work in Macedonia, while Serb influences were in the main barred out. What particularly helped the process of Bulgarization was the formation in 1870 of the independent Bulgarian (or Exarchist) church, a body which could offer the Macedonian Slavs the things which they seem to have craved above all others at that time: emancipation from the Greek clergy, and the church service in a tongue which they could understand. Hence a general stampede to the Exarchist church, restrained only by the calculation that it was materially more expensive to get christened, married, or buried by that businesslike body than by the old Patriarchist or Greek church. Once inside the Exarchist fold, you were regarded by the authorities as a Bulgarian and taught by your religious superiors that you must feel yourself one.

After the formation of the new Bulgarian state in 1878, the Bulgarian nationalist propaganda in Macedonia went forward with redoubled vigor. It was carried on from Sofia and from the seat of the Exarchate at Constantinople with all the means and by all the devices that the government and the church could bring to bear. Meanwhile the Turks, somewhat disillusioned as to the harmlessness of their Bulgarian protégés and always experts at the art of playing the Christians off against each other, determined to open the door to rival influences. Hence in the late ’80s and the ’90s the Serbs could at last rush in and strive to make up for lost time by organizing a rival propaganda, with all the paraphernalia of Serbian bishops, churches, schools, etc. As the Greeks were also busily engaged in the same kind of work, the Macedonian question then entered that acute phase which so delighted the Turks and wore out the nerves of Europe--that desperate and sanguinary mêlée, in which the three rival races strove to spread their ‘national culture,’ not only by furiously proselytizing the unfortunate Macedonians, but by exterminating each other. It must be admitted that in both forms of activity the Bulgarians came out ahead. Not only did their _komitadjis_ dominate the blood-stained field, but they had a network of schools and churches quite surpassing either of their rivals. Refugees from Macedonia also seem to have fled to Bulgaria in larger numbers than to Serbia or Greece; and indeed they formed a very active and influential element at Sofia, which did not permit the Bulgarian government to forget the Macedonian question for a moment.

On the eve of the Balkan Wars, the situation might be summarized by saying that a section of the Macedonian Slavs had more or less warmly adopted the Bulgarian cause, and another, probably smaller, section, the Serbian cause, and--it seems to me--the great mass of this population was still lying inert and undecided, untouched by any schools, chiefly concerned about peace and its daily bread, prepared to go with either party that should prove the stronger. So much for the sentiments of the population.

Both sides have also appealed to other arguments to prove that all Slavic Macedonia ought to belong to them. Endless controversy has raged over the question whether its people speak Bulgarian or Serbian. It has been triumphantly demonstrated, on the one hand, that the Macedonians are Bulgars because they use a definite article and do not inflect their nouns; but it has also been conclusively shown that they are Serbs by all the laws of morphology and phonetics. In fact, the best philological judgment seems to be that these people speak a series of dialects intermediate between Bulgarian and Serbian, gradually shading off from one into the other; and that they can without much difficulty understand either language.

Equally inconclusive are the arguments based on popular customs. Although it has been attempted, one will never solve the Macedonian question by proving that marriage, burial, and saint’s day customs in this region are strikingly Serbian, or that the female costumes and the embroidery worn by the ladies are unmistakably Bulgarian. In customs as in language, this is simply a transitional area with affinities with both its neighbors.

It is therefore a rather tragic thing that for a generation or two the public in Bulgaria has been trained to think that Macedonia is a fundamentally Bulgarian country pining for liberation. The feeling on that subject has been all the more intense because this was almost the only region that could be considered as unredeemed Bulgaria. Bulgarian patriotism could concentrate and specialize on Macedonia. Serbian feeling about the country was formerly not quite so strong, perhaps, since Serbia had so many other unredeemed kinsmen to ponder over--in Bosnia first and foremost. At any rate, since the events of the last seven years, after they have fought three wars for the possession of Macedonia, the Serbs now entertain feelings about that country that are not a bit less ardent and intransigent than those of the Bulgarians.

Those three wars--or the last two at least--can hardly be left out of the account. If before 1913 the Macedonian problem might be considered an open question, with the balance of rights inclining somewhat in favor of the Bulgarians, it would seem that today Serbia has acquired, by blood and suffering, titles that can scarcely be denied. After Bulgaria’s two perfidious attacks--the first one in 1913 so indefensible that prominent Bulgarians have since called it “an act of insane folly,” “a fratricidal crime,” and the second one in 1915 hardly less dastardly, for it was a blow in the back when Serbia was fighting for her life against the Austro-German onslaught--; after Bulgaria has conducted her wars with a savagery worthy of her allies and joined in what seems little less than a deliberate effort to exterminate the Serbian nation; after Bulgaria, in her moments of apparent triumph, has loudly announced the intention to appropriate not only Macedonia but half of the older Serbia as well; and after Serbia’s so desperate and gallant struggle and final brilliant victory--it may be all very well for the beaten Bulgar to present himself, with Wilsonian phrases to replace his old Prussian ones, and say, “Let’s have peace and make up, and you give me all we’ve been fighting for”; but it would be more than human nature could expect, or than strict justice, I think, can demand, that Serbia or her Allies should grant his request.

It is another question, of course, whether this outcome will make for permanent peace in the Balkans. Much will depend on the degree of generosity and tact that the Serbs may show in dealing with those Macedonians who have come to feel themselves Bulgars, and with the probably larger mass who as yet have no definite national consciousness of any kind. There is reasonable ground for hope, I think, that, if peace continues for a generation or so, the majority of the Macedonians can be won over by quite legitimate means to Serbian nationality.

Rather different, perhaps, is the case of another territory lost by Bulgaria at the treaty of Bucharest, and which she has again failed to recover--the Southern Dobrudja. Apart from the one city of Silistria (with 14,000 people), this small territory would seem to be of little value to anybody. It contains, however, over 100,000 Bulgarians as against only 6000 Roumanians; moreover, it is of strategic importance. Roumania’s motive for demanding it in 1913 was to protect the railway leading to her chief port, Constanza, a line which was at one point only about twenty miles from the old Bulgarian frontier. But through the cession then made, the danger was merely shifted to the other side. It is now Bulgaria’s chief Black Sea port, Varna, and the railway serving it that are menaced, for the Roumanian frontier comes within about ten miles of them. Hence the American delegation at Paris endeavored to have the frontier of 1913 corrected so that neither side would be in danger. But Roumania displayed a certain obstinacy, and the Conference, not wishing to complicate much more serious questions then pending between it and Roumania, shelved the Dobrudja matter, intimating, however, that it might be taken up later in connection with the problem of Bessarabia.

Not only has Bulgaria failed to regain her losses of 1913, but the new Peace Treaty deprives her of some bits of territory that have hitherto belonged to her. Serbia has secured some small rectifications of the frontier established in 1913, all of them for strategic reasons. One of them, in the valley of the River Strumica, was very genuinely needed, for at that point the old frontier came within about six miles of the Belgrade-Salonica railway, and what this means is shown by the fact that in the first year of the Great War, before Bulgaria officially entered the contest, this all-important railroad was almost cut by a raid of Bulgarian _komitadjis_. The other chief rectification, in the Pirot-Tsaribrod basin, seems more questionable, and has the disadvantage of bringing the frontier even nearer to Sofia than has been the case since 1878.

A more considerable loss to Bulgaria, though not necessarily a definitive one, is that of the territory in Western Thrace which she acquired in 1913. To this question I shall come back in a moment in connection with the whole problem of Thrace. As a preliminary to that, however, it seems necessary to say a word as to the general situation and claims of Greece.

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While the Balkan settlement now being effected at Paris is in the main a confirmation of that of 1913, some new departures have been made or are in prospect; and these relate almost wholly to the problem of Greek irredentism. For if Roumanian or Serbian national unity could be attained chiefly by the acquisition of former Austrian and Hungarian territories, the question of Greek national unity involves primarily further changes of territory in the Balkans.

It has been estimated by Mr. Venizelos that the Hellenic nation today comprises over eight million people, of whom only 55% live in the kingdom of Greece. Of the rest about one million are widely dispersed all over the world; nearly two millions reside in Asia Minor and Cyprus--lands outside the scope of this survey; there are 100,000 in the Dodecanesus, those Aegean islands which Italy certainly should, and probably will, transfer to Greece. There remain, as unredeemed Greek populations in the Balkans, about 731,000 people in Thrace and at Constantinople, and about 151,000 in Northern Epirus and Southern Albania. All told, Greece hopes to liberate about two millions of her kinsmen as a result of the War, and to bring it about that at least 75% of the race, that portion which is gathered in the lands about the Aegean, should live united in the Hellenic kingdom.

On the northwest Greece lays claims to that territory which she calls Northern Epirus and which her opponents call Southern Albania: a territory which she fought for in 1912-13, but which the Powers at that time, under Austro-Italian influence, awarded to Albania. This district contains two important towns, Koritza and Argyrocastro, and a total population of about 120,000 Orthodox Christians and 80-100,000 Mohammedans. It seems to be fairly well agreed that the Mohammedans are and feel themselves to be Albanians, and that most of the Christians also speak Albanian in their homes as their mother tongue. The Greeks claim however, that these Christian Epirotes read and write only Greek and are really bilingual; that by their religion, culture, historic traditions, and their ardent Hellenic patriotism today, they are essentially Greeks, and belong to Greece by the same right as Alsace and Lorraine to France. All of this the Albanian spokesmen, of course, strenuously deny. They maintain that this is a thoroughly and devotedly Albanian population, whose separation from the rest of the Shkypetars would be among the most glaring of the many mutilations that this much-tried nation has had to endure.

Nothing is more difficult than to ascertain the sentiments of a population among whom such a thing as a genuinely free election has never been known, propaganda and terrorism are the most common things in the world, and the rifle has hitherto been the principal means of settling questions. Albanian nationalism is so new and Albanian education so much a novelty of yesterday that perhaps the Albanians have never had a fair chance. At any rate, the balance of evidence so far seems to favor the Greeks. Almost all the schools in the contested area are Greek; the predominance of the pro-Greek element in the intellectual and economic life of the country can scarcely be disputed; the manifestations of Greek sentiment, especially at Koritza, have been impressive; and most impressive of all, perhaps, was the uprising of the Northern Epirotes in 1913, when Europe tried to place them under Albanian rule and then found itself unable to make them submit to it. At all events, the Paris Conference did not arrive at an agreement about this question. While the British and French advocated transferring all of Northern Epirus to Greece, the Italians stood out for leaving it to Albania, and the Americans advocated a compromise solution, which would have ceded the southern, Argyrocastro district to Greece, while leaving to Albania the northern district of Koritza, which some people have called the intellectual centre of Albanian nationalism.

Albania is menaced with some other losses. There has been talk of forming her northern territories into a separate autonomous province under the protection of Yugo-Slavia. Something might be said for this project from the economic standpoint, since, through the control of the Drin valley and the ports at its mouth, Serbia would obtain the only relatively easy outlet to the sea south of Fiume. The Drin valley has usually been taken as the western starting-point in plans for an Adriatic-Transbalkan railway. But from every other standpoint, the project in question seems objectionable in the extreme. Whatever may be the case in Epirus, no one can claim that the North Albanians are devotees of Serbian culture or have any feelings towards the Serbs save ancient and bitter hostility. One could hardly think of a more successful device for creating a permanent storm centre in the Balkans.

A more certain territorial loss to Albania is that of the port of Avlona, which Italy occupied in 1914, and which she assuredly will be allowed to keep. After all, her possession of it is no more unnatural than England’s position at Gibraltar or our own at Panama. Furthermore, it is probable that Italy will receive some kind of mandate from the Allies or from the League of Nations to supervise Albania. It is pretty generally admitted, even by the Albanians themselves, that this nascent and terribly backward state needs a protector; and since our government has been unable to assume that rôle, as the Albanians would have preferred to see us do, both we and they can scarcely object to Italy’s undertaking it.

To return to the subject of Greek claims--the main object of Mr. Venizelos’ diplomacy at Paris was the question of Thrace. This was a double-barrelled problem, for it referred both to the territory which fell to Bulgaria in 1913, which we call Western Thrace, and to Eastern Thrace, which means all that is left of Turkey in Europe except Constantinople.

Here again we are in a region of statistical chaos and ethnographic nightmares. The racial problems of Thrace are as bad as those of Macedonia--worse in fact, since they are so new and unfamiliar. We know in a general way that throughout both the Thraces Turks, Greeks, and to a less extent Bulgarians are scattered about with a promiscuity that almost defies analysis or conclusions. The racial statistics available--the Turkish census of 1910, the Greek Patriarch’s statistical estimates of 1912, and the Bulgarian census in Western Thrace for 1914--make it a point never to agree on a single item. Religious factors add to the confusion. In Western Thrace there is a large population called the Pomaks: people who are probably Bulgarian in race and speech, but who are Moslems in religion and in their _Weltanschauung_. Ought they to be counted as sterling Bulgarian patriots, as people at Sofia maintain; or rather as Turks, as Constantinople and Athens consider them? Finally, after all the wars, migrations, and massacres of the last eight years, one may well doubt whether any of the three censuses mentioned could claim to represent the existing situation, even assuming that they were honestly made in the first place.

At all events, one point in this chaos is tolerably clear. In Eastern Thrace the Greeks have the best claim on the basis of nationality, if one takes as the criterion the situation before the Balkan Wars. Speaking very roughly, they may then have numbered about 400,000, as against some 250,000 Turks and only about 50,000 Bulgarians. Not only did the Greeks hold virtually the entire coast, even on the side of the Black Sea; but in the interior they formed the matrix of this strange agglomeration, in which the Turkish and Bulgarian enclaves were embedded.

In Western Thrace the question is more difficult. The answer to it depends on whose statistics one thinks least unreliable, and largely on whether one counts the Pomaks as Bulgars or Turks. The Pomaks are rather less known to us than the tribes of Central Africa; but if one may judge of their sentiments today by what little is known of their behavior in the past, one would hesitate to put them down as Bulgarians. At any rate, one is faced here by Mr. Venizelos’ estimates: a total population of about 400,000, made up of 285,000 Turks, 70,000 Greeks, and 59,000 Bulgarians; and, on the other side, the Bulgarian census purporting to show 210,000 Turks, 185,000 Bulgarians (including 70,000 Pomaks) and only 32,000 Greeks. In fact the latest Bulgarian estimates do not admit the existence of any Greeks at all here: which leaves one free to make any one of several unpleasant conjectures as to what the Bulgars have done with them. A slight Greek majority over the Bulgarians is claimed by the one side, then; and a large Bulgarian preponderance is claimed by the other.

The question also has an economic and a political aspect. If Bulgaria is deprived of Western Thrace, she will be shut off from the Aegean Sea, which certainly forms her shortest and most natural outlet to the Western world. It is true, as the Greeks point out, that Bulgaria has several ports on the Black Sea, and as the Straits are surely going to be placed under international control and freely opened to all nations, Bulgaria will not be cut off from external communications. Moreover, Greece is willing to offer her special commercial rights, to be defined by the Powers, in certain Greek ports on the Aegean. But this quite naturally does not satisfy the Bulgars. They maintain that if they were to be deprived of their one direct and secure access to the open sea, this would be a disaster and an affront from which their people would never recover.

This raises, of course, the political question. From the standpoint of nationality, it would seem only just to award Eastern Thrace to Greece, and perhaps at least the southern half of Western Thrace as well. The Greeks ardently desire this, both for the sake of liberating their kinsmen, and also, doubtless, in order to build a bridge towards Constantinople, the glittering prize of the future, which is always dangling before Greek eyes. But beyond this narrow isthmus of Hellenism along the north Aegean coast, there would always be the lowering Bulgarian giant, thirsting to recover what he considers to be the key to his house. Whatever be the rights and wrongs in the case, a very severe strain is being put upon Bulgaria’s self-control by the present settlement of the Macedonian question. If, in addition, Bulgaria were to be permanently stripped of the territory she already possesses on the Aegean, the resulting dangers to the peace of the Balkans would be obvious.

For some such reasons, and since the ethnographic situation in Western Thrace was so uncertain, the American representatives at Paris, as is well known, stood out against the attribution of this territory to Greece. Finally, a compromise was arranged by which, in the treaty of Neuilly, Bulgaria was made simply to cede the disputed territory to the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. What they will do with it remains, apparently, still unsettled. It may pass to Greece; it may ultimately be restored to Bulgaria; conceivably it may be joined to Eastern Thrace to form an internationally controlled autonomous state. In any case, this is likely to remain one of the danger-zones of Eastern Europe.