Chapter 36

There have been various modifications in the frontier line between Serbia and Bulgaria. The Bulgars acknowledge that in the case of the Struma salient, of the part near Vranja and of the villages on the bank of the Timok, it was clearly for the purpose of safeguarding the railways; and few people would be found to say that Serbia has been other than modest in her demands. Compare the Italian position on the Brenner with the Yugoslav frontier against Bulgaria and in the Baranja: against Bulgars and Magyars the Yugoslavs only secure a sound defensive frontier, whereas Italy obtains a capacity for the offensive against Austria.[112] It is rather different with regard to Tsaribrod, on the main line between Ni[vs] and Sofia. So good a friend of the Yugoslavs as Dr. Seton-Watson has deplored the cession of this small place, since it appears likely to imperil a future friendship between Serbia and Bulgaria. As a matter of fact the Yugoslav Peace Delegates requested, for strategic purposes, a still more southerly frontier on the Dragoman Pass, which was denied to them. But Tsaribrod, which is dominated by the heights of Dragoman, is anyhow a place of minor importance. It is much to be hoped that the inhabitants will not imitate those of the Pirot _intelligentsia_ who in 1878 shook off the dust of their town when it became Serbian and migrated to Sofia, where they never wearied of anti-Serbian agitation. One must do one's best not to retard the arrival of that day when it will be almost a matter of indifference as to whether a village is situated in Serbia or in Bulgaria. Mr. Stanojevi['c], the deputy for Zaje[vc]a, which is not far from the frontier, proposed in the Skup[vs]tina that Tsaribrod should be left to the Bulgars in exchange for a sum of money. This suggestion was opposed by the Radicals, and the far-seeing Yugoslav statesmen who would gladly have adopted it were left hoping that the Skup[vs]tina would some day decide in its favour.... This moderation on the part of the Serbs has been less in evidence at Bucharest and still less at Athens. The Peace Conference which felt itself unable to deprive its Ally of southern Dobrudja, and unable to resist the persuasive eloquence of M. Venizelos, does not seem to have contributed towards a lasting Balkan peace. A reviewer in the _Observer_, while approving of Mr. Leland Buxton's hope of a Serb-Bulgar reconciliation, asks why this should be effected to the exclusion and obvious detriment of Greece. "Why not a Balkan Federation?" he asks. In view of the very different races which inhabit the Balkans, he might just as well ask, "Why not a European Federation?" And the statesmen of the non-Slav Balkan countries do not seem to have made serious efforts to prevent the coming of a purely Slav Federation. It remains to be seen whether, when that comes to pass, the Greek and Roumanian people will have achieved such statesmanship as to make an equally small effort to keep under their control their large Slav territories.... "We should no longer think of Thrace," said M. Venizelos in the Greek Chamber in 1913, "for it is impossible to include in the Greek State all those parts where Greeks have lived; we ought to be modest and contented with what is most righteous and attainable; we ought not to let ourselves be carried away by our imagination."

(_d_) THE ROUMANIAN FRONTIER

THE STATE OF THE ROUMANIANS IN EASTERN SERBIA

A new frontier between Yugoslavia and Roumania has been drawn by the Allied Powers in the Banat. But before we consider its merits and absurdities we must examine the Serbo-Roumanian question in the several departments of eastern Serbia. During 1919 one heard a good deal, in Bucharest and in Paris, of the pitiful Roumanians whom the Serbs had always deprived of their own national schools and churches. It was claimed, chiefly by a certain Dr. Athanasius Popovitch, that the Roumanians in Serbia were longing for the day of their redemption. On March 8, 1919, two deputations of Roumanians from the Timok and from Macedonia, who had lately arrived in Paris in order to plead before the Conference, presented themselves to the Roumanian colony at 114 Avenue des Champs-Elysees. We are told that in consequence of their moving narrative, and on account of the loud appeal made by them to all their free brothers, the Roumanian colony founded, with great enthusiasm, a national league for their delivery. The Vice-President of the league was announced to be Dr. Athanasius Popovici. In a pamphlet called _Les Roumains de Serbie_ (Paris, 1919), Dr. Draghicesco, a Roumanian Senator, denounces the Serb authorities for having obliged Dr. Athanasius, while he was a schoolboy, to change his surname into the purely Serbian one of Popovitch. "Not being able to endure this régime of violence," we are informed, "he expatriated himself and established himself in Roumania." But if Dr. Athanasius felt so strongly with regard to his name when he was a mere schoolboy, one is puzzled to understand why, being an adult and a pamphleteer in 1919, he should be hesitating between Popovitch, which is Serbian, and Popovici, which is Roumanian. The Senator does not seem to be well informed as to the early years of Dr. Athanasius, who so far from expatriating himself as an indignant schoolboy, remained in Serbia, where he went through five classes of the gymnasium in Belgrade, after which he studied theology in the same town, with a view to succeeding his father, who was a priest at Du[vs]anovac in eastern Serbia. Later on Athanasius performed his military service at Zaje[vc]a, where he married--so one of his sisters told me--one Mileva, the daughter of Yovan Stan[vc]evi['c], a merchant. After his marriage he went to Jena, in order to continue his studies, and there he became a Doctor of Letters. It may be that while he was at Jena he became conscious of the régime of violence to which the Roumanians in Serbia are subjected; at any rate he decided not to return to that country, where his wife and three sisters are well satisfied to live. He launched himself into a furious anti-Serbian propaganda in favour of those who, in the words of Dr. Draghicesco, are profoundly sad and full of grief at being neither Serbian nor Roumanian, who when they meet a Roumanian brother listen to him with pleasure and, with their eyes full of tears, murmur: "How happy we should be to be with you." ... When I travelled through those parts with a view to verifying Dr. Athanasius's assertions, I was invariably told by persons of Roumanian origin that they had no complaint whatever against the Serbs, and that the last thing they desired was to be politically united to the Roumanians of the kingdom. Dr. Athanasius might reply that his wretched compatriots were impelled by fear to give such answers. But what do they fear?--one finds that among these people are deputies, priests, army officers and so forth. "To-day," says Dr. Athanasius, "all the peoples who are reduced to slavery by other people secure the right to return to their fatherland." The Roumanians of Serbia would have to be a good deal more miserable before wishing to have anything to do with Roumania. Milan Soldatovi['c], ex-mayor of the great mining village of Bor and himself of Roumanian origin, said that he had never heard of any one who went to work in Roumania. No doubt the present generation of Roumanian landowners deeply deplore the misdeeds of their ancestors, who drove the ancestors of these peasants away from Roumania. "The peasant hovels were merely dark burrows, called _bordei_, holes dug in the ground and roofed with poles covered with earth, rising scarcely above the level of the plain.... The interior was indescribable. Neither furniture nor utensils, with the exception of the boards which served as beds or seats and the pot for cooking the _mamaliga_"[113]--his sole food, a paste consisting of maize meal cooked in water. And one cannot be astonished if the Roumanians in Serbia are chary of believing that their native land has changed for the better. "If," said a Roumanian peasant before an Agricultural Commission in 1848, "if the boyar could have laid hands upon the sun, he would have seized it and sold God's light and warmth to the peasant for money." Even in 1919 the peasant still had much reason to be dissatisfied, for where the owner parted with his land it was usually--no doubt as a stage in the transaction--made over to the village as a whole. And if the boyar no longer has the monopoly of the sale of alcohol, if he has so far improved that Vallachia is not now losing its inhabitants as it was after the Regulations of 1831, when we read that "in vain the rivers are assiduously watched, as if in a state of siege; the emigrants cross at the places which are clear of troops. Emigration is especially rife in winter, when the frozen Danube presents an ever-open bridge," yet among the Roumanians of Serbia it has been handed down from father to son what happened in the reign of Prince Milo[vs]. To take one case out of many such that are preserved in the National Archives at Belgrade, a dispatch was sent on February 11, 1831, by Vule Gligorievi['c], his representative in those parts, to Prince Milo[vs], who was at Kragujevac, enclosing a supplication from the priests and other inhabitants of the large Roumanian island called Veliko Ostrvo, in the middle of the Danube, praying that they might be allowed to cross to Serbia. "We are in great misery," they wrote, "and have boyars who are very bad, and we cannot bear the misery in which we find ourselves, and in the greatest grief we beg your Highness to let us come to Serbia with our wives and children." The Prince had a special sympathy for Roumania and was therefore most reluctant to intervene in her internal affairs. He adopted a very cautious attitude in this matter, but when Gligorievi['c] sent him petition after petition he was finally so touched by the recital of their woes that he permitted them to cross the river; and one night, with the help of the Serbian authorities, the whole island crossed over, to wit 57 families, with 186 oxen, 70 horses, 694 sheep and 87 pigs. Milo[vs] made them a free grant of land for the building of a village, together with a vast stretch of territory for pasture and stock-raising; at his own expense he built them a church and extended to them all the liberties and advantages enjoyed in Serbia by the Serbs themselves. As a token of their gratitude these Roumanian emigrants called their village Mihailovac, after the name of Michael, the Prince's son. This village is the birthplace of our friend Dr. Athanasius, whose sentiments appear to have placed him in a minority of one. When his pamphlet came into the hands of Jorge Korni['c], the mayor of Mihailovac and a Roumanian by origin, he brought it to the prefect at Negotin saying that he wished to have nothing to do "with any devil's work."

As Dr. Athanasius and his chauvinist friends give a pretty lurid picture of the Roumanian villager who lives in Serbia, I visited a few places where the population is wholly Roumanian or Serbo-Roumanian. The 766 inhabitants of Ostralje are all of Roumanian descent, the mayor being one Velimir Mi[vs]kovi['c], a sergeant of reserves who has been transferred from the army in order to carry on his municipal duties. All the inhabitants speak Serbian and Vlach. "We were always Serbs," they said. "Nobody told us that we had migrated to this place." And amongst those who assembled to talk with us at the schoolmaster's house there was only one who, in the Roumanian fashion, had drawn his socks over his white trousers. The 2221 inhabitants of the village of Grljan are about two-thirds of Roumanian and one-third of Serbian origin. Formerly they each had their own part of the village, but now they are intermingled both in the village and in the cemetery. They intermarry freely; thus Jon Jonovi['c], the most notable person, who used to represent this district in the Skup[vs]tina at Belgrade, has three Serbian daughters-in-law. He was a member of the Opposition Liberal group of Ribarac. "And did you ever request that your fellow-countrymen should have their own Roumanian schools and churches?" we asked. This is one of the chief demands of Dr. Athanasius. "I was not the only Roumanian who was a deputy," said the old man of the furrowed face. "There was Novak Dobromirovi['c] of Zlot; there was Jorge Stankovi['c], for instance; but we never thought of asking for such a thing, since we had no need for it." The son of the wealthy Sima Yovanovi['c] at Bor observed with a smile that the first business of Roumanian schools would have to be the teaching of Roumanian. "My father sent me to be educated at Vienna," he said, "and when I met some boys from Bucharest we found that our language was so different that we had to talk to one another in German. And now when a commercial traveller comes here from Roumania I have to talk German to him, as I would otherwise have to converse with my hands and feet." The French mining officials, by the way, at Bor testified that they had never heard of any tension between men of Serbian and those of Roumanian origin; the Roumanians, who prefer agricultural work, are more attracted to the mines in winter, when over 40 per cent. of the 1500 employés are Roumanians.

Dr. Athanasius and his friends are agitated, as one would imagine, when they discuss with you the numbers of their countrymen. In _Le Temps_ of April 22, 1919, they declared that they could produce 500,000, for they realized that their previous claim of between 250,000 and 350,000 was not large enough to give the Roumanians in Serbia the benefit of the principle of nationality. But even this more modest figure will be found, on examination, to be exaggerated. In the four north-eastern counties of Serbia there were 159,510 Roumanians in 1895; 120,628 in 1900, and in 1910 a little over 90,000. This diminution, say the chauvinists, is due to a falsifying of statistics, for those, they say, who have attended a Serbian school are inscribed as Serbs. The truth is that everyone is entered according to his mother-tongue. And history knows countless instances of a gradual decrease in the case of people placed in foreign surroundings and exposed to foreign influences. Like the Illyrians who people Dalmatia, the Thracians of ancient Dacia and the Serbs who emigrated to Russia in the seventeenth century, the Roumanians of Serbia are undergoing this process and are inevitably becoming Serbicized. Frequently we noticed that men possessing no Serbian blood did not care to admit their Roumanian origin, which, however, is no secret to their neighbours in spite of the Serbian termination "i['c]" that, in the course of years, has been affixed to their names. An allusion to their origin is clearly regarded as lacking in delicacy. "Well, my ancestors were Roumanian," is often as much as they will admit. And when some enterprising agitators came over from Roumania to the department of Po[vz]arevac in 1919, the Roumanians of those parts gave up to the authorities all those who did not manage to escape. For ten years Lieut.-Colonel Gjorge Markovi['c] commanded the 9th Regiment, which is chiefly formed of Roumanians from that region. They used to tell him that they wanted to have nothing to do with the Roumanian boyars. "Here we are boyars ourselves," they said. All of them speak Serbian, many of them write it; and on winter evenings they have for years received instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic and singing, which compares favourably with Roumania's army, in which, as I was told at Bucharest, the plan of starting any education had to be postponed in consequence of the outbreak of the Great War. Together with the unwillingness of these people to acknowledge their origin, one observes a general vagueness as to the home of their forefathers. Apparently these came over from southern Hungary, whence the name Ungureani,[114] or from Tara Rumaneasca, _i.e._ the Roumanian land, whence the name Tarani. Others again are descended from Roumanized Serbs who came from Kossovo and other Serb regions of the south, lived in the Banat and Transylvania among the Roumanian villages, acquired the Roumanian language and then crossed over to Serbia. These three classes have all come to Serbia in recent times. Any attempt on the part of Dr. Athanasius and his friends to drag in the Romans can be answered by the undoubted fact that the ancient Roman colonists had completely disappeared from Serbia as far back as the fifteenth century, leaving no trace at all, and there is no connection between them and the present Roumanian population of Serbia. No memories remain of the old Roman colonists, save certain place-names which, as Professor Georgevi['c] remarks, strike one as surprising in the midst of a purely Serbian population. It is interesting to note that these ancient Roman place-names are very rare in the regions inhabited to-day by men of Roumanian origin.

It would not have been worth whole devoting so much space to the activities of Dr. Athanasius and his adherents but for the fact that European public opinion, which has concerned itself extremely little with the Roumanians of Serbia, might possibly imagine that their advocate deserves to be taken seriously.

2. THE BANAT