Part 9 (2/2)
At the beginning the Bulgar leaders took it for granted that Russia was invincible, and antic.i.p.ated speedy and complete victory for her.
They were also supplied with false news, and refused to credit at first any Russian defeat. The Bishop of Ochrida was furious when I reported to him the sinking of the Petropalovski, and fiercely declared that the war was in reality an Anglo-Russian one, and that j.a.pan was merely our tool.
When riding on relief work among the burnt villages it was easy to learn the great part Russia had taken in building up the Bulgar rising in Macedonia. The same tale was told in almost each. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, a rich, n.o.ble and generous gentleman had visited the village. He was richer than you could imagine; had paid even a white medjid for a cup of coffee; had called the headmen and the priest together and had asked them if they would like a church of their own in the village. And in due time the church had been built. Followed, a list of silver candlesticks, vestments, etc., presented by this same n.o.bleman--the Russian Consul. The Turks had looted the treasures. Could I cause them to be restored? Sometimes the Consul had had an old church restored. Sometimes he had given money to establish a school. Always he stood for the people as something almost omnipotent.
In August M. Rostovsky, the Russian Consul at Monastir, had been murdered. There was nothing political in the affair. The Russian had imagined the land was already his, and that he was dealing with humble mouzhiks. He carried a heavy riding-whip and used it when he chose. I was told by an eye-witness that on one occasion he so savagely flogged a little boy who had ventured to hang on behind the consular carriage that a Turkish gendarme intervened. One day he lashed an Albanian soldier. The man waited his opportunity and shot Rostovsky dead on the main road near the Consulate. Russia treated the murder as a political one, and demanded and obtained apology and reparation of the Turkish Government. The Consul's remains were transported to the coast with full honours. All this for a Russian Consul in Turkey. Truly one man may steal a horse and another not look over a fence. Russia mobilized when Austria insisted on enquiry into the murder of an Archduke. So well was Rostovsky's funeral engineered that the native Slav peasants looked on him as a martyr to the sacred Slav cause, not as a man who had brought his punishment on himself.
Russia was not, however, the only Power in Monastir. It seethed with consuls. And the most prominent was Krai, the Austrian Consul-General, a very energetic and scheming man who ”ran” Austria for all she was worth, and was a thorn in the side of the British Consul, whom he endeavoured to thwart at every turn. He persuaded the American missionaries, who were as innocent as babes about European politics, though they had pa.s.sed thirty years in the Balkan Peninsula, that he and not the Englishman could best forward their interests, and they foolishly induced the American Government to transfer them and their schools to Austrian protection. And he pushed himself to the front always, declaring that he had far more power to aid the relief work and trying to make the English consult him instead of their own representative. This annoyed me, and I therefore never visited him at all. Up country among the revolted villages it was clear that the luckless people had been induced to rise by the belief that, as in 1877, Russia would come to their rescue! But as time pa.s.sed, and Russia herself realized that the j.a.panese were a tough foe, it became more and more apparent that no further rising would take place in the spring. The Balkan Orthodox Lenten fast is so severe that a rising before Easter was always improbable. This Easter would see none.. I remembered with curious clearness the words of the Pole who gave me my first Serbian lessons. ”Russia is corrupt right through. If there is a war--Russia will be like that!” and he threw a rag of paper into the basket scornfully. His has been a twice true prophecy. The Bulgarian Bishop of Ochrida still believed firmly in Russia's invincibility. Furious when I refused to have cartridges, etc., hidden in my room--which the Turks never searched--he turned on me and declared that England was not a Christian country and would be wiped out by Holy Russia, who had already taken half j.a.pan and would soon take the rest and all India too.
By the middle of March I was quite certain no rising would take place. The Foreign Office in London still expected one, and notified all relief workers up country to wind up work and return. The others did, but I stayed and managed to ride right through Albania.
CHAPTER NINE.
ALBANIA
”Where rougher climes a n.o.bler race displayed.”--BYRON.
Study of the Macedonian question had shown me that one of the most important factors of the Near Eastern question was the Albanian, and that the fact that he was always left out of consideration was a constant source of difficulty. The Balkan Committee had recently been formed, and I therefore decided to explore right through Albania, then but little known, in order to be able to acquire first-hand information as to the aspirations and ideas of the Albanians.
Throughout the relief work in Macedonia we had employed Albanians in every post of trust--as interpreters, guides, kava.s.ses and clerks.
The depot of the British and Foreign Bible Society at Monastir was entirely in Albanian hands. The Albanian was invaluable to the Bible Society, and the Bible Society was invaluable to the Albanians.
Albania was suffering very heavily. Every other of the Sultan subject races had its own schools--schools that were, moreover, heavily subsidized from abroad. The Bulgarian schools in particular were surprisingly well equipped. Each school was an active centre of Nationalist propaganda. All the schoolmasters were revolutionary leaders. All were protected by various consulates which insisted on opening new schools and protested when any were interfered with.
Only when it was too late to stop the schools did the Turks perceive their danger. First came the school, then the revolution, then foreign intervention--and another piece of the Turkish' Empire was carved off. This had happened with Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria. The Turks resolved it should not happen in the case of Albania.
Albania was faced by two enemies. Not only the Turk dreaded the uprising of Albania, but Russia had already determined that the Balkan Peninsula was to be Slav and Orthodox. Greece as Orthodox might be tolerated. No one else.
The Turkish Government prohibited the printing and teaching of the Albanian language under most severe penalties. Turkish schools were established for the Moslem Albanians, and every effort made to bring up the children to believe they were Turks. In South Albania, where the Christians belong to the Orthodox Church, the Greeks were encouraged to found schools and work a Greek propaganda. The Turks hoped thus to prevent the rise of a strong national Albanian party.
The Greek Patriarch went so far as to threaten with excommunication any Orthodox Albanian who should use the ”accursed language” in church or school. In North Albania, where the whole of the Christians are Catholics, the Austrians, who had been charged by Europe with the duty of protecting the Catholics, established religious schools in which the teaching was in Albanian, and with which the Turkish Government was unable to interfere. The Jesuits, under Austrian protection, established a printing press in Scutari for the printing in Albanian of religious books. But this movement, being strictly Catholic, was confined to the North. It was, moreover, initiated with the intent of winning over the Northern Christians to Austria, and was directed rather to dividing the Christians from the Moslems and to weakening rather than strengthening the sense of Albanian nationality. The results of this we will trace later.
None of these efforts on the part of Albania's enemies killed the strong race instinct which has enabled the Albanian to survive the Roman Empire and the fall of Byzantium, outlive the fleeting mediaeval Empires of Bulgar and Serb, and finally emerge from the wreck of the mighty Ottoman Empire, retaining his language, his Customs and his primitive vigour--a rock over which the tides of invasion have washed in vain.
When threatened with loss of much Albanian territory by the terms of the Treaty of Berlin, the Albanians rose in force and demanded the recognition of their rights. There is a popular ballad in Albanian cursing Lord Beaconsfield, who went to Berlin in order to ruin Albania and give her lands to her pitiless enemy the Slav. The Treaty did nothing for Albania, but it caused the formation of the Albanian League and a national uprising by means of which the Albanians retained some of the said lands in spite of the Powers.
This induced Abdul Hamid for a short time to relax the ban upon the Albanian language. At once national schools were opened, and books and papers came from Albanian presses. The Sultan, alarmed by the rapid success of the national movement, again prohibited the language. Schoolmasters were condemned to long terms of imprisonment. As much as fifteen years was the sentence that could be, and was, inflicted upon any one found in possession of an Albanian paper, and the Greek priests entered enthusiastically into the persecution. But Albanian was not killed. Leaders of the movement went to Bucarest, to Sofia, to Brussels, to London, and set to work. With much difficulty and at great personal risk books and papers published abroad were smuggled into Albania by Moslem Albanian officials, many of whom suffered exile and confiscation of all their property in consequence.
But there was another means by which printed Albanian was brought into the country. During the short interval when the printing of Albanian had been permitted, a translation of the Bible was made for the British and Foreign Bible Society. This Society had the permission of the Turkish Government to circulate its publications freely. When the interdict on the language was again imposed a nice question arose. Had the Society the right to circulate Albanian Testaments? The Turkish Government had not the least objection to the Gospels--only they must not be in Albanian. A constant war on the subject went on. The director of the Bible Depot in Monastir was an Albanian of high standing both as regards culture and energy.
Grasping the fact that by means of these publications an immense national propaganda could be worked, he spared no pains, and by carefully selecting and training Albanian colporteurs, whose business it was to learn in which districts the officials were dangerous, where they were sympathetic, and where there were Nationalists willing themselves to risk receiving and distributing books, succeeded to a remarkable degree.
The Greeks, of course, opposed the work. A Greek Bishop is, in fact, declared to have denounced the dissemination of ”the New Testament and other works contrary to the teaching of the Holy and Orthodox Church.” Nevertheless it continued. It was with one of the Society's colporteurs that I rode through Albania. I was thus enabled everywhere to meet the Nationalists and to observe how very widely spread was the movement. The journey was extremely interesting, and as exciting in many respects as Borrow's Bible in Spain.
Leaving Monastir in a carriage and driving through much of the devastated Slav area I was greatly struck on descending into the plain land by Lake Malik to see the marked difference in the type of man that swung past on the road. I saw again the lean, strong figure and the easy stride of the Albanian, the man akin to my old friends of Scutari, a wholly different type from the Bulgar peasants among whom I had been working, and I felt at home.
Koritza, the home of Nationalism in the South, was my first halting-place. It was celebrated as being the only southern town in which there was still an Albanian school in spite of Turk and Greek.
Like the schools of Scutari, it owed its existence to foreign protection. It was founded by the American Mission. Its plucky teacher, Miss Kyrias (now Mrs. Dako), conducted it with an ability and enthusiasm worthy of the highest praise. And in spite of the fact that attendance at the school meant that parents and children risked persecution by the Turk and excommunication by the Greek priest, yet the school was always full. The girls learned to read and write Albanian and taught their brothers. Many parents told me very earnestly how they longed for a boys' school too. The unfortunate master of the Albanian boys' school, permitted during the short period when the interdiction was removed, was still in prison serving his term of fifteen years. Could not England, I was asked, open a school? Now either a child must learn Greek or not learn to read at all. And the Greek teachers even told children that it was useless to pray in Albanian, for Christ was a Greek, and did not understand any other language.
Everywhere it was the same. Deputations came to me begging for schools. Even Orthodox priests, who were Albanian, ventured to explain that what they wanted was an independent Church. Roumania, Serbia, Greece, even Montenegro, each was free to elect its own clergy and to preach and conduct the service in its own language. At Leskoviki and Premeti folk were particularly urgent both for schools and church.
<script>