ileges of the Serbian Church did not
extend to the Roumanians. The Serbs had, from the beginning of the
thirteenth century, been founding monasteries, and, although about
twenty were secularized or affiliated to others by Maria Theresa, yet
there remained eleven in the Banat and one, Hodosh, to the north of
the Maro[vs]; and as the Roumanians had no monasteries at all they
were received as guests in some of these. And so things continued for
about a hundred years.

SERBS ASSIST THE BULGARIAN RENASCENCE

While the Serbs were flourishing, ecclesiastically, in the Banat, the
Bulgars had been painfully keeping alive, until 1767, their lonely
Patriarchate at Ochrida. Time and again the Greek Patriarch at
Constantinople had tried to suppress it, at first on account of
cupidity and afterwards, say the Bulgars, for fear lest it should help
to arouse the Bulgarian national spirit; but that spirit had fallen to
such a depth that the second edition of a comparative lexicon of the
Slav languages, which was issued, at the behest of the Empress
Catharine in 1791, makes no mention of Bulgarian, and in 1814 the
Slavist Dobrovsky regarded Bulgarian as a form of Serbian. And yet,
say the Bulgars, the national spirit survived so wonderfully by those
far waters of Macedonia that even when the Greek language was
introduced into the offices and the Church administration, and when
Greeks had usurped the throne of St. Clement, they still found it
possible to stand out for the independence of their Church, which
handed on the memories of the Bulgarian past. We must be allowed to be
sceptical--the town of Ochrida in the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries is said by contemporary writers to be now in
Serbian, now in Bulgarian, now in Macedonian territory. And the very
observant Patriarch Brki['c] of the eighteenth century tells us, in a
calm, passionless description of the diocese, which he wrote in
exile--he was the last Patriarch of Pe['c]--that the inhabitants of a
place called Rekalije, in the district of Djakovica, are not Albanians
but Serbs and Bulgars who had been, a short time before, converted to
Islam. It seems probable that the sharp divisions of Serb, Bulgar, and
so on, did not then exist, and that the Greek Patriarch at
Constantinople did himself not know what variety of reprehensible Slav
it was that lived in those parts.... The last Patriarch of Ochrida,
whose name was likewise Arsenius, spent the remainder of his l