ined 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 [vS]umen 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 [Greek: sigor-alem], 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