aired fairies, the "samovilas," of the forest
lakes, who gave him their protection, and he is said to have assisted
girls to marry by abolishing the Turkish restrictions. They say that
he is still alive, and when he reappears, gloriously seated on
[vS]arac, then will the people be free, at last, and united.[18]
Through the long centuries of Turkish oppression he--who personifies
many of the traits in the national character, with Christian and with
pagan attributes--he, in these legends, many of which have a high
poetic value, was able to keep alive the hope of deliverance. From one
end of the Balkans to the other, from Varna to Triest, the popular
hero is Marko Kraljevi['c]. He is as much the personage of Bulgarian
as of Serbian folk-songs, and this is well, seeing that he was a
Serbian prince while many of his adoring subjects were Bulgars--the
noble Albanian chronicler, Musachi, for instance, calls his father Re
di Bulgaria. As Marko is dear to them in song the Bulgars have come to
think that he was a Bulgar; thereupon the Serbs point out that he was
the son of Vuka[vs]in, that Marko is an admittedly Serbian name, and
that Kralj (King) and Kraljevi['c] are titles so unknown in Bulgaria
that when the Sofia newspapers alluded to Louis Philippe, Ferdinand's
grandfather, they spoke of him--him of all people--as Tzar Louis
Philippe. Thereupon the Bulgars retort that, anyhow, Marko was cruel
and perfidious and a braggart and a drunkard and a fighter against
Christians, and a fighter remarkable for cowardice. But if we are
going to look at the private character of all the world's national
heroes, we shall be the losers more than they. Let Marko, who joins
the Serb and the Bulgar in song, find them engaged, when he comes
back, in drinking together and not in making him the subject of
antiquarian and acrimonious debate.

THE "GOOD CHRISTIANS" OF BOSNIA

While Serbia was listening to the Turkish cavalry, the Ban of Bosnia,
Tvertko, raised that province to its greatest eminence. Being a
collateral heir of the old house of Nemania, and having wide Serbian
lands under his rule, he had himself proclaimed king on the tomb of
St. Sava in 1377. He called his banat "the kingdom of Serbia," and
allied himself to Prince Lazar, the most powerful of the Serbian
rulers who were still independent. In Bosnia at this time the Bogomile
heresy, after winning the people of Herzegovina, that wild and
mournful province, attracted not only the p