welve millions of silver money which were issued in
1883-1884, proved quite insufficient to drive away the foreign money, so
that the latter continued to be used in all commercial transactions. It
was not until 1887 that the Government prohibited the circulation of
Servian and Roumanian coins. Later Russian money was also prohibited,
and there is now a purely national currency. On the outbreak of the war
in 1913 a _moratorium_ was declared, and the internal finance of the
country was managed on a paper currency. The confidence of the people
kept this paper money at its full value. I was never able to get any
concession in exchanging English gold for paper.

Bulgaria, notwithstanding all the preoccupations of a young nation,
finds time to encourage the arts. As the illustrations to this volume
will show, there is a flourishing school of native art in Bulgaria. To
Nicolas Pavlovitch (born 1835, died 1889) belongs the honour of having
been the father of modern Bulgarian art. He graduated at the academies
in Vienna and Munich, and, after visiting the various museums in Dresden
and Prague, exhibited during 1860 in Belgrade two pictures whose
subjects had been suggested by ancient Bulgarian history. He then went
to Petrograd and Moscow. In 1861 he returned to his native country,
where he endeavoured, by means of his lithographs and pictures of
subjects both ancient and modern, to stimulate his compatriots to
political and intellectual life. He also tried to reform and modernise
church painting in accordance with the requirements of modern artistic
technique, and made two unsuccessful attempts at opening a school of
painting. He painted portraits, and, in the palace of the Pasha of
Roustchouk, he illustrated a Turkish history of the Janissaries.

In 1896 a State school of painting was founded at Sofia, and there is
now a fine art gallery in the capital. But most of the artistic impulse
has come from abroad, and the most notable names in Bulgarian art after
that of Pavlovitch are Piotrovsky (Polish), Boloungaro (Italian), de
Fourcade (French), Sliapin (Russian). The first art exhibition was
organised in 1887 by Ivan Angeloff, teacher in the Gymnasium of Sofia
and a graduate of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. This exhibition,
which contained three pictures painted in Bulgaria and a number of
sketches and studies dating from the artist's student days in Munich, as
well as drawings by students of the Gymnasium, was held in one of