Russia declared war against Turkey (1827), Bulgaria awoke."

From 1366 to 1827 Bulgaria had been enslaved by the Turk. Now within the
space of a few days and with hardly an effort on her own behalf, she was
suddenly to be restored to independence.

[Illustration: ROUSTCHOUK, ON THE DANUBE]

CHAPTER V

THE LIBERATION OF BULGARIA

Significantly enough, the first sign of a renaissance of Bulgarian
national feeling was an agitation not against the Turks but the Greeks.
Patriotic Bulgarians, under the Sublime Porte, sought to re-establish
their old National Church and shake it free from its subjection to the
Greek Patriarch at Constantinople. The Sublime Porte was induced to look
upon this demand with favour. A step which promised to emphasise the
divisions between the Christians evidently should be of advantage to the
Turks. The Greek Patriarch was urged to consent to the appointment of a
Bulgarian bishop. He refused. In the face of that refusal Turkey acted
as the creator of a new Christian Church, and in 1870 a firman of the
Sultan created the Bulgarian Exarchate, and Bulgaria had again a
national ecclesiastical organisation. Two years later the first Exarch
was elected by the Bulgarian clergy. But gratitude for this religious
concession did not extinguish the longings for political independence of
the Bulgarian people. When a Christian insurrection broke out in
Herzegovina against Turkey in 1875, the Bulgarian patriots rose in arms
in different parts of their country. The massacres of Batak were the
Turkish response, those "Bulgarian atrocities" which sent a shudder
through all Europe and set a term to Turkish rule over the Christian
populations in her European provinces.

I have been recently in the Balkans with the veteran war artist, Mr.
Frederick Villiers, who has personal recollections of those times of
massacre and atrocity. Speaking with him, an eye-witness of the
devastation then wrought, it was possible to understand the fierce
indignation with which the English-speaking world was stirred as the
details of the horrors in the Balkans were unveiled. In all about 12,000
Bulgarian people perished, mostly butchered in cold blood. Turkish
anger, it seems, was inflamed against the Bulgarians, because, in spite
of the recent church concession, some of them had dared to strike for
freedom; and this display of Turkish anger made the full freedom of
Bulgaria certain.

[Illustration: "MYSTERY"--A STUDY I