The Balkan Peninsula Part 7

Mountain resorts to rival those of Switzerland, spas to match those of Germany and Austria, autumn and winter seaside beaches of great beauty and fine sunny climate--all these exist in the Balkan Peninsula, and need only to be known, and to be known as peaceful, to attract tourists.

The Adriatic coast has charms of rugged coast-lines and bright waters; the Black Sea littoral, though flat and sandy, has a warm sunny summer or autumn climate; the Aegean is a sea of brilliant purples and rosy mists, in which air, rock, and water mingle to greet the eye with a great opal jewel. A November sunset on the Sea of Marmora gave to my eyes such a feast of suffused colour as I had not seen since I left the sh.o.r.es of the southern Pacific. The rocky hills had the rich red of the Jersey cliffs, but the sea and sky were incomparably warmer and deeper in tone. Across the sea the sh.o.r.es of distant Asia shone dimly through two veils of mist, one of the tenderest rose, the other of the palest gold. The greater part of the Greek coast has the same deliciousness of colour in autumn and in summer.

A few travellers bolder than the ordinary search out nowadays the sh.o.r.es of the Adriatic, the beautiful coast of Greece, and even the margin of the Sea of Marmora in quest of beauty and relief from the tedium of civilisation. But they must face poor means of communication (though to Constantinople and to Trieste there is an excellent train service) and scanty accommodation of any kind--almost none of good quality. Within a very few years, if the Balkans could settle down to peace and the legalised plunder of foreign visitors--a pursuit which is as profitable as brigandage and far more comfortable,--the seaside resorts that would spring up within Balkan territories would of themselves provide a handsome revenue. The sh.o.r.es of the Aegean and of the Sea of Marmora in particular would attract tourists wearied of the air of hackneyed sameness which comes after a while to pervade seaside haunts in Italy and France.

From another attraction the Balkan States could hope for a great tourist traffic. I have caught but fleeting glimpses of the Balkan range and of the Rhodopes and the Serbian mountains, but have seen enough to know that they offer boundless delights to the climber, to the seeker after winter sports, and to the lover of the picturesque; and the Swiss Alps in these days are overcrowded, and the Tyrolean mountains and the Carpathians begin to receive a big overflow of people who have a taste for heights that are not covered with hotels and funicular railways. But the mountains of the Balkan Peninsula offer prospects, I believe, of greater beauty, certainly of greater wildness, than any other ranges of Europe. Of the Rhodope mountains, in particular, one gets the most alluring accounts from the rare travellers who have explored them. Seen by the pa.s.sing voyager as they stand guard with their farthest spurs over Philippopolis, they suggest that no account of their charm could be too glowing. I have promised myself one autumn or summer a month in this range, exploring its flower-filled valleys and its wild cliffs, shining through an air which seems now of rose and now of violet.

For winter sports the Serbian, Montenegrin, and Albanian mountains, as well as the chief Balkan range, promise well. I believe that it was part of the plan of Bulgarian reorganisation after the war, which King Ferdinand had in his mind, to set up great winter hotels in the mountains of his kingdom. The other Balkan States could with advantage give hospitality to similar plans. Provided that security is a.s.sured--and the Balkan peasant is in my experience the gentlest-mannered kind who ever cut throats in a wholesale way at the call of a mischief-maker--visitors to the mountains of the Balkan Peninsula would find the wildness, the uncouthness of the surrounding national life, very attractive. The picturesque national costumes, the national music, wild and uncanny, the strange national dances, all add to the fascination of the savage scenery. In an age when a fog of dreary sameness comes over all the civilised world, the Balkans have a great a.s.set in their primitivism. Theirs is not a wholly European civilisation; indeed, except in the capital cities, it is not chiefly a European civilisation. Everywhere there is a touch of the mystery, the fatalism, the desert-bred wildness of the Asiatic steppes. For centuries the hand of the Turk has been heavy on the land, and a strong stream of his blood courses still through the veins of most of the Balkan peoples.

It is not the East this Balkan Peninsula, but it is not the West, nor will be for some generations.

There is yet another possible means of attracting great streams of visitors to the Balkan regions. Throughout the mountains there are numberless medicinal springs. In Serbia and Bulgaria the water of two springs is being exploited for table use, and in Bulgaria the warm medicinal springs are being developed for bathing resorts. At Sofia there are now in course of erection great public baths which will be equal to any in Europe when they are completed. In the mountains above Sofia warm springs are being utilised, and quite a large spa village has grown up. King Ferdinand, who has a fine commercial instinct whatever the failures of his war diplomacy, has done good service to his kingdom by developing its baths and springs.

The plain country of the Balkan Peninsula is but little attractive.

Under the Turkish rule nearly all plantations of trees were destroyed, and a general air of desolation was maintained. Since the Turk left, cultivation and development have been on strictly utilitarian lines, and there has been little chance for gardens or woods. The eye of the voyager misses them, and misses also the sight of castles, churches, or great buildings. The dreariness of the plain is unrelieved by forests.

The rivers flow sullenly along without a bordering of trees. The Thracian plain--the greater part of which has now gone back to Turkey and thus lost hope of a redemption of its really fertile soil--is in particular desolate and forbidding. But even there, and more frequently in the plain country of Bulgaria and Serbia, there is now and again a charming village in some dell with adornment of trees and gardens. The average village, however, is a collection of hovels, their roofs lying so close to the ground that they seem to be rather burrows than huts, their aspect suggesting that they are hiding themselves and their inhabitants from the eye of a possible ravager.

Desolate as this plain country is, it has its attractions at dawn and sunset in the clear colourfull air of the Balkan Peninsula; and where the hill slopes, denuded of their forests, have been covered over by a dense oak scrub the autumn aspect of the plain at sunset is incomparably lovely. The scrub, when the first of the autumn frosts come, blazes out in such scarlet and gold as cannot be imagined in the moist and soft climate of England. With the setting of the sun and the coming of the violet night the earth's carpet seems to be here smouldering, there burning, a sea of lambent fire so bright that you look to see its burgeoning reflected in the sky.

I should advise the tourist wishing to see the Balkan Peninsula at its best to choose the fall of the year for a visit. In the summer there is great heat and dust and plague of flies. In the winter travel is impossible with any comfort except along the railway lines, and the whole Peninsula is frost-bound. The spring is a beautiful season at its later end, but not at the time of the thaw.

As to the route for a voyage there are several alternatives. One may take the Oriental Express through to Constantinople and work a way up the Balkan Peninsula from there: or take train to Trieste and approach the Balkans by the Adriatic side: or, taking the Oriental Express, leave it at Bucharest and journey from there to Sofia: or, taking the Oriental Express, leave it at Belgrade, making that the starting-point for a riding trip. Certainly to enjoy the country one must leave the railways and journey on horseback or by cart over the wilder tracks. An interpreter who speaks English can be engaged in any one of the capitals. The hire of horses, oxen, and carts is very cheap, if you are properly advised by your interpreter and pay the local rates only.

Forage, too, is cheap: and so is "the food of the country," i.e. bread, cheese, bacon, and goat and sheep flesh. Most civilised luxuries of food can be obtained in the capitals and bigger towns, but they are dear.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Exclusive News Agency_

SOFIA

General view, looking towards the Djumala Pa.s.s (45 miles away). Taken from the front of Parliament House, showing monument of Alexander II, known in Bulgaria as the "Tsar Liberator"]

Let me suggest a few typical Balkan tours.

Take train to Belgrade: then go by Danube steamer to Widdin. From Widdin to Sofia go by rail, and then back to Belgrade on horseback, sending on heavy luggage by rail, but making at Nish on the way a depot of provisions and linen.

Take train to Bucharest. Go from there to Stara Zagora on horseback, crossing the Roumanian frontier at Roustchouk, going over the trail of the Russian Army of Liberation and seeing the Balkan mountain pa.s.ses.

Take train to Sofia, and from there to Yamboli. At Yamboli go on horseback (in the track of the Bulgarian Third Army of 1912) to Kirk Kilisse, Lule Burgas, Chorlu, Silivri (on the Sea of Marmora), and Constantinople. A somewhat wild trip this would be, but quite practicable. The most comfortable way to travel would be to take ox wagons for the luggage and the camping outfit. That would restrict the day's march to twenty miles. The horses--(diverging to look at scenery and battle-fields)--would do about thirty miles a day.

Take train to Constantinople, and from there boat to Salonica. Go on horseback from Salonica to Belgrade. This would show the most disturbed part of the Balkan Peninsula and some of its wildest scenery.

Take train to Philippopolis, and from there go on horseback and with ox wagons for a tour of the Rhodope mountains.

Of course it is possible to take much tamer tours of the Balkans.

Practically all the big towns are connected with the European railway systems. But you would see, thus, towns and not the country. The Balkan towns are to my eye very dreary. There are practically no fine old buildings, for in the Turkish occupation the greater number of these were destroyed. The modern buildings have rarely any character. The churches, usually of the Slav school of architecture, alone relieve the monotony of economical imitations of French and British buildings. In Belgrade, it is true, there has been an effort to carry the Slav note farther, and some of the commercial and public buildings show a Moscow influence.

Mr. Noel Buxton, M.P., that most enthusiastic admirer of the Bulgarians, can carry his enthusiasm so far as to admire Sofia. He wrote recently (_With the Bulgarian Staff_):

Few sights can be more inspiring to the lover of liberty and national progress than a view of Sofia from the hill where the great seminary of the national church overlooks the plain. There at your feet is spread out the unpretentious seat of a government which stands for the advance of European order in lands long blighted with barbarism. Here resides, and is centred, the virile force of a people which has advanced the bounds of liberty. From here, symbolised by the rivers and roads running down on each side, has extended, and will further extend, the power of modern education, of unhampered ideas, of science, and of humanity. From this magnificent view-point Sofia stretches along the low hill with the dark background of the Balkan beyond. Against that background now stands out the new embodiment of Bulgarian and Slavonic energy, genius, and freedom of mind, the great cathedral, with its vast golden domes brilliantly standing out from the shade behind them.

In no other capital is a great church shown to such effect, viewed from one range of hills against the mountainous slopes of another.

It is a building which, with its marvellous mural paintings, would in any capital form an object of world interest, but which, in the capital of a tiny peasant State, supremely embodies that breadth of mind which

... rejects the lore Of nicely calculated less or more.

But I think that that is a too kindly view. What makes the Balkan capitals additionally dreary is that there is no "society" in the European sense. The Turkish idea of keeping the womenfolk in the harem survives to the extent that woman is not supposed to frequent places of entertainment, to receive or to pay visits. In Bulgaria the women are secluded with an almost Turkish strictness: in Serbia, not quite so strictly, but still strictly.

Bucharest is quite another story; but Bucharest would rather resent being called a Balkan city. There is no seclusion of the very charming Roumanian women, and the atmosphere of the city is a little more than gay. Plant a section of Paris, a section including Montmartre, into the middle of an enlargement of the old quarter of Belgrade, and that is Bucharest. It is the one Balkan city which has a luxurious and to an extent polished aristocracy.

Some of the smaller towns are slightly more interesting--Philippopolis, for instance, in a position of great natural beauty--but the average Balkan town must be set down as squalid. Its centres of social interest are the cafes, where men who have the leisure a.s.semble to drink coffee made in the Turkish fashion, tea made in the Russian fashion, and occasionally _vodka_, which is the usual alcoholic stimulant. Tobacco is smoked mostly in the form of cigarettes. Excellent (and cheap) cigarettes are supplied by the government _Regies_ in Serbia and Bulgaria.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Exclusive News Agency_

BUCHAREST]

The wise tourist will keep clear of the Balkan towns apart from the actual capitals, and will carry his food and lodging with him. Under these circ.u.mstances a good standard of ease can be maintained if a train of ox wagons sufficient to the size of the party is enlisted. Ladies can travel with fair comfort in an ox wagon. As regards the danger of Balkan travel, in my experience--and that was during war-time--there is none.

Serbian peasant, Bulgarian peasant, Greek peasant, Turkish peasant, alike are amiable and obliging fellows, if they do not feel in duty bound to cut your throat on some theological or political point. Being strangers, tourists would have no theology and no politics. So much for the inhabitants. The officials, provided pa.s.sports are clear and the precaution is taken of getting letters at the capital from the authorities of the country you are travelling through, will be helpful.

The one district that might be a little dangerous is that corner of Macedonia where Greek and Bulgar are always playing against one another the old game of ma.s.sacre.

CHAPTER IX

THE BALKAN PEOPLES IN ART AND INDUSTRY

The five centuries of Turkish domination, during which all the arts and most of the crafts were neglected in the Balkan Peninsula, killed nearly completely the ancient civilisations of the Greeks, the Serbs, and the Bulgars. But a few traces of the old culture survive to this day as mournful and tattered relics of the greatness of those departed Empires.

The old Bulgarian Empire, combining a Slav with a Turconian element; the old Serbian Empire, almost purely Slav but influenced a little by Italian and Grecian influence, evolved in the days of its greatness the beginnings of a national literature and national architecture. In Serbia particularly was there a strong and promising growth of humane culture, and the greatest of the Serbian rulers, Stephen Dushan (14th century), whose death before the walls of Constantinople at the beginning of the Turkish invasions gave up the Balkan Peninsula to the Crescent, left as one monument to his name a well-reasoned code of laws. He was throughout his reign a sincere friend of learning. In Bulgaria during the 10th century, under the Czar Simeon, there was a brief efflorescence of learning. Montenegro, which alone of the Balkan States kept its head unbowed before the Turk, was a busy centre of literary effort in the 16th century. Under the stress of constant war, however, the arts of peace died down almost completely in the Balkans until the Liberation of the peoples in the 19th century. During the interval, however, the peasants in their homes kept up some little knowledge of the traditions of their forefathers' greatness. Legends were pa.s.sed down from father to son in chants set to a rough music. In these chants, too, were recorded the deeds of heroism which marked the ever-recurring revolts against the Turk.

What survives to-day from this period of oppression is a very characteristic national music, melancholy usually, as might be expected, but of arresting sweetness; and an art of peasant-applied decoration, which recalls the earlier and more primitive forms of Byzantine Art.

Balkan tapestries, Balkan carpets, Balkan embroideries, woven or st.i.tched by the peasant women, have a note of barbaric boldness in design and colour which distinguishes them at once from the peasant work of other countries.

This applied art in decoration is wisely fostered by the various governments, and there is liberal encouragement also given to modern art. Especially is this the case in Bulgaria. The impression I have got from seeing picture collections in the Balkans is that the local artists have learned foreign methods without adding any national bent of their own, and contrive to give a native character to their pictures only when they make the choice of some particularly horrible subject. Yet there should come a vigorous art as well as a vigorous literature one day from these Balkan States. There the mysticism, the melancholy, the transcendentalism of the Slav is mixed with the fatalism of the Turk, and the vivacity of the Greek and the Roumanian in the national types.

Byzantine traditions, Slav traditions, cla.s.sic Greek traditions, Roman traditions mingle to influence this composite character, the two former predominating, but the two latter having a very definite power. It should be rich soil for talent, even for genius.

Interesting opportunities were given in the Southern Slav Art Exhibitions of 1904 and 1906 (the first at Belgrade, the second at Sofia) to note the trend of art in the Balkans. At those Exhibitions Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, and Slavonian arts were represented. The Croatian pictures--I follow a trustworthy guide in stating this--showed a high degree of technical skill, not distinguishable from Austrian art in character: the Slavonian pictures were also technically good, but of a more impressionist character: the Serbian pictures imitated in technique the Old Masters, but took their subjects almost exclusively from Serbian history: the Bulgarian pictures had no national characteristic in style, but usually sought to be transcriptions of some form of Bulgarian life of the day.

Summing up the art position in the Balkans, it can be fairly said that before the outbreak of the last great war very good progress had been made for the few years since the Liberation from the Turks. A wise policy for the future would be to encourage as much as possible the peasant arts and crafts which are distinctive, and not to seek to impose too much of modern art education, which may stifle national influences and inflict a sterile sameness.

Balkan industry varies greatly with the height of the country, as well as with the racial type. The mountaineers are usually lacking in steady industry: the peoples of the plain are usually exceptionally hard workers. Very many emigrants from the Balkans go to the United States to work there in the mines, and on works of railway construction, for a term of years. The Bulgarian will come back from the United States with 300 saved up, and settle down in his native village as farmer or trader. The Serbian will come back with 200 saved up, but with a wider knowledge of United States life, and he will settle down as pastoralist or farmer, but not as trader. The Albanian or Montenegrin will come back with little or no money, but with a wonderful armoury of silver-adorned weapons and much other personal decoration. So graced, the mountaineer will have no difficulty in marrying the girl of his choice, and she will do most of the work that is needed thereafter, whilst he attends to the hunting and the fighting. The Greek and the Roumanian go abroad, preferably as traders, and afterwards elect to stay abroad, though it is to be recorded in proof of modern Greek patriotism that in 1912 there was a steady flow of Greeks from all parts of the world coming back to their native land to fight in the army.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BULGARIAN FARM]

Considered industrially the Bulgarian is the best type in the Balkans.

He is a steady, tireless worker on the soil; takes to factory life amiably; and has in a very strongly marked degree "the road-making talent."

A very valuable index to national character is provided by a people's roads. The most successful Imperial governors, the Romans, were also builders of the finest roads the world has known. The British people have been good road-builders as well as good Empire-makers; the French people, too, and every other people who at any time have done big enduring work in the government of the world. If a nation is not a good road-building nation it will not go far: and the converse is probably true. On this road-building test the Bulgarians have a prosperous future indicated, for they are very pertinacious and skilful road-builders.

During the 1912 war I noticed that despite all other pre-occupations they were pushing roads forward at every possible opportunity. The Turks going back to Adrianople and Kirk Kilisse found a great number of roads built or building--the first serious efforts in that direction since the downfall of the Roman Empire.

The Bulgarian's chief occupation is agriculture. The system of land tenures is that of peasant ownership. There are no large estates and very few non-occupying landlords. The chief crops are wheat, barley, maize, rice (around Philippopolis), tobacco, and roses. The tobacco is of as good quality, almost, as that of Turkey. The Bulgarian Government encourages the culture of tobacco by distributing seed, free of cost, among the planters, by setting a bounty on the export tariff, and by authorising the Bulgarian National Bank to consent to loans on the surety of certificates granted to the planters until they are able to dispose of their crops advantageously.