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V. The Bulgarian movement
10. Hilmi Pasha's Measures of Repression. Incidents at Mogilla and Smerdesh.
The measures which Hilmi Pasha adopted to suppress the Macedonian Committeewere drastic and wholesale, but none the less ineffective; indeed, theyoverreached themselves by their excessive severity. If the Turks couldhave contented themselves with hunting down the bands (a thing they hardlyattempted), and arresting the prime movers of the agitation, they mighthave achieved their end. But when they proposed to banish the ringleaders,Russia stood in the way, whereas they were allowed to carry out their uselessand provocative measures against the mass of the population, with the resultthat the Bulgarians were driven to desperation, and revolted in self-defence.Everywhere, alike in the towns and in the villages, the notables of theBulgarian communities were thrown into prison — not by twos and threes,but by twenties and thirties. Rich
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and poor, merchants from the cities, and lads from the upper classesof the secondary schools, were herded together in the Turkish gaols. Theschools were all closed, sometimes by order, sometimes because they hadbeen turned into barracks for the troops, sometimes because the teachershad either been arrested or had fled to escape arrest. The very few Bulgariandoctors and lawyers who manage to exist in Macedonia — one could almostcount them on one's fingers, so dangerous is it to be possessed of education— were also imprisoned. Business was at a standstill, and the very Jewsin Salonica were crying out because there were no Christian merchants leftwith whom they might do business. The cities were in a state of siege.Military patrols tramped the streets at all hours, and bivouacked outsidethe principal buildings. The townsfolk were forbidden to stir abroad aftersundown, and if urgent need arose for a doctor, he could be summoned onlyby bribing a soldier or policeman to fetch him. In the larger villagesand the country towns where no consuls or Europeans reside the case wasstill worse. The entire male Moslem population of military age had beencalled to the colours, reinforced by the ragged regiments of Asia Minorand the defiant, undisciplined levies of Albania. These troops were quarteredin the villages and the smaller towns, and they naturally vented theiranger at being called away from their fields upon the Bulgarian inhabitants.The reserves of the third class (Ilaveh,i.e., Landsturm) had theworst reputation. They were all unpaid, and frequently received no rations;indeed, when I was in Monastir the army contractors had been so long unpaidthat they refused to supply even bread upon credit. The result was thatthe troops had no choice but to live upon the peasants. One met them strollingabout the streets adorned with all manner of looted garments, sometimeswearing socks which they had stolen from the women, and sometimes carryingsheepskin coats over their shabby uniforms. Their chief occupation wasto search for arms, and as a Turk is always too lazy to look for concealedweapons, they took the simpler and shorter course of torturing or beatingthe villagers — men, women, and
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children — in order to force them to reveal the hiding-places of theweapons they were supposed to possess. What all this meant in physicalpain, in material loss, and in the dishonour of the women, the imaginationcan hardly conceive, for scarcely a village went free. I was in one ruralcentre, Doiran, during the height of the persecution. It is a tiny townon the borders of a lake among purple mountains, the centre of a regionso beautiful that one left the fields for its narrow streets, reluctantand afraid, knowing well the human misery that lay concealed behind thewhite walls and red tiles which glittered in the sunshine. I remember arrivingat ten o'clock in the morning to find that the Turkish authorities werestill asleep, while the Albanian levies in the town were very much awake,and drunk, with rifles in their hands. Despite the risk from spies (halfthe place was "Greek" in its politics, though not a word of Greek was everspoken) the women had no sooner heard that Europeans had come to the townthan they began to crowd our inn, filing through in groups, each with itsmiserable tale to tell. They were all in tears, demoralised as much bywhat might happen as by what had actually taken place; for rumour was alwaysready to assert that a massacre had occurred in some neighbouring town,or that this Christian village or the other had been burned to the ground,and Doiran expected that its turn would come next. But the women were mainlyconcerned for the fate of husbands, sons, brothers, arrested on suspicionand detained without trial. There were sixty political suspects in Doirangaol, and others had been drafted to Salonica, while a few had been released.These latter had harrowing tales to tell of the cruelties which went onnight by night within the gaol. One young lad had been liberated, withlame and shapeless feet, after a merciless bastinado. Others, he said,had fared worse than he, and there were eye-witnesses to testify that someat least of these prisoners had been forced at the bayonet-point to walkup and down the corridor of the prison night after night, in the hope thatthe madness which comes to a man deprived of sleep would induce
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them to reveal some guilty conspirator's secret. Another prisoner hadbeen forced to stand hour after hour with his hands raised above his head.There was no prospect of mercy or redress. The women could only weep andtell their story, and we could only promise to report the facts to oneof the consuls. When the matter was at length brought to Hilmi Pasha'snotice he telegraphed promptly to the prefect (Caimakam) of Doiranin something like these terms: "It is said that you are torturing yourBulgarian prisoners. Is this true ? If so, a Commission will be sent toinvestigate your responsibility." Naturally the man replied with a stoutdenial, and Hilmi Pasha, satisfied that he had done his duty, showed thetwo telegrams in triumph to the consul.
Other measures of repression even more disastrous were lightly undertaken.The gaols would not hold all the Bulgarians of Macedonia, and so the orderwent forth that every man of peasant origin in the towns must return tohis native village and stay there. For fear of outrage or disturbance,the thousands of Macedonian Bulgarians who repair year by year to Constantinopleto earn a little competence were ruthlessly expelled, and driven back totheir homes. The migratory masons and carpenters who inhabit such villagesas Smilovo and Smerdesh in winter, and spend the summer wandering aboutin quest of work, were also interned in their homes during the only seasonwhen their work was possible. Of all the means which could have been devisedto provoke a rebellion this was the most efficacious, for all these thousandsof able-bodied men, the most energetic and intelligent section of the population,were deprived of subsistence and occupation, and left in idleness and angerto concert their revenge. Finally, thanks mainly to the brutality of thesoldiery, who also had a grievance, since they were haled from their landsjust as the season of harvest was approaching, the normal insecurity ofthe roads became so intolerable that even the peasants rarely cared toquit their villages. Murders, sometimes with a motive, sometimes at theprompting of mere wanton brutality, were everywhere of daily occurrence,and
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the murder-books, grim catalogues which are kept in every bishopricand consulate — the only original literature which Macedonia produces —had their blank pages rapidly filled. For this violence the Turks wereonly partly to blame. Encouraged by the obvious intention of the authoritiesto bring the Bulgarians under the harrow, the Greeks betook themselveswith redoubled zeal to the work of espionage, and they paid the price inblood. Moreover, it was the policy of the Committee to reply to violencewith violence. The Turks of Monastir punished the Christians of the townby an attempted massacre as a reply to what had happened in Salonica, andthe Bulgarians in the villages round Monastir exacted retribution by murderinglocal Moslems. The result of this competition in bloodshed and injusticewas a nightmare of terror in which the whole normal life of Macedonia stoodpetrified and fear-bound. Within the space of ten days in the month ofMay I visited three market-towns on market-day — Monastir, Doiran, andKuprili — to find the market-place deserted and silent. The merchants werein prison, and the peasants dared not quit their homes; indeed, where theirfields lay at any distance from the hamlet even tillage was suspended.The plague would have wrought less havoc than this legal and regular persecution,which Hilmi Pasha directed in the intervals of reforming Macedonia.
Meanwhile the bands, constantly recruited from the vast army of outlawsand suspects, were not idle, though as yet they did not willingly assumethe aggressive. Wherever the troops came up with them a bloody stain wasleft upon the countryside, and it was rather the peasants than the insurgentswho suffered. I came upon the village of Mogilla (about eight miles fromMonastir) one afternoon, just as the troops were leaving it after one ofthese affairs. They straggled along, a disorganised herd, without officersand carrying the trifling spoils which they had been able to glean in themiserable hamlet which lay smoking behind them. A little band of outlawsunder a gallant young leader named Svetkoff, once a teacher of music inthe Monastir High School, had been trapped in some isolated mud cabins
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just outside the village. The police were searching for hidden arms,and when they came to these houses they were received with a volley. Troopswere hurried up with cannon, and a regular siege was laid to these flimsyhuts. Through an afternoon and a night the Bulgarians held out, firingwhenever a foe showed himself above the mud walls which enclosed theirlittle fortress. In the intervals of fighting, so the Turks told us, theydanced a grim step to the tune of some ballad of revolt, shouting all thewhile their defiance of the slaves who besieged them, their contempt forthe Sultan, and their readiness to die free men. They could have had nodoubt about their fate, for the wall left no way of escape, and the Turksbehind it were firing comfortably through loop-holes. The end came beforedawn, when a shot from the mountain guns set the poor fortress of the outlawsablaze. At the same time the Turks set on fire seventeen houses of thevillage to serve them as lamps for their marksmanship — one thinks of Nero'sChristian torches. One by one, as they dashed out, the survivors of thelittle band were shot down within the enclosure. When I arrived the groundwas still blood-stained. The mud walls still smouldered and glowed; a storklooked vainly for her accustomed roof from a perch on a crumbling gable,and the air was charged with the stench of burning flesh. In the churchyardthe last scene of the tragedy was going forward. The villagers were buryingthe contents of two great carts — corpses heaped in a mass of charred anddishonoured flesh. There were eleven dead insurgents, their bodies strippedand mutilated by their savage and unchivalrous enemies, four innocent peasantsof the village and two young women shot while the search for arms wentforward. Among the weeping crowd of village mothers and widows stood twolittle girls, who had been wantonly wounded. The priest of the place, afrail old man, lay speechless and paralysed on a heap of straw at the pointof death, and the peasants were carrying the dead rebels to their lasttrenches, without service or prayer. It was a scene of misery and moralsqualor. The homeless families wept for their burned
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hovels, and the bereaved peasants for their dead relatives with thepiercing animal grief of the East. But at the time I fancied they had fewthoughts to spare for the insurgents who had fallen in their cause. Thescene seemed to teach how little life is worth in the Balkans. It is neitherreverenced nor valued, and if a bullet ends it — why, then, it only endsa long series of miseries and oppressions, cuts short a few years of fruitlesstoil and petty sufferings that have not even the halo of heroism to redeemthem. Six months later I heard this same fight recounted in a popular ballad,and realised that poor Svetkoff, whose handsome form I had seen tossedlike so much rubbish into the pit, had become an immortal name, inscribedin the calendar of freedom. The Bulgarians hide their sentiment and conceal.their deeper emotions, while they jostle sacred things with common spades.The sequel was easy to guess. Here were seventeen homeless families, whichincluded nigh thirty able-bodied men. Their only hope now was to join aroving band. It was safer on the whole to be in the mountains with a rifleon one's back than to cringe in a village outwardly loyal. It was not difficultto imagine how these men from Mogilla would fight. They carried with themthe picture of murdered wives and wounded daughters, of smoking homesteadsand the charred bodies of comrades. They would neither spare themselvesnor pity others, their dim minds ruled by no better law than vengeance.And that also is part of their misery. Outrage begets outrage, and eachrace demoralises its foes.
In the same week of May an incident on a much more horrible scale occurredat Smerdesh, a big village of over 2,000 inhabitants which lies on themain road from Castoria to Florina. It is a gloomy and forbidding place,built of stone upon a gaunt hillside in a narrow valley where the sun shinesfor no more than three hours in a day. There is little tillage and butscanty pasture around it, but the peasants none the less are wealthy andenterprising, itinerant masons for the most part, who ply their trade allover the Levant, and invest some part of their savings in substantial androomy houses. It had a great church with carved
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pillars, of which it was inordinately proud, and a large school. Itis the native place of Tchakalároff, the cruel but competent generalof the Southern insurgents, and among the village families his relativesform a sort of aristocracy. The Turks had long feared and suspected Smerdesh.Tchakalároff often visited it, and few Turks ever ventured to approachit. There had been a skirmish near is during April, and a punitive expeditionwhich started out to subdue the place had marched back without daring toenter it. Nothing further occurred for some five weeks, and then suddenlya large force of regulars under one Haireddin Bimbashi (major), accompaniedby a swarm ofbashi-bazouks[1], came marchingup the road from Castoria, towards sundown on the evening of May the 21st.[2]This man is a semi-civilised person of handsome presence and polished manners,who studied in Paris, and had been professor of French in the MilitaryAcademy of Monastir. He also it was who commanded the troops ar Armenskoo,where the worst excesses of the insurrectionary period were perpetrated.It was long a puzzle to me why Smerdesh, which had given no overt provocation,whatever Tchakalároff may have done, should have been signalledout for a horrible punishment. The explanation was, I am told, that HaireddinBimbashi had arranged with thebashi-bazouks that by way of paymentfor the license he allowed them, he should receive a substantial proportionof the proceeds of the sale of the loot. Once again it turns out that greedlies at the root of Turkish oppression. It was, I think, the worst caseof its kind in Macedonia. For there was no fight, no resistance, no parley,no summons to surrender.
The people of Smerdesh, seeing the Turkish force
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approach, and having no means of defence — for there was no insurgentband either in or near the village on that day[3] —sent a deputation to make their submission and to ask for considerate treatment.The deputation was met half-way by a volley of musketry, and returned toreport its failure. The guns were then brought up, the village surroundedand subjected, during the night, to a heavy cannonade. A few houses wereset on fire in this way. Two hours after dawn the troops and thebashi-bazouksrushed in, and set to work to pillage and burn methodically with the aidof petroleum. The troops were withdrawn before noon, and thebashi-bazouksleft in possession for two whole days. One hundred and sixty-six houseswere reduced to ashes, and nothing but a solid beam, a comfortable hearthstone,or a stone which gives a name and a date remains to commemorate what oncewere homes. The great church is a mere roofless shell, and the school aheap of rubbish. The majority of the inhabitants contrived somehow to escapein the darkness, before the investing cordon was completely formed — itis said also that they had subterranean shelters. About one hundred andthirty who remained were massacred; over fifty were wounded, and many womenand girls are said to have been outraged. One heard pitiable stories ofvillagers who hid themselves to escape the soldiers, only to perish inthe flames. One old priest pretended to be dead, and some ruffian flunga great stone upon him. Another priest bought his life from one marauderonly to be caught empty-handed and murdered by the next. Most of the woundswere inflicted at close quarters with steel, and one heard tales whichsounded authentic about bed-ridden women too weak to flee who expired underthe lust of the soldiers. About sixty houses escaped the conflagration,naked and stripped, and in them the once prosperous village, proud of itswealth, its industry, and its education, found shelter through the followingwinter. It had no
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capital with which to rebuild, and no leisure or opportunity to work.For it was still a mark for the hostility of Greeks and Turks, and throughthe greater part of the year the Greek Bishop of Castoria, who had beenappointed a sort of trustee for the village after the catastrophe, refusedto grant passports to the Exarchist inhabitants who sought permission togo abroad in search of work. They had arranged a little chapel in a shed,to take the place of their ruined church. On the walls they had hung littlewater-colour sketches of Christ and the Madonna to serve instead of thevaluableeikons they had lost. On a day when I visited the placea column of troops had just left the village, and the marks of their bayonetswere visible upon the poor little pictures of this improvised shrine.
Shortly after these incidents at Mogilla and Smerdesh the InsurgentConvention met and deliberated on their position. They were not preparedfor a general rising. They had neither money nor arms nor ammunition enough.But they could not afford to submit to a repression so overwhelming andso brutal without striking some blow in return. To have lain idle undersuch provocation would have meant the collapse of the propaganda, and theloss of all the fruits of their ten years of steady work. They had indeedgiven the first provocation, if they are to be held responsible for theacts of the desperate youths who blew up the bank at Salonica. But theTurks were no longer punishing. Their aim was to crush the Bulgarian racein Macedonia. The schools, the churches, and the commerce of the Bulgariansas well as their political organisation were in peril. Europe was indifferent,and unless they were prepared to succumb, they had no choice but to savethemselves. They decided to proclaim a general rising after the harvest.It was, under all the circumstances, a war of self-defence. For a briefperiod the guerilla bands were inactive, and on the night of the and ofAugust, 1903, the supreme moment arrived. But even in this desperate situationthe Bulgarians showed their habitual prudence. They knew that they mightfail. They knew that further efforts might be necessary. They knew alsothat the
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districts which revolted would be so utterly devastated that they wouldbe incapable of further revolt for many years to come. It was accordinglydecided that only the province of Monastir should be called upon to rise,and even there certain districts were exempted (notably Perlepe and Morihovo).Several motives dictated the choice of Monastir. The country is mountainousand suitable for guerilla warfare. The peasants are resolute and well organised.Since Monastir does not adjoin the Bulgarian frontier, it would be obviousto Europe that the movement was a genuine Macedonian revolt, and not amere invasion organised in the Principality. Finally, a revolt under thedirection of the Committee in this southern province claimed by the Greekswould serve to advertise the fact that the rural population is not Hellenicbut Bulgarian.
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