Balkanomania

I

ANYONE who has been to the Balkans knows how magnetically he is drawn back to the countries that border those snowy mountains. There is some wholly inexplicable claim on all who have been there that makes them always want to return. I do not pretend to explain it. It is not the Ruritania atmosphere, nor yet the intriguing complications of Balkan politics, nor even the certainty of seeing the Middle Ages alive in the twentieth century, that is the lure. It is something far more light-hearted, something that appeals to one’s sense of humor and love of beauty at the same time, for, once in the Balkans, one never ceases either to laugh or to wonder at the things that one meets, the extravagant situations one encounters, and the unbelievable paradoxes of these lovely mountainous lands.

A friend of mine who has lived his life in the Balkans was traveling a few years ago in brigand-infested Epirus, in western Greece. He was on foot in a lonely pass when from behind a bush a wild and picturesque rascal leapt formidably. ‘Halt!’ cried the rascal. ‘I am the famous brigand, Stephanos!’ My friend did nothing, but admired the brigand in silence. Again Stephanos issued his challenge. This time my friend offered him a cigarette, and the brigand, more faintly and with less conviction, repeated his war cry. ‘Tell me all about it,’ said my friend soothingly, and in perfect Greek. ’I am an Englishman and deeply interested in the history of your country; take a cigarette — they are good ones.’ The brigand underwent a transformation. He broke into laughter, apologized profoundly, and smoked. ‘I thought you were a Greek or an Italian,’ he replied. ‘Had I known you were English I should have greeted you as a friend.’

Now this is a true and accurate story. It cuts to the very heart of modern brigandage — for the most part. Greek brigands are a race that is on the increase rather than the reverse. They are no myth, but to Greeks an intolerable nuisance in the western mountainous regions. In Epirus they operate near and round the wealthy towns of Janina and Argyrokastro and accumulate vast sums of money. But the technique of their profession presupposes a native material upon which to work. With anything else they feel in deep water and a trifle shy. Even last year, when I was in Greece, two notorious brigands, during the course of the general election from which Venizelos emerged in triumph, abducted two parliamentary candidates who were going the rounds of their constituents. The wretched men were taken into the hills and held to ransom for the prodigious price of fifty thousand pounds. The ransom was paid and they were ultimately released. It was then discovered by the authorities that the brigands were but the employees of a limitedliability company whose headquarters were in Janina, the directors being the mayor, the local chief of police, and several of the leading citizens. Shares were believed to pay an easy 50 per cent dividend. But there was more even than this. One of the captured candidates was the extravagant grandson of a very wealthy Athenian lady. He was known to be in debt. Unkind tongues suggested that either he was also one of the principal shareholders or he had made an arrangement of fiftyfifty with the brigands — for his ransom was paid by his grandmother!

Now this is the raw material that goes in part to form the lure of the Balkans. To live in such entertaining lands means never to have a dull moment. Nothing is really what it seems; it is a permanent Alice in Wonderland. To describe the atmosphere as opéra bouffe or Chocolate Soldier is to miss the very kernel of the thing. It goes far deeper. It is the element of perpetual surprise that is what enchants. Every corner hides something new; the dullest man you meet may have a life of astonishing romance. And this is true of every citizen of every Balkan state. You are never certain of what his past life or his real profession or his real sentiments are. But to you, as an acknowledged foreigner, he is invariably hospitable and charming. I always remember the courtesy of the Serbian police official who, when I first visited Serbia in 1913, examined my passport with the minutest attention, read it carefully through, upside down, and handed it back with a graceful and dignified gesture of understanding and approval. Or the other official on the same trip who, reading the right way up, was only able to decipher the sentence, ’We, Sir Edward Grey.’ ‘You are Edward Grey?’ he asked me. I replied in the affirmative to avoid further delay. ‘Pass through, then, Edward Grey,’ he replied kindly.

II

But there is a very clearly marked line of demarcation between the true Balkan state and the Balkanized and semi-Western state. Once at the Balkan frontier you know in an instant. From Hungary to Rumania, for instance, is a voyage from the one world to the other. Hungary, despite all its extravagant Occidental vulgarity, is not and will never be really Western, but it is certainly not Balkan — far from it. It is an unpleasing crossbred.

But get out of the blue Orient Express at Arad station on the Rumanian frontier, sniff the air, and you will know in a trice that you are in the Balkans. You will at once observe the exaggerated severity of the customs officials to the travelers who are their own compatriots and the surprising leniency toward yourself; their interest in the more unusual objects in your possession and their apologies for the disturbance they have created. Outside you will hear the soft chatter of the charming Rumanian language and see the sentries all smoking cigarettes happily at their posts. Then suddenly you will hear one of the soldiers start a song in the indefinable lilt of Oriental music, there will come to you the scent of some wine that you have never scented before, a herd of sheep will be driven up to the platform so that the shepherd can see the train, and you will feel once and for all that you have left another world behind you.

Or land at a Greek port and see how, as you lean on the side of the ship, the foremost boatload of rascally luggage porters will pick you out as soon as you are in shouting distance and decide to fasten themselves to you as being the most promising foreigner. Try how I may, I have never succeeded in obscuring the foreign character of my appearance — and I have always fondly believed that my face was ordinary enough to be mistaken for Russian, Serb, German, English, or French. But the men of the Balkans know the differences of movement and gesture that make their world distinct from mine. With every movement and look I give myself away, just as in fact a man of the Balkans, however he be dressed, gives himself away to my now more experienced eye in the streets of London. In the Balkans there is a set of gestures indicative of thought that are completely and fundamentally different from those in use in Western countries. Many are of Oriental origin, some Slavonic, but there are others that are of immense antiquity. The gesture of beckoning, which we more recent people hardly ever recognize, consists of a motion of the hand downward and toward the body. I have found that very same motion represented on Greek sculptured reliefs of the sixth century before Christ.

Or take the Turk, the most silent of the Balkan peoples. He can carry on whole conversations without sound. A Turkish friend of mine showed me once how two men could recognize each other in a café, converse for five minutes by gentle movements of hand, of eyebrow, of lip, and of shoulders, in such a way that a Westerner would hardly notice that anything had passed between them except the barest recognition. No wonder the Balkan states are the ideal breeding ground of conspiracies and secret societies, where means of communication are so often those of silence and gesture. The gestures, too, are so restful and convenient. I early learned the conventional Balkan movements that indicate refusal or negation, and those for agreement and affirmation. They are mere movements of the eyebrows and save endless trouble. They are accepted at once. The Balkans are not like Italy, where a thousand No’s are treated as an affirmative and persistence is the basis of success. One gesture in the approved native fashion and the hawker, tout, boot shiner, or flower seller goes his way and worries you no more. That is, to me, one of the principal advantages of the Balkans. No one worries you too much. Italy is exhausting in its futile bickering and bartering; the ear is stunned and the eye shocked. But in Greece, Turkey, or Rumania a decision is a decision, provided it is made in the fashion of the country. A little knowledge of gestures is worth months of study in a difficult Balkan language.

But once a decision is made it must be kept to or your reputation is lost forever. An Englishman I know went once to the bazaar at Constantinople and bartered for a piece of silk. The vendor’s price was fifty dollars. My friend said that it was ludicrous and that he would give one and a half dollars. This he said to stop the transaction and get on to the next shop. But it was, after all, a definite offer. The vendor closed at once and held out the silk (which was probably worth one dollar). My friend then said that he did not want it after all. Never have I seen a man so outraged as that silk merchant. He was really angry and swore never to trust an Englishman again. And he was the one who was acting correctly. An offer to purchase, if accepted, must be follow ed by a completion of the deal. That goes to the very roots of Balkan bargaining. It is the only serious act in a long series of quarrelings, insults, hesitations, heartburnings, and enticements.

I am a firm believer in the honesty of the ordinary Balkan citizen. There is a certain code of honor which seems to me to be common to all Balkan states and never found quite in the same form outside them. Roughly it amounts to this: If you and your property are at the mercy of any ordinary man whose vocation is not brigandage, he will never take advantage of that position. You may have left all your valuable luggage lying on the railway platform, but no one will touch it if you are not there to defend it. But once you are there any Tom, Dick, or Harry will do his best to abstract it from under your nose. I have had my pocket picked more than once in Balkan towns, but there always stands out one remarkable occasion when, on a voyage to Athens, I left in my hotel room at the little town of Chalkis a gold watch of no little value. I discovered my loss when almost at Athens. On arrival, knowing what was the right course, I telegraphed to the hotel to send me my gold watch. It arrived the next day by special messenger. I often wonder whether I should ever have seen it again if I had left it in any of the worldfamed hotels of Europe proper.

So, in business dealings or in bartering, show yourself a fool or a knave and a knave greater than yourself will cheat you. Have your proposals clear-cut and definite and you will never be worsted. An antique-monger will ask you a hundred dollars for a thing worth five. If you beat him down to ten you may imagine yourself a fine fellow. Then later you discover the real value of your purchase and you call the vendor a scoundrel and a thief. But it is you who are at fault, for, all the time, he was ready to sell it for five dollars, if only you had been competent enough to find that fact out. Meantime he regards you as a fool, which indeed you are. But the method of bargaining is always simple. No extraneous elements are brought in.

The Balkan method is not quite the same as that of the Oriental proper. The Balkan makes no appeal to pity; he rarely summons his ancestors to witness or his starving family and straitened means to assist. He is out for a bargain just as you are, and stakes his all on persuading you of the supreme merits of the goods he offers. If he can persuade you that their merits are greater than in fact they are, then he is merely succeeding as all good business men succeed in all ages and all climes. I have been more swindled in my own country than ever in the Balkans. So often in the antique shops in some small English town I have softened my heart to some story of family illness or oppressive taxation or recent bereavement. How often in London will you see ‘Premises coming down: lowest possible prices,’ or ‘Salvage Sale.’ I know of one shop in west London that has announced its imminent collapse for fifteen years, and I am a Londoner and can tell you where that shop is! But the Balkan trader would be shocked at such methods. He would think them dishonest. ‘If you can’t sell goods on their own merits, or above them, by your own unaided skill, then do not sell at all’ would be his verdict.

III

I have seen the Balkan people during Balkan wars, during the European War, and in times of peace. During a Balkan war I always felt that they were in their element. During the European War they seemed like children in the midst of a riot. All the patriotism, all the bigotry, all the hatred, malice, and spite that can be found in people whose institutions are largely mediæval, came to the fore in the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. All the splendor and pageantry of mountain fighting and all the individual heroism and individual cruelty of Balkan peoples had free play during these unhappy years. I saw Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Turkey at their best and their very worst. But in the Great War, when Turks opposed British, Bulgarians opposed British and French, and Greeks and Serbs fought side by side with Allies against Bulgarians and Germans, they were like little children playing at a game they did not understand with weapons they scarcely knew how to use. Each Balkan state at war came to rely upon her elder brother to show her the way to play this intricate game. For game it never ceased, somehow or other, to be until the end, when the price had to be paid by each for the entertainment.

Yet the antique combats that were graced with the name of ‘wars’ in 1912 and 1913 remained all the time their beau idéal of what war should be, and the bulk of Balkan peoples to-day still think the same. Their mental attitude was rather that of the Saracens, Crusaders, and Russians who complained, when the scientific Byzantines repelled them with Greek fire, that it was not fair play; they had come, they said, to fight and be fought, not to be roasted alive by inventions of Satan. And the confusion of races and tongues was such that at many places Bulgars fought against Bulgars, Serbs against Greeks, Rumanians against Serbs or British. I remember one prisoner, taken on the British front in Salonika, who had served in the Turkish army in 1912 against the Serbs, then, after the cession of a part of Macedonia to Bulgaria in 1912, in the Bulgarian army against the Greeks. Later that territory was occupied by Serbs in 1913 and he fought against Bulgars. Finally in 1915 the Bulgars overran it again and the poor bewildered creature found himself fighting against British troops. I shall never forget his relief and happiness when he was taken prisoner and his joy when I gave him a pot of jam, which he ate in one rapid mouthful, for he had not seen jam for two years!

More compelling still, as an illustration of how the Balkan and European wars left these unhappy peasants tost and bewildered, was the case of the mayor of the little village of Orliak, in the Struma Valley. We had occupied the valley and formal notice had been sent to the mayor that no wine or spirits were to be sold under any conditions whatever to the occupying troops. Needless to say, within twentyfour hours a dozen or so foolish British soldiers were found hopelessly and utterly intoxicated by raw spirit. The mayor was seized and thrown into rigorous imprisonment for a week — pour encourager les autres. At the conclusion of his captivity he demanded to see the officer who had condemned him. The officer, curious to know the reason for this morbid desire, granted the interview. ‘Sir,’ said the mayor, ‘I have sought you out to tell you the story of my life.’ The officer wilted a little, but, much intrigued, continued the interview. ‘In 1911,’ said the mayor, ‘I was the head of this village, then under the comfortable but severe rule of the Turk. I am half Greek and half Bulgar. Whenever anything went wrong in my village the Turks cast me into prison. In 1912 the Bulgars came here and occupied the valley and, when irritated, cast me into prison. Later the Greeks came and drove them out, but followed the same rules in their treatment of me. Then in 1916 the French army of General Sarrail came, found some fault with my administration, and imprisoned me under most unhappy circumstances. Now the great British army, renowned for its justice, has come here and cast me into a dungeon. Sir, from all these, my experiences, I have at last come to the conclusion that I must be an evil man. I will repent.’ And he went away. Half scoundrel, genial and childlike, this cheerful man’s life may be taken as the epitome of the life of almost any inhabitant of Macedonia and of all too many of the citizens of Serbia and Rumania. After years of reshuffling they were, during the Great War, literally thrown into the whirlpool. Only now are they at last settled with some semblance, however fleeting it may seem to them, of stability.

As with citizens and mayors and local notables, so it was with towns. How well students of international affairs know the names of places that have figured large in treaties! The Enos-Midia Line, which has so often been the boundary of Turkey-inEurope. The Sanjak of Novibazar (which our Foreign Office once thought was a prince). The Dobrudja, partitioned and repartitioned. They are now names in textbooks, mere myths in international affairs. Yet each name implies villages and towns that suffered incredible ills from being the pawn of politicians. Devastation has followed in the track of each equitable arrangement.

One case more poignant than most came my way when I was traveling in Thrace in 1921. The Greek boundary against Turkey had just then been fixed as running from Enos, and including it, northward to Adrianople. Enos, a Greek town at the mouth of the Maritsa River, of great charm and interest, had fallen to the Greeks again. I went to stay there some months after it had come into Greek charge. It was a heap of ruins, for during the war the Turks had cleared it owing to fear lest the Greek inhabitants should communicate with British ships off Samothrace. Four or five years of evacuation had allowed the place to crumble into ruin, which the Turkish soldiery had increased by stabling their horses in the exquisite Byzantine churches and by pulling out rafters from houses to serve as firewood. It was one of the most pathetic places I have ever seen, yet in one of the most beautiful situations in the whole of the North Ægean. The newly returned Greeks were hard at work on a provisional restoration of the poor battered village. First they had restored the largest church, set up the altar, and opened it for service. Then, with the cardinal centre of the new village established, they had opened a school, settled a schoolmaster, and then finally, to complete the three essentials of any Balkan village, opened a new, clean, and attractive café. Peasants had crept back to settle and rebuild their shattered houses, police were stationed in the village and a garrison near at hand, for the Turkish frontier was still only a few miles away and bandits were still loose in the wild uplands of Turkish Thrace. Slowly the little townlet was reviving. Then came the disaster of 1922 when the Greek forces were driven by the Turks out of Asia Minor. With the disaster came a readjustment of frontiers in favor of Turkey. Again the unhappy village of Enos came to the fore as the pivot of a new line. The Greek frontier was pushed back across the river only a few miles west of Enos. And the work of reconstruction was once more undone. The poor settlers who had crept back to their homes were once again driven off into the wilderness to resume their age-long trek as refugees. The newly built church was abandoned, the school and the café. I have not been back to see this poor village again. I have not the heart. But without doubt its churches are again stables, its school bedecked with crescent flags, its café now filled with Turks, and it has once again relapsed into the somnolence that overwhelms all Turkish villages. Its ruins will now never be rebuilt again. Nor will Turk or Greek ever feel safe there, for at any new disturbance of frontiers Enos will play its poor part. There is no hope of stability for its inhabitants, nor any rest.

This is only one of many frontier villages. They all fare alike. None except refugees of long standing will venture to settle in them. And they, nomads bred by European diplomacy, are resigned to a brief stay and thankful if they can get a year’s respite here or two years there from their continual wandering.

Another sign of Balkan troubles that any traveler by railway can see at any time in any Balkan state is the ruin that periodically has overtaken all bridges and viaducts. Look out of your carriage window as the Orient Express passes over the Save at Belgrade; look again as you cross the Vardar at Hudova near the Serbo-Greek border. Look from the coast train that goes from Salonika to Adrianople as you cross the Struma at Rupel Pass. Look as you sit for twenty minutes crossing the great Danube mouth in the Dobrudja by the world-famous Cernavoda bridge, the pride of Rumania. At each place you will see rising gauntly from the river bed old rusting fangs of earlier bridges. Some have been blown up four and five times in the ten years from 1912 to 1922. Each explosion has echoed to a different war cry, each crash been greeted with the cheers of a different army.

IV

We live in quiet and restful lands where these regular convulsions are never felt and we cannot realize how to Balkan peoples the sword is always hanging over their heads. If you were to psychoanalyze any Balkan peasant his reaction to the word ‘bridge’ would be ‘dynamite’; to ‘frontier,’ ‘ruin’; to ’ Peace Treaty,’‘refugees.’ And all the time he is cheerful, simple in his loves and hates, guileless and full of humor.

I remember three visits I have made in three totally different settings. The first was in a fishermen’s hut on the border of an inland lake on the SerboGreek frontier. The second in the mountain hut of Greek shepherds on the island of Skyros. The third in the whitewashed house of an Alsatian farmer in the Banat on the Rumano-Hungarian frontier hard by the River Maros. The men all had something in common, something intangible, friendly, philosophic, and profoundly interesting. I felt somehow entirely at my ease with all of them, far more than I should ever feel if dropped suddenly into some French or Italian or even English village.

My arrival at the fishermen’s hut was to me unforeseen. I had gone inland into a waste and unoccupied region with the intention of spreading my bed in an old station house on an abandoned railway line, not far from Doiran. I arrived at sundown to find my station house a heap of ruins. I had relied on its being still there, for I had stayed in it a year before. But ruin moves fast in the Balkans and now it was no more. The sudden darkness of Balkan lands fell and there I was benighted. My eye caught a small hut of reeds on the lakeside. I entered and saw three men seated round a large and friendly fire that was on the floor and filled the hut with pleasant but acrid fumes. On the fire was a dish of lake fish, odorous and appetizing. Without explanations and without more than a few words I was made to understand that I could remain there as long as I wished. The three men were Greek-speaking Bulgarians, but one of them was deaf and dumb and his speech consisted of one of the most remarkable gesture languages I have ever seen. Graphic beyond description, I soon learned it. It would have been comprehensible to any citizen of any Balkan state, but probably meaningless in any other country. I knew enough of Balkan ways and Balkan tongues to learn it with the help of the other two men. We talked in the evenings — for I stayed there a week — of every subject under the sun; of the ways of fish, the mechanism of watches, and the habits of the wolves which every now and then were visible on the hills outside. We talked of wars, of politics, and of food. These men lived entirely in the present. They had no plans, no hopes, no fears, and no ambitions. They were simply waiting for the wheel of fortune to allot them their next move, whereas I knew my every movement for many years ahead — at least in outline.

In Skyros I spent a similar week with men totally different in birth, in education, and in race. They were all shepherds and all of one family. Five nephews and one aged patriarchal uncle made up the party. They had left their homes below on the coast town of the island and come up into the hills for the summer to tend their sheep. The old uncle ruled with a rod of iron. Smoking was forbidden; we rose at four-thirty and went to bed at eight. Like all Greeks, they were incurably curious, bursting with conversation, and utterly friendly and polite. We talked for hours every night. We fed with wooden spoons from the same bowl. When the uncle was away we shared clandestine cigarettes furtively. When we slept we each climbed into a bunk which was fixed to the walls. We laughed without ceasing at many things, and at sunset we sat outside to see the incomparable view of rocky island, distant peaks of Pelion and Ossa, and turquoise sea. We drank no wine because there was none to drink. The local monastery was the only emporium of wine and we were far from it; besides, I think the old uncle disapproved.

All these young men had been soldiers and had fought with Greek forces during the European War. One had been where I had been, another had gone as far afield as Odessa, where a lonely Greek division was sent to help White Russians. But all the time I felt that they had no real interest outside their lovely island and their flocks and herds. They told me much that I had never dreamed of in the management of sheep and goats — how the shepherds have a separate cry for the sheep and another for the goats so that when the flocks are intermingled they can divide them into two. I watched them at work and saw how the sheep or the goats obediently but slowly separated themselves, grazing all the time, and in two flocks obeyed the orders. Dogs were merely the protectors of the flock and the finders of lost sheep. I saw one round up a wandering sheep, seize it, and rub its face in a muddy pool so as to teach it not to wander again. But the activities of the dogs cease at this point; they are not trained as ours are. The whole business really falls upon the shepherd.

I learned much from these men. Most of all I learned their pride in living their own life and their selfcontained love of their hills and valleys and seas. They knew all about European politics and peace treaties and diplomatic moves, but they felt that such things belonged to a world apart. As every Greek to-day says, ‘We live in Greece: you live in Europe or America.’ The Balkans are a world apart.

In the Banat the setting was completely different. We had come by car from the Black Sea and were on our way to Budapest (it was two years ago). We had hoped to reach the frontier by sundown, but arrived half an hour late and found the frontier closed and the gates shut at the road across the bridge at Cenadul. We stopped in the little village, where Rumanians live side by side with French-speaking Alsatian Germans, who colonized these parts in the eighteenth century. We put up at the little farm of one of these Alsatians. The village was small, compact, and completely clean and tidy. I felt that the Balkans must be in the remote southeast for from this very Western setting. But we were at a meeting place of three countries, Rumania, Hungary, and Jugoslavia, and my host assured me that everyone in the village was trilingual. And the peasants whom I spoke to and asked about their land were no different from the Bulgarians and the Skyriots with whom I had stayed in earlier years. The heel of the Turk had touched the land. The great armies that went to burn Vienna in 1699 were still a power in the countryside. I felt their dead touch even as one feels it the length and breadth of the Balkans. All the night I was kept awake by a long howling cry that came four times every hour. In the morning I asked what it was. ‘That is the man who stands on the church tower all night,’ replied my host, ‘to keep watch against fire and tell us that all is well.’ Here was a Turkish or Balkan institution still living, while in most Balkan states it has died out. With it, too, was some memory of the muezzin on the minarets. And all these folk were colonists or refugees from different parts, though, in some cases, of long standing. Somehow or other the full atmosphere of the Balkans was here; the distant Carpathians supplied the mountainous setting and I felt that ‘Europe’ as the Balkan peoples know it was far off, even though a few hundred yards would take me into Hungary. Here was the true feeling of instability and resignation to the vicissitudes of a life over which the ordinary citizen has little or no control.

Only a few days previously I had seen the same conditions of life, but exaggerated beyond anything one can sec to-day in any other Balkan state. At Silistra on the Danube — a town captured and recaptured time and time again in every Balkan war — the peasants are Turks, simple unthinking survivals from the seventeenth century. They are more Turkish than any Turks of to-day. Their mosques and mullahs still remain supreme, for they have no Mustafa Kemal to deal with them. The peasants are far swarthier and darker than any Turks of Constantinople; they are the dull unimaginative Turks who, as soldiers, conquered half Europe two centuries ago. Now they stay here, isolated from their fellows, surrounded by the activities and ingenuities of a progressing Christian people. No one worries them, no one educates them, no one now wants to eject them. They are like old lions with their claws cut and their teeth drawn. Picturesque beyond description, they still retain the costumes of over a century ago and the indolence of ages. They are useful and harmless citizens, and for them and all the Turks of the Dobrudja the King of Rumania has built a brandnew mosque at Constantza on the Black Sea. But between this Turkish corner of the Dobrudja and the neat pastures of the Banat there is really very little difference. It is the presence of the Turk which has contributed so largely to keeping the Balkans Balkanized! These Dobrudjan Turks of the lower Danube are the last surviving Turks in Europe outside the present boundaries of Turkey, anachronistic and attractive, antique and harmless, the last survivors of a mighty army of occupation and oppression.

V

Recent repatriations and migrations have cleared Macedonia of Bulgars and Turks, left Thessaly and Crete free of all Turks, and resettled in Macedonia and western Thrace the tens of thousands of Greeks who came pouring from Asia Minor, from Turkish Thrace, from Pontus, and from the Caucasus in 1922. New types of Greek have invaded Greece — Greeks who speak a Cappadocian dialect that no one understands, Greeks who speak and read only Turkish and whose very Bibles are written in Turkish script, and even Greeks whose chief tongue is Russian or Georgian. I have spent long days with all of them. Some of these new types are finer than any found in Old Greece, all are strange and out of the world. The Caucasus is, after all, another Balkans in spirit as well as in appearance. Spiritually all are at home in their new setting, though in fact they are none too happy with their immediate neighbors.

I spent three weeks in 1921 with a party of Greeks of whom half were Thracians and half Caucasian Greeks. They could not converse in any tongue but Turkish because their dialects were so different. Their manners, their gestures, and their habits were also totally different. The Caucasian Greeks, who spoke Russian, Georgian, and Greek equally well, had the heavy lumbering walk of the Russian peasant. They still wore Russian boots, for most of them had served in some Russian force during the war, and they had kept their kits. The Thracians were a quick, alert folk, chattering and disputing, Greek to the core, Turkish only in veneer. The two brands did not agree and were often at blows. All alike looked back with regret to the rich pastures and cornfields they had abandoned for the untilled Macedonian fields they had been given. But on one lovely moonlight night I saw them at their best. A full harvest moon turned their fancies to music and the Caucasians danced a strange solemn dance to the accompaniment of a single-stringed violinlike instrument that wailed melodies that were neither Russian nor Turkish, but compounded of the wild hill melodies of the Caucasus and the dirges of Central Asia. They were children of lands far wilder even than the Balkans, and lovelier.

That same night the presence of the real Balkans made itself felt. As we sat and smoked between dances we suddenly heard a scamper of horses, which we could not see, for the moon had set. ‘They have broken their hobbling,’ said one, ‘and will return by morning.’ Morning came and there were no horses either near or on the most distant horizon. Nor did we see them again. My friends soon grasped the situation and accepted it as a fait accompli as soon as it was grasped. What had happened was that border thieves had come over the Serbian border, which was only two miles away, and had swept our horses away with them, as skillfully as Scottish mosstroopers. Afterward I remembered seeing, as I was walking near the frontier the day before, a fierce dark man, who carried a rifle across his saddle. He had passed me on the road, eyed me with disfavor, as I him, given no greeting, and ridden on. He was the outpost of our horse stealers. But they were not my horses, so he had no compunction in stealing them. To me he might, as a poor benighted foreigner, have been merciful. Certainly he did not rob me on the road, and his rifle against my small automatic made his chances easy. Now I understood why every shepherd in those parts carried a rifle.

I have attempted to catch the indefinable Balkan atmosphere in a fewbrief histories. I cannot express it in any other way. I have a thousand other instances by which to illustrate it, each different to the other, and yet, somehow, I have failed to isolate in language the common quality that underlies the facts so as to give the essence of the thing. All I know is that there is an unfailing charm about everything Balkan. It is more evident when you see it dying. Montenegro to-day is a sad and moving spectacle. Cettinje, most romantic of all Balkan cities, lies dead, its king gone, its legations closed, its palace derelict. The peasants still linger, the most picturesque of all Balkan peoples, but their day is over. They now have stability and the certainty of peaceful cultivation of their lands. Their country is now absorbed in the comforts and consolations of a larger land. They remain now as a thing for tourists to wonder at, a show sight of ‘what the Balkans used to be,’ in chars-à-bancs that come winding up the impregnable military road from Cattaro and Ragusa, bringing them fresh from their comfortable steamers and trains. Here, if anywhere, you can see a Balkan state from which the charm has been driven, which does not lure you back again, and of which in the sultry cities of Europe the memory does not rise fragrant and humorous, a little sinister, but always cheerful. True Balkan lands call one back, and the call is peremptory, harsh as the brass bugles of their toy armies, but friendly, hospitable, and comforting.