Village Life, Bulgaria, 1894
The more I saw of Bulgaria the more I came to the conclusion that it was a lucky accident which caused Sofia to be selected as the seat of the…
From: 1894 C.E. To: 1894 C.E.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“Village Life” From The Peasant State: An Account of Bulgaria in 1894 by Edward Dicey, 1894.
The more I saw of Bulgaria the more I came to the conclusion that it was a lucky accident which caused Sofia to be selected as the seat of the Government, the head-quarters from which the reorganization of the country was to be initiated and conducted. If the Principality is ever to play an independent part in history, it must be in virtue of its distinctive Bulgarian character; and this character is more strongly marked and less diluted by foreign elements in the district surrounding Sofia than in any other portion of the State. In the capital and its vicinity the Tomak population is small in number and almost confined to the towns.
The inland position of Sofia and its remoteness from the sea-coast prevent it from being subjected to any of the cosmopolitan influences which more or less affect all seaboard districts. Moreover, from the height of the plateau which constitutes the province of Sofia, its inhabitants are mountaineers as compared with the people of the fertile, low, southern plains, while their lives are passed in a far colder climate than that of Eastern Roumelia. Under these conditions the Sofiote Bulgarians display the intense conservatism of habit which marks all races whose existence is a lifelong struggle against a cold though bracing climate, against a hard though not ungrateful soil, and against a variety of economic causes which render freedom from the necessity for constant toil almost as rare as absolute destitution. In short, the characteristics which distinguish the Bulgarians as a race are to be found more strongly developed in the inhabitants of the northern plateaus.
If Bulgaria is allowed to work out her own development, the organization of the State must be based upon the peculiar economic conditions which, as I have endeavoured to show, distinguish it from almost all other communities; and the atmosphere, moral as well as material, of the country round Sofia is more favourable to development on these lines than that of which Philippopolis is the centre. Making allowance for a difference of site, one Bulgarian village is the very counterpart of every other. You have only to drive in any direction from Sofia to find village after village, generally buried in the valleys at the foot of the hills, which are so like each other that no one not a native would find it easy to distinguish them.
One of the favourite drives from the capital is that to the hamlet of Panscherevow, which lies some dozen miles south of Sofia, on the slopes of the mountain range of which Vitosch is the highest point, and which stands on the banks of the river Ishka. On leaving Sofia you drive for about six miles along the high-road to Constantinople, the one central artery which traverses Bulgaria from the Servian frontier at Zaribrod to the Turkish frontier at Mustapha Pasha. I should fancy, myself, that the road must have been originally constructed by the Romans—it runs so pitilessly straight and is so obviously the work of a road-building race.
Even in the Turkish days this road was kept in comparatively good repair, as it formed the military route between Stamboul and Belgrade. The construction of the railroad has to some extent diminished its importance, but it is still the chief means of communication between the various towns which lie along its course. Neither expense nor trouble are spared in building new bridges, keeping the roadway in good order, and digging trenches along the sides so as to carry off the water, which formerly flooded the road whenever the mountain streams poured down the hillside in torrents after the snow had melted in the uplands.
The plain, through which the road runs, is, as a rule, cultivated. It is hard to say exactly where the tilled fields end and where the open pasture-land begins, as there are no hedgerows or landmarks of any kind between one field and another. Here, as elsewhere, I was puzzled to understand where the labourers lived, whose daily toil brought and kept such a wide area of land under cultivation. Dotted over the plain, at long distances apart, you could see the whitewashed belfries which denote the neighbourhood of a village; but outside the villages, neither farmhouses nor cottages were to be seen anywhere.
We did not pass or catch sight of, in the half-dozen miles we traversed along the high-road, a single dwelling of any kind, with the exception of a roadside tavern. As soon as we left the high-road, our way lay along a rough field track, over which it was difficult for any vehicle more complicated in its structure than a Bulgarian cart to make progress. In rainy weather, or when the snow lies upon the ground, these country roads must be almost impassable, and, in consequence, the villages to which they lead must be practically inaccessible.
Deep ruts and big boulders have to be traversed at frequent intervals; and no horses, less wiry or sure-footed than those of the country, could well draw a carriage up the almost precipitous ascents by which the track crosses one hillock after another. The only way to make the ascent is to lash the horses into a mad gallop at the foot of every hill, and even then they are not always equal to the effort. Carriage accidents in this part of the country are of frequent occurrence, and would be still more frequent if, when the carriage begins to roll backwards owing to the inability of the horses to crest the hill, its downward course was not commonly stopped by striking against some of the huge stones which lie embedded in the field track.
In summer time, however, Panscherevow is a favourite resort for the townsfolk of Sofia, and forms a sort of Sofiote Richmond. The condition of the road leading to this suburban village gives you a fair idea of what must be the character of the country cross-roads in more remote districts, where pleasure traffic is utterly unknown.
The village comprises some two or three hundred inhabitants, and has, if I counted correctly, about thirty dwelling-houses. Most of these cottages are surrounded by a low wall, made in most cases of loose stones welded together with mud, but in some cases the walls are replaced by wooden palings. All the houses have white-washed walls, and are covered with sloping, red-tiled roofs.
The walls are built either of stone, mixed up with rubble, or of hard-baked mud. The eaves of the roofs stretch downwards over the walls and form a sort of rough verandah, whose shade must be welcome during the great summer heats, and whose shelter serves as some sort of protection against the bitter winter winds. At the same time, these eaves must obscure the dim light which comes into the dwelling-rooms through the narrow, iron-barred windows. Every house almost is one-storied, and built flush with the ground on which it stands. Inside the space formed by the walls surrounding the cottages there are wooden sheds and stables, and plots of open ground, half waste, half kitchen garden. Most of the enclosures have trees growing in them, often trees of respectable size and considerable age. Timber, at all deserving of the name, is a thing very rarely met with in this part of the country outside the villages, as, under Turkish rule, all the trees were cut down for fuel.
It was not, perhaps, the fault of the Turks that the country is thus denuded of foliage. In a rigorous climate, with its long, bitter winter, fuel is an absolute necessity of existence; and, till the coal mines had been opened up, the only fuel available was the timber of the plains and hillsides. The complaint against the Turks is not that they cut the trees down, but that, with characteristic Turkish want of foresight, they failed to make any provision for the future by planting new trees to replace the ones cut down. The Government are making great efforts to raise new plantations, not so much for the supply of fuel as with the view of providing a more constant succession of rains. As it is, Bulgarian agriculture suffers greatly from the uncertainty and irregularity of the showers needed to refresh the soil during the dry season.
Within the enclosures, pigs, fowls, and ducks strut about round the cottages, and seem as much at home there as the human occupants. The walls with which the cottages are hemmed in, and whose construction and maintenance in good repair must cost a great deal of labour, are not only useful for the purpose of keeping the live stock within a ring fence, but they also suit the ideas and tastes of the Bulgarian peasant.
According to peasant notions, the women of the household ought to remain within the precincts of their homes when their services are not required in the fields. If you meet a party of peasants going to market you will notice that, if there is room in the carts for anything beyond the freight, the men ride in the cart, the women trudge behind on foot, carrying on their shoulders the goods which they are taking to market, and which, if the men would consent to walk, might be carried in the carts.
Nothing can be plainer than the lives led, during the greater portion of the year, by both men and women. They are up by daybreak, and work in the fields till after sunset. It seems intrinsically improbable that, as the country grows more prosperous, the peasants should be content with their present existence; and I was told, whilst travelling in the richer districts, that, of late years, there had been a considerable increase in the demand for meat and poultry on the part of peasants who had formerly been content to live on bread and garlic
The fact of the cottages being more or less hidden behind walls renders it difficult to look inside the houses. The Bulgarians, too, do not like strangers to come within their dwellings. But the houses in the one narrow, winding street which runs through the village, face the roadway, and, as their doors generally stand open, you can form, by peeping in as you pass, a fair impression of what a Bulgarian peasant's cottage is in reality. The floors are of mud; the kitchen fronting the street is also the living-room.
Behind there is a sleeping-room, with a bedstead in it for the head of the house, while the sons and daughters sleep upon mats stretched on the floor. The furniture consists of wooden tables, benches, and chests. The crockery and household utensils of every sort seem of the commonest and coarsest kind.
I should doubt if there is a single house in the whole village in which any English labourer or artisan, earning good wages, would not deem it a hardship to be obliged to live in. At the same time, there was no single dwelling which, given the habits and customs of the country, could be fairly described as unfit for human habitation.
A similar remark applies to the dress of the villagers. The day on which I visited Panscherevow happened to be a Sunday. In Bulgaria, though work is done in the fields on Sunday to some extent, the day is more or less of a holiday, and there are more people to be found in the villages than would be seen there on an ordinary week-day. Possibly, on a Sunday, a native might detect some little extra care or adornment in the dress of the peasants, but to a stranger the difference in attire between work-days and holidays is utterly imperceptible. The men had certainly made no change in their shaggy sheepskins and their woollen leggings. The women's stiff skirts and flannel petticoats may have displayed a trifle more embroidery than usual, and the white linen skull-caps, with their pendent tails, were obviously fresh from the wash-tub.
In most cases, however, the dress of men, women, and children alike was frayed, soiled, and tattered. The clothing was warm and stout enough to keep out the cold, but it was generally so old and so worn that, in other lands, the wearing of such attire would have stamped the wearer as a pauper.
The women are fair-haired, fair-complexioned, slatternly creatures, somewhat resembling the Scandinavian type, stout and strongly built, and fairly clean in appearance. The men not at work seemed to be gathered mostly in the liquor-shops or to loaf outside its doors; but, in as far as I could notice, they drank very little, and were certainly quiet, well-behaved, and, for the most part, silent. Every now and then a woman in passing by would exchange a remark with the crowd of men gathered around the liquor-store; but there was no general conversation of any kind, either inside or outside the doors of the tavern.
When I visited Panscherevow the violets and primroses were just out, and, as there is a considerable demand for flowers amidst the townfolk of Sofia, our carriage was surrounded with village children bearing nosegays in their hands. They never, however, asked you to buy, or begged or thrust their wares upon you with the importunity of the Eastern mendicant. They held out their flowers stolidly; but, if you showed no wish to purchase, they went away equally stolidly, and left you in peace without asking for anything. The children were one and all ragged, ill-shod, unkempt, but for all that they looked healthy and well fed, while the general lack of beauty in their features and figures was redeemed by a pleasant smile. When the attempt to do a trade in flowers had been discontinued as useless the children returned to their games.
After the wont of Bulgarian children they played quietly and silently, without screams and without disputes.
In the cottages, into whose interior I could catch a glimpse, I could see no sign of the picture of the Virgin Mary, to be found so invariably in the huts of the Russian moujiks. Neither here nor elsewhere in my travels through Bulgaria did I come across any of the roadside shrines and crosses, so frequent in Russia, before which you may any day see crowds of peasants kneeling and praying, even when the snow lies deep upon the ground.
Yet, in an odd way of their own, the Bulgarians are devout believers; they are also scrupulous as to observing fasts and going to confession. During Lent squads of the regiments stationed at Sofia were marched down three or four times a day to the church, and after confession received absolution eti bloc. In as far as I could calculate from the frequency with which I met these squads going and coming to the church, every soldier in the garrison must have had to confess at least once a week during Lent At this season the peasants absolutely refuse not only to eat meat, poultry, or butter, but in most instances decline to supply them for sale in the towns. The result is, that even for strangers who are not members of the Greek Church, Lent time in Bulgaria becomes more or less of a penitential season.
The peasants avowedly attach extreme value to the due celebration of the Church services, and pay the fees demanded by parish popes for baptisms, weddings, and funerals, without any great amount of grumbling. The pope, in the great majority of parishes, is a peasant of the same class as his parishioners, too much occupied with the cares of his family, with looking after his cattle, and above all with the tilling of his plot of land, to be able to trouble himself greatly about spiritual matters. As long as he can get his flock to pay their dues and to attend service on the great festivals of the Church, he considers that he has done his duty. In the same way, when once the peasants have got a church where the ritual of their creed is properly performed by a duly appointed pope, their religious requirements, such as they are, are amply satisfied. Their lives are too hard to allow them to pay much attention to spiritual matters, and I suspect their whole tone of mind would, under any conditions, prove eminently unfavourable to the development of religious fervour.
So far as Christianity consists in hating Turks and Jews, the Bulgarian peasants are sincere Christians; but their religion has hardly progressed, as yet, beyond that somewhat rudimentary stage. This view of mine is derived mainly from what has been told me by every resident in the country to whom I have spoken oii the subject But all I have seen myself, here and in other Sclav countries, confirms me in my belief that the Greek Faith is the least spiritual of all the various creeds of Christendom, and that the Bulgarians are the least religious-minded, in a doctrinal sense, of all the races which constitute Christendom after the Eastern rite.
It does not follow that because the Bulgarians are for the most part ignorant of, and indifferent to, religious dogma of every kind, they are not attached to their own faith, or still less are not prepared to regard all persons who differ from them as heretics and infidels deserving of extermination. All experience shows that men will fight as hard and die as bravely for the mos.t ceremonial of creeds, as they will for the highest forms of religious belief. All I wish to point out is, that spiritual fervour and doctrinal zeal are not, and cannot be, the same important factors in the daily life of a peasant country, as they are in that of more highly cultivated and more wealthy communities, where large classes have at once the means and the leisure to indulge in religious contemplation.
The church—by which I mean the material fabric, not the spiritual body—is a conspicuous object in every Bulgarian village, ranking next in size and importance to the village school-house. Both church and school-house are invariably plain white-washed buildings. The best house in Panscherevow is that of the mayor, or rather the kmet, or deputy-mayor, as the place is not deemed important enough to have a full-blown mayor of its own. A sort of barn is attached to the mayor's dwelling, which serves as the town house of the village, where the Communal Council holds its sittings and where local justice is administered.
Take it altogether, I should say the inhabitants of Panscherevow—in common, for that matter, with those of most Bulgarian villages—seem to me not to have a bad time. If there is no luxury, there is a good deal of rough comfort, and if their wants are few, these wants are fairly well satisfied. Barring the taxes and military service, they lead much the sort of lives they would like to lead; and that, after all, is about as much as human nature can reasonably expect.
However, I ought to add that I visited most of the Bulgarian villages when the trees were green, the air warm, and the sun shining. In the long, bleak winter time a peasant's life in Bulgaria may well wear a less cheerful aspect. The general aspect of all the villages I visited seemed to denote the prevalence of a general coarse well-being amidst the villagers, equally removed from refinement on the one hand and from destitution on the other. In the whole course of my travels I never came across a single dwelling, outside the towns, which you could imagine by any flight of fancy to be the abode of a man of fortune, or even of a well-to-do tradesman.
Still, I have no doubt that the great majority of the occupants of these mud cottages have more money hoarded up than you would find in the possession of any English peasant farmer who would be content to live in a similar tenement, under similar conditions of existence. Whatever their hoarded wealth may be, no trace of it is to be noticed inside the houses, where the Bulgarian peasant families live from the hour of their birth to that of their death.
The most comfortable dwelling I ever saw, in any of the Bulgarian villages which I visited, was that of a pope in charge of one of the many half-deserted monasteries which are to be found throughout the country. The monastery lies half hidden in one of the ravines which intersect the sides of Mount Vitosch. It stands some five or six hundred feet above the plain, and commands exquisitely beautiful views of the champaign flats, over which the shadows of the clouds float and shift under the sparkling sunlight.
If ever Sofia becomes a capital after our Western fashion, the slopes of Mount Vitosch will become valuable as chosen sites for suburban residences. Even as it is, the monastery in question is frequently visited on Sundays and feast-days as a pleasure resort by the people of Sofia. Sparkling rivulets run down the mountain-side close to the convent, and in these streams there is excellent trout-fishing. Good shooting, too, is to be found in the neighbourhood; and if you wish to make the ascent of Vitosch, the monastery is as good a place as any other from which to make your start. If you are not over particular as to your quarters, you can hire rooms for the night from the prior of the convent, who provides entertainment for man and beast.
The general look of the place is something between a roadside tavern and a farmyard; all that remains of the ancient monastery is a small chapel almost hidden from sight amidst the stables and outhouses. Geese, ducks, fowls, and pigs straggle all over the place, wandering in and out of the guest-rooms, which open on a wooden balcony. A coarse plank table was placed in the courtyard, at which the prior was seated to receive his visitors and customers, and from whence he was able to keep his eye on the farm-servants and on the live-stock of his farm.
He was a genial, fresh-coloured, not over clean old gentleman, between seventy and eighty; he had a long, white beard, and was clad in a singularly shabby and musty black surplice, with the usual tall, straight, black, round chimney-pot hat on his head. He gave us coffee and mastik, smoked the cigarettes we offered him, and, both in his look and manner, resembled the landlord of a country tavern rather than an ecclesiastical dignitary of high rank. One of our party spoke Turkish fluently, and as the prior was a Bulgarian who had been born, and had lived the greater part of his life, in Macedonia, the language of the Turks was as familiar to him as his own.
He informed us that he had been compelled to quit Macedonia some twelve years ago because he had given political offence, and that he had then come to Bulgaria, where he had been kindly received and appointed to the priorship of the convent. He seemed to entertain as bitter an animosity against the Turks as was consistent with a very good-humoured and easy-going disposition. On our referring to the recent withdrawal by the Sultan of the edict concerning the schools in Macedonia, which had given such offence to the Bulgarians, he observed that even if the Turks ever happened to do what was right one day, they always did what was wrong the next.
He added that the grievances of Macedonia would never be removed till the Turks had been driven out of the country. It seemed to me he was much more interested in our questions the crops and about the accommodation he could offer to visitors, than he was when the conversation turned upon political or ecclesiastical matters. He informed us that he had a stipend of £320 a year from the State; that, besides this, he made a certain amount of money by his farm and poultry-yard, and still more by letting the rooms of the convent during the summer months. He also got a little—but, as he added, a very little—from the fees and offerings of the village hard by, whose parish church was the convent chapel.
He complained also that out of his stipend he was compelled to pay the services of a coadjutor pope, and to keep the church in repair. What he may have paid the curate I cannot say, but from the look of the chapel, which the prior took us to visit, it must have been long years since a penny had been laid out on repairs of any kind.
The chapel, the prior assured us, had been built between five and six centuries ago, before the Turks had conquered Bulgaria. Being ignorant of all architectural lore, I could form no opinion as to the antiquity of the building. The chapel was so dark, the walls and pavements were so obscured with the smoke of wax-tapers, that it was impossible to decipher the inscriptions on the flags, or to discover what the blotches of faded colours on the walls were intended to represent. The prior seemed to know as little about the convent's history as I did myself, and all he could tell us was that both it and the chapel were very old indeed, and that there was no money forthcoming to place the chapel in proper repair, with new crosses, new pictures of the Virgin, new missals, and new vestments, such as would befit the historic dignity of the shrine.
It struck me that to any one at all versed in ecclesiastical architecture, the chapel would have proved a sort of treasure-trove. But the opinion of the prior seemed to be that it was quite good enough as it stood, for all the use that was ever made of it. The day on which I visited the place was the Greek Good Friday, but there had been no service performed there that day, as the peasants of the neighbouring village had all gone to Sofia to attend the weekly market, and nobody had come to church. At its very fullest, the chapel could not well contain more than a score of people. Altogether, I should consider the prior had a very easy berth, and, even in wealthier countries, would have been considered well paid for such clerical labours as he performed.
He told us that he owned two houses in Sofia, and that in the winter time he resided there himself, because the air in the hills was too keen and too sharp for a man of his age. In his absence, the curate looks after the spiritual requirements of the village, and the prior only returns when the visitors commence driving out from the capital. I saw no reason to suppose that the prior neglected his duty, either in his own opinion or in that of his parishioners. The reason why I have dwelt upon his personal position, as he told it to us, is that the incident seems to me to be a curious illustration of Bulgarian national character.
Here was a man who, in virtue of his position, was of more than average education, who was certainly not unintelligent, and who was possessed of means which would have enabled him to live in considerable comfort; yet he was content to pass his life as a peasant amongst peasants, not from any high ideal of the existence best befitting a minister of God, but simply because the sort of life he thus led was the one most in accordance with his own tastes, as it is with those of the great mass of his fellow-countrymen.
Dicey, Edward. The Peasant State: An Account of Bulgaria in 1894, John Murray, 1894.
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