s for three or four centuries lost all
consciousness of a fatherland. The countrymen of Simeon and Dushan
became mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for their foreign
masters. Servia and Bulgaria simply disappeared. As late as 1834
Kinglake in travelling to Constantinople from Belgrade must have
passed straight across Bulgaria. Yet in "Eothen," in which he
describes his travels, he never even mentions that country or its
people.

It is easy to understand that this history of Turkish horrors should
have burned itself into the heart and soul of the resurrected Servia
and Bulgaria of our own day. But there is another circumstance
connected with the ruthless destruction and long entombment of these
nationalities which it is difficult for foreigners, even the most
intelligent foreigners, to understand or at any rate to grasp in its
full significance. Yet the sentiments to which that circumstance has
given rise and which it still nourishes are as potent a factor in
contemporary Balkan politics as the antipathy of the Christian
nations to their former Moslem oppressors.

GREEK ECCLESIASTICAL DOMINATION OF SLAV

I refer to the special and exceptional position held by the Greeks
in the Turkish dominions. Though the Moslems had possessed themselves
of the Greek Empire from the Bosphorus to the Danube, Greek
domination still survived as an intellectual, ecclesiastical, and
commercial force. The nature and effects of that supremacy, and its
results upon the fortunes of other Balkan nations, we must now
proceed to consider.

The Turkish government classifies its subjects not on the basis of
nationality but on the basis of religion. A homogeneous religious
group is designated a millet or nation. Thus the Moslems form the
millet of Islam. And at the present time there are among others a
Greek millet, a Catholic millet, and a Jewish millet. But from the
first days of the Ottoman conquest until very recent times all the
Christian population, irrespective of denominational differences,
was assigned by the Sultans to the Greek millet, of which the
patriarch of Constantinople was the head. The members of this
millet were all called Greeks; the bishops and higher clergy were
exclusively Greek; and the language of their churches and schools
was Greek, which was also the language of literature, commerce, and
polite society. But the jurisdiction of the patriarch was not
restricted even to ecclesiastical and educational matters. It