1916 when a number of Bulgarian
deputies made a joyous progress to the capitals of their allies, under
the leadership of the Vice-President of the Sobranje, Dr. Momchiloff,
renowned at the time as a Germanophil, they were welcomed with great
pomp at Buda-Pest and declared in ceremonial orations to be brothers
of the Turanian Magyars; but Momchiloff deprecated this idea. "We are
brothers," he said, "of the Russians, and see what we have done to
them!" It was also during the War that Dr. Georgov, Professor of
Philosophy and Rector of Sofia University, wrote a dissertation in a
Buda-Pest newspaper,[12] which demonstrated very clearly to the
Hungarians that the Bulgars are Slavs; the Professor points out that
the Turanians had so rapidly been absorbed that Prince Omortag
bestowed Slav names upon his sons, and this complete mingling of the
radically different peoples was assisted, says the Professor, by the
fact that those Bulgarian hordes in the days before they crossed the
Danube were already partly mixed with Slavs, since they had been
wandering for decades to the north of the Danube, around Bessarabia,
in which country the Slavs were members of the same Slovene race as
those whom they were afterwards to meet. So thoroughly were the
original Bulgars submerged in the Slavs that when their sons set out
from the district between Varna, Rustchuk and the Balkans, proceeding
west and south, they met with no resistance from the unorganized Slavs
of Moesia and Thrace, owing to the circumstance that these latter
did not feel that the new arrivals were strangers. In fact, says the
Professor, there are in the present Bulgarian people far fewer and far
fainter traces of the original Bulgars than there are of the old
Thracians, as also of the Greeks and of the different people who in
the course of the great migrations probably left here and there some
stragglers. Sir Charles Eliot says of the Bulgars that "though not
originally Slavs they have been completely Slavized, and all the ties
arising from language, religion and politics connect them with the
Slavs and not with Turkey or even Hungary." Professor Cviji['c], by
the way, who in 1920 received the Patron's Medal of the Royal
Geographical Society for his researches into Balkan ethnology, regards
the author of _Turkey in Europe_ as a greater authority in this field
than himself.... It is not easy, away from Montenegro and a few remote
valleys, to find communities on the Balkan mainla