BULGARIA AND ITS WOMEN 



By Hester Donaldson Jenkins 



A MONG the Oriental girls with whom 



/\ I lived in my nine years' residence 

 X A. "1 the Near East, none interested 

 me more than the Bulgarians. They are 

 perhaps the least Oriental of the eight or 

 more nationalities to be found in Con- 

 stantinople College, of which I was a pro- 

 fessor. They are fairer and brighter in 

 coloring than the Armenians, Greeks, or 

 Persians, rather taller and larger on an 

 average, and have more energy and less 

 languor than the Turk. 



Bulgarian girls incline to roundness of 

 contour and figure, many of them having 

 round, full face, ripe, rosy mouths, and 

 dimples. This effect is heightened by 

 the fashion of wearing the hair in braids 

 wound about the head. One sees plenty 

 of dark hair in Bulgaria, but one also 

 looks with pleasure on warm brown tints, 

 chestnut tresses, and occasional auburn 

 heads. One of the most beautiful girls 

 I ever saw was a Bulgarian, with a glori- 

 ous mass of copper-colored waves, a clear 

 pale skin, handsomely set gray eyes, a 

 delicate mouth, and small white teeth, 

 and the height and carriage of a princess. 



The bright cheeks that so many of the 

 Bulgarians have are a pleasant change 

 from the dark or pale skins of the Ar- 

 menians and Greeks. Their eyes are gen- 

 erally less large and languorous than 

 Oriental eyes, looking you squarely in the 

 face, with more frankness and less se- 

 duction. 



THE LANGUAGE OE THE COUNTRY 



The origin of the Bulgarian people and 

 their relationship to the other Balkan na- 

 tions is naturally of interest in these times 

 of stress. The Bulgars are a branch of 

 the great Slavic race, just as are the Rus- 

 sians, the Servians, the Rumanians, and 

 the Croatians. They are, however, not 

 pure Slavs, having received an admixture 

 of Tatar blood many centuries ago, a fact 

 which is occasionally betrayed by the up- 

 ward slant of the eye and the high cheek- 

 bone. 



All of these Slavic peoples except the 

 Rumanians speak languages derived from 



a common old Slavic, and sufficiently 

 alike so that an educated Bulgarian can 

 read Russian or Servian with little diffi- 

 culty ; and they use a common alphabet, 

 which is a modification of the Greek, in- 

 cluding some queer compound sounds not 

 in the Greek tongue, such as the first 

 letter of the name Tschaikowsky, which 

 we transliterate by Tsch. The Bulgarian 

 language is full of sibilants and English 

 gutturals, but does not include the deep 

 German or Armenian guttural. 



The names of some Bulgarian girls 

 may give an idea of the sound of the 

 language : Nadezda, Nadelka, Xarafinka,. 

 Blagoya, Vesselina, Goonka, Zdravka. 

 The last names all end in off for the men 

 and ova for the women, meaning son of 

 or daughter of. Thus Magthalena Pe- 

 trova is Magdalen, daughter of Peter; 

 Alara Angelova is Mary, daughter of An- 

 gelo. Family names are just coming into 

 fashion, so that Peter Dimitroft''s son 

 may call himself either Dimitroff or 

 Petroff, in the former case making the 

 name Dimitroff permanent in his family. 



EVER A WARLIKE NATION 



When Russia was an insignificant coun- 

 try under Polish or Tatar dominion, and 

 Byzantium ruled the Eastern Roman Em- 

 pire, the Serbs and Bulgars were warlike 

 nations on the northern frontier, continu- 

 ally taking advantage of Byzantine weak- 

 ness, often in bitter rivalry. Thus at one 

 time a Greater Servian Empire occupied 

 what is now Macedonia and pressed to 

 the gates of Constantinople : and twice a 

 Bulgarian Tsar extended his empire of 

 conquest close to the Bosporus, menac- 

 ing Greek sovereignty. 



Bulgaria and Servia both, therefore, 

 have what they regard as a glorious past 

 to inspire them, and the country that Avas 

 the arena of the recent Balkan-Turkish 

 war had been possessed and governed in 

 turn in the past by Greek. Serb, and Bul- 

 gar. When Constantinople finally fell 

 into the hands of the Turks, in 1453, the 

 Greeks of that city, haughty in their hu- 

 miliation and isolation, gathered them- 



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