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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



THE OLD COOK Ol' RILA 



This patriarchal-looking individual was an important personage 

 for the poor families that used to visit the shrine at Rila. With this 

 enormous spoon he would ladle out soup to the hungry. 



in this region is difficult to say, but there 

 lie has been for more than a thousand 

 years, spreading out from the parent cen- 

 ter in a brood which at length has cov- 

 ered much of the territory from the 

 Euxine to the Adriatic. He early em- 

 braced Christianity and from the first 

 Boris down to the last, whose coming of 

 age I helped to celebrate several years 

 ago, religion has highly colored the poli- 

 tics of Bulgaria. 



Gibbon, in a famous passage, has re- 

 marked that "the glory of the Bulgarians 

 was confined to a narrow scope both of 

 time and place" ; and true it is, whether 

 one speaks of that remoter era when the 

 Emperor Simeon gave to the Bulgars 



their golden age or 

 to the present day — 

 when less than forty 

 years sufficed to mark 

 the passage of the 

 country from a state 

 of awful servitude to 

 a place of power and 

 prosperity. And now, 

 eight years after the 

 triumphant conclusion 

 of the First Balkan 

 War, it is again a 

 shorn and shattered 

 nation. 



By reason of their 

 closer proximity to the 

 on-marching forces of 

 the Prophet, the Bul- 

 garians fell earlier 

 captive to the Turk 

 than the other Chris- 

 tian peoples of the 

 Balkans ; and the 

 Turkish supremacy in 

 Bulgaria, which began 

 with the fifteenth 

 century and lasted 

 well into the nine- 

 teenth is the gloomiest 

 epoch in the national 

 annals. 



There, as ever where 

 the Turkish foot had 

 trod in triumph, free- 

 dom vanished, learn- 

 ing languished and 

 the memories of past 

 glories all but disap- 

 peared. Even the 

 character of the people seemed to change, 

 and had it not been for the priests and 

 the brigands it is probable that the thread 

 of Bulgarian national life would have 

 been definitely sundered. But in their 

 mountain fastnesses this strange com- 

 bination of the monk and the marauder 

 kept alive the national feeling. 



BRIGANDS ARlv POPULAR IIpROF,S IN THE 

 BALKANS 



The brigands of the Balkans have ever 

 been the popular heroes. In Serbia they 

 appeared under the name of Haiduks, in 

 Bulgaria as Ilaidutin, and in Greece as 

 Klephts, the most famous of the latter 

 being perhaps Marco Bozzaris, though 



Photograph by Frederick .Moore 

 MONASTERY : BULGARIA 



