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BALKAN PENINSULA 91 are found not only in wandering troops, as elsewhere in Europe Rumanian, have been supposed to point to the influence exercised but in settlements or cantonments in the neighbourhood of towns by the primitive speech upon the idioms of the immigrant races. and villages. Owing to the numerous conversions to Islam which followed the At the beginning of the 19th century the whole Turkish conquest, the Mahommedan population of the Peninsula is Peninsula, with the exception of Dalmatia, Montenegro, Religions. half Jargeiy the purely element.ofMore than and the Ionian Islands, formed a portion of the theinA1excess banianofnation and Turkish about two-fifths the Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted the creed of the conquering race. Ottoman Empire. The period of Turkish de- Political Among the Bulgars and Greeks the conversions were less numerous. cadence had begun a century before, and the changesThe Bulgarian Mahommedans, or Pomaks, who inhabit the valleys of process of disintegration now set in. Owing to the uncomKhodope and certain districts in northern Bulgaria, are numerically insignificant; the Greek followers of Islam are almost confined to promising character of the Mahommedan religion and the Crete. The whole Moslem population of the Peninsula is about contemptuous attitude of the dominant race, the subject 3,300,000. The great bulk of the Christian population belongs to nationalities underwent no process of assimilation during the Orthodox Church, of which the (Ecumenical Patriarch at Constantinople is the nominal head, having precedence over all other the. four centuries of Turkish rule; they retained not only ecclesiastical dignitaries. The Rumanian, Bulgarian, Servian, their language but their religion, manners, and peculiar Montenegrin, and Greek churches are, however, in reality auto- characteristics, and when the power of the central authority cephalous. The Bulgarian church enjoys an exceptional position, waned they still possessed the germs of a national existence. inasmuch as its spiritual chief, the Exarch, who resides at Con- The independence of Greece was acknowledged in 1829, stantinople, controls the Bulgarian prelates in European Turkey as well as those in the principality of Bulgaria. On the other that of Servia (as a tributary principality) in 1830. No hand, the Greek prelates in Bulgaria are subject to the Patriarch. territorial changes followed the Crimean war except the Religious and political questions are intimately connected in restoration to Moldavia of Southern Bessarabia, which Eastern Europe. The heads of the various religious communities Russia had annexed in 1812 ; but the continuance of the are the only representatives of the Christian population recomiized by the Turkish Government; they possess a seat in the local ad- weakened authority of the Porte tended indirectly to the ministrative councils, and supervise the Christian schools The independent development of the various nationalities. The efforts of the several branches of the Orthodox Church to obtain a Ionian Islands were ceded by England to Greece in 1864. separate organization in the Turkish dominions are to be attributed The great break-up came in 18/8. The abortive Treaty of exclusively to political motives, as no difference of dogma divides them. The Serbo-Croats of Dalmatia, some of the Gheg tribes in San Stefano, concluded in that year, reduced the Turkish Albania, a small proportion of the Bosnian Serbs, a still smaller possessions in the Peninsula to Albania, Epirus, Thessaly number of Bulgarians in the Principality and Macedonia, and a and a portion of southern Thrace. A large Bulgarian few Greeks in the islands belong to the Catholic Church. A certain Principality was created extending from the Danube to the number of Bulgars at Kukush in Macedonia and elsewhere form a umate church, which accepts the authority and dogma of Rome /Egean and from the Black Sea to the river Drin in but preserves the Orthodox rite and discipline. The Armenians are Albania; it received a considerable coast-line on the Aegean, divided between the Gregorian and Uniate-Armenian churches, each and abutted on the Gulf of Salonika under the walls of under a patriarch. The other Christian confessions are numerically that town. At the same time the frontiers of Servia and inconsiderable. The Gagaiisi in Eastern Bulgaria, a Turanian and Montenegro were enlarged so as to become almost coniurkish-speaking race, profess Christianity. Until comparatively recent times Turkish and Greek were the tiguous, and the latter State received the ports of Antivari only languages systematically taught or officially recognized in the and .Dulcigno on the Adriatic. From a strategical point an of view the Bulgaria of the San Stefano treaty threatened Languages. the ®a^speech l^nds subject to Turkish rule.theThe former, of the conquering race, was official lan; the latter, owing to the intellectual and literary superiority Salonika, Adrianople, and Constantinople itself; and the of the Greeks their educational zeal, and the privileges acquired by Great Powers, anticipating that the new state would become t ieir church, became the language of the upper classes among the a Russian dependency, refused their sanction to that inChristians. The Slavonic masses, however, both Servian and strument.. The Treaty of Berlin followed, which limited Bulgarian, preserved their language, which saved these nationalities from extinction. The Serb dialect, extending into regions the Principality to the country between the Danube and which escaped the Turkish yoke, enjoyed certain advantages denied the Balkans, created the autonomous province of Eastern to the Bulgarian : in free Montenegro the first Slavonic printing- Rumelia south of the. Balkans, and left the remainder of press was founded in 1493 ; at Ragusa, a century later, Serb litera- the proposed Bulgarian state under Turkish rule. The ture attained a high degree of excellence. The Bulgarian for Montenegrin frontier laid down at San Stefano was connearly four centuries, ceased to be a written language except in a few monasteries : a literary revival in recent times siderably curtailed, Dulcigno, the district north-east of the was the first symptom of returning national consciousness. Tara,, and other territories being restored to Turkey; in In Rumania the Roman tongue of Trajan’s colonists and to Nish, Servia received the districts of Pirot and the Latinized Dacians gave way in the Middle Ages to Slavonic addition under the rule of the Bulgarian Tsars; it revived under the Vranj e on the east instead of the Ibar valley on the west; VVaiiachian and Moldavian princes, but was not introduced into the the. Ddbruja, somewhat enlarged, was ceded to Rumania' liturgy and state documents till the middle of the seventeenth which surrendered southern Bessarabia to Russia. Bosnia century The Rumanian and the two Slavonic languages have and. Herzegovina were handed over to Austrian adminisborrowed largely from the Turkish in their vocabularies, but not in tration; under a subsequent convention with Turkey, their structural forms, and have adopted many words from the Greek. The modern Greek has also a large number of Turkish Austria sent troops into the sanjak of Novi-bazar. The words which are rejected in the artificial literary language The complete independence of the principalities of Servia, revival of the various Balkan nationalities has in every case been Rumania, and Montenegro was recognized. The claims accompanied or preceded by a literary movement; in Servian literature, under the influence of Obradovitch and Vuk Karaiitch of Greece, ignored at San Stefano, were admitted at the popular idiom notwithstanding the opposition of the priest- Berlin; an extension of frontier, including Epirus as well hood, superseded the ecclesiastical Russian-Slavonic ; in Bulgaria as Thessaly, was finally sanctioned by the Powers in 1880, the eastern dialect, that of the Sredna Gora, prevailed ; in Runfania but owing to the tenacious resistance of Turkey the latter an artificial reconstruction on the Latin model with an elimination province only, together with the district of Arta, was ot all foreign elements was attempted and abandoned. Among the Greeks whose literature never suffered a complete eclipse, a similar acquired by Greece in 1881. Rumania was proclaimed effort to restore the classical tongue has resulted in a kind of com- a kingdom in that year, Servia in 1882. In 1880, promise ; the conventional literary language, which is neither after a naval demonstration by the Powers, Dulcigno ancient nor modern, differs widely from the vernacular. The was surrendered to Montenegro in compensation for the frrVhue °nly- S!irvivin" remnant of the ancient Thraco-Illyrian districts of Plava and Gusinye restored to Turkey. In beW, SS fV^esUngstudy to philologists. It undoubtedly 1886 the informal union of Eastern Rumelia with Bulgaria unfortnr* t ^ bend0 -G™T famil-v’ but its earlier fonns cannot, was sanctioned by Europe, the districts of Tumrush ascertai rrUn^’ ned owing to the absence of literary monuertam remarbabl Jflanguages o analogiesespecially between the the Bulgarian Albanian and (Rhodope) and Krjali being given back to the Sultan. In the Sb other of the Peninsula, 189/ Crete was withdrawn from Turkish administration,