Bulgaria | Page 8

1913 because a French war correspondent had, in a despatch
which had escaped the Censor, likened the crossing of the Thracian
Plain by the great convoys of Bulgarian ox-wagons to the passage of
the Danube by the Huns in the fourth century. The Bulgarians, always
inclined to be sensitive, thought that the allusion made them out to be
barbarians. But it was intended rather, I think, to show the writer's
knowledge of the early history of the Balkan Peninsula and of the close
racial ties between the Bulgarians of to-day and the original Huns. We
have seen how the Gothic invasion, coming from the Baltic to the

Black Sea, pushed on to the borders of the Hun people living east of the
Volga. These Huns now prepared an answering wave of invasion.
To the Goths the Huns--the first of the Tartar hordes to invade
Europe--were a source of superstitious terror. The Gothic historian
Jordanes writes with frank horror of them:
We have ascertained that the nation of the Huns, who surpassed all
others in atrocity, came thus into being. When Filimer, fifth king of the
Goths, after their departure from Sweden, was entering Scythia, with
his people, as we have before described, he found among them certain
sorcerer-women, whom they call in their native tongue Haliorunnas,
whom he suspected and drove forth from his army into the wilderness.
The unclean spirits that wander up and down in desert places, seeing
these women, made concubines of them; and from this union sprang
that most fierce people, the Huns, who were at first little, foul,
emaciated creatures, dwelling among the swamps and possessing only
the shadow of human speech by way of language.
According to Priscus they settled first on the eastern shore of the Sea of
Azof, lived by hunting, and increased their substance by no kind of
labour, but only by defrauding and plundering their neighbours.
Once upon a time when they were out hunting beside the Sea of Azof, a
hind suddenly appeared before them, and having entered the water of
that shallow sea, now stopping, now dashing forward, seemed to invite
the hunters to follow on foot. They did so, through what they had
before supposed to be trackless sea with no land beyond it, till at length
the shore of Scythia lay before them. As soon as they set foot upon it,
the stag that had guided them thus far mysteriously disappeared. This, I
trow, was done by those evil spirits that begat them, for the injury of
the Goths. But the hunters who had lived in complete ignorance of any
other land beyond the Sea of Azof were struck with admiration of the
Scythian land and deemed that a path known to no previous age had
been divinely revealed to them. They returned to their comrades to tell
them what had happened, and the whole nation resolved to follow the
track thus opened out before them. They crossed that vast pool, they
fell like a human whirlwind on the nations inhabiting that part of

Scythia, and offering up the first tribes whom they overcame, as a
sacrifice to victory, suffered the others to remain alive, but in servitude.
With the Alani especially, who were as good warriors as themselves,
but somewhat less brutal in appearance and manner of life, they had
many a struggle, but at length they wearied out and subdued them. For,
in truth, they derived an unfair advantage from the intense hideousness
of their countenances. Nations whom they would never have
vanquished in fair fight fled horrified from those frightful--faces I can
hardly call them, but rather--shapeless black collops of flesh, with little
points instead of eyes. No hair on their cheeks or chins gives grace to
adolescence or dignity to age, but deep furrowed scars instead, down
the sides of their faces, show the impress of the iron which with
characteristic ferocity they apply to every male child that is born among
them, drawing blood from its cheeks before it is allowed its first taste
of milk. They are little in stature, but lithe and active in their motions,
and especially skilful in riding, broad-shouldered, good at the use of the
bow and arrows, with sinewy necks, and always holding their heads
high in their pride. To sum up, these beings under the form of man hide
the fierce nature of the beast.
That was a view very much coloured by race prejudice and the
superstitious fears of the time. It suggests that at a very early period of
Balkan history the different races there had learned how to abuse one
another. English readers might contrast it with Matthew Arnold's
picture of a Tartar camp in Sohrab and Rustum:
The sun by this had risen, and clear'd the fog From the broad Oxus and