The rise of this enigmatical people affords a striking example of the power of national feeling to uplift the downtrodden.  Until the year 1876, the very name Bulgarian was scarcely known except as a geographical term.  Kinglake, in his charming work, Eothen, does not mention the Bulgarians, though he travelled on horseback from Belgrade to Sofia and thence to Adrianople.  And yet in 1828, the conquering march of the Russians to Adrianople had awakened that people to a passing thrill of national consciousness.  Other travellers,—­for instance, Cyprien Robert in the “thirties,”—­noted their sturdy patience in toil, their slowness to act, but their great perseverance and will-power, when the resolve was formed.

These qualities may perhaps be ascribed to their Tatar (Tartar) origin.  Ethnically, they are closely akin to the Magyars and Turks, but, having been long settled on the banks of the Volga (hence their name, Bulgarian = Volgarian), they adopted the speech and religion of the Slavs.  They have lived this new life for about a thousand years[184]; and in this time have been completely changed.  Though their flat lips and noses bespeak an Asiatic origin, they are practically Slavs, save that their temperament is less nervous, and their persistence greater than that of their co-religionists[185].  Their determined adhesion to Slav ideals and rejection of Turkish ways should serve as a reminder to anthropologists that peoples are not mainly to be judged and divided off by craniological peculiarities.  Measurement of skulls may tell us something concerning the basal characteristics of tribes:  it leaves untouched the boundless fund of beliefs, thoughts, aspirations, and customs which mould the lives of nations.  The peoples of to-day are what their creeds, customs, and hopes have made them; as regards their political life, they have little more likeness to their tribal forefathers than the average man has to the chimpanzee.

[Footnote 184:  The Peasant State:  Bulgaria in 1894, by E. Dicey, C.B. (1904), p. 11.]

[Footnote 185:  Turkey in Europe, by “Odysseus,” pp. 28, 356, 367.]

The first outstanding event in the recent rise of the Bulgarian race was the acquisition of spiritual independence in 1869-70.  Hitherto they, in common with nearly all the Slavs, had belonged to the Greek Church, and had recognised the supremacy of its Patriarch at Constantinople, but, as the national idea progressed, the Bulgarians sought to have their own Church.  It was in vain that the Greeks protested against this schismatic attempt.  The Western Powers and Russia favoured it; the Porte also was not loth to see the Christians further divided.  Early in the year 1870, the Bulgarian Church came into existence, with an Exarch of its own at Constantinople who has survived the numerous attempts of the Greeks to ban him as a schismatic from the “Universal Church.”  The Bulgarians therefore took rank with the other peoples of the Peninsula as a religious entity., the Roumanian and Servian Churches having been constituted early in the century.  In fact, the Porte recognises the Bulgarians, even in Macedonia, as an independent religious community, a right which it does not accord to the Servians; the latter, in Macedonia, are counted only as “Greeks[186].”