BULGARIAN ATROCITIES.

Globe, Volume VII, Issue 753, 17 November 1876, Page 3

BULGARIAN ATROCITIES.

The London Telegraph of September 14th prints the report made by Eugene Schuyler, Secretary of Legation and Consul-General of the United States at Constantinople, and Prince Tsereteleff, Second Secretary of the Bussian Embassy of that city, giving the details of their recent journey amid the Scenes of Turkish atrocity in Bulgaria. They B ay :—The village of Bovardjik was bombarded, pillaged, and then burned, only because the inhabitants had been unwilling ±o receive into their village the BashiBazouks who accompanied the Caimacam at whose bands they had already suffered greatly. The inhabitants of this village, about 1000 in all, came to meet Chefket IPasha, aad laid down their arms ; but the Pasha seufc them back, telling them to defend themttelves, and ordering the troops to lire upon them. The villagers ran away in all directions without the least resistance, atid were massacred during their flight. The official number of the victims is 170, of whom two were priests, eigist women, and eight children. We saw human bones and human skulls in the fields, and ascertained the fact that only twenty houses remained in the village, and that the school and church were destroyed afterward—the last, which was built of hard Btone, not without much trouble, tieveral heads were brought to yamboli, among othera by an official named

Hadji-Moulasßim. Three heads were thrown into the street before the house of the Consular Agent of Italy at Burgos. He himself told us this fact.

Conducted by a certain Pope Harlton, who is believed to be an ex-priest, this band tried to get to the Balkans, but was pursued by the regular troops and the Mussulman villagers, and on May 11th took refuge in the monastery of the Archangel Michael, near Drenova, where it was surrounded. On being summoned to surrender, the insurgents demanded twenty-four hours to state their complaints, but this was refused them, and on the arrival of Fazly Pasha, from Bhumla, with two cannons, the monastery was bombarded. Under cover of the night and a heavy fall of snow, a part of the insurgents escaped. At break of day, seventy-five went, without arms, and with a white flag, to surrender. They were all massacred, by order of the Pasha commanding, in the most cruel manner. Some were cut to pieces, others had their limbs cut off, or long strips of flesh torn from their bodies, and others were disembowelled. On arriving at the monastery, the troops killed there the mother of the prior—an old woman of eighty. The pillage was begun by the regular troops, and continued by the Bashi-Bazouks for fifty days. In the village of Musiuk-Hodja the church was pillaged and'.desecrated. Tn this place, out of 7000 sheep, there remained only twenty-four. The chief of these irregular troops was Deli-Nedjib, the Caimacam of the Plevow, aided by Saadullan Effendi, of Selvi. On May 21st, these troops burned and sacked the village of NovoSelo, and killed 691 persons, 350 of whom were women and children. Out of this number, 140 persons were killed in the village itself, the rest in the mountains and near Kalofer, where they were massacred by the band of Hadji Ibrahim, of Oftchular (Caza of Kazarlok). The majority of the victims were old men, infirm people, and children, who were unable to save themselves. A child of five years, Toakim, the son of Yore-Popof, was killed and thrown upon a burning roof. Kole Tordoroff, before being killed, had his hands cut off. We saw at Gabrova a little girl eighteen months old, with her skull fractured by a yatagan. The dead bodies were mutilated. About 100 young girls and women were violated, and some were kept several days in Turkish villages. In the convent of the Holy Trinity, at Novo Selo, where there were thirty-nine nuns, the Bashi-Bazouks massacred one of the nuns at the gate and five others and the abbess in the church. Two of these had their hands cut off. The bodies were stripped and burned in the church. We found among the ruins shreds of the clothes of the victims, and half-burned human bones. Besides these seven nuns, the father of one of them and the priest were killed in the same convent. Some of the nuns were repeatedly violated, and two of them were kept for some days in a Turkish village. Among the acts of cruelty committed in these villages, we limit ourselves to mentioning the massacre of thirteen shepherds at Kravenik, who were seized by the men of Hadji Ibrahim, of Oftchular, had their hands tied, and were killed by sabre cuts. The only one who escaped did so with the loss of an ear. He gave us the details of this affair. At Batoshevo an old man named Kole Ratchef was thrown alive into the flames. Some days before our arrival at Schikpa, 6000 sheaves of wheat were stolen from this village by the neighbouring Turks, but here also the authorities remain in their habitual inaction. Near Offohlay, a village between Kazanlyk and Tevi Gagra, more than 200 women and girls who had come about the middle of June from the other side of the Balkans, to gather the harvest, on the formal assurance of Vail Adrianople that they would run no risk, were attacked by the Turks of this village. Two of the Mussulman guardians who accompanied them were seriously wounded, as well as several of the young girls, thirty of whom were violated. The Hon Evelyn Ashley writes to the Daily News: — Sir,—ln the absence of any further papers or declarations from our Foreign Office I think it well to send you some extracts from a letter which I have just received from an acquaintance of mine, an Englishman, in Bulgaria. I may add, for the benefit of the cynical, that he is not an " enthusiast," nor a tourist, nor a newspaper correspondent, but an official, namely, a British vice-consul, writing from the vice consulate. The Foreign Office will easily guess who he is, but I do not give name or place, because as he is not only British vice-consul but also occupier of an estate some distance from his post, I fear lest in these disturbed times I might expose him to some risk or suffering. About the number of the slain he says :—" 1 have seen the first instalment of Mr Baring's report, dated from Philippopoli, and it seems to me good in many ways, though, if he does not increase his estimate of 12,000 Bulgarians having been killed, I much fear that he will have counted only the quarter of the victims." He writes as follows about the much discussed story of the burning of forty girls, which your correspondent, if I remember rightly, first reported in one of his letters :—' I suppose you recollect that a statement was made in some English papers that forty Bulgarian girls were seized by BashiBazouks, and, after having been cruelly outraged, were burned, Mr Baring, as I see, says that no Bulgarian girls were burned by BashiBazouks, and as far as the letter goes he is correct. The original statement was founded on the misunderstanding of a colloquial Turkish phrase. To burn in Turkish is yakmak ; but this verb is constantly used in the sense of to ruin. A debtor will say to a harsh creditor : ' Beni istey, or mousoun yakma V Do you want to burn—i.e., to ruin me ? The forty girls were taken by BashiBazouks from the village of RadiKeni, and were carried off by them into the mountains of the district of Gabrova. They were never more heard of." After referring to the destruction of the village of Basardjik by troops, my correspondent gives the following pleasing incident as the close of the day's work :—" After the 200 peasants had been murdered and the spoil divided, a detachment of regular troops passing through a Bulgarian village about one and a half mile distant from the scene of massacre, found some fugitives concealed. Of these sixteen were given up whom the soldiers took to some distance, and found on tbc road seven more md in a field of standing rye. They told the twentythree that if they would dance the national Bulgarian dance, no harm should come to them, and so the victims danced, and as they danced the soldiers shot the dancers down. What a' dance of Jdeath p The poor peasant

flinging out his limbs in the ' Horo,' while the jeering soldiery at a convenient distance make them their targets."

The Daily News publishes another letter from its special correspondent in Bulgaria respecting the Turkish there. _ At Klissura, one of the places he had visited, there was a rising, and four Turks were killed. When the troops arrived, however, no more resistance was offered than at other places. The insurgents ran away, separated, broke up into little parties, and were afterwards caught and miserably killed. Klissura, nevertheless, was pillaged, 200 of the women were killed, every house was burnt down, and a number of old and decrepit and sick people who could not escape perished in the plains. Some tents had since been sent by the Turkish authorities to shelter the survivors; but they were insufficient in number, were old, and though they kept out the sun, did not afford protection from the rain. The sufferings of the people were terrible. As the commissioner and his party left the place a hundred of the women ran after him for a mile with cries and lamentations. They had expected food and succour of some kind. When they found that the party had only come to make an inquiry their disappointment was overwhelming, and they sat down by the wayside, exclaiming, " We are starving!" " We are starving!" again and again. The special correspondent of the Daily News at Deligrad telegraphs as follows: Accounts of Turkish atrocities are very rife. When the Turks capture any fugitives in the villages they occupy they torture and then kill them. At Djunis today an old man told me a horrible story. In one of the villages on the slope of Jastrebaz the Turks captured a family while escaping. They took the baby, spitted it, roasted it alive, and absolutely forced the parents to eat the smoked flesh of their own child, after which they butchered the parents. The old man stated that he had witnessed these himself. He is a priest. The troops were Egyptians, and General TchernayeS tells me they are worse than the Bashi-Bazouks or the Circassians.

Hundreds of women came to us recounting what they had seen and what they had suffered. Not a woman in the place seems to have escaped outrage. They all confess it openly. In other places where these things occurred the women have shown a hesitation to speak. In some cases they denied they had been outraged, and we afterwards learned they confessed to others that they had been. At Avrat-Alan, a delegation of ladies called upon Mr Schuyler to make their complaints,and he was somewhat astonished to find they had very little to say. Upon going away, however, they left him a letter, signed by them all, saying that scarcely a woman in the place had escaped outrage. They could not bring themselves to tell him viva voce, but thinking that as he was investigating here in an official capacity, he ought to know, they had decided to write to him. Here, however, they did not hesitate to speak out. Outrages were committed so publicly and so generally that they feel it would be useless to try to hide their shame, and they avow it openly. These acts were committed not only in the houses but in the street, in the yards, and in the courts, for the Turks have not even the decency which may accompany vice. Mothers were outraged in the presence of their daughters, young girls in the presence of their mothers, of their sisters and brothers. One woman told us, wringing her hands and crying, that herself and her daughter, a girl of fifteen, had been violated in the same room. Another that she was violated in the presence of her children. A girl of eighteen avowed, shuddering and burying her face in her hands, that she had been outraged by ten soldiers. A woman who came to us on crutches, with a bullet still in her ankle, said she had been violated by three soldiers while lying wounded on the ground, groaning in agony. Young, delicate, fragile little creatures, ten and twelve years old, were treated in the same brutal manner. A woman told us that her daughter, a tender, delicate little thing of twelve, had been seized and outraged by a Bashi-Bazouk, although she had offered all the money she had in the world, although she offered herself if he would spare the child. Another told us of a poor little thing of ten violated in her presence, with a number ofjpther girls. Still another told us how a dozen young girls, twelve or fifteen years old, had taken refuge in her house, hoping to escape detection ; how they had been discovered ; how two of them had been outraged, and killed, because they had resisted ; and how the others then Bubmittel to their fate, white, shivering, their teeth chattering with fright. We were told of a young girl of sixteen outraged by three or four Bashi-Bazouks in the presence of her father, who was old and blind. Suddenly she saw one of them preparing in mere sport to kill the poor old man, and she sprang forward with a shriek, threw her arms around his neck, weeping and trying to shield him with her own delicate body. It was all in vain ; the bullet sped on its course, and the sweet young girl and the blind old man fell dead in each other's arms.