MORE TURKISH ATROCITIES.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 425, 4 November 1876, Page 3

MORE TURKISH ATROCITIES.

THE MASSACRE AT OTLUKKU. 3,000 PERSONS SLAIN. FRIGHTFUL OUTRAGES ON Women. You have already had full accounts of the awful massacres at Batak, a village which surrendered without firing a shot. Here is Mr Schuyler’s condensed account of what took place at Panagurista and Otlukku, where the few insurgents had jnade a show of resistance. Apparently ’no message to surrender was sent : — After a slight opposition on the part of the insurgents the town was taken. Many of the inhabitants fled, but about 3,000 were massacred, the most of them being women and children. Four hundred Auildings, including the bazaar, and tbe largest and best houses were burned. Both churches were completely destroyed, •and almost levelled to the ground. In one an old man was outraged on the altar, and afterwards burned alive. Two of the schools were burned. From the numerous statements made to me hardly a woman in the town escaped violation and brutal treatment. The ruffians attacked children of eight, and old women of eighty, sparing neither age nor sex. Old. men had their eyes torn out and their limbs cut off, and were then left to die, unless some more charitably disposed man gave themthe final thrust. Pregnant women were ripped open and the unborn babies carried triumphantly on the points of bayonets and sabres, while the children were made to bear the dripping heads of their comrades. This scene of rapine, lust, and murder was continued for three days, when the survivors were made to bury the bodies of the dead. The perpetrators of these atrocities were chiefly regular troops employed by Hafiz Pacha. The scenes that took place in this village and in many others are almost too horrible for description. The crimes that made Sodom and Gomorrah infamous were wrought upon the helpless population. Not a woman in the place seems to have escaped outrage. • They confessed it openly. In other places 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. Mothers were outraged in the presence of their daughters. Young girls in the presence of their mothers, of their sisters, and brothers, The same authority tells us the story of a young schoolmistress nicknamed “ The Queen of the Bulgarians,” who was beguiled into embroidering a flag for the insurgents. This educated, intelligent, sensitive young girl was seized and outraged in the presence of half a dozen of her comrades and neighbours, by three or four brutes, who still pollute the earth with their vile existence. But this was not enough. Her father was shot down in his own house, and she and her mother dug his grave in their garden, and buried him. Still, the poor girl had not suffered enough. The Turkish authorities heard that, she had embroidered the flag, and two weeks after the insurrection was completely crushed they ordered her arrest. A mudir had been -sent to the vill age in the meantime, and he seized and took her to his house at 10 o’clock at night, with the woman at whose house the flag had been worked. This woman told us what occurred in the mudir’s house that night. The poor girl in spite of tears and prayers that might have moved a tiger to pity, was stripped naked, beaten, spat on, and j again outraged. It was then that she was nicknamed “ Queen of the Bulgarians,” and the next day she and another "''•Oman, who had been likewise maltreated > 'even a more horrible way, were sent to

Tartar Bazardjik. Here she was surrounded by the Turkish population, hooted, jeered, pelted with mud, spat upon, and insulted with the foulest epithets that a Turkish mob could find. Then fainting and insensible, she was thrown into a cart, and sent off to Philopopolis, thrown into prison there, and kept on bread and water until the arrival of Mr Schuyler. Then she was set at liberty, ill, shattered in health, and broken-hearted. The horrors of Cawnpore, which years ago stirred all England, have been far surpassed in Bulgaria.