Philippopolis

Not too long ago, at Philippopolis, there have been 4 accountable editors of an opposition paper there, in jail at one and the identical time for the publication of articles which most likely they’d by no means seen and couldn’t have learn if they’d seen them. On the similar time, no reader of the Bulgarian Press can doubt the need for some type of censorship. Their columns are crammed with essentially the most violent and rancorous abuse of their political opponents. The phrases wherein the editors of the rival papers abuse one another are resembling couldn’t be talked about in respectable society, and the final character of the articles is of the coarsest and crudest sort. In so far as I can study, the circulation of just about all of the Bulgarian papers is extraordinarily restricted, and extends little or no past the cities wherein they’re printed. Within the nation districts newspapers are hardly to be discovered in any respect. This state of issues will little doubt proper itself in time, however for the second the native Press enjoys an quantity of license far in extra of that warranted by the final tradition of native newspaper readers.

Human nature is identical all over the place

I’ve little doubt that in Sofia, as in each different city, there’s a specific amount of native scandal. Human nature is identical all over the place, and I’ve no cause to suppose that the home morality of Bulgaria is exceptionally excessive. Nonetheless a stranger can not assist being struck with how little you hear within the golf equipment or elsewhere of home gossip, and nonetheless much less of scandal. The reason of this I take to be that, owing to the absence of normal society and a form of semi-Oriental sentiment with regard to the privateness of the house, the general public is aware of comparatively little of what goes on inside their neighbors’ homes. I witnessed one incident which appeared to me to throw appreciable mild on the relations of married life amidst the peasant class. Someday, after I was passing Zaribrod, the station on the Servian frontier, I seen a crowd collected on the platform, listening to a person gesticulating and shouting with excessive violence, a factor which you not often witness in Bulgaria. On inquiry I discovered that the person was a Bulgarian peasant, who had carried on a small retail enterprise in Sofia. He was leaving the nation together with his household as a result of he discovered that an intrigue existed between his spouse and a younger man within the city, and this intrigue, as he declared, hindered his spouse from attending to her house duties and precipitated her to neglect the enterprise. On the frontier station he had found the lover hidden in a third-class compartment, whereas he and his household have been travelling second-class.