Ottoman administrators

Noyes was critical of the Turkish rule of

Bulgaria. He stated that Ottoman administrators, like the governor of

Silistra, Ibrahim Pasha, were people of “the most profound incapacity.”  Most of the officials, the author wrote, were

“taken from the very dregs of society” who “suck the very vitals of their

provinces.” 

From the conquest to the present, he wrote,

Bulgaria has suffered under the Ottomans: “Bulgaria is a desert of Islam not a

desert of sand but of rich, uncultivated waster. Populous cities sprang up in

the time of the ancient kings, some of which did not lose their importance

until long after the Turks encamped in Europe. With the Moslem invasion,

however, expired the Bulgarian spirit. Their ancient renown passed away before

the rapid lessor of Ottoman conquest. Many of their cities and villages were

swept away, while others, left untenanted and alone, have so moldered into dust

that not a trace of them remains.”

Monuments of her ancient power

The American had an inquisitive mind and

could not but search for Bulgaria’s “monuments of her

ancient power”. Although he could not find much, Noyes noted that

“among the Balkans the traveler now and then meets with reminiscences of the

Slavo-Bulgaric rule in the primitive customs, and traditons of the people, and

the crumbling remains of a rude and ancient architecture.” 

Noyes observed the existence of a large

number of tumuli, conical mounds (tepe in Turkish and Hunkain Bulgarian or

graves of the Huns) in the Bulgarian countryside: “Ask the Bulgarian peasant

who erected them, and he will answer, ‘God only knows…’ My imagination,

however, associated these mysterious monuments with ancient Scythian heroes and

Bulgarians kings. . . These silent watchmen of the Bulgarian plains may had

witnessed adieux as touching as those of Hector and Andromache; heroes as noble

as Ajax and Ileus may sleep beneath them; but unlike Ajax Telamon and the

Trojan kings, their deeds have been embalmed in no immortal Iliad.”

Noyes could not but notice the memorials of

cruelty and oppression in more modern times. He described one such monument for

the American reader in very emotional terms: “Far away in the northward, near

the Servo-Bulgarian frontier, there is an immense conical mound formed of

twenty thousand human skulls. Whitened by the snow and rain, it gleams on the

plains of Nissa like a tower of Parian marble. The winds from the mountains,

sighing through the innumerable cavities of the skeleton heads, give them

doleful, doleful voices. To a few still cling locks of hair, like mosses and

lichens, which, floating in the wind, add unspeakable horror to this most

barbarous monument.