Ottoman Danubean Bulgaria

Mutchmore arrived in Ruse from Romania. He

wrote that the city was “full of the history of long and dreary oppressions and

atrocities.” Ruse, the author said, was situated upon as “pretty a spot as is

to be found on the globe, on an abrupt bank of limestone rocks high above the

Danube, so that the stretches of the beautiful river may be seen for

miles.” 

The environmental beauty could not be

matched with the city itself because the former capital of Ottoman Danubean Bulgaria was

“a heap of Turkish dirt and ruins, for the Turk never cleans away anything, he

simply climbs upon it.” He was impressed by the work of the new Bulgarian

administration. He wrote that in “free Bulgaria” the city was going through a

“metamorphosis.” He saw new and beautiful buildings being built in the city by

the Bulgarians themselves.  

Magnificent country

Mutchmore was very impressed by the natural

beauty of the “magnificent country” from Ruse to the Black Sea,

with its “wealth of fruit and its lines of beauty.” However, in “this beautiful

country, as God has made it,” the one-handled wooden ploughs were “still used

as they appear in the hieroglyphic inscriptions in Egypt.” The Bulgarians had

no incentive to change, to enrich themselves because “the struggle has only

been for existence since the Turk conquered” them, for had they produced more

the Turks would take it.

In Bulgaria, from end to end “one sees mud

or stone huts about ten feet high, hatched with reeds, or the stocks of marsh

flags or bulrushes, with the ground for the floor, teeming with fleas and often

reeking in dirt.” The author blamed the Turks for all these huts which

“disfigure the finest country on earth.”3&

One of Mutchmore’s favorite topics was

Orthodoxy and the work of the American missionaries in Bulgaria. While visiting

Romania, Mutchmore already in describing Romanian Orthodoxy, wrote that “the

Greek priest lives nowhere where there is any progress; he would not be healthy

in it.”  He had a preconceived view that

Orthodoxy must be replaced by Protestantism in its American versions. Writing

about the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Mutchmore stated that it was “a bundle of

dissolving ignorance, its life is malicious.”

With very few exceptions, he said, the

Bulgarian clergymen, were “ignorant, superstitious, lazy and low, and often

came out of the dregs rather than the heads of society.” This was the reason

for the “demoralization” of the masses. The American clergyman believed and

hoped that the power of the Orthodox Church would be broken. In his view this

was not too difficult because there was no real religion in the country.