Anti Russian and pro German

He was surprised to see in the Eiffel

Restaurant the waiters “puffed tobacco smoke as they took the guests’ orders,

and reclined at full length on a bench in the lull of business.” He tried to

explain this by making a sarcastic comment that democracy seemed to have made

some headway since the liberation of the country. However, the author liked the

friendliness and great hospitality of the Bulgarian people he met along the

Danube.

Bigelow was anti-Russian and pro-German.

He was very critical of Russia’s policy in Bulgaria and thought that Germany

ought to have the final say in Southeastern Europe. He attempted to explain

Bulgarian politics by quoting an unnamed Bulgarian diplomat critical of Russian

policy toward his country, and hoping that not the Russian Tsar but the German

Emperor would become the “Protector of the Danube.”

James M. Buckley travelled through Bulgaria

in 1888. He believed that each traveler saw “what he took with him,” and for

this reason he thought that his experiences were worth recording because

“several views are more illuminating than one.” In his books Travels in Three

Continents: Europe, Africa, Asia he described his trip through Eastern Rumelia

and Bulgaria.

 “The

view as we rode along was wonderfully beautiful. Villages and towns are far

apart, and one might easily have fancied himself travelling through a

succession of parks connected with some ancestral estate, his only perplexity

that he saw no house or castle, and few persons.” He was impressed by the

“immense masses of granite” that surround and underlie Plovdiv. He praised the

political “independent existence” of Eastern Rumelia which gave “it much more

interest to Western travelers than would have if still a province of Turkey.”

Bulgarian Orthodox Church

He took part in a convention in Sofia of

the Bulgarian Protestants and was impressed with their work. However, like

Mutchmore, he was very critical of the Bulgarian Orthodox

Church. In his view the Bulgarian Church “was a very low form of

Christianity,” for which the principles of the Gospel were “concealed under the

mask of superstitions; no intelligible instruction is given; pomp, ceremony,

priest craft, support the religion, which exerts little influence over the

daily lives of the people, and can afford little or no comfort in their

experience of privation and toil.”

Sofia, the capital city, did not impress

him much. Were it not for the palace, one or two elaborate hotels of an Eastern

style, and the Bulgarian letters on the signs, he wrote, it would be easy to

“mistake the place for an American prairie town already endeavoring to put on

the airs of a city.” He was more impressed by the fertility of the land, the

number of rivers which flew into the Danube and with the herds of cattle and

flocks of sheep. Many Bulgarians, he wrote, were very “striking-looking men.”

However, the general aspect of the country was “not one of prosperity, and a

primitive scene was that of buffaloes drawing carts.”