Travels in Southeastern Europe

The burden of the Balkans / by M. Edith Durham.

THE STORY OF THE PEOPLE. 45 In many ways there is little doubt that the subject peoples indeed retrograded. Their primitive customs they clung to instinctively as a means of self-protection. Their acquired knowledge and progress in the arts of peace and war they lost, for they had no chance for the exercise of either. The wholesome exercise of fighting their quarrels out to the end was denied them, and the Turkish policy of making means of communication as difficult as possible to this day prevents the growth of any trade or manufacture. Heavy and irregular taxation, then as now, made the gathering of any capital hopeless. The subject people lay helpless, and suffered bitterly. All travellers who visited these lands draw painful pictures of the state of the wretched inhabitants. Dr. Brown, writing in 1673, says: 'I could not but pity the poor Christians, seeing under what fear they lived in those parts, when I observed them to make away as soon as they perceived us coming towards them. In Macedonia the men and women would betake themselves into the woods to avoid us.' And Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, travelling across Servia in I717, writes: 'The oppression of the peasants is so great that they are forced to abandon their tillage, all that they have being a prey to the Janissaries whenever they chose to seize on it.' The mass of the people were no better than slaves. Disarmed and systematically robbed by their conquerors, they were powerless to resist. Only in the mountainous districts were the fiercer spirits able
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About this Item

Title
The burden of the Balkans / by M. Edith Durham.
Author
Durham, Mary Edith, 1863-1944.
Canvas
Page 45
Publication
London :: Nelson,
[1905]
Subject terms
Eastern question (Balkan)
Balkan Peninsula -- Description and travel.

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https://name.umdl.umich.edu/ans3900.0001.001
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"The burden of the Balkans / by M. Edith Durham." In the digital collection Travels in Southeastern Europe. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/ans3900.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 30, 2025.
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