Travels in Southeastern Europe

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

78 THE BURDEN OF THE BALKANS. These are worked by peasants, and the profits are supposed to be halved between the owners and the workers. It is hardly necessary to say that this is not enforced by law. I was often told that all the taxes came out of the peasants' half. Nevertheless, so long as the landlord stayed away, they said they got along pretty well. The 'chiftlik' peasants did not suffer during the insurrection in the same way as did the peasant proprietors, for their houses, being the property of the landlord, were not burnt. One third of the villages I visited were mixed Christian and Moslem. Some of the Moslems, I was told, are Slavs, but this I had no time to investigate. The Christian peasantry is mainly Slavonic, but presents very different types in different villages, caused by the greater or less admixture of Greek, Bulgar, or Albanian blood. The bulk of these peasants speak a Slav dialect, which is not the Servian of Belgrade or Montenegro. Neither is it, I am told by the people themselves, the Bulgarian of Sofia. It contains, as is only natural, a large number of Turkish, Greek, and Albanian words, and has some grammatical peculiarities. The third person singular of the present indicative ends always in a 't' (e.g., 'kazat''he says'), a form which does not belong to either literary Servian or Bulgarian, but is used by illiterate Serbs in Servia; and the definite article placed after the noun-a characteristic of Bulgarian, and also of Roumanian and Albanian-is by no means generally employed. The noun is often inflected as in Servian,
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Title
The burden of the Balkans / by M. Edith Durham.
Author
Durham, Mary Edith, 1863-1944.
Canvas
Page 78
Publication
London :: Nelson,
[1905]
Subject terms
Eastern question (Balkan)
Balkan Peninsula -- Description and travel.

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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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