The Balkan Peninsula

ure campaign which can be seen threatening. But if the storm-racked peninsula could be granted a term of peaceful development, there is no doubt at all but that it w

tumn and winter seaside beaches of great beauty and fine sunny climate-all these exist in the

ye with a great opal jewel. A November sunset on the Sea of Marmora gave to my eyes such a feast of suffused colour as I had not seen since I left the shores of the southern Pacific. The rocky hills had the rich red of the Jersey cliffs, but the sea and sky were incomp

Trieste there is an excellent train service) and scanty accommodation of any kind-almost none of good quality. Within a very few years, if the Balkans could settle down to peace and the legalised plunder of foreign visitors-a pursuit which is as profitable as brigandage and far more comfortable,-the seasi

yrolean mountains and the Carpathians begin to receive a big overflow of people who have a taste for heights that are not covered with hotels and funicular railways. But the mountains of the Balkan Peninsula offer prospects, I believe, of greater beauty, certainly of greater wildness, than any other ranges of Europe. Of the Rhodope mountains, in particular, one gets the most alluring accounts

er cut throats in a wholesale way at the call of a mischief-maker-visitors to the mountains of the Balkan Peninsula would find the wildness, the uncouthness of the surrounding national life, very attractive. The picturesque national costumes, the national music, wild and uncanny, the strange national dances, all add to the fascination of the savage scenery. In an age when a fog of dreary sameness comes over all the civilised world, the Balkans have a great asset in their primitivism. T

e, and in Bulgaria the warm medicinal springs are being developed for bathing resorts. At Sofia there are now in course of erection great public baths which will be equal to any in Europe when they are completed. In the mountains above Sofia w

e sight of castles, churches, or great buildings. The dreariness of the plain is unrelieved by forests. The rivers flow sullenly along without a bordering of trees. The Thracian plain-the greater part of which has now gone back to Turkey and thus lost hope of a redemption of its really fertile soil-is in particular desolate and forbidding. But even there, and more frequently in the p

scrub the autumn aspect of the plain at sunset is incomparably lovely. The scrub, when the first of the autumn frosts come, blazes out in such scarlet and gold as cannot be imagined in the moist and soft climate of Engl

mer there is great heat and dust and plague of flies. In the winter travel is impossible with any comfort except along the railway

Sofia: or, taking the Oriental Express, leave it at Belgrade, making that the starting-point for a riding trip. Certainly to enjoy the country one must leave the railways and journey on horseback or by cart over the wilder tracks. An interpreter who speaks English can be engaged in any one of the capitals. The hire of horse

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y). Taken from the front of Parliament House, showing monume

a few typical

Sofia go by rail, and then back to Belgrade on horseback, sending on heavy l

crossing the Roumanian frontier at Roustchouk, going over the trail o

the Sea of Marmora), and Constantinople. A somewhat wild trip this would be, but quite practicable. The most comfortable way to travel would be to take ox wagons for the lugg

n horseback from Salonica to Belgrade. This would show the most dis

there go on horseback and with ox wago

eary. There are practically no fine old buildings, for in the Turkish occupation the greater number of these were destroyed. The modern buildings have rarely any character. The churches, usually of the Slav school of architecture, alon

the Bulgarians, can carry his enthusiasm so far as to a

y. From here, symbolised by the rivers and roads running down on each side, has extended, and will further extend, the power of modern education, of unhampered ideas, of science, and of humanity. From this magnificent view-point Sofia stretches along the low hill with the dark background of the Balkan beyond. Against that background now stands out the new embodiment of Bulgarian and Slavonic energy, genius, and freedom of mind, the gre

jects

alculated l

The Turkish idea of keeping the womenfolk in the harem survives to the extent that woman is not supposed to frequent places of entertainment, to r

women, and the atmosphere of the city is a little more than gay. Plant a section of Paris, a section including Montmartre, into the middle of an enla

centres of social interest are the cafés, where men who have the leisure assemble to drink coffee made in the Turkish fashion, tea made in the Russian fashion, and occasionally vodka,

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ravel, in my experience-and that was during war-time-there is none. Serbian peasant, Bulgarian peasant, Greek peasant, Turkish peasant, alike are amiable and obliging fellows, if they do not feel in duty bound to cut your throat on some theological or political point. Being strangers, tourists would have no theology and no politics. So much for the inhabi