Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/71



Because of this, as the Turkish yoke was thrown off and the national state emerged, first in Serbia in the 19th century, then in Greece, and later in Bulgaria, the agrarian problem was possible of almost immediate solution: in Greece, for Thessaly, a newer annexation, expropriation was only achieved in the closing years of the last century. The landlords were not only foreigners of another creed, but the « tyrants » of yore, the vanquished of today. In Morea, as the flames of the Christian revolt burst forth in the year 1821, the former masters realised that the time to leave had arrived, and they departed accordingly. By this total expropriation the Turks themselves were, albeit unwillingly, the best helpers. From Serbia they emigrated slowly: in Bulgaria they were constrained to depart, the administration doing its best to accelerate their exodus. Now very few of the Turkish villagers are to be seen in the Bulgarian districts of the Black Sea, gained by the Roumanians after the Balkan War: good men, grateful to the new State for the special protection accorded to them. The titles to property presented by the Bulgars were often exceedingly dubious. A concealed violence was at the root of the problem: peasants of western Bulgaria arrived in small groups and in a few years were firmly established by the tolerance of the State and endowed with the fields and houses of the outcast Turk.

An exception must be made in regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina. As the Austro-Hungarian administration came in 1878 to exercise a European « mandate », — to all appearances permanently — later to be transformed into true sovereignty, it found Moslem landlords hard subjects to deal with, of Slavonic blood though they were and of historical descent, as, in the 15th century, when the Turks conquered the two provinces, the landlords, menaced with the confiscation of their properties, preferred