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The Balkan Trail

Chapter 20: FOOTNOTES:
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About This Book

A travel narrative that follows an English-speaking narrator's journey across the Balkan borderlands and principal cities, recording landscapes, markets, monasteries, and the people encountered. It interweaves eyewitness sketches of urban life, religious and ethnic communities, diplomatic and military presences, and the shadow of insurgency and political violence. Rural routes, mountain passes, and frontier bridges are described alongside portraits of local guides, soldiers, brigands, and missionaries. Chapters map a progression from border crossings to capital cities and contested towns, combining descriptive travelogue, reportage on nationalist tensions, and anecdotal cultural observation, accompanied by illustrations and a regional map.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I am indebted to Mr. Smyth-Lyte for this section of the narrative.

[2] A foreign-made metal coin, worth about a farthing.

[3] A Turkish term denoting civilians, in contradistinction from soldiers.

[4] The number is probably an error of public crier Mecho.

[5] By ‘Odysseus.’

[6] An inscription on the blade of a yataghan possessed by the author reads: ‘Open the door to me in both worlds.’

[7] The figures were given me by Boris Sarafoff.

[8] Not all the munitions of war secretly brought into the country came through Bulgaria. Certain insurgent leaders who spoke Greek without a foreign accent worked in Greece, purchasing arms with the connivance of the Greek authorities under the pretext that they were leaders of Greek bands, hostile to the Bulgarians; and much dynamite was imported through the Turkish Custom-house at Salonica.

[9] Beside this record of the Turks stands a most dastardly deed on the part of the insurgents. Retiring from Nevaska a party of them laid a diligent trail to a spot in the mountains where they carefully prepared a lunch, poisoning the Mastica with arsenic, and leaving several bottles of it on the ground, to appear as if the band had left hurriedly at the approach of the Turks. This was told me in person by Tchakalaroff, the voivoda who led the band.

[10] The italics are the author’s.

[11] I have lost the name.