Greeks, Turks, Romanians, Bulgarians

"I have been informed by a gentleman who has resided forty years in Turkey, that when he first entered the Ottoman dominions every educated Bulgarian called himself a Greek, and would have been ashamed to employ his national designation, which was hardly in general use before the movement of 1860." 

(From the anonymous introduction to the 1890 edition of Kinglake's Eothen.)


Victorian Englishmen before the Armenian and Bulgarian atrocities assumed all Christian subjects of the Sublime Porte, including Romanians, were Greeks. When Bulgarian nationalists spoke to villagers in what is now called Northern Macedonia about their nationality the only reply they got was that they were Christians (source Mark Mazower's The Balkans). In Romania in the 1860s an Ottoman official said 'all Romanians of distinction' spoke Greek (to him), but not Turkish (ibid).

In Turkey in 1890 any man of distinction would have been ashamed to call himself a Turk. The country was ruled by Ottomans and the word Turk was derogatory, like the derogatory racial epithets that it is dangerous even to quote without bowdlerising, in these straitlaced days. Kemal, when he created modern Turkey insisted on making the word the basis of the Turkish national state, which is why the Kurds will never sign up for it. Kemal of course  named himself Ataturk, Father of Turks.

The anonymous preface of 1890 goes on:

"The “unchanging East” is a popular phrase which is only true in a very limited sense. It has arisen chiefly from the habit of pious publishers of representing Abraham in the costume of a modern Bedouin Sheikh, and it is peculiarly audacious to apply it to regions like Constantinople and Egypt, which have witnessed exceptional vicissitudes and undergone remarkable changes,—political, religious, and linguistic. It is however just to say that the Turk is unchanging,—and it is to the presence of the Turk that are due the peculiar characteristics of the Levant, as the region visited by Kinglake may conveniently be termed; like the Bourbons, he forgets nothing and learns nothing; as he was on the day when he entered Europe, so he was in 1834 and so he is now. The boundaries of Turkey have changed; there are now no Pashas at Belgrade, or even at Sofia; and Ottoman territory is no longer plague-stricken. But whenever one crosses the Turkish frontier, one may find functionaries like the delightful potentate of Karagholookoldour, and be conscious of effecting within the space of a few hundred yards a change greater than can be experienced in any amount of travel in other European countries, including Russia. One passes from regions where people have roughly the same habits and ideas as ourselves—where they believe in political economy, get drunk in public, sit upon chairs, and do not feel there is anything indelicate in mentioning their wives—to a land where people do none of these things, where the naked desolation of the country at the side of the railway offers a startling contrast to the smug prosperity of the Balkan States, where people prefer to sit curled up on hard sofas, and where it is bad taste to condole with a man on his wife’s death."

Ataturk changed Turkey into a modern state and prosperity has changed the East, but Turkey, now purged of the large Christian minorities who lived there in 1890, is still not (and I'd argue never will be) part of Europe, whereas Russia is.