The Russian shells knocked down a large number of houses in this quarter, and these houses have never been rebuilt. Then, too, the Mahommedan population of Rustschuk are out of joint with the new order of things, and have left their homes to take refuge in lands where Islam is still the dominant creed; and, as a result, a large number of Turkish dwellings have been left empty and are rapidly falling to pieces. The minarets, however, still taper gracefully towards the sky; the muezzins still call out the hours of prayer; the turban is still the common head-dress of the men ; there are still veiled women to be met with in the streets; and the dull, sober tone of a Bulgarian city is still, to some extent, enlivened by the bright hues and tints of the Eastern world.

The inhabitants of Rustschuk claim that their town has increased so rapidly in population that it contains some five thousand more inhabitants than Sofia. This may be so, but the place did not impress me as covering anything like the area of the capital, though, owing to the comparatively large proportion of Turkish dwellings, in which it is always difficult to ascertain the exact number of the inhabitants, the total population may easily be more dense than it appears to be.

Christian population

The majority of the inhabitants are still Moslems or Jews by religion, and even of the Christian population the larger portion are Romanians and Austrians. The explanation of this fact is that Rustschuk is essentially a commercial city, and that the Bulgarians do not, as a rule, take kindly to trade, except of a retail kind. The small shops, dealing in the local wares of which Rustschuk is the mart, are mainly owned by Bulgarians.

But the warehouses and stores, where the goods imported from abroad are stocked, and where speculative sales and purchases are made in the hope of potential profit, are almost entirely in the hands of Greeks and Jews. The Bulgarians, with few exceptions, have not the knowledge of foreign languages, or the experience of foreign countries, requisite for import and export trade, if conducted on a large scale.

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