Beneath the stones and rubbish that cover the floor to the height of several feet, are the bones and ashes of 200 women and children burnt alive between those four walls. Just beside the schoolhouse is a broad shallow pit. Here were buried a hundred bodies two weeks after the massacre. But the dogs uncovered them in part. The water flowed in, and now it lies there a horrid cesspool, with human remains floating about or lying half exposed in the mud. Nearby, on the banks of the little stream that runs through the village, is a sawmill. The wheel-pit beneath is full of dead bodies floating in the water. The banks of this stream were at one time literally covered with corpses of men and women, young girls and children, that lay there festering in the sun, and eaten by dogs.
Even Tatar Bazardjik
But the pitiful sky rained down a torrent upon them, and the little stream swelled and rose up and carried the bodies away, and strewred them far down its grassy banks, through its narrow gorges and dark defiles beneath the thick underbrush and the shady woods as far as Pestera, and even Tatar Bazardjik. forty miles distant. We entered the churchyard, but the odour here became so bad that it was almost impossible to proceed. We took a handful of tobacco, and held it to our noses while we continued our investigations Istanbul Private Tours.
The church was not a very large one, and it was surrounded by a low stone wall, enclosing a small churchyard about fifty yards wide by seventy-five long. At first we perceive nothing in particular, and the stench is so great that we scarcely care to look about us, but we see that the place is heaped up with stones and rubbish to the height of five or six feet above the level of the street, and upon inspection we discover that what appeared to be a mass of stones and rubbish is in reality an immense heap of human bodies covered over with a thin layer of stones.
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