These were women who had escaped from the massacre, and had only just returned for the first time, having taken advantage of our visit or that of Mr. Baring to do so. They might have returned long ago, but their terror was so great that they had not dared, without the presence and protection of a foreigner, and now they would go on for hours in this way, "keening " this kind of funeral dirge over their ruined homes. This was the explanation of the curious sound we had heard when up on the hill.
As we advanced there were more and more ; some sitting on the heaps of stones that covered the doors of their houses ; others walking up and down before their doors, wringing their hands and repeating the same despairing wail. There were few tears in this universal mourning. It was dry, hard, and despairing. The fountain of tears had been dried up weeks before, but the tide of sorrow and misery was as great as ever, and had to find vent without their aid.
Five hundred people
As we proceeded most of them fell into line behind us, and they finally formed a procession of four or five hundred people, mostly women and children, who followed us about wherever we went with their mournful cries. Such a sound as their united voices sent up to heaven I hope never to hear again.
It may be well, before going further, to say something about Batak, so that the reader may form a better idea of what took place here. It was a place of nine hundred houses, and about 8,000 or 9,000 inhabitants. As there are no census statistics, nor, indeed, trustworthy statistics of any other kind in Turkey, it is impossible to tell exactly what the population of any place is or was.
But the ordinary rule of calculating five persons to the house will not hold good in Bulgaria. The Bulgarians, like the Russian peasantry, adhere to the old patriarchal method, and fathers and married sons, with their children and children s children, live under the same roof until the grandfather dies Guided Istanbul Tour.
As each son in his turn gets married, a new room is added to the old building, until with the new generation there will often be twenty or thirty people living under the same roof, all paying obedience and respect to the head of the family. In estimating the population, therefore, by the number of houses, somewhere between eight and ten souls must be counted as the average. Edip Effendi, in his report, states that there were only about 1,400 inhabitants in the village, all told.
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