BULGARIAN ATROCITIES.

Northern Advocate, 26 August 1913, Page 5

BULGARIAN ATROCITIES.

DESCRIBED BY PIERRE LOTI. "HORROR UPON HORROR'S HEAD" THE SHAMBLES OF ADRIANOPLE (By Telegraph-Press Assn.-Copyright) LONDON, Aug. 25. Pierre Loti, the celebrated novelist and litterateur, and a member of the French Academy, in a telegram to the " Daily Telegraph," declares: " The Bulgarians are making Thrace a desert surpassing in abomination everything told or imagined. " The village of Haonza, which may be regarded as typical of hundreds of others, is a heap of ruins. " Turkish prisoners and wounded villagers were compelled to smash the sculptured . marbles in the mosques with sledge-hammers, while the Bulgarians harassed them with bayonets. Every column in the cemetery was broken and the dead exposed. The Bulgarians amused themselves by defiling the scattered bones and casting the violated bodies of women and children into a well.

Only forty out of a thousand inhabitants escaped massacre.

"The last night of the Bulgarians' occupation of Adrianople," continues M. Loti, "was terrible. Greeks were tied four and four and thrown into the river. "The Bulgarians piled boats ana carts with captives, and were about to start at daybreak, when they were interruoted by the unexpected arrival of the Turks.

"Before quitting, the Bulgarians threw into a well the few remaining prisoners, and returned to capture Rechid Bey. They tore out both his eyes from their orbits and severed his arms.

"Four thousand Turkish prisoners were herded on an island in the river an order that they might die of

hunger. "I saw trees," concluded the narrator, "despoiled of their bark, which famished prisoners had devoured. The Bulgarians, a'fortnight after this torture, cut the throats of those still alive."