An essay by their fellow countryman Edward Stearns, concerning Bulgaria, has gained enormous popularity among the English. Under the title “There Is No Simpler People Than the Bulgarian” he published his impressions, his experience, and his disappointment at the mistake of buying property in our country:
Lately it has become fashionable among us Britons to buy property in Bulgaria. On the one hand, the genuinely beautiful landscape we can only dream of here; on the other, the low prices of village houses and the tempting offers of gated complexes — the scales tipped toward what looked, at first glance, like a bargain. But friends, do not make the mistake I made: do not buy property in Bulgaria, do not set foot there, do not do business, and avoid any contact with Bulgarians. Because on the other side of the scale, relentlessly, weighs the simple-mindedness of the Bulgarian people. A simple-mindedness that is murderous, despairing, immeasurable, terrifying, all-embracing, dangerous, relentless, staggering!…
The Bulgarians, I dare say, are the simplest people on earth. There is no simpler people than the Bulgarian, and here I should like to make one distinction. By “simple people” I do not mean a people that is illiterate, ignorant and uneducated. No! They are literate, but they are blockheads. They are educated, but they are hollow. They are intelligent, but they are simple. For an ignorant people is one that has had no chance to make use of modern schooling, of access to information, of the chance to exchange ideas with the nations of the whole world. I would not call those peoples simple, because they live in some kind of society, however primitive; they hold together and look for a way to develop. The Bulgarians, on the contrary: they have enormous opportunities, they are educated and informed, their land is magnificent, their geography strategic — and they squander it all, sell it, wipe it out, destroy it, because they are simple.
They are not even a people, but a rabble of simple men, because nationhood is not merely belonging to a given patch of geography: it is a set of shared aims, ideas and values, a set of shared actions meant to develop the whole of society, shared actions to realise those ideas and to guard those values. None of that exists among the Bulgarians. I use the word “people” in their case only out of a kind of propriety; if I were frank, I would call them a rabble of idiots — idiots in the Greek sense of the word. I even doubt that the Bulgarian people exists today. To me the Bulgarians have vanished, and in their place some kind of mob remains. No, that is inexact, because a mob has some common purpose, and they have none; no, they are not even a mob. They are different people who happened to land in the same place, with different aims, trapped in the geography they happen to inhabit, and burdened with the history of those who once lived there, whose heirs they consider themselves by some unfathomable logic.
What kind of Bulgarians are they? How does this rabble dare to stain the name of that ancient and great people? Is it possible that what they are making today as history should be entered in the historical account of a people such as the Bulgarian? Hands off the name “Bulgarians”, you simpletons. You are not, and you could not be, Bulgarians. Because to call yourself a Bulgarian it is not enough to lean on genes: you must have spirit, will, strength. Not merely to rattle off the names of historical figures and heroes, but to imitate their deeds, to follow their ideas, to carry out their dreams for Bulgaria.
“But how so,” you will ask, “is there nothing that unites these people who inhabit this territory called Bulgaria?” There is, of course: they have common traits, but those traits do not make them a community, do not make them a people — they are sell-outs, envious and thieves. They do not strive to better their own lot: it is enough for them to rejoice in the misfortune of those around them, and if by chance they see no one more unfortunate than themselves, that makes them unhappy. They do not rejoice in other people’s achievements; they look for a way to spoil them, smear them and wreck them. If someone decides to do something for the common good, they take him for a fool, they mock him and they jeer. Money is the driving force for them; for money they will do anything — here honour, lawfulness, morals are simply empty words.
“But why do you say they are simple?” you will ask. Because they have everything a person needs in order to see where he is going wrong. All the necessary information about their own position as a nation, about the reasons they are in this unenviable state, about the measures they must and can take to get out of it — and still they hope to be put right by precisely those who brought them to that state. They protest against those who cheat them, rob them, use them and oppress them, and at the same time they leave their future in those same hands. They are indignant when they themselves become the object of a fraud, and they gloat when the one defrauded is somebody else.
The Bulgarians consider themselves tarikati — a word I would find hard to translate into our language. Broadly speaking, a tarikat is a swindler, petty and grand, but a cowardly swindler: timid, frightened, always glancing over his shoulder, and yet proud of being a swindler. His swindling, however, is of a kind that most often leads to his own downfall.
What, if not simple, must you be to rejoice in another’s misfortune instead of fighting it. How can you gloat that this or that foreigner was robbed, cheated and beaten in your own country, and still expect to profit from him. You have to be very simple to take pride in the inventiveness of your own criminals, whose victim tomorrow may be you. You have to be very simple to take pride in knowing criminals, and to threaten others with those acquaintances, instead of helping to expose and convict them. You have to be very simple and spineless if you see lawlessness and do not resist. You have to be very simple to believe that those to whom you have entrusted the running of your country, the judging of you, the charting of your future — that they will bring in the rule of law, because they are precisely the ones who break the law.
You have to be very simple to rejoice that the Greeks are supposedly about to become as badly off as you, and not to understand that you go on sinking without a murmur while they go on fighting relentlessly. Not to see that even bankrupt as a state, as a society they are light-years ahead of you. That even their wages, by which you measure everything, are many times larger than your paltry handouts.
You have to be very simple to work for people who think they are above the law, to let them pile up fat profits at your expense, to watch every day their mockery of the state and of you yourself. And if some outside observer happens to show you all those illegalities of which you are a daily witness, thinking you do not see them, you simply shrug and say: “Well, what can I do?”
You have to be very simple to count on slipping between the drops yourself, when around you a rain of injustices is falling. That you, of all those around you who like you are trying to survive, will be the one who makes it. That somebody else must lead some other people in order to put your life in order. You have to be very simple, very cowardly, very spineless.
You have to be very simple to believe that your country will come right while you are thousands of kilometres away from it, looking for security and happiness where somebody else has already won them. You have to be very simple to think that the future of your country depends not on your actions but on the actions of the rest, while at the same time, by some absurd logic, you have an enormous opinion of yourself and of your unrealised, unappreciated abilities. You have to be very simple.
You have to be very simple to live in an earthly paradise and destroy it. You have to be very simple to believe the television, to think with the television, to listen to the television, to take in the world through the television, and not through your own judgement of what is happening around you.
Do not do business with these people, do not associate with them, destroy them. They will betray one another of their own accord and help in their own destruction. They are that simple.
Note: there is no original English text. Edward Stearns is fictional; the essay was written in Bulgarian and published on Bazikileaks as a supposed translation from an Englishman.