Note 77 — HISTORICAL REVIEW OF BOSNIA.

I am indebted for this fact to Mr. W. J. Stillman, the excellent correspondent of the Times in the Herzegovina, who gives an account of these refugees in a letter from Ragusa dated Oct. 19, 1875, which I may be allowed to quote as illustrating the more recent sufferings of this interesting sect, and the sad case of the Christian refugees of Bosnia and the Herzegovina generally. ‘The people of Popovo were tranquilly engaged in their fields and houses, when the troops—Regulars and Bashi-Bazouks—came up; the latter killed the first they came upon where they found them (one of them, the brother of a villager who had appealed successfully to the Pashà at Trebinje against the extortions of the Agas some months ago, being cut to pieces alive), and all the rest fled in panic. The good curé of Ossonich is doing all he can for them; but there are only eighty-five houses in this village, and he has 2,125 souls of the Popovites on his register for succour. Of these 300 were out on the mountain-side on the night of the worst storm we have had this season. One woman with a new-born babe was so exhausted in her flight that she went to sleep, sitting on a rock nursing her child, fell off in her sleep, and was found by one of the other peasants next morning still sleeping, with her babe at her bosom, in a pool of water which had fallen during the storm. The curé tells me that these people are mainly Bogomilites, remains of an ancient sect once widely spread in Bosnia and identical with the Albigenses.’ I observe that Jireček, quoting Kosanović (Glasnik 29, (1871), 174), alludes to a rumour that in the valley of the Narenta and near Creševo, ‘there are still Christians who neither submit to Franciscans, nor Popes, nor Imâms, but govern themselves according to old traditions, which an Elder delivers to the rest.’ I hope at some future period to be able to say more on the present state of the Bogomiles.