Read & Reflect

In 1857, the Rev. Cyrus Hamlin of Bangor, Me. took off for the Turkish province of Bulgaria. His instructions: "The people needs to be taught to read, hear and reflect." Few did more to teach Bulgarians to read and to reflect than Cyrus Hamlin and his Protestant missionary friends. They translated the New Testament into Bulgarian and helped bring out the first periodical in the Bulgarians' native tongue. When the Turks massacred Bulgarian rebels in 1876, it was the missionaries' protests that did much to make Bulgarian liberation into a world cause. After the liberation in 1878, the missionaries stayed on to form centers of Western thought in the Greek Orthodox state.

"The Real Culprit." The 15 Protestant pastors who sat in Sofia's courtroom accused of espionage and black-marketeering (TIME, March 7) were the spiritual descendants of the same U.S. missionaries. As their trial wore on, it became plain that the pastors were being tried solely because of their Western traditions and connections. The Communist prosecutor, his witnesses and even the defendants' lawyers joined in denouncing "American imperialism as the real culprit on trial."

The pastors, broken in pretrial examinations, had "confessed." Said the Rev. Zdravko Beglov: "The last three months were not the most agreeable of my life, but they were the most useful. I read 12,000 pages of progressive literature. The security police's attitude was one of trying to explain to me that I was misguided."

The pastors' lawyers also plugged their clients' cultural guilt as proof that they had been led astray. Intoned one: "The defendants were not only obedient tools, they were ideologically convinced tools. The defendants are victims of a foreign influence." Another made it even plainer where his sympathies really lay. "My client," he said, "is a weak-willed person [who] sold out to the Anglo-Americans. I ask for one year in prison for my client. If he does not like the way I am defending him, he ought to be frank and say so."

"Abundant Evidence." Thus cheered on by the defense, Prosecutor Dimiter Georgiev saw no reason to prolong the trial. He produced no documentary evidence of the espionage charge and cut his witnesses short. Said he: "The evidence is abundant and clear." He demanded the death penalty for four of the defendants, heavy prison terms for the others.

Last week Presiding Judge Konstantin Undzhiev pronounced sentence. Because of the "pastors' honest and sincere confessions," said Undzhiev, he had waived the death penalty. The four principal defendants--the heads of Bulgaria's Congregational, Baptist, Methodist and Pentecostal churches--got life imprisonment; nine of their associates drew prison terms ranging from five to 15 years, and two got off with suspended sentences.

The Western tradition would be suspended in Bulgaria for a while.

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