English: Two courageous and enlightened British ladies, Mackensie and Irby, travelled through a large part of the Balkan peninsula in the years 1862 and 1863. They published their studies in 1867 in London in the book „The Turks, the Greeks and the Slavons. Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe. By G. Muir Mackenzie and A. P. Irby, London, 1867. With Maps etc.” The authors approached their subject very seriously. Everywhere they went they met the local people and collected information from them. The information was later checked with the consuls and missionaries. Their conscientiousness and objectivity was so high that when in Constantinople, they met with representatives of both the Greek Patriarchate and the Bulgarian people in order to verify once more the collected by them data. Simultaneously, they also investigated the ongoing at that time Greko-Bulgarian church dispute which ended with the creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870. How much their book was appreciated by the people versed in these matters is seen by the fact that it was translated into several languages and that a second edition appeared in 1877, with a foreword by the great Gladstone.

The book is supplemented with an ethnographical map which we reproduce in facsimile in the size of the original. As it can be seen from this map almost the whole of Macedonia (to the west reaching the river Cherni Drim and to the south-west – the mountain Gramos), the whole district of Nish, Dobrudzha and a part of southern Bessarabia are included in the boundaries of the Bulgarian people.

It is worth mentioning the interesting detail that this book was translated into Serbian by the well-known Serbian statesman and academician Cheda Mijatovich who also served several times as Serbian minister and who was for several years the Serbian ambassador in London until the brutal murder of the dynasty of Obretenovich in Serbia. Mr. Mijatovich presented this book to the Serbian people with one foreword, full with admiration, in which not only there is not a single word of objection that Macedonia and the district of Nish are shown as Bulgarian lands but he even praises Mackensie and Irby for their objective depiction of the Slavic peoples in Macedonia, Bosnia and Hertzegovina. And the Serbian readers of this book did not object either.