THROUGH THE LANDS OF THE SERB
By
MARY E. DURHAM
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1904
DEDICATED
TO
MY MOTHER
[Illustration: MONTENEGRIN WOMEN, CETINJE.]
CONTENTS
PART I
MONTENEGRO AND THE WAY THERE
I. CATTARO--NJEGUSHI--CETINJE
II. PODGORITZA AND RIJEKA
III. OSTROG
IV. NIKSHITJE AND DUKLE
V. OUR LADY AMONG THE ROCKS
VI. ANTIVARI
VII. OF THE NORTH ALBANIAN
VIII. SKODRA
IX. SKODRA TO DULCIGNO
PART II
OF SERVIA
X. BELGRADE
XI. SMEDEREVO--SHABATZ--VALJEVO--UB--OBRENOVATZ
XII. NISH
XIII. PIROT
XIV. EAST SERVIA
XV. THE SHUMADIA AND SOUTH-WEST SERVIA
XVI. KRUSHEVATZ
PART III
MONTENEGRO AND OLD SERVIA
1903
XVII. KOLASHIN--ANDRIJEVITZA--BERANI--PECH
XVIII. TO DECHANI AND BACK TO PODGORITZA
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MONTENEGRIN WOMEN, CETINJE
CEMETERY NEAR CETINJE
BAKER'S SHOP, RIJEKA--ALBANIAN AND TWO
MONTENEGRINS
BULLOCK CART, PODGORITZA
UPPER MONASTERY, OSTROG
RUINS OF ANTIVARI
MOUNTAIN ALBANIANS IN MARKET, PODGORITZA
STREET IN BAZAAR, SKODRA
SKODRA
MOSQUE, SKODRA
SHOP IN BAZAAR, SKODRA
MONTENEGRIN PLOUGH
SERVIAN PEASANT
TRAVELLING GIPSIES, RIJEKA, MONTENEGRO
SOLDIERS' MONUMENTS
CHURCH, STUDENITZA--WEST DOOR.
CORONATION CHURCH, KRALJEVO
TSAR LAZAR'S CASTLE
CHURCH, KRUSHEVATZ--SIDE WINDOW OF APSE
THE PATRIARCHIA, IPEK (PECH)
PODGORITZA
MAP OF THE LANDS OF THE SERB
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
In the spelling of proper names the
system adopted in the _Times Atlas_ has
been followed as nearly as possible.
Owing to the absence of Miss Durham in
Macedonia, the following pages have not
had the advantage of her revision in
going through the press.
PART I
MONTENEGRO AND THE WAY THERE
"What land is this?"
"This is Illyria, lady."
_Twelfth Night._
THROUGH THE LANDS OF THE SERB
CHAPTER I
CATTARO--NJEGUSHI--CETINJE
I do not know where the East proper begins, nor does it greatly matter,
but it is somewhere on the farther side of the Adriatic, the
island-studded coast which the Venetians once held. At any rate, as soon
as you leave Trieste you touch the bubbling edge of the ever-simmering
Eastern Question, and the unpopularity of the ruling German element is
very obvious. "I--do--not--speak--German," said a young officer
laboriously, "I am Bocchese"; and as we approached the Bocche he
emphasised the fact that he was a Slav returning to a Slav land. Party
politics run high even on the steamboat.
We awoke one morning to find the second-class saloon turned into a
Herzegovinian camp, piled with gay saddle-bags and rugs upon which
squatted, cross-legged, a couple of families in full native costume, and
the air was thick with the highly scented tobacco which the whole party
smoked incessantly. The friendly steward, a Dalmatian Italian,
whispered hastily, "This is a Herzegovinian family, signorin'. Do you
like the Herzegovinese?" Rather taken aback, and not knowing what his
politics were, I replied, stupidly enough, "I find their costume very
interesting," This frivolous remark hurt the steward deeply.
"Signorin'," he said very gravely, "these are some of the bravest men in
the world. Each one of these that you see would fight till he died."
Then in a mysterious undertone, "They cannot live without freedom ...
they are leaving their own land ... it has been taken, as you know, by
the Austrian.... They are going to Montenegro, to a free country. They
have taken with them all their possessions, and they go to find
freedom."
I looked at them with a curious sense of pity. Though they knew it not,
they were the survivors of an old, old world, the old world which still
lingers in out-of-the-way corners, and it was from the twentieth century
quite as much as from the Teuton they were endeavouring to flee. All
these parti-coloured saddle-bags and little bundles tied up in cotton
handkerchiefs represented the worldly goods of three generations, who
had left the land of their forebears and were upon a quest as mystical
as any conceived by mediæval knight--they were seeking the shrine of
Liberty. "Of old sat Freedom on the heights"; let us hope they found her
there! I never saw them again.
On the other hand, in a boat with Austrian sympathies, the tale is very
different. "I am a Viennese, Fräulein. Imagine what it is to me to have
to travel in this dreary place! The people?--they are a rough,
discontented set. Very ignorant. Very bad. No, I should not advise you to
go to Montenegro--a most mischievous race." "And what about Bosnia and
the Herzegovina?" "Oh, you will be quite safe there; _we_ govern that.
They are a bad lot, though! But we don't stand any nonsense."
Thus either party seizes upon the stranger and tries to prevent his
views being "prejudiced." He seldom has need to complain that he has
heard one side only; but there is a Catholic side, an Orthodox side, a
Mohammedan side, there are German, Slav, Italian, Turkish, and Albanian
sides; and when he has heard them all he feels far less capable of
forming an opinion on the Eastern Question than he did before.
Dalmatia has its charms, but tourists swarm there, and the picturesque
corners are being rapidly pulled down to provide suitable accommodation
for them. Let us pass on, then, nor pause till we have wound our way
through that wonderful maze of fiords, the Bocche, and landed on the
quay at Cattaro. Cattaro is a tiny, greatly coveted, much-fought-for
town. The natural port for Montenegro but the property of Austria, it
swelters, breathless, on a strip of shore, with the waters in front of
it, and the great wall of the Black Mountain rising sheer up behind. Its
"heart's in the Highlands," but the enemy holds it as a garrison town;
the Austrian army pervades the neighbourhood, and a big fort, lurking
opposite, commands the one road from mountain to coast. Cattaro, after
all, is only a half-way house to Montenegro, and this is why Austria
lavishes so many troops upon it.
Behind the town starts the rough zigzag track, the celebrated "ladder of
Cattaro," which until 1879 was the only path into Montenegro, and is
the one the peasants still use. The making of the road was for a long
while dreaded by the Montenegrins, who argued that a road that will
serve for a cart will also serve for artillery. A tangible, visible gun
was their idea of the means by which changes are wrought; but the road
that can let in artillery can let in something more subtle,
irresistible, and change-working. The road was made, and there is now no
barrier to prevent the twentieth century creeping up silently and
sweeping over this old-world land almost before its force is recognised.
Whether the hardy mountain race which has successfully withstood the
gory onslaught of the Turk for five hundred years, will come out
unscathed from a bloodless encounter with Western so-called civilisation
Time alone can tell.
The road from Cattaro to Cetinje has been so often written of that it is
idle to describe it once again, nor can any words do it justice. After
some three hours' climbing, we pass the last Austrian black-and-yellow
post, and the driver, if he be a son of the mountain, points to the
ground and says, "Crnagora!" (Tsernagora). Crnagora, gaunt, grey, drear,
a chaos of limestone crags piled one on the other in inextricable
confusion, the bare wind-swept bones of a dead world. The first view of
the land comes as a shock. The horror of desolation, the endless series
of bare mountain tops, the arid wilderness of bare rock majestic in its
rugged loneliness, tell with one blow of the sufferings of centuries.
The next instant fills one with respect and admiration for the people
who have preferred liberty in this wilderness to slavery in fat lands.
Wherever possible, little patches of ground are cultivated, carefully
banked up with stones to save the precious soil from being washed away,
and up on the mountain sides scrubby oaks dwarfed and twisted by the
wind find a foothold among the crags. Most of the men carry revolvers,
and the eye soon becomes so much accustomed to weapons that on a return
to unarmed lands everyone appears, for a few days, to be rather
undressed. The road winds, the red roofs of Njegushi come in sight, and
we make our first halt in a Montenegrin town, and rest our weary horses.
We enter the little inn, and our coachman claims his revolver, which is
hanging with several others behind the bar, for none are allowed to
enter Austria; they are deposited in some house near the frontier and
picked up on the way back. George Stanisich, the big landlord, hurries
up his womenkind to make ready a meal, looks after the drinks, and
converses cheerfully on the topics of the day--preferably on the war, if
there happens to be one. "Junastvo" (that is, heroism--"deeds of
derring-do") is a subject that occupies a large space in the Montenegrin
mind, and no wonder, and every man's ambition is to be considered a
"dobar junak" (valiant warrior) and worthy of his forefathers.
Njegushi cannot fail to make a most vivid impression on the mind, for it
is the entrance to a world that is new and strange. The little
stone-paved room of the inn, hung with portraits of the Prince and the
Tsar and Tsaritsa of Russia; the row of loaded revolvers in the bar; the
blind minstrel who squats by the door and sings his long monotonous
chant while he scrapes upon his one-stringed gusle; and the tall,
dignified men in their picturesque garb, all belong to an unknown
existence, and the world we have always known is left far below at the
foot of the mountain. In Njegushi one feels that one has come a long way
from England. It is, in fact, easy to travel much farther without being
so far off. Yet the Montenegrin love of liberty and fair play and the
Montenegrin sense of honour have made me feel more at home in this far
corner of Europe than in any other foreign land.
Njegushi is the Prince's birthplace. His ancestors were some of a number
of Herzegovinians who, intolerant of the Turk, emigrated in the
fifteenth century. The village they left was called Njegushi, and they
gave the same name to their new home. In connection with this I give
here a curious tale which I have met with more than once. I repeat it as
told; my informants, Servians, believed it firmly, but I can find no
confirmation of it.
When these Herzegovinese migrated to Montenegro, a large body of them
went yet farther afield and settled in the mountains of Abyssinia, among
them a branch of the family of Petrovich of Njegushi, from which is
directly descended Menelik, who preserves the title of Negus and is a
distant cousin of Prince Nikola of Montenegro, and to this large
admixture of Slav blood the Abyssinians owe their fine stature and their
high standard of civilisation, as compared with the neighbouring African
tribes.
The house of the Prince stands on the left of the road as we leave the
town. The road ascends once more; a steep pull up through a bleakness of
grey crags; we reach the top of the pass (3350 feet), and turn a corner.
"Cetinje!" (Tsetinye), says the driver briefly, and there, in the
mountain-locked plain far below, lies the little red-roofed town, a
village city, a kindergarten capital, one of the quaintest sights in
Europe, so tiny, so entirely wanting in the usual stock properties of a
big town and yet so consciously a capital. Two wide streets which run
parallel and are joined by various cross streets make up the greater
part of it, and it has some 3000 inhabitants. As we enter the town the
first building of importance stands up on the left hand, brand-new, a
white stone building with a black roof. To any other capital it would
not be remarkable either for size or beauty; here it looms large and
portentous. It is the biggest building in the town, and it is the Palace
of the Austro-Hungarian Legation. Not to be outdone, Russia has just
erected an equally magnificent building at the other end of the town,
which now lies between representatives of the two rival powers. "Which
things are an allegory." Twenty years ago Cetinje was a collection of
thatched hovels. To-day, modest as they are, the houses are all solidly
built and roofed with tiles. Few more than one storey high, many
consisting only of a ground floor, all of them devoid of any attempt at
architecture; not a moulding, a cornice, or a porch breaks the general
baldness: they are more like a row of toy houses all out of the same box
than anything else. The road is very wide, and very white; a row of
little clipped trees border it on each side, so clipped that they afford
at present about as much shade as telegraph posts, and they all appear
to have come out of the same box too. It is all very clean, very neat;
not a whiff offends the tenderest nostril, not a cabbage stalk lies in
the gutter. It is not merely a toy, but a brand-new one that has not yet
been played with.
Cetinje is poor, but dignified and self-respecting. A French or Italian
village of the same size clatters, shouts, and screams. Cetinje is never
in a hurry, and seldom excited. It contains few important buildings. The
only ones of any historic interest are the monastery, the little tower
on the hill above it where were formerly stuck the heads of slain Turks,
and the old Palace called the Biljardo from the fact that it contained
Montenegro's first billiard-table. It now affords quarters for various
officials and the Court of Justice. There are no lawyers in Montenegro,
and this is said to simplify matters greatly. The Prince is the final
Court of Appeal, and reads and considers the petition of any of his
subjects that are in difficulties. Such faith have folk in his judgment
that Mohammedan subjects of the Sultan have been known to tramp to
Crnagora in order to have a quarrel settled by the Gospodar. That he
possesses a keen insight into these semi-civilised people and a
remarkable power of handling them is evident from the order that is
maintained throughout his lands even among the large Mohammedan Albanian
population, and it would undoubtedly have been much better for the
Balkan peoples had he had larger scope for his administrative powers.
Cetinje's other attractions are the park, the theatre, and the market,
where the stranger will have plenty of opportunity of wrestling with the
language.
The language is one of the amusements of Montenegro. It is not an easy
one. I hunted it about London for months, and it landed me in strange
places. The schools and systems that teach all the languages of Europe,
Asia, Africa, and America know it not. In the course of my chase I
caught a Roumanian, a Hungarian, and an Albanian, but I got no nearer to
it. I pursued it to a Balkan Consulate, which proved to consist entirely
of Englishmen who knew no word of the tongue, but kindly communicated
with a Ministry which consisted, so they said, entirely of very charming
men, with whom I should certainly be pleased. The Ministry was puzzled,
but wished to give me every encouragement. It had never before had such
a run upon its language. It suggested that the most suitable person to
instruct me would be an ex-Minister who had come over to attend the
funeral of Queen Victoria. The ex-Minister was very polite, but wrote
that he was on the point of returning to his native land. He therefore
proposed that a certain gallant and dashing officer, attache to the
Legation, should be instructed to call and converse with me once a week.
"No remuneration, of course," he added, "must be offered to the gallant
captain." "But suppose," I said feebly, "the captain doesn't care about
the job; it seems a little awkward, doesn't it?" "Oh no," said the
Consul, exultant; "when he hears it is by the orders of X., he won't
dare refuse." As I am not a character in one of Mr. Anthony Hope's
novels, but merely live in a London suburb, I thanked everybody and
retired upon a small grammar, dazzled by the fierce light that my
inquiries had shed upon the workings of this Balkan State, and wondering
if all the others were equally ready to loan out Ministers and attaches
to unknown foreigners.
There is a childish simplicity about the conversation of the up-country
peasant folk that is quite charming. They are as pleased with a
stranger who will talk to them as is a child with a kitten that will
run after a string, and, like children, they have no scruples about
asking what in a more "grown-up" state of society would be considered
indiscreet questions, including even the state of one's inside. The
women begin the conversation and retail the details to their lords and
masters, who, burning with curiosity, stand aloof with great dignity for
a little while, and end by crowding out the women altogether. Neither
men nor women have the vaguest idea whence I come nor to what manner of
life I am accustomed. When they learn that I have come in a train and a
steamboat, their amazement is unbounded. That I come from a far countrie
that is full of gold is obvious. "And thou hast come so far to see us?
Bravo!" Much patting on the back, and sometimes an affectionate squeeze
from an enthusiastic lady, who at once informs the men that I am very
thin and very hard. "Bravo! thou art brave. Art married?" "No." Great
excitement and much whispering. "Wait, wait," says a woman, and she
shouts "Milosh! Milosh!" at the top of her voice. Milosh edges his way
through the crowd. He is a tall, sun-tanned thing of about eighteen
years, with the eyes of a startled stag. His mother stands on tiptoe and
whispers in his ear that this is a chance not to be lightly thrown away.
A broad smile spreads over Milosh's face. He looks coy, and twiddles his
fingers. "Ask her! ask her!" say the ladies encouragingly. "Ask her!"
say the men. Milosh plucks up courage, thumps his chest and blurts out,
"Wilt thou have me?" "No, thank you," I say, laughing; and Milosh
retires amid the jeers of his friends, but really much relieved.
"Milosh, thou art not beautiful enough," say the men; and they suggest
one Gavro as being more likely to please. Gavro takes Milosh's place
with great alacrity, and the same ceremony is repeated. The crowd enjoys
itself vastly, and tries to fit me out with a really handsome specimen.
I glance round, and my eye is momentarily caught by a very goodly youth.
"No! no! he's mine, he's mine!" cries a woman, who seizes him by the
arm, and he is hastily withdrawn from competition amid shouts of
laughter. "I have no money," says one youth frankly, "but thou hast
perhaps enough." "And he is good and beautiful," say his friends. For
they are all cheerfully aware that their faces are their only fortunes.
There is a barbaric simplicity and a lack of any attempt at romance
about the proposed arrangements which is exquisitely funny, for they are
far too honest to pretend that I possess any attractions beyond my
supposed wealth. I have often wondered what the crowd would do if I
accepted someone temporarily, but have never dared try. Five offers in
twenty minutes is about my highest record.
But all these are country amusements. Cetinje is far too civilised a
city to indulge in them, and to "see Montenegro" we must wander much
farther afield.
[Illustration: CEMETERY NEAR CETINJE.]