OF THE NORTH ALBANIAN
"The wild ass, whose house I have made the
wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. He
scorneth the multitude of the city, neither
regardeth he the crying of the driver."
The difficulty of the "Eastern Question," as it is called, lies in the
fact that it is not "a" question at all but a mass of questions, the
answering of any one of which makes all the others harder of solution.
Of all these, the Albanian question is the hardest to solve, and has not
as yet received the attention that it calls for and will shortly compel.
Few people in the West--none, I might almost say, who have not been to
Albania--can realise that to-day in Europe there lives a whole race, a
primeval lot of raw human beings, in a land that is not only almost
entirely without carriageable roads, but in which in many cases the only
tracks are even too bad for riding, the conditions of life are those of
prehistoric barbarism, and the mass of the people have barely even
attained a mediæval stage of civilisation.
When the Albanian arrived in Europe none knows, and authorities differ
as to his possible relationships with other people, but there is no I
manner of doubt that he is the direct descendant of the wild tribes that
were in the Balkan peninsula before the Greeks and before the Romans,
and have been variously described as Thracians, Macedonians, and
Illyrians, according to the part they inhabited. They are described as
having been fierce fighters and very wild, and they furnished Rome with
some of her best soldiers. Nor were they lacking in brain power; men of
barbarian Balkan blood arose who ruled their conquerors and provided the
Roman empire with a list of emperors that includes Diocletian and
Constantine the Great.
Empires have risen and empires have passed away, and the Albanian has
remained the same wild thing. The might of Rome waned; the Servian, the
Venetian, and the Ottoman have followed in turn. "Annexed" but never
subdued, the Albanian merely retired to the fastnesses of the mountains
and followed the devices of his own heart, regardless of his so-called
ruler. The Albanian of to-day is nominally under Turkish rule, but
nominally only.
The Albanian's position with regard to Turkey is a very peculiar one.
The Turk, so his friends tell us, has many admirable qualities, but even
those who love him best do not pretend that he has ever attempted to
civilise, cultivate, or in any way improve the condition of, his subject
races. Under the Turk all development is arrested, and nothing ripens.
The Albanian, for the most part, remains at the point where he had
arrived when the Turk found him, and except that he has adopted the
revolver and breechloading rifle, he has not advanced an inch. He is the
survival of a past that is dead and forgotten in West Europe.
His language has troubled philologists considerably. It is a soft, not
unpleasant-sounding tongue, full of double "shshshes" and queer
consonant sounds; such queer ones that it fits no known alphabet, and he
has never found out how to write it down. Quite recently several
attempts have been made, mostly by foreigners, to tame this wild
language to an alphabet, and three or four different systems have been
evolved, all more or less unsatisfactory, as no alphabet unaided can
cope with its peculiar sounds. One in which Roman letters are used and
plentifully strewn with accents, both above and below, is the most
favoured in North Albania, but the Turk does not allow Albanian as a
school language, the mass of the people speak nothing else, and Albania
remains a land without a literature, without a history, without even a
daily paper. To possess and use an unwritten language in Europe in the
twentieth century is no mean feat It carries one back to remote
prehistoric times, confronts one with blank unwritten days, and suggests
forcibly that the Albanian is probably possessed of raw primeval and
perhaps better-left-unwritten ideas. Our search for the live antique
cannot take us much further. But the Albanians, in spite of their
antiquity, are incredibly young as a people, and blankly ignorant of the
outer world. They are still in the earliest stage of a nation's life
history, and have not yet advanced beyond the tribal form of life.
At an early date--some say as early as the fourth century, but this
seems doubtful--the Albanians became Christian. I have failed to
discover what man or men succeeded in thus powerfully influencing this
very conservative people. It is a remarkable fact that, though all the
other Christians of the Balkans early declared for the Eastern Church
and all the Pope's efforts to reclaim them failed, the Christian
Albanians of the North have remained faithfully Roman Catholic.
The mountains of Albania, like those of Montenegro, are a series of
natural fastnesses, among which a small army of attack is massacred and
a large one starves. Moreover, a large part of the land was not worth
the expense of taking. The tribes were exceedingly ferocious, and would
have taken a great deal of conquering, but as they had no leader under
whom they could combine and make organised attacks, they were not the
danger to the Turks that the Montenegrins were. Moreover, the fact that
they belonged to the Western and not to the Eastern Church prevented
them from making common cause with the other Christian peoples. Once and
once only were they on the point of obtaining recognised national
existence, and this was under the leadership of the great Skender Beg.
But Skender Beg died in 1467, and as yet no one has arisen capable of
welding the semi-independent tribes into a solid whole. The Turks
purchase peace from them by leaving them to do as they please among
their mountains. The Albanians purchase privileges from the Turks by
fighting for them and supplying the Turkish army, as they did formerly
the Roman, with some of its best soldiers. And Albania to-day remains
separated into a number of distinct tribes, which are governed by their
own chieftains according to unwritten laws which have been handed down
orally from a very remote past. The Turkish "Government" has
practically no say in the matter. At any rate, what it says it has not
the power to enforce.
The Albanian is ignorant and untrained, but he is no fool. His one
ruling idea has been to go on being Albanian in the manner of his
fathers. He perceived quickly all the points that would enable him to do
so, and he seized upon them. The mountain people in the more
inaccessible parts retained their Christianity. The Albanians who
swooped upon the plains vacated by the Serbs found it greatly to their
advantage to profess Mohammedanism, and both Mohammedan and Roman
Catholic were ready to make common cause against the Christians of the
Eastern Church. So indispensable have the Albanians made themselves to
the Turkish Government that it has been forced to concede to them every
license, lest it should lose their support. Far from making any attempt
at civilising them, it has never scrupled to make use of their savagery
in warfare, and in warfare the Albanian can be exceedingly savage. Never
from the beginning of time has he been taught anything that the Western
world thinks necessary; never in the majority of cases has the most
rudimentary education come his way. His Mohammedanism and his
Christianity he practises in an original and Albanian manner, and in his
heart he is influenced mainly by traditional beliefs and superstitions
which are probably far older than either. He purchased his freedom by
making himself useful to the Turk, and the Turk has left him in the
lowest depths of barbarism. The only schools that exist in the land are
those of the Italian and Austrian Frati, and such civilisation as the
Albanian possesses he owes to the labours of these devoted men. As for
travelling and means of communication, it seems probable that the roads
to-day are far inferior to what they were in the time of the Romans. And
this is the land of the only one of her subject races with which Turkey
has been "friends." The deplorable state of Albania is an even stronger
indictment against Turkish "government" than that of Macedonia. To-day
the country is practically in a state of anarchy. Little or nothing is
done in the way of cultivation; blood-feuds rage, and men are shot for
quarrels that are family inheritances and originated for long-forgotten
reasons in the dark ages.
Human life is cheap, very cheap. An ordinary Englishman has more
scruples about killing a cat than an Albanian has about shooting a man.
Indeed, the Albanian has many of the physical attributes of a beast of
prey. A lean, wiry thing, all tough sinew and as supple as a panther, he
moves with a long, easy stride, quite silently, for his feet are shod
with pliant leathern sandals with which he grips the rock as he climbs.
He is heavily armed, and as he goes his keen eyes watch ceaselessly for
the foe he is always expecting to meet. There is nothing more
characteristic of the up-country tribesman than those ever-searching
eyes. I have met him many a time in the Montenegrin markets, in the
weekly bazaar in his capital, and on the prowl with his rifle far in the
country. Up hill or down hill, over paths that are more like dry torrent
beds, it is all the same to him; he keeps an even, swift pace, and he
watches all the time. Dressed as he is, in tightly-fitting striped
leg-gear and in a short black cape, his appearance is extraordinarily
mediæval, and he seems to have stepped straight out of a Florentine
fresco. His sash is full of silver-mounted weapons, he twists his
tawny-moustache, and he admires himself exceedingly. He walks with a
long rolling stride, planting his feet quite flat like a camel or an
elephant--a gait which gives him an oddly animal appearance. His boldly
striped garments, with their lines and zigzags of black embroidery,
recall the markings of the tiger, the zebra, and sundry venomous snakes
and insects. He seems to obey the laws that govern the markings of
ferocious beasts; his swift, silent footsteps enhance the resemblance,
and his colouring is protective; he disappears completely into a rocky
background. The black patterns vary according to the tribe he hails
from. If you ask his name, he generally gives you his tribal one as
well, and points over the mountains towards his district. He is
So-and-So, for instance, of the Hotti or the Shoshi. Most men, whether
Christian or Mohammedan, have their heads shaven; sometimes on the
temples only, the rest of the hair standing out in a great bush;
sometimes the entire head, with the exception of one long lock that
dangles down the back. There are two distinct types of Albanians--a dark
type with black hair, brown eyes, and clean-cut features, and a very
fair type, grey or blue-eyed, taller and more powerfully built. To this
class belong almost all the shaven-headed men with the dangling locks, a
row of whom, squatting on their heels, look remarkably like a lot of
half-moulted vultures. According to popular belief, the long lock is to
serve as a handle to carry home the head when severed. A head, it seems,
can be carried only by the ear, or by inserting a finger in the mouth,
and this latter practice the owner of the head, when alive, objects to!
But in spite of his wild-beast appearance and his many obvious faults,
the Albanian is by no means all bad. I will almost say that he possesses
the instincts of a gentleman. At any rate, he "plays fair," according to
his own very peculiar creed. He boasts that he has never betrayed a
friend nor spared a foe. It is true that "not sparing" includes torture
and various and most horrible atrocities, but it is a great mistake in
considering any of the Balkan peoples to make too much capital out of
"atrocities." A century ago every race, including our own, considered
the infliction of hideous suffering the legitimate way of punishing
comparatively small crimes. At the risk of being laughed at, I will say
that I do not believe the Albanian is by nature cruel. The life of the
poor up-country peasant is hard and rough beyond what anyone who has
only lived in a civilised country can realise, and the life of such a
man's beasts is of necessity a hard one also. But though I have met him
with his flocks on the hillsides and have watched him carefully in
street and market, I have never seen the Albanian torturing an animal
for the fun of the thing, as does the Neapolitan, the Provençal, and the
Spaniard. The revolting "jokes" with lame and helpless animals which can
be seen any day in the streets of Naples are not to be met with in the
capital of the bloodthirsty Albanian.
[ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN ALBANIANS IN MARKET, PODGORITZA.]
I have trusted the Albanian somewhat recklessly, I have been told; I
have given him plenty of chances of robbing me, and several of making
away with me altogether; but he has always treated me with a fine
courtesy, and has never taken a mean advantage. He is a brave man, and
he is an intelligent man. When he gets the chance, he learns quickly and
picks up foreign languages speedily. And when he succeeds in leaving his
native land and escaping the awful blight of the Ottoman, he often shows
great business capacity, and a surprising power of adapting himself to
circumstances.
The ordinary Christian Albanian of the town is very different from the
up-country savage, and is a pathetically childish person. He tries very
hard to be civilised, but his ideas on the subject are vague. How far he
is from understanding the prejudices of the twentieth century the
following conversation will show. It is one of many similar. I was
walking up the steep, cobble-stony bazaar-street of Antivari late one
afternoon in the summer of 1902. The shop owners stood at their doors to
see me pass. Presently a man came forward, a tall, fair, grey-eyed
fellow. He spoke very politely in a mishmash of Servian and Italian. "I
have never seen a foreign woman before," he said, "will you come into my
shop and talk to me?" I followed him into his shop. As I was
unmistakably from the West, he gave me a tiny box to sit on, and then
squatted neatly on the ground himself, called for coffee, and started
conversation. He was amazed at my nationality, and showed me some cotton
labelled "Best hard yarn" among his goods. Otherwise "England" conveyed
no idea to him. England, having no designs on Albania, does not count
much as a Power with the ordinary Albanian, but is merely something
distant and harmless that does not matter, whereas an eye is kept on
Austria and on Italy, and Russia is regarded with extreme suspicion.
"And you have come all this journey to see us!" he cried. "It is
wonderful! I am a Christian Albanian. I am Catholic." Here he crossed
himself vigorously to show that he really was, for in these lands your
position in this world and the next depends mainly upon how this is
done. "Ah, but you should see Skodra!" I told him I knew it well, and he
beamed with pleasure. We discussed its charms and the unsurpassed
magnificence of its shops. "And it is in the hands of those devils the
Turks. Ah, the devils! I came here eighteen years ago with my father,
because this is a free land. Here all is safe, but it is a poor country.
When I was a boy I was bad. I went to the school of the Frati, but I
would not learn. Now I know nothing, and I speak Italian, oh, so badly!"
He rocked himself sadly to and fro with his big account-book on his
knees. Son of the race with the worst reputation in Europe and born in
one of Europe's worst governed corners, he lamented (as which of us has
not done?) the lost chances of his youth and his lack of book-learning.
To comfort him, I told him his people in Skodra had been very good to
me. He cheered up. "Why do you come here?" he asked. "Why do you not
travel in my country?" I said that I was told that it was a bad time and
the country very dangerous. He considered the question earnestly, and
looked me all over. Then he said seriously, "No; my people are very good
to women, they will not hurt you. But there is no government, so the bad
people do what they like. There are some bad people; Turks, all Turks.
But there is no fear. Truly they will take all your money, but they will
not hurt you. That," he said simply, "would not be honest. My people are
all honest. You must not shoot a woman, for she cannot shoot you. Now
with a man it is different; you must shoot him, or he will shoot you
first. Also you cannot take his money if you do not shoot him first." To
all of which points I agreed.
"Truly it is a misfortune," he continued, "that there is no government.
If we had only a king!" "Do you think you will have one?" I asked. He
chuckled mysteriously. The air just then was thick with rumours of a
Castriot descendant of the Skender Beg family who at that very moment
was reported to be awaiting an opportunity for landing in Albania.
Reports of his fabulous wealth were arousing much excitement in the
breasts of his prospective subjects, but I fancy a rumour of their
custom of "shooting first" must have reached his ears; for, so far, this
middle-aged gentleman, whose life has been passed in Italian palazzos,
has shown no hurry to take up his inheritance. My friend's ideas were
vague and formless, and he could get no farther than "a king for Albania
and death to those devils the Turks." After a little more talk, I got up
to say good-bye. But he insisted upon my having more coffee first. "It
is true that I am poor," he said, "but I am not too poor to give two
cups of coffee to one who has come so far to see us. Some day in your
country you will see some poor devil from Skodra, and you will be good
to him because his people are your friends." Nothing could exceed the
grace with which he proffered hospitality to a stranger guest, but he
saw no objection to robbery with murder if committed according to rule;
and he prided himself on his Christianity. He shook hands with me very
heartily. "A pleasant journey," he said. "Remember me when you meet a
Skodra-Albanian in London. I shall never see you again--never, never."
The sun was setting rather dismally, and with "nikad, nikad" (never)
ringing in my ears and the gaunt ruins of the dead city before me, I
felt quite as depressed as the Albanian. Truly the Albanian outlook is
not a cheerful one.
In the larger towns, where Turkish troops are quartered and there are
plenty of Mohammedan officials, the Christians are in the minority, and
their cowed manner makes it fairly obvious that they have a poor time.
But the Christians of the mountains very much hold their own. The
Mirdite tribe in the heights between the Drin and the coast is entirely
Christian and one of the most fiercely independent. The town Christian
who has picked up a smattering of education from the foreign Frati, has
had a peep at the outside world and vaguely realises the blessings of
life in a well-ordered land, sighs for some form of civilised
government. Some have even told me that they wish to be "taken" by
somebody--"by Austria, or Italy, or you, or anybody. It could not be
worse than it is now." But the mass of the people resent most fiercely
the idea of any foreign interference, and cling fast to their wild and
traditional manner of life. Whether Christian or Mussulman, the Albanian
is intensely Albanian. A Christian will introduce you to a Mohammedan
and say, "He is a Turk, but not a bad Turk; he is good like me; he is
Albanian." The Christian that the Albanian Mussulman persecutes is, as a
rule, the Christian of another race. Between Christian and Mohammedan
Albanian there is plenty of quarrelling, but then so there is between
Christian and Christian, Mohammedan and Mohammedan. It is of the
blood-feud, intertribal kind, played according to rule; for even in
Albania it is possible, if the rules be not observed, for killing a man
to be murder. When a common enemy threatens, a "bessa" (truce with one
another) is proclaimed, and they unite against him. The chief tribes in
Northernmost Albania are the Hotti along by the Montenegrin frontier and
by the lake; the Shoshi and the men of Shialla and of Skreli in the
mountains above the plain of Skodra; the Mirdites in the mountains
between the Drin and the coast; and the Klementi on the Montenegrin
frontiers by Mokra and Andrijevitza.
The Turks from time to time, when the Albanians have been more than
usually lively, by various means (including treachery) have contrived to
give the chieftains of one and another "appointments" in remote corners
of Asia Minor, but with no results so far, except that the people,
deprived of the only man who had any authority over them, became yet
more unmanageable. Even the mildest of the town Christians takes a
delight in pointing out in the bazaar the tobacco which has paid no duty
and saying, "We pay no tax for tobacco; we are Albanian, and we do not
like to." The Turks have been unable to enforce this tax, and have to
content themselves by searching the baggage that leaves the country and
opening the hand-bags of tourists to prevent tobacco from leaving
untaxed.
The Albanians seldom do anything they "do not like," and they are quick
to object to any interference. Just now they have been objecting to
"reformation" on Austro-Russian lines. The so-called reforms were the
laughing-stock of everybody--Servian, Montenegrin, and Albanian--when I
was out there last summer. For the Albanian's "unreformedness" has
always been his chief attraction in Turkish eyes, and in order to give
him every opportunity to behave in an "unreformed" manner, when the
spirit moved him, the Turk in recognition of his services in the last
war supplied the Albanian lavishly with weapons. Christians throughout
the Turkish dominions have always been forbidden to carry arms. The
Christian Albanian alone has this privilege. Every mountain man has
firearms of some sort, many of them fairly modern rifles. It is one
thing to give a man a gun and quite another to take it away from him.
When the weapons were merely used upon the wretched unarmed Servian
peasants in the plains of Old Servia, not a soul in any part of Europe
save Russia paid the smallest attention; but when Stcherbina, the
Russian Consul, fell a victim, it was a different matter, and the Turks
found themselves in the unpleasant position of having either to offend
Russia or to quarrel with their best allies. They proceeded to "reform"
Albania on truly Turkish lines. They chased the Albanians out of the
territory they had had no business to have swooped upon, and they
arrested a few leaders as a matter of form. The Albanians were
astonished and rather aggrieved, for they had done very little more
than they had always been given to understand they might do. Further
interference might have alienated the Albanians altogether, but as for
the sake of appearances and the "reform scheme" some non-Mohammedan
officials had to be appointed, the Turks sent an Armenian and a Jew,
called respectively Isaac and Jacob, to Skodra. Isaac and Jacob were
shot in the main street in the day-time, and as far as I have heard
their situations are still vacant. The affair caused some little amount
of excitement, nevertheless the Albanians did not wish to resort to
violence so long as the "Government" did not make itself disagreeable.
There is an old tomb in Skodra, the last resting-place of some minor
Mohammedan saint. Shortly after the deaths of Isaac and Jacob some
mysterious writing was found upon the tomb. Though written in very
ordinary charcoal, it was obviously of more or less divine origin, and
the people anxiously waited the deciphering of the message. It proved to
be merely a piece of a verse from the Koran conferring a vague blessing
upon somebody. "Allah be praised!" said an old hodja, greatly relieved,
"it has not told us to go and shoot any more reformers!"
There were a great many more soldiers in Skodra than before. I asked
several people the reason of this, in order to see what they would say.
They one and all said, with a smile, "The Turks want to reform Albania,
but they are obliged to send the soldiers to the towns, because the
people in the country do not like them!" The town swarmed with soldiers.
An officer rushed at my old guide, whom I was employing to interpret for
me in the bazaar, and abused him in a loud voice till I interfered; a
soldier seized and beat very severely a wretched little boy who begged
of me, and my efforts on his behalf were of no avail; and these were all
the results of the reforms that I saw or heard of in Skodra.
But the idea seems gaining ground that the Albanian in the event of a
war may cease to support a dying cause and elect to play a game of his
own. When, as must inevitably be shortly the case, Macedonia is under a
Christian governor, Albania will be yet more separated from the present
seat of government (Constantinople), and the situation will become
acute. I heard a good deal about "the king that is to be." Many Serbs
even expressed their opinion that the Albanians would be a great deal
better if their independence were recognised; saying that at present
they are responsible to no one; the Turk incites them to commit
atrocities, and washes his hands of all they do; and that left to
themselves the Albanians would develop into a fine people. That they
have the makings of a fine people is probably true. That they are now
capable of self-government is quite another thing. Unlike the other
Balkan peoples, they have no past, no former empire. Their history is
all "years that the locusts have eaten." What is to become of the
Albanians? is one of the hardest of all the Eastern questions. Austria
desires to have the answering of it.