SKODRA
Skodra is the capital of North Albania. In our maps it is usually called
Scutari--a name which causes it to be confused with the other and far
better known Scutari on the Bosporus. In a French paper I once read an
account of "the Prince of Montenegro's palace on the Bosporus" which
described the Princes country place at Podgoritza, near the lake of
Scutari. But the French seldom shine as geographers.
Skodra can be reached from the port of St. Giovanni di Medua, at which a
line of Lloyd steamers calls regularly. From thence a ride of nine
hours, if you can find a horse, will take you by a very bad road to the
town. But even from the Turks, who take a _couleur-de-rose_ view of the
resources of their land, I failed to learn that the route offered any
attractions. It can also be reached by a steamer which, when there is
enough water in the river, ascends the Bojana as far as Obotti, whence a
barge will wobble you up to the town in an hour or thereabouts.
By far the prettiest and pleasantest route is that from Cetinje by the
lake. The _Danitza_, the chief vessel of the Montenegrin squadron
according to the engineer, runs twice a week from Rijeka. It is a
clean, tidy little boat built in Glasgow, and is very fairly punctual as
to time. The sluggish stream meanders slowly in and out the hills; the
channel of deep water serpentines through acres of water-lilies, white
and yellow, whose leaves form a dense mat on the surface and a happy
hunting-ground for the water birds--duck, moorhens, herons, spoonbills,
and pelicans. It is a færie river, with the magic of the hills upon it,
all silent save for the flap of the herons that rise as the boat glides
past. Half choked with reeds and weeds which grow rankly luxuriant and
rot in tangles, it tells of the making of the fertile lands of
Montenegro, for the plains are all ancient lake beds from which the
water has retreated. One hears without surprise that fever haunts the
river in autumn, but, judging by the healthy appearance of the folk of
the neighbourhood, it cannot be of a very virulent type, and at no time
of the year have I met with any mosquitoes.
At the rivers mouth stand wretched shanties of rock and brushwood, the
dwellings of the fisher-folk who reap, in the late autumn, a plenteous
harvest. Vast shoals of small fish called "scoranze" rush up the lake
from the sea, and are netted in such thousands that, dried and salted,
they form one of Montenegro's chief exports.
[ILLUSTRATION: STREET IN BAZAAR SKODRA.]
We pass the island of Vranina and glide out into the great green lake,
leave the heights of Montenegro behind us, and see at the farther end
the "Accursed Mountains" of Albania purple in the distance. The waters
of the lake, according to the Albanians, are endowed with marvellous
curative properties. You must drink of them for a month, and then, no
matter what is your disease, you "throw it all up," or else you die!--a
severe kill--or--cure remedy upon which I have never experimented. We
stop at Plavnitza and at Virbazar to pick up passengers, who come out in
big canoes with long, upturned, pointed prows, and the deck is soon
crowded with gay baggage and its strange owners, all of whom are usually
anxious to make friends. You have only to show an interest in the
women's babies and the men's weapons to secure entertainment for the
rest of the voyage. "Show the lady your new gun," said a tall Albanian
to a youth. He passed over a Russian repeating rifle. A woman who was
standing near hastily got out of the way. The Albanian expressed
contempt. "It might go off," said the woman. "Well, what if it did?"
laughed the Albanian. "Look at me. I've been shot twice. It's nothing.
Once I was hit here," he touched his shoulder; "and the doctor cut out
the ball with a knife," he added with great satisfaction. "My brother
died," said the woman briefly.
So on, in leisurely fashion, till at the end of the lake we see the
Crescent flying from an antiquated warship--the red flag and the dying
moon that we falsely call the "crescent," for it will never wax again. I
confess that I never see it on the borders without a curious thrill. I
was brought up to consider the Turk a virtuous and much injured
individual. Now I never cross his frontier without hoping soon to be
able to witness his departure from Europe.
A shattered fortress frowns on the hill, a row of ramshackle buildings
lines the shore, a filthy crowd fills the custom-house steps.
Scutari--Albanese, Skodra at last. Time rolls back from the invisible
boundary against which the centuries have beaten in vain, and before us
lies the land of a prehistoric people and the life of past ages. Canoes
big and little come paddling out in a scrambling hugger-mugger;
Montenegro becomes, for the time being, a type of all that is most
civilised in West Europe, and we leave it behind us on the steamboat.
The custom-house is a dark den, in which everyone shouts at once and
tumbles over everyone else. Smuggle your dictionary, if you have one, in
an under pocket; there is no knowing, says the Turk, what a book in a
foreign language may contain, so away with them all. There are few
things more deadly. Passports are, or are not, asked for according to
the amount of political tension. I have heard of two individuals who
"rushed" that frontier by the aid of receipted bills, the stamps on
which gave them a pleasingly official air, and have twice myself crossed
the Turkish frontier "when I hadn't ought." Anyone with an ounce of wits
can, I believe. And really there is something to be said for a passport
system that is warranted to exclude no one but the fools. The Persian
who inspects the passports, on this occasion, merely asked for our
names, which were too much for him. We gave him our visiting cards; he
copied our Christian names letter by letter, then, exhausted by the
effort, he added London as sufficient address, and the ceremony was
complete. He is a humble youth, will accept twopence as bakshish, and be
your dog for a florin. Like most Turkish officials, he exists, I
presume, on the pickings of his office. And the nation he loves the
best in all Europe varies according to the nationality of the individual
he is addressing.
One gets used to arriving at Skodra as one does to most other things,
but the first visit is an amazement. It will be some time before I
forget that day when we emerged for the first time from that
custom-house. The captain of the steamer ruthlessly whacked off all the
would-be porters except one small boy, and bade him take us to the
carriage stand. Off sped the boy like a hare, threading the mazes of the
bazaar, dodging round corners and plunging down dark airless passages,
his bare feet gripping the pavement, we following hard on his heels,
dazzled by sun-spots, blinded in the darkness, confused by the unwonted
sights, and slithering on the slippery cobblestones which slope down to
the gutter in the middle where the pack-asses walk and the muck
accumulates. Finally, after a ten minutes' chase, he halted us
breathless on an open space on the farther side of the bazaar, stowed us
into the remains of a peagreen fly, and accepted sixpence with
gratitude. Off we rumbled down a lane that, but for its wayfarers, might
be English, so familiar are its hedges, ditches, bramble and clematis,
and we reached the residential part of the town and a decent hostelry in
about twenty minutes.
Skodra is not merely an interesting spot to visit from Cetinje; it also
belongs rightly and properly to Servian history. From a very early
period (it is said the seventh century) it formed part of the Servian
territories, and it remained unconquered after the fatal battle of
Kosovo. It was the capital of George Balsha, Prince of the Zeta, and was
resigned by him into the hands not of the Turks, but the Venetians,
traces of whose architecture yet remain in the town. Though more than
once attacked, it was not taken by the Turks until 1479, and then only
after a siege of six months. Now the Turk holds Skodra, the Albanian
calls it his, and the Montenegrin has never forgotten that it once
formed part of the great Servian Empire. According to the Albanian, it
is the finest city in Europe, and when he tells you so he is proudly
speaking what he believes to be the literal truth. To him it is an ideal
spot, the model of what a capital should be, and the centre of his
universe.
The Albanian may be caught young, and tamed; he may wander into far
countries; he does a good trade in Rome; he may even live years in
England; but for him a glory always hangs over the capital of his
country. He is rare in London; there are only two or three of him, and
he was hard to find. I tracked him to a far suburb, and when he learnt
whence I had come his enthusiasm was unbounded. The greatness and
magnificence of his country made it not at all surprising that the whole
of Europe coveted it, and he gloried in the fact. "Not that Russia, nor
them Austria, nor nobody," he said, "was going to have it! English mans
silly mans; no understand my people. My people all one week like that";
here he whirled his arms wildly round his head; "next week go back work.
Olright. War with Turks? No, ain't going to be none." "Isn't the Turkish
government a hard one?" I asked. "There ain't no government," said he
gleefully. "What about the taxes?" "Oo pay?" said the Tame Albanian;
"you tell me that." Money, he admitted, had to be raised at intervals,
but you always lived in hope that it would be raised in some other
district, and if you displayed a proper amount of spirit it was. In the
days of his youth he had fought for the Turks. "I Bashi-bazouk," he said
with pride; "reg'lar army all them Mohammedans. I Catholic. I good
Christian. I Bashi-bazouk." To us Bashi-bazoukdom and Christianity are
odd yoke-fellows. To him, quite right and proper.
Head of a flourishing business in London, and clad in a smart overcoat
and a billycock hat, he sat down cross-legged on the floor, and his eyes
sparkled as he thought of the good old Bashi-bazouk days. To London he
came because, as everyone knows, "there is lot of money in London." He
knew no word of English and but little Italian; had scarcely any money;
his entire stock in trade consisted of some native costumes and some
silver filigree work. Failure would seem to have been inevitable, but
the pluck and enterprise of the ex-Bashi-bazouk overcame all
difficulties. "You think my country wild country," said he; "now I tell
you--London; it big bad place. Five million peoples in London. My God,
what a lot of criminals! In my country no man starve. He knock at door.
'What you want?' 'I hungry.' 'Olright, you come in.' He give him bread,
he give him wine. In London you say, 'You git 'long, or I call a
p'leece.'" Wherever a Christian Albanian requires help, he has but to
knock at the door of another Christian Albanian and say so. No payment
is ever thought of. "How should we live," said a man to me, "if we did
not help one another?" Compared with Albania, London, even now in the
eyes of the ex-Bashi-bazouk, is a vast and uncivilised wilderness.
Perhaps he is right. Nevertheless, he has found it an excellent place to
get on in. His wife--"my Albanian missus," as he called her--had, he
confessed, a very poor time. Knowing no language but Albanian, and
sighing always for the sun and the shores of the lake of Skodra, she was
near weeping when she heard that I had just come from the beloved spot.
She wore a red cap with coins round it, and a medal dangled in the
centre of her forehead. She seemed singularly out of place in a London
back-shop. "By God," said her husband casually, "I'm sorry for that pore
fem'le!" And he had a certain sympathy for her, in spite of his cheerful
tone.
"Earth hunger," the fierce desire for a particular plot of ground, a
plot which reason may point out to be barren, arid, lonesome, and in
every way unlovable, but which is the cradle of the race, is and perhaps
will always be one of the most unconquerable of human passions. The Tame
Albanian says he means to end his days in "the finest city in Europe,
Skodra."
It is not a salubrious spot. It is suffocating in summer and flooded in
winter. It suffers from heavy rains, and lies low. Its one virtue is
that it does not possess mosquitoes, but it makes up for this by being
full of tuberculosis. Nevertheless, it grips one's imagination, it
arouses the sleeping spirit of first one and then another long dead
ancestor who lived in the squalid, glittering Middle Ages and before,
and they point the way and they whisper, "Such and such we did, and this
also--_do you not remember_?" and strange things that one has not seen
before seem oddly familiar; three or four hundred years ago, they or
something very like them were part of one's daily life.
In the bazaar down by the river, with its maze of narrow crooked
streets, its crazy wooden booths and its vile pavement, life goes on
much as it did with us ages ago. Each trade has its own quarter, as in
all Eastern bazaars. And narrow ways, called Mercery Street, Butchers'
Row, Goldsmiths' Alley, in many an English town, still tell of the time
when so it was in England, in days when timber was as cheap, streets as
crooked and narrow, and pavement as bad as they are now in Skodra. And
then in England, as now in Skodra, people wore colours--red, blue,
green, yellow--and those that could afford it were brave with
embroideries. Their wants were few, luxuries there were few to be
purchased, and they showed all their worldly goods upon their persons in
a blaze of gold and finery on high days and holidays. Skodra does so
still, and so does every peasant and many a nobleman in the old-world
Balkan peninsula of to-day. Gorgeous garments solidly made they are, for
they will not go out of fashion next season, nor the season after, never
indeed until Albania is "civilised," and when will that be? So the
finery is made to last, and is worn and worn till it descends to
"Petticoat Lane" and is bought by the very poor. And when the stitchery
is all rubbed off by the friction of years, still the garment hangs
together, and is worn until it finally drops off piecemeal in squalid
rags. All these garments, however gorgeous without, are lined with
coarse materials, often pieces that do not match patched together, for
the Albanian ideas of dressmaking are old-world. The modern modiste has
invented cotton and linen costumes lined with silk or satin. Her
ancestress, however, acted on the Albanian plan, and the beautiful silk
and brocade costumes that have come down to us from Elizabeths and
Charles I.'s time are finished within with coarse and unsightly canvas.
Near the entrance of the bazaar are the workshops of the carpenters, who
make and carve great chests to hold the clothes, gaudy things painted
peagreen and picked out with scarlet and gold, degenerate descendants of
the beautifully carved and coloured chests in which all Europe kept its
clothing in Gothic and Renaissance days. The makers of the chests
fashion, too, wonderful cradles, coloured in the same gay manner, and in
them the babies are packed and slung on pack-saddles or on women's
backs. In a land of rough travelling, a strong box in which to pack the
baby is a necessity, and doubtless our ancestors used the solid oak
cradles we know so well in a like manner. Any day in the bazaar is
interesting, for the shopmen nearly all make their own goods. The
gunsmiths fill cartridges all day long, for they are an article much in
demand, repair rifles and revolvers, and fit fine old silver butts,
gorgeous with turquoise or cornelian, on to modern weapons. The
silversmith squats cross-legged on the floor with a tray of burning
charcoal, some tweezers, a roll of silver wire, and a little box full of
silver globules. He works silently, deliberately, with long, nimble
fingers picking up the tiny globules and arranging them, snipping and
twisting the little bits of wire, building up and soldering with great
dexterity the most effective designs--designs with sides that match, but
are never quite symmetrical, like Natures own work, satisfying the eye
in a way that no machine-made article ever will. However rough his
workmanship, his idea is almost always good, and he produces daring
effects with glass rubies and emeralds of the largest size. In work of
this sort the Albanian excels. When he comes to larger constructions,
his trick of working by eye and getting balance by instinct is not so
successful; his rooms are all crooked, his houses out of the square.
Perhaps this is the inevitable out-come of his odd-shaped mind. It is
rumoured that three-sided rooms may be found in Skodra, for the simple
reason that somehow the builders, owing to a nice confusion of angles,
could not squeeze in a fourth wall.
They are an honest, civil lot, these Skodra tradesmen; and though your
money will probably fly from hand to hand and disappear round the
corner, the change always comes back correctly in the end, and you pass
the interval drinking coffee with the shop owner. If your purchases are
many, he will kindly send out to buy a piece of common muslin in which
to wrap them; for Skodra does not supply paper, and when you have bought
a thing, conveying it away is your own affair. We in London are used to
having paper included lavishly with the goods, but an old lady once told
me that in her young days the fashionable drapers of London would lend
linen wrappers to those who bought largely, and the said wrappers had to
be returned next day. In this particular Skodra is not more than eighty
or ninety years behind London.
To see the bazaar in all its glory one must go on a Wednesday; that is
"bazaar day," and all the folk of the surrounding country flock
thither. "Which is bazaar day in London?" I have been asked any number
of times by Serb, Montenegrin, and Albanian. And "Every day is bazaar
day in London" is the one thing that gives them any idea of London's
size. The five million inhabitants, railway trains, electric lights, and
so forth, are all quite beyond their ken; but "bazaar every day" stuns
and dazzles them, and at once calls up a picture of vast crowds and
illimitable wealth. On "bazaar day" Skodra is thronged with strange
types--costumes bizarre, grotesque, wild and wonderful, and the road
from an early hour is crowded with flocks, pack-animals and their
owners. Flocks as strange as their drivers, for the ram of the pattering
drove of sheep is often dyed a bright crimson, and his horns instead of
curling neatly round by the sides of his head are trained to stand up
like those of an antelope with their tight twist pulled out to long
spiral His fashion is an even older one than that of his masters, for we
find the ram with the same head-dress in early Egyptian frescoes. For
some of these people it is three, even four days' tramp down to the
market from their mountain homes, and over the rough tracks the women
carry incredibly heavy burdens; not only the bundles of faggots or hides
that are for sale, but the baby in a big wooden cradle is tied on the
top. The men march in front with their rifles and look after the flocks.
Firearms have to be left outside the bazaar. It is true that a good
number of people are still privileged to carry them, but I have haunted
the bazaar quite alone so often that I have ceased to believe in the
many blood-curdling tales about its murderous possibilities with which
travellers are usually favoured. Nor, when you once know your way, do
I think any guide or kavass necessary. It is very dull with a kavass,
for no one comes to play with you. I tried it once for an hour or so,
and never again. But though you see no murders, you may see cases where
apparently vengeance has been satisfied with mutilation, and meet a man
whose nose has been cut off so lately that a bloodstained rag covers the
vacancy. And the mountain-man swaggers up to the cartridge shop and
fills the many spaces that have occurred in his belt since last he came
to market.
[ILLUSTRATION: SKODRA.]
I have no space to describe the dresses of the various tribes; the women
with stiff, straight, narrow skirts boldly striped with black that
recall forcibly the dresses upon the earliest Greek vases; the great
leathern iron-studded belts; the women with cowries in their hair; the
wild men from the mountains in huge sheepskin coats with the wool
outside; town Christian women blazing in scarlet and white, masses of
gilt coins, silver buttons and embroidery; Mohammedan ladies shapeless
in garments which may be correctly termed "bags," or to be still more
accurate, "undivided trousers," of brilliant flowered material, not only
thickly veiled but with blue and gold cloth cloaks clasped over the head
as well, shrouding the figure and allowing only a tiny peephole through
which to see; poor women, veiled down to the knees in white, looking
like ghosts in the dark entrances; Turks in turbans, long frock-coats
and coloured sashes; little girls their hair dyed a fierce red and their
eyebrows blackened. They all unite in one dazzling and confused mass
which one only disentangles by degrees, and when I plunged for the first
time into that unforgettable picture, saw the blaze of sunlight, the
dark rich shadows, the gorgeousness, the squalor, the glitter, the
filth, the colour, the new-flayed hides sizzling in the sun and
blackened with flies, the thousand and one tawdry twopenny articles for
sale on all hands, I thought with a pang of the poor Albanian "fem'le"
who was passing weary, colourless hours in a grey London suburb, and
understood the sickness of her soul.
Of all the old-world things in the town--older than the neatly cut
flints for the flintlocks that are still in use, older than the tight
mediæval leg-gear--the loose tunic bound round the waist by a sash and
the full drawers tied round the ankle, as worn by the common Mohammedan
men and boys of the town (a very ordinary dress throughout the East) is
the oldest. It is the dress of the men on the early Greek vases; of the
Dacians on Trajan's column; of the captive Gauls in the Louvre; the
dress, in short, of all the "barbarians," the "braccati" of the Romans.
The Romans and the toga and the chlamys are all gone, and here, in the
same old place, the barbarians are cutting their skirts and trousers on
the same old pattern, and are very fairly barbarous still. But they have
learned to shave their heads and to wear a white fez, and with this
modification we at once recognise them as our old friend Pierrot, whose
history points to the fact that he really did come from the Near East.
Venice held all the Dalmatian coast and part of Albania. Venice was the
home of masques and pantomimes, and among the existing prints of the
pantomime characters is one "Zanne" in the familiar "Pierrot" dress.
What more likely than that the fool of the piece should be represented
as a boor from a conquered province? To this day, in so-called civilised
towns, an unhappy foreigner is still apt to be considered a fair butt by
the lower classes. Zanne came to England, and figures among the sketches
for one of Ben Jonson's masques.
Skirts with us are purely feminine garments, but the skirt of the
barbarian has grown in Albania into a vast unwieldy kilt, and the
Mohammedan Bey swaggers about in a cumbrous fustanella which reaches
down to his ankle and sticks out like an old-fashioned ballet-girl's
skirt. He cannot work because he wears the fustanella, and it is said
that he wears the fustanella in order to be unable to work. Forty 1
metres of material go to this colossal and ridiculous garment. The
greater part of the fulness is worn in front, and sways clumsily from
side to side as the wearer walks. The Greeks adopted it in a modified
form, but it must be seen on an Albanian to realise its possibilities.
The Albanians have rarely, as yet, succeeded in doing anything in
moderation. After seeing what the men were capable of in the skirt line,
I was not surprised that the shepherd-folk out on the plains began by
asking my guide with great interest if I were a man or a woman.
But we must leave the bazaar, though many days do not exhaust its
interests; leave the butchers' quarter, a harmony in pinks and
blood-red, where the dogs lap red puddles, the butcher wipes a wet knife
across his thigh, and the people run about with little gobbets of mutton
for dinner, a fiercely picturesque place sicklied with the smell of
blood; leave the "Petticoat Lane" of Skodra, where the cast-off finery
of Albanian ladies and the trappings of beauty are displayed alongside
heaps of the most hopeless rags. Aged crones as antique as their wares
squat upon the ground. The sunlight blazes on the gold stitchery till it
sparkles with its pristine splendour; the hag in charge of it,
Atropos-like, points out its beauties with a large pair of shears, while
Lachesis spins a woollen thread alongside. I vow they are the Fates
themselves selling the garments of their victims.
By the afternoon the crowds of country-folk are already reloading the
pack-animals, decked with blue bead headstalls and amulets to keep off
the evil eye, that await them at the entrance of the bazaar, where the
gipsy smiths and tinkers work, half stripped, a-ripple with tough
muscle, under little shanties made of sticks and flattened-out petroleum
cans. How the land got on before the petroleum can was introduced it is
hard to imagine. In the hands of the gipsies it is the raw material from
which almost everything is made.
The peasants load their beasts--they are adepts at pack-saddling and you
rarely see a sore back--and trail slowly across the plains towards
their mountain homes. The bazaar is shut up, darkness comes on fast, and
belated foot passengers pick their way with lanterns.
Night in Skodra is uncanny. The half-dozen tiny oil lamps do not light
it at all. When there is no moon, the darkness is impenetrable and
absolute, save perhaps for a long streak of light from the door-chink of
the next shop and the lighted windows of the mosque opposite. The black
silhouettes of praying figures rise and fall within them, but the mosque
itself is swallowed up in the surrounding blackness. A spark appears on
the roadway, someone passes with a lantern and disappears. The street is
dead still till a sword clanks and the patrol marches past. The lights
are extinguished in the mosque. The darkness is dense and dead, and
there is no sound. It is only nine o'clock, but all Skodra seems asleep.
Skodra the town, as distinguished from the bazaar, has not a great deal
to show. It is a big town with some 40,000 inhabitants, and as all
houses of any size stand in a large yard or garden, it covers much
space. Here every man's house is his castle, and the high walls are not
only for seclusion but for defence. Skodra, from time to time, receives
a rumour that thousands of armed men are marching upon it. All the shops
are shut, the guards are doubled on the bridges, and folk shut
themselves in their houses. The phantom army does not appear, and in two
or three days things are going on as before. "But it will come some
day," said a man, when I laughed about a reported army of forty thousand
that had never turned up.
The Mohammedan quarter has the air of being far more wealthy and
high-class than the Christian. The houses that one gets a glimpse of
through the gateways are large and solid. But the streets are lonesome
and deserted. Now and then I met a couple of veiled ladies, who, if no
man were in sight, usually strove hard to make my acquaintance, and
partially unveiled for the purpose. But as I know neither Turkish nor
Albanian, we never got farther than the fact that I was "a Frank" and a
deal of smiling and nodding. Two in particular walked a long way with
me, chattering all the time, and for the benefit of the inquisitive, I
must say that they were both very pretty girls. In Skodra not only the
Mohammedan but the town Roman Catholic women go veiled, though the
country-folk do not, and until married are often kept in a seclusion
which to our ideas is little short of imprisonment--facts which throw a
strong light upon the unlovely state of society which has made them
necessary; for the etiquettes of society are usually based upon raw and
unpleasant truths. It is idle folly to ascribe Western and
twentieth-century ideas to these primitive people, but the fact remains
that the life of the average Albanian woman is an exceedingly hard one.
That of the country-folk is a ceaseless round of excessive physical
toil; that of the poorer town woman is, I am told, often spent at the
loom from morning till night--labour that only ends when the Black Fate
snips her thread.
[ILLUSTRATION: MOSQUE, SKODRA.]
Though the Mohammedans far outnumber the Christians in the town, the
mosques are all small plain buildings, only saved from ugliness by the
elegance of their tall slim minarets, nor are there many of them. With
a grotesque lack of a sense of the fitness of things, the Turkish army,
when it has a washing-day, uses the largest graveyard as a
drying-ground, and a shirt or a pair of drawers flaps on each tombstone.
It was not until I saw this sight that I had any idea that the Turkish
soldiers ever had a washing-day. A lean, unkempt, ragged lot of poor
dirty devils with scowling faces, they look more as if returning from a
disastrous campaign than as if quartered in the barracks of the capital.
And the sight of them is enough to make one have no difficulty in
believing the tale that they not unfrequently help themselves to mutton
from across the frontier when the "Government" is discreetly gazing in
another direction. Their powers of endurance in war-time are not
surprising when their life during "peace" is taken into consideration. A
fight in which you may loot all you want must be a pleasant holiday by
comparison.
The Christian quarter of Skodra looks less flourishing, and there are
crosses on some of the doors, otherwise the two quarters are much the
same. The Roman Catholic townsfolk wear a special costume. That of the
men is odd; that of the ladies perhaps the most hideous that has been
ever devised. Their gigantic trouser-petticoats of purple-black
material, in multitudinous pleats, fall in an enormous bag that sticks
out all round the ankles, and impedes the wearer to such an extent that
she often has to hold it up with both hands in front in order to get
along. With her face veiled and the upper part of her body covered with
a scarlet, gold-embroidered cloak with a square flap that serves as a
hood, she forms an unwieldy, pear-shaped lump--grotesque and gorgeous.
The streets here are apt to be flooded in wet weather, and the side
walks are high. Big blocks of stepping-stones, like those at Pompeii,
afford a way over the road, nor do carts seem to find any difficulty in
passing them.
The cathedral of the Roman Catholics is a large brick building, some
fifty years old, with a tall campanile, standing in grounds which are
surrounded by a high wall. Its great blank interior, owing to lack of
funds, has not suffered much from "decoration." At the gateway the women
loosen their veils and go into God's house with uncovered
faces--beautiful faces, with clean-cut, slightly aquiline noses, clear
ivory skins, red lips, and dark eyes with long lashes. There are benches
in the nave, but a large proportion of the congregation, especially the
country-folk who crowd in on feast days, prefer to sit on the floor;
they spread a little rug or handkerchief, kick off their shoes and squat
cross-legged on it as in a mosque; women with their breasts covered with
coins that glitter as they sway to and fro in prayer; mountain-men with
their cartridge belts upon them ready for use against a brother
Albanian. A fine barbaric blaze of colour, scarlet and scarlet and
scarlet again. The service begins; harshly dissonant voices, loud and
piercing, chant the responses; and the deep sonorous voice of the young
Italian at the altar rings out like the voice of civilisation over the
barbaric yowling of the congregation. As he mounts the scarlet and gold
pulpit there is a hush of expectation. The sermon, in Albanian, is a
long one, and the crowd hangs breathless on his words. His delivery and
his action are simple and dignified, and I watch him sway his
congregation with deep interest, though I can understand no word. He is
working up to a climax, and he reaches it suddenly in a sentence that
ends in the only non-Albanian word in the sermon, "Inferno." The word
thunders down the church on a long-rolled "rrrr," and he stands quite
silent, grasping the edge of the pulpit and staring over the heads of
the people. There is a painful hush, that seems like minutes. Then he
suddenly throws himself on his knees in the pulpit and prays. Violently
moved, his flock prostrate themselves in a passion of entreaty, and
those who sit on the ground bend double and touch the floor with their
foreheads.
The barbaric gaudy congregation, the ascetic earnest young teacher, the
raucous wailing voices that rang through the great bare church, made up
a poignantly impressive, quite inexplicable whole. I gazed upon the
praying crowd and wondered vainly what their idea of Christianity may be
and what old-world pre-Christian beliefs are entangled with it. The
Albanian clings to these through everything, and in spite of all their
efforts the Frati have as yet made little or no headway against
blood-feuds. The Albanian has never adapted himself to anything; he has
adapted the thing to himself. He practises the Christianity upon which
he prides himself, with the ferocity with which he does everything else.
He fasts with great rigour, wears a cross as a talisman, and is most
particular to make the sign of the cross after the Latin and not after
the Orthodox manner. But his views are very material. "Have you got the
Holy Ghost in your country?" I have been asked more than once. And an
affirmative answer brought the enthusiastic remark, "Then England is
just like Albania!" The life of Benvenuto Cellini is interesting reading
after a tour in Albania, for it represents with remarkable fidelity the
stage in religious evolution to which the wild Albanian of to-day has
arrived.
Difference of religion is usually given as the reason for the fact that
the Albanian has almost invariably sided with the enemies of the other
Christian peoples of the Balkans. One suspects, however, that it is
rather "the nature of the beast" than the particular form of belief that
he has chosen to profess that has cut him off, his fierce independence
rather than his religious creed, and the more one sees of him the more
probable does this appear.
There are very few Orthodox Albanians in Skodra. Such as there are wear
the same dress as the Mohammedans, but the women are not veiled.
Skodra, except in the way of customs, possesses few antiquities, save
the ruins of the old citadel which crown the hill overlooking the town.
These are said to be of Venetian origin and to have been fairly perfect
till some thirty years ago, when the local Pasha, having heard of
lightning conductors, determined to buy one for the better protection of
the tower, which was used as a powder magazine. To this end he chose a
handsome brass spike, and then found he was expected to pay extra for a
lot of wire. Being economical, he took the spike only, had it fixed to
the topmost tower, and anxiously awaited a storm. It soon came! The
handsome brass spike at once attracted the lightning. Bang went the
powder magazine, and the greater part of the citadel was shattered
before his astonished gaze. The hill now is crowned with a heap of
ruins, but as strangers are strictly forbidden to visit it, I presume
the Turks have constructed something that they consider a fortress among
them.
At the foot of this hill are the ruins of a small church. Big white
crosses are painted upon it, and it is considered a very holy spot.
Every Christian peasant stops as he passes it and crosses himself, and
though all that is left are fragments of the walls, I have been told
that a service is still occasionally held in it. The only other relic of
past days in the neighbourhood is the fine stone bridge with pointed
arches near Messi, about four and a half miles from Skodra across the
plain. This is undoubtedly Venetian work. The stream it spans is a
raging torrent in the wet season, and has wrought much damage in the
town and devastated a large tract of the plain. The rest of this is
covered with short turf and bracken fern, and grazed by flocks of sheep
and goats. The herdsmen, shaggy in sheepskins and armed with rifles, the
strings of country-people and pack-animals slowly tramping to or from
market, and the blue range of rugged mountains make up a strange, wild
scene. Nor, if you take an Albanian with you to do the talking,--for
everyone "wants to know,"--does there appear to me to be any danger in
wandering there.
Skodra is the capital, but it has no decent road to its port. It is
situated on the outlet of the lake, but though a little money and work
would make the Bojana River navigable for small steamers, and all the
shores of the lake would thus be put in direct communication with the
sea, nothing is done, and this, which should be the chief trade route
for North Albania and a large part of Montenegro, is of little use.
Skodras exports are not enough for Skodra to worry about greatly. Hides,
tobacco, some sumach root and bark for dyeing and tanning, some maize
and fruit, and a number of tortoises, which the Albanian finds
ready-made, form the bulk of the exports of the neighbourhood. Skodra is
one of the few capitals which you can leave with the certainty of
finding it exactly the same next year.