THE PILGRIMAGE ON THE FOREST-MOUNTAIN.
Through the Forests of the Black-Mountain—The Flower
of Illyria—A Mysterious Fly—Enchanted Ground—The Fairy
Mountain—Great Christian Pilgrimage—The Shrine on the
Mountain-top—Christian Votaries in the Garb of Islâm—The
Night-encampment—How the Turks dance—Anacreontic Songs—An
Epic Bard, Poetic Genius of Bosniacs—Insolence of Turkish
Soldiers and their Ill-treatment of the Rayahs—Types at
the Fair—Aspect and Character of Men—_Chefs-d’œuvre_ of
Flint-knapping—Christian Graveyard and Monastery—Dismiss our
Zaptieh—Night on Forest-mountain of Troghìr—Wrecks by Wind
and Lightning—Scene of Forest Fire—Timber Barricades—Summit
of Vučia Planina—A _Bon-vivant_—Steep Descent—Night in a
Hole—Almost impassable Gorge—Egyptian Rocks—Repulsed from a
Moslem Village—Tombs of the Bogomiles—Arrive at Franciscan
Monastery of Gučiagora—Fears of a Massacre—Relations of
Roman Catholics with the Turks—Austrian Influence in
Bosnia—Aspirations of the Bosnian Monks.
At last we made our escape from the Kaïmakàm, and, escorted by our
new Zaptieh, began ascending the Crni Vrch, or Black-Mountain, named,
like the Crnagora (Montenegro), not from any blackness of the rock,
but from being covered with dark forests, or simply from its savage
wildness, ‘black’ being with the Sclaves synonymous with everything
harsh and fierce. About an hour and a quarter’s ascent brought us to one
of its summits, when we passed a Mahometan woman, who, though veiled,
went through the absurd formality—common enough among the Bosniac
Mahometans—of squatting against the roadside with her back turned towards
us till we had put a sufficiency of road between her and ourselves.
Further on we came to a shed such as we had seen in the vale of Ussora,
where we regaled ourselves with coffee, and a chubby kind of cucumber,
which however our Zaptieh was the only one to fancy.
Beyond here the scenery became wilder and indescribably beautiful. On
one side rolled out beneath us the Possávina and the winding vale of
Bosna, and far beyond the dim ranges of Slavonia; on the other side
rose the peaks and shoulders of Vlašić and Troghìr and a tossing sea of
low mountains, the nearer billows green with the fine forest growth,
into which we now plunged—and to quit the scorching sun of noon for
woodlands still fresh with the dewy coolness of night is indeed to take
an aërial bath! The beeches amongst which we now steered our course,
by a meandering forest-path, were no longer gnarled and stumpy, but
tall and queenly, as those of an English park. Amongst them, here and
there, towered isolated oaks, champions as it seemed of a lost fight,
tough rugged old barbarians, battling every inch with those civilised
victorious beeches—hemmed round but unyielding—heroic, taking every
attitude of god-like struggle—here a manly, muscular Laocöon, wrestling
with serpentine brambles and underwood, that insinuates itself among the
knotted limbs—a mighty Hercules, uplifted arm and club as to fell the
hundred-headed Hydra—or there sovereign Jove, the Thunderer himself,
hurling—so the jagged branches interpreted themselves—forked lightning at
the beechlings round! But in vain. The oaks must be content to reign in
plain and valley. On these uplands the beeches camp triumphantly, till
higher still the pines repulse them from the mountain citadel, and in the
great struggle for existence each tree finds its own level.
But how soft the refrain from this deep bass of nature! Pale,
dreamy tufts of male and lady fern, delicately luminous in the
forest-depths, Canterbury bells — for English pilgrims, what fitter
accompaniment?—vibrating to the zephyrs in the orbs of sunlight; brighter
still, the ruby coronals of sweet-williams; and, where it should be,
among its native mountains, luxuriant gentian, drooping like Solomon’s
seal, weighed down as with elfin vases of lapis lazuli. This is the
flower of Illyria, which, as Pliny tells us, took its name from her
last king—that Gentius who ruled these lands in the days of Perseus of
Macedon, and who first brought into credit the virtues of the herb which
now alone preserves his memory.
Now and then we emerge on a glade of breathing bracken—from the leafy
orchestra round, the myriad chirp of tree-crickets, caught up below by
blue and red winged brothers, who, in their glee, half skipping and
half flying, seem amphibious of earth and heaven—a ‘kingly’ minstrelsy,
as beseeming the rank and beauty of the butterfly dancers. Amongst
the company we noticed a purple Emperor, Dukes of Burgundy, majestic
swallow-tails, a cream-spotted tiger-moth—beauties of Camberwell—not
to speak of blues and lesser stars—marsh fritillaries and delicate
wood-whites, hovering over damper hollows; and in one dark watery dell
‘edged with poplar pale,’ a black and mysterious butterfly, which I am
content to leave within the limits of the Unknown. It is not for me to
enquire into the transformation of such sooty insects—_nec scire fas
est!_—for we are now treading enchanted ground—we are actually on the
skirts of earthly fairyland. Yonder dark forest mountain, unfathomable as
it seems, is called by a name which the Bosniac woodman still mentions
with awe. It is nothing else than the Vila Gora—the fairy mountain.
Yes! even within the limits of Europe the nymphs of the old world have
something more than twilight thickets for their mourning; here at least
they have still some sunny glades and laughing runnels left them for
their merry-go-rounds. We are now in a land where the fairies live not
only in the lays but the minds of men—and malicious sprites some of them
are, sable as that mysterious fly! As the peasant gropes his way through
yonder haunted pine-wood, the trees begin to drip with grisly lichen, the
trunks grow scarred, and sooty with storm and lightning, and a cloudy
pall obscures the sun, and a sudden gust of wind rattles the bony limbs
above—and lo! across the gloomiest forest-crypt, lashing her coal-black
stag with serpent scourge, shoots—_the Evil Vila_!
But let us be chary of such ill-omened words! and pass on rather to that
flowery dell among the beech-trees where the good Vilas are dancing.
In form they are as beautiful maidens with ever-loosened zones. Their
eyes are blue as the heavens, and their hair, which falls even to their
ankles, golden as the sunlight. Some are riding through the forest on
wind-swift steeds. They are singing the fates of men; they are weaving
destinies; they are watching with motherly tenderness over the slumbers
of the heroes of the race, who, lapped in their bosoms, are dreaming on
of better days in many a mountain cave, till the guardian nymph shall
rouse each warrior from his sleep, to sunder for ever the chains of the
oppressors. Methinks they are waking even now!
Once or twice our ears were saluted with strange idyllic strains,
harmonising with the scenery, and we passed by swineherds recumbent
beneath spreading beech-trees, and piping to their bristly charge on
barbaric instruments. We chose a shady chestnut-tree by a stream, under
which to cook our frugal repast (for though nature was bountiful of
blackberries we could not live on them), and while so engaged a shepherd
lad came up and serenaded us with Bosnian airs on his rude double pipe or
Svirala.
We now followed a small tributary of the Ussora, and in its shallow bed
made our first acquaintance with the mineral wealth of the country. It
was a brilliant mosaic, a medley of vermeiled jasper, snow-white quartz,
fragments of rich iron ore, glittering scales of mica, green serpentine;
and we picked up a beautiful piece of opaline chalcedony, enwrapping a
nest of little crystals in its agaty folds. The hamlet near the point
where this rivulet runs into the Ussora is known as Zlatina, which means
golden, and is a name commonly given throughout Bosnia to places where
gold is popularly supposed to exist; but though there are many old gold
mines in different parts, and gold is still washed in some of the rivers,
the ignorant peasants are said to mistake sulphur for it, or perhaps more
probably the interior of iron-pyrites—our ‘crow gold’—so that the name
itself proves nothing.
Beyond here we forded the Ussora, and now began to fall in with long
trains of Bosnian rayahs, a troop of small Bosnian horses laden with
bales and human beings, all streaming in the same direction as ourselves.
It was evening when we began to ascend a small wooded mountain, escorted
by this motley troop; the women and children mostly on foot, the men
usually on horseback, and with their bright red turbans—worn about here
by even the poorest classes—forming a brilliant foreground to the
surrounding foliage. We followed the current, and an hour’s winding
ascent brought us to the summit of a mountain, normally lonely, and
devoid of habitation, but now thronged to overflowing by a gorgeous
array of peasants from the uttermost recesses of Christian Bosnia, and
some even from beyond the Serbian frontier. The summit of the mountain
formed a long flat neck capacious enough to accommodate many thousands,
and rising to its highest point towards its north-western extremity.
As each detachment of peasants arrived they tethered their horses, and
made straight to the summit of the ridge, which was surmounted by a rude
shrine. This was the central point of the vast assemblage, and the reason
of this great Christian gathering was soon explained.
The Roman Catholic population of this part of Bosnia had assembled from
their mountain strongholds far and wide to do honour to two of their
saints, known in their own parlance as Svéta Góspa and Svéta Kátta—Our
Lady and St. Catherine; St. Mary the patroness of the old Bosnian
kingdom, and St. Catherine the favoured Virgin Martyr of Bosnian Queens.
To-morrow was the feast of the Miraculous Assumption, and the pilgrims
had thronged to this Christian Delphos, the sacred navel of their land,
in a great crisis of their national history, if not to consult saintly
oracles, at least to obtain the support of their two tutelary goddesses.
Though we realised it not at the time, we were on something more than the
eve of a Romish feast. On the very day of this great pilgrimage, while
these thousands were praying before their mountain shrine, a revolt was
beginning in Bosnia, of which we have not yet seen the end, and which,
for better or worse, must change her whole future.
[Illustration: Pilgrims at the Shrine, near Comušina.]
This is what happened at the shrine. On arriving, each peasant bowed
reverently before it, and executed certain mystic passes connected with
his religion. He then made his way step by step round the outside of the
shrine, moving, as they say, with the sun, from left to right; and if he
were particularly pious or particularly conscience-smitten, he stumped
round on his knees. On the right or northern side of the shrine a priest
standing within it held forth a gilt crucifix, which each passer-by
kissed; and having performed the circuit of the exterior, each votary
entered the shrine itself and completed his devotions before barbaric
pictures of his divinities which were facing east—laying, it might be, on
the altar a homely nosegay of rosemary and golden zinnias. Many devotees,
after leaving the mysterious canopy, remained facing it outside, as
represented in the sketch, on their knees, counting their beads or
holding out their clenched fists in a peculiar attitude, intended,
perhaps, to represent a cross. Some prayed very earnestly; and indeed
the occasion was no ordinary one. When each had finished, he left the
immediate neighbourhood of the shrine and joined the multitude below, so
that the grassy slope around the building, which was a rude wooden shed,
was reserved for those actually performing their devotions. This sketch
was drawn on the eve of the festival, when the shrine was less crowded.
But what was most striking was the thoroughly Mahometan appearance of so
many of these Christian devotees. The influence of Islâm seemed to have
infected even their ritual; for many grovelled on the ground and kissed
the earth, as in a mosque. There was one man whom I should have mistaken
for a Hadji or Turkish pilgrim; there were others with the shaven crown
of a true-believing Moslem, and the single pig-tail, so thoughtfully
preserved by the Faithful to aid the Angel Gabriel in dragging them into
Paradise. There were women with faces so nearly eclipsed that they seemed
in fear of the injunctions of the Koràn; and even the monks who had come
up from the monastery of Comušina might be mistaken at a little distance
for Turkish officials. There was something pathetic in the sight of so
many Christians, dressed indeed in the garb of Mahometans, but still
clinging to the faith of their fathers![175] Indeed, the whole scene was
one which, though well-nigh impossible to describe, no one who had seen
it could ever forget, and in which even those who lament the superstition
must acknowledge some elements of grandeur and beauty;—the solitary
mountain-peak, momentarily thronged by pilgrims who in some childish
yearning after heaven had pitched their place of worship here so as to be
nearer their celestial goal—the votaries themselves—these poor peasants,
brutalised by centuries of misrule, steeped in ignorance and bigotry,
outcasts of this world rapt in silent communings (as they believed) with
another and a happier; beneath them the primeval forest; around in every
direction an aërial gulf; and beyond, far as the eye could pierce the
deepening twilight, range upon range of lonely mountains.
Not but what these thrifty Bosniacs had turned the opportunity to account
by combining with their religious festival and pilgrimage a large
fair—or, as the Germans would say, a year-market—which occupied the other
end of the mountain neck. A long lane was formed along which to arrange
the wares, but the show was mostly reserved for the _festa_ itself on the
morrow. On each side of this lane the peasants were camped in families;
and in the festivities of the night and the fair next morning we saw
displayed before us, as in some brilliant picture-book, the whole life
of the rayah country people from a large tract of Bosnia: their varying
costumes, their simple diet, their cheap necessities, their dances and
discordant minstrelsy, and over all, the shadow of a Damoclean scimetar.
As the night drew on the whole neck of the mountain was lit up by
cheery bonfires, round which the peasants clustered in social circles.
Our Zaptieh provided us with blazing logs for ourselves, over which
we performed our own culinary operations, supplemented by a generous
haunch from a sheep, roasted in the usual Bosnian fashion. This is how
the peasants cooked their meat—for on this high-day there were some who
indulged in such a luxury as mutton. They took a sharp stake about eight
feet long, and inserting it in the slaughtered animal’s mouth or neck,
skewered it right through the carcase and out at the tail. Two low forks
were now driven into the ground, the huge spit with its burden was lodged
on them, a large fire was kindled over against it, and the peasants
took turn and turn about to make the spit go round. A goodly portion of
the assemblage seemed determined to make a night of it, and what with
carousing, dancing, singing, and playing, I will not deny that they
succeeded.
The first dance I saw was of a comic kind, performed by two men, and
there were so many varying figures that one fancied they must improvise
them as they went on. The accompaniment on a ghuzla, the one-stringed
lute of the Serbs, was of the dolefullest, and the dance itself was
anything but graceful. The chief object that they apparently had in view
was to dislocate every limb in the most comfortable way possible. Now and
then they stamped on the ground, and then walked after each other and
round each other in a clown-like fashion; and now and then they would
pause and tread gingerly with their feet, as if they were trying whether
ice would bear, fumbling the while in a stupid way about their noses, as
if to see that spectacles were safely fixed on them. The Kolo, however,
or round dance of the Sclaves, was more elegant, and chiefly danced by
the girls, who formed themselves in a ring and danced round and round,
sometimes in a very spirited manner.
The most monotonous of all the dances was that with which some Turkish
officials, who had fixed their quarters at the further end of the
mountain neck, solaced themselves. Not that they danced themselves! they
were far too lazy and phlegmatic to do that; but they impressed into
their service a succession of rayah boys, who in turn danced long _pas
seuls_ before their lords and masters. Without leaving what we may call
his pedestal, a boy kept treading the ground to the weary see-sawing
music, and trying to make every muscle and limb quiver like a jelly.
Then, after performing this operation for a good ten minutes, with his
face towards his Turkish admirers, he slowly turned round on his pivot
and danced—if such tremulous distortion could be called dancing!—for
an equal space of time, with his back to the spectators, and then he
gradually swerved round again as if he were roasting before a slow
fire, and was from time to time adjusted by a turnspit! But the Turks,
comfortably squatted on carpets strewn over the turf, gazed gravely on by
the hour together, and seemed to enjoy the spectacle.
We heard much playing of ghuzlas and double pipes and flutes, and
much vocal accompaniment with lyric songs and long epic ballads. The
instruments, with the exception of the ghuzla, were the same as the
Croatian already described, and the ghuzla itself resembled a tamburitza
with three strings and bow in place of fingers; but the playing on them
struck me as slightly better than what we had heard at Siszek. The metre
was as curious and as much a relic of an older world as the instruments
whose Arcadian affinities have been already touched on. One of the many
minstrels was enchanting an audience of Bosniac maidens with a lyric,
whose measure, unless my ears deceived me, was identical with that of
Anacreon’s song beginning,
λέγουσω αΐ γυναῖκες,
Ἀνακρεων γέρων εἶ.
And it was strange and impressive, with the air merry with tree-crickets
from the foliage around, to catch, as it, seemed, the cadence of that
exquisite ode in which the Teian bard paid his homage to the same cicadas!
μακαρίζονμέν σε τέττιξ,
ὅτι δενδρέων ἐπ’ ἄκρων
ὀλίγην δρόσον πεπωκὼς,
βασιλεὺς ὅπως ἀείδεις.
But the songs, though interesting, were not beautiful, and, to tell the
truth, were often more like a succession of street-cries than any other
sound, human or divine! This was mainly owing to what was the chief
peculiarity of the singing—the long stress, namely, laid by the voice on
the last syllable or the last trochee, insomuch that success in a singer
seemed to lie in the ability of keeping on at the concluding howl longer
than his fellows.
One asks oneself with amazement how such dolorous chaunts could possibly
have originated? Was it possibly the dire necessity of droning in concert
with a bagpipe? The ‘_dudelsack_’—pitilessly expressive word!—is not
unknown in Bosnia at this day, and was certainly as much the property
of the primitive Sclave as of the primitive Englishman. Doubtless, too,
early singing is pinched and crippled and distorted by the rudeness of
early instruments. I did not see a bagpipe here, but traced its evil
communications everywhere. It seemed to have corrupted all the other
instruments. They had caught it. It had got into their throats like a
fog, and given a twang to every chord. It was a positive nightmare of
bagpipes. There was a bagpipe in the flute, and a bagpipe in the lute,
and a bagpipe even in the whistle!
The singing, at any rate, reacts on the poetry; for the long expenditure
of breath renders a pause a physical necessity for the recovery of
wind at the end of every two lines, so that the lays were generally
divided into couplets. Much that looks Procrustean, and many apparently
capricious full-stops in classic metres might, one would think, be
referred to similar causes. Nearly a minute would sometimes elapse after
one couplet before the singer had recovered breath to continue.
But what carried one back into epic days at once was a larger gathering,
forming a spacious ring lit up by a blazing fire, in the middle of which
a Bosniac bard took his seat on a rough log, and tuning his ghuzla began
to pour forth one of the grand sagas of his race. Could it have been an
unpremeditated lay? Without a book or any aid to memory he rolled out the
ballad for hour after hour, and when I turned to rest, not long before
sunrise, he was still rhapsodising. I do not pretend to know what was
the burthen of the ballad. Perchance it recorded the enchantments of
the Vila in yonder forest-mountain; perchance it told how Czar Dūshan
marched to seize the city of the Cæsars; or of the finding of Knez Lazar
and the sad day of Kóssovo; or, mayhap it belonged to that later cycle
of Serbian poetry which centres round the half-hero, half-renegade,
Marko Kraljević.[176] For in this land, without books, without history,
it is these heroic lays—Tabories they call them, from Tavor, their
God of War—that keep alive from generation to generation the sacred
traditions of the race. In the days of bondage these have been the one
proud heirloom of the Serbian people from the Adriatic to the Danube.
Their spirit has been continually refreshed from the perennial fount of
epic song. Separated by creed and the barriers of nature, and the caprice
of man, it is this national poetry that has kept them from forgetting
that they are brothers, that has turned their mind’s eye back from the
divisions of the present to the union of the past, and has fed their
ambition with the memories of a time when one of their princes seemed
about to catch up the falling diadem of Byzantium and place it on his
brow. For the Bosnian Serb seems to forget the narrower traditions of his
half alien kingdom in these more glorious legends, which override the
cant of geographers and diplomatists, and make him see a brother in the
Serb of the Black Mountain or Old Serbia, or the free Principality; and,
indeed, he too has some claims to share these memories, for the city of
the Serbian Cæsars, Prizren the Czarigrad, lies within the Bosnian limits.
Doleful, then, as these strains may seem to a civilised ears, it ill
becomes the stranger to mock at them. Over those rude men they seemed to
exercise a kind of charm. The hearers of the bard to whom I was listening
seemed never to grow weary. Every now and then an ecstatic thrill would
run through the whole circle, and find utterance in inarticulate murmurs
of delight. So carried away are the emotions of the listeners, that it
is by no means rare—though I did not witness this;—for them to be moved
to tears. ‘I cannot describe,’ says an observer,[177] ‘the pathos with
which these songs are sometimes sung. I have witnessed crowds surrounding
a blind old singer, and every cheek was wet with tears; it was not the
music, but the words, which affected them.’ For these songs speak to the
heart. They are instinct with that natural simplicity which is the very
soul of pathos. True, there is lacking something of the tremendous energy
of our old Teutonic sagas. There is less sword-play; but there is more
poetry. We should never expect to find an Anglo-Saxon gleeman of our epic
days likening, as does one of these unlettered Bosnian bards, the cheeks
of the loved one to the flush of dawn and her eyelids to the silken wings
of swallows. This airiness of phantasy, the brilliance of the imagery,
seem to witness the close communion of the race with the Oriental
world around them; but there is a national sobriety ever bridling the
imagination, just as we have seen the Oriental gorgeousness of a Serbian
lady’s dress tempered with something of the homely Serbian house-mother.
But what, perhaps, is more striking than all, is to find the rude
simplicity of Homer combined with a dramatic force more characteristic
of the age of Euripides.[178] Surely in such spring flowers—and wintry
indeed has been the spring of this poor Bosnian stem!—is to be found the
best proof that the stock is not all cankered, and the surest earnest of
fruits to ripen yet. In a poetry that has received the reverent homage
of Goethe it cannot be fanciful to see a token that the race is capable
of attaining to the highest pinnacles of civilisation. It can hardly
be unreasonable to seek here for a retort against those who speak of
the South Sclavonic rayah as an utterly degraded being, and who cannot
discern that
He still retains,
’Mid much abasement, what he has received
From Nature—an intense and glowing mind.
It is unfortunate that I am unable to conclude the account of this—to
me—uniquely interesting night with the mention of songs and ballads, and
that more must be added which it is most displeasing to relate.
It is only just to say that, taking into consideration the troubles
in the Herzegovina, and—what may have been traceable in the hurried
calling-out of the reserve at Dervent and Tešanj—the possible
foreknowledge of the imminence of an outbreak in Bosnia, it was quite
natural for the Turkish authorities to view with suspicion an assemblage
of several thousand Christian Bosniacs, and even to take precautionary
measures against any disturbances—or conspiracy. No one can therefore
blame the Kaïmakàm of Tešanj for despatching some officials and a
retinue of gendarmes to watch the proceedings. This night the Turks
had taken their station at the end of the neck of the hill, as if the
better to ward off any possible attack, and to secure a line of retreat
if necessary. The presence of these Zaptiehs gave me an opportunity of
observing how these tools of the Mahometan government dealt with the
Christian Bosniacs, when not under the immediate surveillance of foreign
consuls. Briefly, they treated them like a herd of cattle; and it is hard
to say which was the more revolting, the intolerable insolence or the
downright cruelty.
I was standing in one of the circles where a Bosnian gleeman was
rehearsing a national epic, when the spell of the song was rudely broken
by a Zaptieh, who, bursting through the ring of listeners and thrusting
the rayahs to right and left, stood before the embers in the middle, and,
playing with his cutlass with one hand, demanded, in such a savage tone
as quite infuriated me, who would light his pipe. The Bosniacs took it
more calmly. The old minstrel laid down his lute and paused for awhile in
his lay. For a few moments there was a moody silence—as if some blunted
sense of injury had outlived long use of wrongs—then a fine man stepped
forward sheepishly and lit the bully’s pipe.
Another time a knot of peasants were gathered together in friendly
converse in the grassy middle-lane, when two Zaptiehs rushed forward
with whips, and flogged them away, _women_ as well as men! But the worst
instance of brutality that came within my observation took place while I
was discussing a bottle of Slavonian wine, and exchanging English songs
for Bosnian, with a merry group of rayahs, belonging mostly to the Greek
Church, ‘Serbs,’ as they proudly called themselves, who had come to take
part in the fair and festa of their Roman Catholic rivals. Of a sudden
our festivities were broken in upon by the sounds of a scuffle behind,
accompanied by such shrieks as made me start up, and the firelight fell
on a gendarme—the same, I think, who had interrupted the minstrelsy—who,
with a stick or some kind of weapon, was beating an old Christian man as
if he were a pig, and kicking the poor cringing wretch the while till he
howled for mercy. I was stepping forward to interpose, but two Bosniacs
clutched hold of me and held me back, whispering with more covered hatred
than can be described, ‘’Tis only the Turks!’ The Zaptieh, however, not
wishing to provoke Frankish intervention, desisted from his belabouring,
and left his victim to limp away as best he might. The group of ‘Serbs’
had not shown any sign of attempting a rescue, but I saw more than
one brow knit ominously for the moment. But the visible emotion was
transient, and their faces relapsed into that impassive stolidity which
is the normal expression of the Bosnian rayah.
It has been already observed that a Zaptieh had been told off with the
express commission of observing our motions, and it was a continual
annoyance to find a gendarme ever dogging at our heels. But it was
obviously disagreeable to the Turks that I should be about at all; and as
the night advanced our detective began to find the duties of espionage
somewhat wearisome, and appears to have put our own Zaptieh, with whom I
noticed him confabulating, up to bidding me retire to rest, as if he were
rather commander than escort. This he did to my no small astonishment,
while I was listening to one of the ballads, and was sent roundly about
his business for his pains, to the unconcealed delight of the Christians,
who from that moment dubbed us Consuls—a name given by the Bosniacs to
any Europeans who are not subject to the caprices of Turkish gendarmes;
for they argue that no one less than a foreign representative would dare
to lift a finger against these creatures of their tyrants.
But at last, though the epic still rolled on—sometimes these rhapsodies
continue with intervals for days at a time!—and though the interest of
the audience flagged not, I thought it time to follow the example set
hours before by L⸺, who was somewhat footsore, and to lie down beside
our fire. And if anyone fancies that our mountain lair was altogether a
bed of roses, he is mistaken, for the night was very cold, and we were
always being partly scorched and partly frozen; and as the ground was
anything but even, falling asleep was rather a doubtful advantage, since
we were pretty sure to roll either into the embers on one side, or down
the steep on the other; and if neither of these casualties befel us ’twas
odds that we started up with a most corporeal and hoofy nightmare upon
us, and discovered that one of the Arab horses, which encompassed us
round about, had mistaken our blanket bags for fodder, and was proceeding
to act upon that assumption.
But it begins to dawn, the vast camp is astir, a subtle aroma of coffee
pervades our waking senses, and a new day breaks forth, wondrously fair
to look upon, but to Bosnia pregnant with bloodshed and misery.
Yet there is no sign of trouble here. New arrivals are perpetually
swelling the festal gathering and crowding round the shrine. It was a
brilliant scene, which no words can convey; but the reader will permit me
to introduce the characteristic group seated on yonder trunk.
The man to the right, in a red turban and a dark indigo jacket, is a fair
example of the Bosniac rayah of these parts, and indeed his dress is
much the same throughout the country. He wears a loose white linen tunic
and trowsers, which latter are confined about the calf in this instance,
though they are often loose and flowing, as among the Croats. His feet
are sandalled in the never-failing _Opankas_, which seem common to all
the southern Sclaves, and may not improbably be the same foot-covering as
that mentioned by Constantine Porphyrogenitus. The Byzantine Emperor says
that the Romans called the boots of the Serbli (or Serbs) Serbula, and
Serbulianos all those who were poorly booted; and indeed, if these are
the sandals alluded to, it must be confessed that the Byzantine contempt
for them as boots was merited, for experience has taught me that the
straps easily break, and that the soles are worn through in no time.
[Illustration: Types at the Fair.]
The woman seated on the middle of the trunk is representative of the
ordinary Latin peasants hereabouts, the red border of her jacket being
probably an ensign of her Catholicism as near Dervent. The rest of the
jacket is black, contrasting with the clean white tunic below; but the
general effect would be funereal were it not for her apron, which is of
as divers colours as Joseph’s coat, and displays those diamond patterns
so much affected by the peasants near Belgrade. The twin brooches on
her belt may remind the antiquary of those worn by our Anglo-Saxon
great-grandmothers, or of such as are exhumed from old Serbian graves,
and the silver work of her ear-rings is doubtless an inheritance from
Byzantium.
The standing figure to her left belongs to a very curious type both of
feature and costume. This was the first occasion on which we came upon a
dress the affinities of which were other than Serbian or Croatian. The
multitude of decoration is overpowering. She is studded with Turkish
coins as with a cuirass of scale armour, her arms loaded with bracelets,
and her fingers with rings; ornamental patterns are crowded over her
jacket and apron,—a gorgeous orange being the pervading colour. Her hair
was spangled with coins in a way which we afterwards saw repeated among
the unveiled Mahometan women of the Narenta valley. There was a certain
heaviness about the dress which contrasted with the lighter costumes
around; it belonged to the general class of Bosnian costume extending
west and south towards Dalmatia and the Herzegovinian frontier. Its
_nuances_ are decidedly Dalmatian. As we crossed the mountains towards
Travnik we came upon more specimens of this type; and in the gorges of
Troghìr and Mazulia were again struck by the curious stamp of features,
which in these mountains seems always to accompany this peculiar attire.
The broad face and flat nose suggest quite a different parentage, and
I noticed brothers and husbands who showed that the peculiarity was
not confined to one sex. I remember one man in particular with nose so
curiously flattened that one was almost tempted to believe that his
profile had been deformed by a bandage drawn tightly across the face
in childhood, after the old Hunnish fashion, and went on to speculate
whether some of the followers of Attila, or perchance some of those
Tartars who flooded Bosnia in the thirteenth century, might not have been
caught in these mountain basins. But this much is certain, that at the
present day these gorgeous barbarians speak Bosniac like their neighbours.
To the left of our Hunnish friend sits a woman in the most civilized
costume of Christian Bosnia, and which, with peculiarities of its own, is
eminently Serbian, of the Danube, and will recall the maiden of Tešanj.
Here, however, besides the hair plaited round a tasselled fez, and the
scarf crossed X-wise over the bosom, is the expanding skirt and the
fur-bordered jacket, such as the ladies of Belgrade delight in wearing.
Some of the girls have decked their hair with zinnias and even
sunflowers. The quantity of false coral and bead necklaces worn is
overpowering, as is the endless variety of modes in which the white and
red kerchiefs that drape the heads are set. Sometimes it was arranged not
unlike the coiffure of the last queen of Bosnia, as she appears on her
monumental slab. Sometimes, as has been already noticed, it threatened
to conceal the face entirely, and some of these half Mahometans were to
be seen with the ‘bags’ reaching to their ankles, _à la belle Turque_.
One girl was arrayed as a bride—in lily white, except the flowers in her
hair, which just peeped forth from beneath a kerchief-veil, woven of the
lightest texture of the country, and falling airily about her person,
fringed with simple lace.
But another maiden demands my presence, and I am called away to sketch,
at her own request, a Bosnian belle, coiffed in the brightest of rosy
kerchiefs, enveloped in a jacket with the most gorgeous golden border,
and cinctured with a sash of orange and purple. Whether the attitude
in which she sat for her portrait was the most elegant she could have
chosen, and whether her boots, in which I fancy she took a peculiar
pride, were of that form most adapted for displaying maidenly gracility
of ankle, may be left for a forbearing public to decide.
[Illustration: Bosnian Belle.]
Her hair is dark—and who so ungallant as to suggest that its hue is
due to artificial causes? Granted that a powder does exist called Kna;
let it freely be admitted that the fair Serbs often show themselves as
desirous as the ladies of the harem to acquire those raven tresses which
the Koràn distinguishes as a sign of comeliness and strength. But a
glance—a scintillation—from those eyes would annihilate any detractor so
mean as to bring such imputations against our Bosniac beauty! Here at
once, so to speak, we are on _terra firma_. These at least are incapable
of assuming an un-genuine hue; and they are _black_,—black as the sloes
with which the national poets delight to compare their mistresses’ orbs,
and haloed round with such dark lashes and eyebrows as the same Serbian
imagination fondly likens to ‘leeches from the fountain.’ But she was
rather the exception in the crowd, and the evident esteem in which her
good looks were held was probably more due to this accident of hue
than anything else; for if at times the tresses of her artless village
rivals _happened_ on the fashionable colour, their eyes were oftener
of a traitorous turquoise than of jet; and as to the little children,
their hair was of a tell-tale flaxen! Nay, it is to be feared that if
our damsel was on the look out for a black-eyed sweetheart to match her,
she would find some difficulty in realizing her hopes, since the men’s
eyes were generally of greys or watery blues, and their lanky locks took
an unfortunately reddish hue of brown; and even supposing her pockets to
have been as full of gold, she was likely to fall as far short of her
ideal as the maiden of Serbian poetry, who sings:—
I wish the happy time were nigh,
When youths are sold, that I might buy.
But for an azure-eyed Milinar,[179]
I would not give a single dinar,
Though for a raven-black eyed youth,
A thousand golden coins in truth.
Alas! alas! and is it true?
My own fair youth has eyes of blue![180]
The women looked as a rule pleasanter than the men, whose general
appearance, as may perhaps be gathered from the illustration, is
anything but prepossessing. The whole crown is shorn of hair, Turkish
fashion, but usually, instead of the single pig-tail of the faithful,
two long elf-locks are left dangling from the back of the head, and the
effect of the bare occiput with these two sickly appendages is little
short of disgusting; add to which that the natural length of the neck
is exaggerated by this tonsure. From the front the aspect is not more
pleasing; the bald pate, combined with the bony attenuated face and round
eyebrows, being often in a ghastly manner suggestive of a death’s-head.
The long sunken eye-slits, whose outer corners curve down, so as to
follow the lines of the brow-arches, give them an air of sleepy cunning,
the eyebrows often overhanging as to form a den for the suspicious roving
eyes. The lips are thick, broad, and pouting. The whole face seems dazed,
and it is almost beyond mortal patience to see the heavy, slow, owlish
way in which their head turns on its axis if anything attracts their
attention. When you look at them they always seem as if they do not know
what expression is expected of them, and their stolidity is enhanced by
turbans which make them look top-heavy. It is easy to understand why
the quick-witted Greeks of the lower Empire should have nick-named the
Sclaves Chondrokephaloi, or ‘block-heads.’
Yet, after all, the hideous tonsure and what is vilest in their demeanour
are but accidental badges of servitude and oppression—removable by a few
generations of free government. The sluggishness of their deliberation
may be quickened by culture; and, the causes of suspicion once removed,
the hang-dog look of the Bosniac would disappear as surely as it has
ceased among the free Serbians, and as it is disappearing at this day
among the liberated Wallachian serfs. The slow, measured utterance of the
race, so far from being a proof of inferiority, has been compared by Ami
Boué to that of Englishmen, and this keen observer of the Serbs speaks
of the people and language as born, if any ever were, for parliamentary
government.
The frame of these Bosniac countrymen lacks the elegance and suppleness
of the modern Greek, but it is stronger and of larger mould. No stranger
who passes through Bosnia can fail to be struck at the exceeding stature
of the inhabitants. The fair here is thronged with men six feet high,
and over. An English traveller who passed through this country in 1634,
and stayed a day or two in ‘Saraih,’ ‘the metropolis of the kingdome
of Bosnah,’ says, ‘the most notable things I found was the goodnesse
of the water, and vaste, almost _gyant-like_ stature of the men, which
with their bordring upon _Germany_, made mee suppose them to be the
offspring of those old _Germans_ noted by _Cæsar_ and _Tacitus_ for their
huge size, which in other places is now degenerate into the ordinary
proportions of men.’[181] Gaunt they may be, lean and overgrown; but they
are sons of Anak; and though they may now seem a cowering rabble, the
example of their self-liberated brothers in Montenegro and free Serbia
should teach the world that in happier circumstances they too might hold
up their heads and display the spirit of heroes. Even in their features,
in their broad benevolent forehead and aquiline nose, are disguised the
lineaments of grandeur and manly beauty. Despite the ill-favour of their
expression, there was generally a lurking geniality to be detected in
it, and when among themselves I was struck with their kindly manners and
good-fellowship; indeed I suspect that it is generally the stranger’s
own fault—probably his want of tact in posing before them as the friend
of the Turk—if they do not show themselves friendly to him, and relapse
into a bearish reserve. And though the Bosniacs are much accused of that
common failing of the Southern Sclaves, intoxication, yet it must be said
to their credit that in this large gathering—so large that hardly a spot
of standing ground was left unoccupied in the whole mountain neck—we
did not notice a single case of drunkenness, and this though there were
plenty of booths in the fair for the sale of arrack and Slavonian wine.
Indeed the general orderliness, the absence of license of any sort, among
the Christian part of the assembly, was beyond all praise.
As to the fair the display of wares was poor enough, there being little
exposed for sale beyond the usual crockery, and the cheapest and most
gimcrack jewelry, brass rings, and brooches of the very worst Bosniac
fabric, and here and there a little fruit—water-melons, and small
plums and pears. The only articles worth mentioning were the square,
elegantly chipped gun-flints, of a kind which is to be found in all
Bosnian markets. These are knapped at Avlona, in Albania, near the old
Acroceraunian promontory, from about which the flints are gathered; and
they are interesting, as being probably the most perfect representatives
in modern Europe of an art which was once the highest among mankind.
Our Norfolk flint-knappers, who still export this old-world article of
commerce to the savages of Africa, could never compete with the artists
who turn out these _chefs-d’œuvre_ of delicate flaking!
[Illustration: Gun-Flint.]
About 1 P.M. we started on our mountain-crossing expedition towards
Travnik; first descending from our altitude towards the Franciscan
monastery of Comušina, which we found to consist of an unpretending house
and a bare, pewless church standing in the middle of a wretched little
village. The door of the monastery was fastened, and a woman who parleyed
with us from an upper window said that all the ‘brothers’ were up at
the shrine. On our way we had passed through the Christian cemetery—a
wilderness so deep in bracken that it seemed to have been purposely left
to the charitable clothing of Nature, as if they feared that even their
graves, if seen, might be insulted by the passing Zaptieh. The memorials
here were rude stones, sometimes scarcely touched by art, sometimes
rudely graven with a Latin cross like one of the ‘Hadjuks’ graves’
already described. But we groped among the fern-leaves in vain for an
inscription.
Beyond this we descended by a path to the Ussora, and finding that our
attendant Zaptieh’s scansorial powers were small, and that, not having
on his shoulders a heavy knapsack like ourselves, he was yet inclined
to lag hopelessly, there was nothing for it but to dismiss him, after
first inditing under a walnut-tree beside the waters of Ussora a letter
in our choicest French to the Kaïmakàm, in which we gave our escort a
good character, only expressing our regret that his inability to climb
mountains _à l’Anglaise_ deprived us of the further pleasure of his
company. We afterwards had reason to regret that besides the backshish
or largess which was his due we gave him too large a proportion of our
remaining store of bread, not sufficiently realising the slow progress
which we should make between this and Travnik.
We now followed the river bed, every now and then wading from one side
to the other of the shallow stream in a vain search for a forest-path
which should lead in the right direction. We found Major Roskiević’s[182]
map so completely out, that we really suspected that he had been the
victim of the Vila’s enchantments—and who, conversant with the history
of the building of Scodra, does not know that it is her practice to
thwart engineers who presumptuously invade her precincts? And I would
urge in proof of this hypothesis that her sacred mount, the Vila Gora
of the peasants hereabouts, under whose brows we are now passing, is
conspicuous by its absence on the Major’s chart. Before we had concluded
our itinerary of Bosnia we had further proofs that the Vila or some other
freakish sprite had possessed that unfortunate officer. Often has the
Major played the part of a will-o’-the-wisp for our especial misguidance!
At times he would display such extraordinary capacities of faith as to
remove mountains. He would evolve streams which existed not, out of his
inner consciousness, and when he conceived that this pleasantry had gone
far enough he would swallow them up in the earth. He would transport
villages bodily. He would run a broad valley through a mountain mass
from which Xerxes would have recoiled, and bridge over chasms at which
Stephenson would have shuddered. Not that his humour is always of this
ponderous turn; oh no! he has his lighter veins, too, in which he will
draw you a zigzagging road straight as a line, or pop the only path on
the wrong side of the stream!
At about 5 P.M. we found ourselves at the junction of the Ziraja and the
Blatnica, as we learnt from some peasants—_for they never meet_ according
to the Major. The peasants, who were dressed in the heavily ornamented
quasi-Dalmatian costume of these mountains, and were of the type which
it has pleased me to call Hunnish, were much delighted at a present of
English needles from the ‘consuls.’
We now began ascending the Troghìr Planina by a faintly indicated
woodman’s path, overshadowed by a beech-forest of finer growth than
any we had yet seen, interspersed with equally majestic pines. Amongst
these mysterious labyrinths we lost our path, and coming towards dusk
on an inviting glade commanding a lovely mountain panorama, pitched on
it as our place of bivouac for the night. Here we found no difficulty
in collecting firewood for a cheery fire, and bracken enough to form a
springy mattress; and having cooked our frugal supper, we submitted to
be lulled to sleep by the chorus of tree-crickets above. The night was
again fine; so that, except for the cold, which in the small hours of
the morning was bitter—as it generally is when the camp fire has burnt
down beyond recovery!—we passed a fairly comfortable night, till we were
aroused by the droning of gnats in our ears, and were again on our way,
before the sun.
But now we began to be beset by a difficulty which while in the forest
zone of the mountains we had not anticipated—namely, the absence of
water, caused by the porous character of the limestone rock; and though
we succeeded in finding our path again, all the runnels we passed were
dried by summer drought. The woods were very silent, and there was no
morning song of birds beyond the cooing of a dove; but while we were
resting we heard a deep musical hum among the tree-tops, proceeding from
myriads of gnats, some of which were droning below. We kept gradually
ascending the back of the Planina, our path continually disappearing or
losing itself in a maze of lesser tracks, which might have been made as
much by animals as by man; and every now and then we had to scramble on
as best we could over tree-trunks of monstrous girth that barred our
path. But still no water to make breakfast palatable! till about two
hours after starting we came to a stagnant pool or puddle about the size
of an ordinary washing-basin, which, as necessity knows no law, we were
driven to make use of, and to pick the tadpoles out of our tea as best we
might!
But how describe this forest scenery! how paint, so that others may
see as we saw them, the golden rays of the rising sun slanting between
the leafy tiers of the beeches, intersecting their shady trunks with
pillars of light, shimmering beyond against the dark mountain flank; not
dappling it in round noon-day patches, but streaking it horizontally with
golden ripples, comparable to nothing but mackerel clouds glorified by
the sunset, trailing across some darker tract of sky. Now and then the
mighty trunks and branches frame vistas of mountain and valley, flooded
still by a forest sea unflecked by habitation—an enamel of quiet blue.
Then the luminous foliage of the beeches gives place for a while to more
sombre pines, whose turpentiny fragrance floats like morning incense down
the forest aisles. Hour after hour, as we ascend, the forest still looms
around us, but the scenery is perpetually changing.
At one point we reached a mountain bluff more open to the wind, and
found ourselves in a clearing not made by man. From the rocky summit
an awful scene of ruin burst upon us. That soft blue heaven—azure and
cloudless as a tranquil sea—it, too, has its storms and windy Scyllas to
play havoc among these aërial masts. This was one universal wreck—the
wreck of an Armada. Far and wide every tree had been struck down like
Canaanitic walls. The very current of the tornado was marked by the lie
of the prostrate trunks. At times a confused medley—piles of scarce
distinguishable spars and giant hulks—jumbled together as if they had
been nine-pins!—showed the eddy of a whirlwind; but generally the trunks
were strewn pointing from the north-east like so many magnets: one
vast torrent track of destruction marking the course of the _Bora_, the
irresistible storm-wind of Illyria. In places we have found the periodic
force of this wind utilized by the Bosniacs, who cut the trees a quarter
through on the leeward side and leave the rest to the woodcraft of Boreas.
[Illustration: Tree struck by Lightning.]
But once more we plunge into the primeval shadows to find ourselves among
more isolated monuments of ruin. Here it is the artillery of heaven that
has been playing on the masted swell of the green Planina. Now we have
reached the very focus of an electric storm. The trunks of beech and fir
sometimes riven asunder, more generally erect but decapitated, stripped
of bark and branches; sometimes shattered columns charred by the aërial
explosion, sometimes splintered up into trophies of white spears. Here is
one of the most striking witnesses to the stupendous power of lightning
that I have ever seen. A beech about eighty feet in height was snapped in
two, the upper part hurled on to the slope below, the lower still rooted
to the ground, but the hard wood splashed by the thunderer’s bolt—as when
a bomb-shell strikes the sea—into gigantic splinters: keen, shapely
blades, as much as twenty feet in length.[183]
Then, again, we passed through a region of pines, grim,
time-stained—scarred and bereft of limbs in many a battle with the
elements—with bare long arms and patriarchal beards of hoary lichen; an
older generation of trees, waiting in vain for kindly axe or levelling
blast; and awakening, in their Arctic desolation, memories of a Lapland
forest-scene. And now once more a charming transformation takes place.
Cheerful beech avenues again overarch us, or open out in sunny glades,
where butterflies—commas, whites, clouded yellows—are fluttering and
settling about yellow salvias and a flower which looked like a rosy phlox
with a single blossom. Now we found, to our great relief, an icy-cold
stream, and prepared our noon-day repast in a beechwood glen that carried
us back to the chalk hills of old England. Here we recognized around us
those old familiar ferns, the prickly and the maiden-hair[184]—polypody,
flouncing the old stumps with charitable raiment—rarer tufts of blechnum;
and, prying curiously among the beech-roots for another of our chalk-hill
favourites, we found—sure enough!—that spiky shell[185] which seems to
imitate the form and colour of the sheathed buds of the beech-leaves.
The track we now followed began to descend rapidly, and we discovered,
after climbing down a considerable way, that we were on the wrong side
of the watershed, so that there was nothing for it but to reascend as
nearly as possible two thousand feet towards the main ridge of Troghìr
which we had left.
A comparatively bare steep tempted us to make straight for our object;
but having with difficulty fought our way upwards through a jungle of
fern and dwarf elder, we presently found ourselves entangled among the
_débris_ of a not very ancient forest fire. The ground was toothed with
sharp splinters of burnt rock, and strewn with a network of branches, too
rotten to bear our weight, but quite strong enough to trap our feet and
tumble us over—all which gins and snares were treacherously concealed
by a forest of bracken which rose above our heads. Add to this, that
at every few yards we had to scale high barricades of sooty timber,
and at the time were at a loss to conceive why Providence should have
made fir-trees so confoundedly spiky! When it is remembered that we had
about five-and-twenty pounds on our backs, and that the sun was broiling
hot, it may be imagined that our progress was slow, and in fact we were
forced to win every inch as much with our hands as our feet. However,
as we gradually stormed our citadel, we were rewarded for our bumps and
lacerations by a view as strange as it was picturesque. In these upper
regions it was only the smaller trees that had been actually burnt down,
the larger had been simply killed and left standing. The sight as we
looked down had a savage fascination quite unique; the colours were
so varied, so striking, so bizarre, that they deserved to have been
perpetuated by a great painter. Here and there were the charred funereal
skeletons of forest giants, with jagged stumps of branches in harsh
relief against a distant background of green valley and blue undulating
mountain, almost voluptuous in its softness of tint and contour. In some
trunks the blackness was chequered, where the bark had peeled off, by
broad scars, taking every tint of amber; in others, it was draped in ashy
festoons of lichen, or swathed in verdant folds of moss. Some trees,
already roasted to death by fire, had at a later period been shivered
by the lightning, and the whiteness of their splinters showed that
little but their bark had been charred by the previous conflagration.
Some indeed had actually survived it, and on one side a small island of
still flourishing trees—a dark yew-green fir, an emerald and a golden
beech—stood out against the sootiest thicket.
But we gradually left this funereal waste beneath us, and groping upwards
once more through virgin forest, at last succeeded in regaining the ridge
of Troghìr. We even hit on our lost path, but it soon eluded us again
and disappeared beneath the wrecks of tall pine-trees, which seemed to
have buried all traces of it. For here, if a fallen tree bars the path,
the Bosniac woodman does not cut it away, but either climbs over it, or,
if the obstacle is too high for man or beast to surmount, he deserts the
track altogether and makes another elsewhere. Thus the forest barricades
are gradually allowed to accumulate till they reach dimensions simply
stupendous, and the path which originally swerved a few yards out of its
course may eventually be turned as much as a mile. But we had learnt
a lesson about trusting to paths which, while still smarting from the
effects of our second ascent of Troghìr, we were not likely to neglect;
so this time we followed the guidance of our compass as literally as we
could, scaling barrier after barrier till we were well nigh worn out. No
one, I think, who has not himself tried to penetrate a primeval forest
on a windy mountain ridge, can realize what these obstacles really are!
It was late in the afternoon when we conquered our last barricade, and
to our delight beheld before us the smooth lawny swell which forms the
summit of the Vučia Planina, from which the Troghìr is an offshoot.
An easy ascent brought us to the top, where we rested awhile to enjoy
the glorious mountain panorama that opened out all round. We are now in
the very heart of Alpine Bosnia, ‘each one of whose lofty mountains,’ to
quote the words of her native historian,[186] ‘exalted to Ayuk, the fiery
star, is an eyesore to the foe.’ But the traveller must make allowance
for Oriental hyperbole. Here, at least, the mountains were contented with
a less sidereal stature; nor was there much that could even be called
rocky or precipitous except the head of Vlašić to the south, which peered
over lower mountain shoulders and conical peaks, shrouded, as the long
neck of Troghìr below us, as all the other Goras and Planinas round, with
dense forest growth. To call the scenery Swiss would be mere flattery;
indeed, its whole character, the small height of the mountains, the
want of boldness, the down-like swell of their contours, recalls rather
the Carpathians than any part of the Alps that I have seen. The summit
of Vučia, on which we now are, is inconsiderable as regards altitude,
not being more than 4,300 feet, according to our aneroid, though, to be
sure, the Major makes it 5,000—for the sake of round numbers. There is
something Carpathian, too, about the forests, the gigantic pines and
beeches, and—as might be expected from the commonly calcareous nature
of the soil—in the flora generally. Here, as in the ranges that border
Roumania, the drooping gentian, the sweet-william, and the sunflower are
among the most noticeable flowers.
But the sun is sinking low in the heavens, and it is high time for us
to be again on our legs. We now made our way across the southern slopes
of the summit, or rather table-land, of Vučia, which forms a lovely
Alp or mountain pasture. At intervals we came upon peasants of the
type we had seen the evening before (we had met with no human being
in the intervening day) tending kine, or mowing hay. When, however,
we approached some women—who, being unveiled, we assumed to be Latin
Christians—to ask the bearings of Travnik, they rushed away into a
thicket screeching, ‘_Hai ’ti! hai ’ti!_’ ‘Off! off!’ so Moslemized—if
indeed they were rayahs, as we think certain—were their ideas of
propriety! One of them had made a sign which we mistook for an answer to
our enquiry, and against our better judgment we followed the direction
indicated, and which afterwards turned out to be hopelessly wrong.
Meanwhile, our lines had fallen in pleasant places. The fresh scent
of hay was delicious; the soft undulating mountain lawn, dotted with
magnificent beeches, kept perpetually recalling a fine English park;
on one side, too, it was appropriately fringed by a fir-plantation of
Nature. It was quite hard to realize that we were far from any town or
even shelter. In the midst of these loneliest of mountains one kept half
expecting to catch sight of the cosy red gables and mullioned windows
of some old Elizabethan mansion. The beeches seemed to have caught the
inspiration of the landscape. In the freer atmosphere of these glades
they had lost the almost poplar-like procerity of their forest-growth,
and expanded into that more pear-shaped outline which is so congenial to
genteel precincts. Over those forest depths through which we had been
diving all the day had reigned the ‘silence of the central sea,’ but
these woodland coasts and islands were alive with garden songsters—tits
and wrens and blackbirds—fluttering about in the golden sunshine of
evening, and filling our ears with familiar home melodies.
Here, too, we saw a most beautiful sight—a fine convolvulus hawk-moth
(we had made acquaintance with another the evening before), up and
dissipating at an hour when all well-regulated moths should be wrapped
in downy slumbers, and making, as we thought, a most unfair use of a
proboscis full two inches long to drain the nectar from a whole spike
of yellow salvia, before any of its fellows should be awake to cry
halves. It was a pert fly, and seemed quite to revel in the sunlight—a
‘_fast_’ trait, it is to be feared in a nocturnal insect. Such airs,
too, as it gave itself!—flouting here, flirting there; flitting on from
conquest to conquest. As if the gorgeous creature did not know that it
was irresistible! As if the very sunbeams did not lackey it—showering
gold-dust over that expanse of delicately-mottled grey! What Danae
sprite, never so pent up in perfumed cell, could resist such courtship?
What flowery elf be proof against the superb obeisance of that taper
body, tricked out in all its tiger livery of rose and sable? To see it
dawdle round a bevy of fair blossoms, in lazy eddies, drifting rather
than flying, with a _blasé_ air of languid inspection; to see it, in more
light fantastic vein, dance off to the flower of its capricious choice,
and bob airily up and down, coquetting with those saffron lips, ere it
poised—how daintily!—to steal their sweetness. It was decidedly livelier
than our friend of yestereen, and so intent upon its nectar as to let us
gaze within a foot of it; it seemed to have a keener, a more epicurean,
enjoyment of life, and gave itself all the airs of a _bon-vivant_. Indeed
it showed its good taste in its preference for salvia; for the scent of
these flowers is exquisite, and I have sometimes stopped wonderingly to
look for musk, so like is the smell at a little distance off.
On this side of the mountains the flowers and foliage are more luxuriant.
Glade and woodland are sprinkled with kinds we have not yet met with, a
large rosy cranesbill, a yellow labiate, with a peak of the most gorgeous
purple leaves—if indeed they were not petals—tremulous little hare-bells,
_lastræa_ and delicate varieties of ferns, while here and there bright
scarlet strawberries gemmed the ground. The trees grow to an even more
gigantic stature than those we saw before. We measured beeches fifteen
feet in circumference, at about three feet from the ground; and many—as
on the Mazulia Planina opposite, where some of the finest timber in
Bosnia is said to grow—rise to a height of a hundred and twenty feet. A
pine-tree measured fourteen feet and a half in girth.
For we are again immersed in the primeval forest—and night seems nearer
and shelter further. The sun was already setting, when a gap in the
trees revealed to us a mountain vista, which showed that we were on the
wrong side of the ridge. A woodman whom we presently met told us that we
were going towards Zenica instead of Travnik, and we discovered that we
were on the debatable mountain neck, between the Vučia and Gorcevica
Planinas. The woodman intimated to us that to strike across and attempt
to regain the Travnik path was hopeless, and that we had better follow
the ridge in the direction of Zenica. But we made up our minds to cut
across and follow the valley of a stream which led in our direction.
Accordingly we crossed over to the western side of our ridge, and found
ourselves on the brink of an almost precipitous steep, descending to the
Jasenica, our desired stream, heard but not seen, thirteen hundred feet
below.
The mean angle at which this slope descended was, as nearly as we could
calculate, 60°. Had it been bare, we could not possibly have descended
it, laden as we were; but it was covered with beech-trees, which might
stop us if we fell; so we resolved to attempt a descent.
It was certainly very difficult work; the beech-leaves made it slippery,
and concealed rocks and boughs would trip us up, or a piece of soil give
way. We were perpetually dislodging fragments of rock, which rolled and
leapt down, quicker and quicker, crash after crash, cannoning against
the trunks, taking bigger and bigger bounds, till a final plunge told
us that they had reached the stream. They never lodged half way. Every
now and then we seemed likely to follow them, but we always succeeded in
arresting our fall by clutching at a passing trunk. It grew darker and
darker; but we still kept on at our painful task, till, about six hundred
feet down, I broke one of my knapsack straps in a tumble, and it being
impossible in such a position either to mend it or to carry it, we were
lucky in discovering, close by, a hollow—formed by the uprooting of a
forest giant—to serve as sleeping-quarters for our third night running,
_sub Jove frigido_, and where we literally _lodged_ till peep-o’-day.
The worst was that we were unable to collect fuel for a fire, and before
morning a chill breeze sprang up, and the thermometer sank almost to
freezing point; for, in less mountainous localities than this, August
frosts are by no means rare in Bosnia. For nocturnal visitors we might
take our choice—as the wind invented footsteps—of the wild swine, bears,
and wolves, that inhabit these mountains; but none of these fourfooted
gentry molested us; and, except that once or twice we woke with the cold,
or by reason of sundry stones and awkward tags of root, which would keep
running into us, we slept soundly enough.
_Aug. 17._—Having executed the needful repairs, we continued our descent
before sunrise, and finally found ourselves at the bottom of the
gorge—the opposite steep of Mazulia frowning over us as precipitously as
that which we had descended, and the whole ravine being so narrow that
there was room for nothing but the Jasenica torrent below, over arched by
the stupendous beeches which clung to both steeps.
In a dry part of its bed we demolished our last scrap of bread, and
reviewed our position, which was not favourable. The gorge in which we
found ourselves was from all points so inaccessible that we doubted
whether it had ever been trodden by foot of man before. To make our way
along the valley seemed well nigh impossible, so vast were the rock
and timber barricades with which the torrent had piled its course. On
the other hand, to reascend either steep was tantamount to a defeat,
and in either case would bring us no forwarder. But it was becoming
painfully evident that we must get somewhere, and quickly—as the day
before, owing to our ill-judged liberality to our Zaptieh, we had had to
stint ourselves of food, and now the last scrap of solid nutriment was
gone—there could be no doubt about that! So, all things considered, there
was nothing for it but to fight our way down the gorge as best we might,
and trust that as the stream got lower its valley would widen. We found
that the best way was to plunge bodily through the water, now and then
jumping from rock to rock, or slipping into deep pools, and every few
yards having to scale dams of trunks and branches, whose hugeness showed
the force of the torrent in the rainy season. The want of an axe made a
good deal of this work more difficult than it otherwise would have been,
so that it sometimes took an hour to make a few score yards of way.
And yet the guerdon of our struggle was rich indeed. An hour or so from
our starting-point the sides of our ravine became more rocky, and started
up sheerly on either side of the stream, which, dashing between these
‘iron gates,’ leapt from a rocky platform, and plunged some sixty feet
below in a magnificent cascade. We were forced to make a tedious détour
by climbing up the steep; but the rocky walls, the overhanging beeches,
the snow-white foam veiling the abysmal gloom, gave us glimpses of a
beautiful picture. The vegetation, too, of our valley was marvellous in
its luxuriance. Here, where the rays of the meridian sun scarcely pierce,
stately sunflowers would raise their great flaming crowns as if to light
up the shades of fell and forest. Drooping gentians—those weeping willows
among flowers!—hung lovingly over the stream: methought they were its
guardian nymphs, swelling its waters with tributary dew from a myriad
azure urns! The dimensions taken by some of the ferns were certainly
extraordinary; the lady-fern waved feather-like sprays near five feet in
length, the hart’s tongue put forth fronds like small palm-leaves, three
feet long and about three inches broad. Even the tree-like moss[187] that
cushioned the damp crevices between the rocks rose to an abnormal stature.
[Illustration: Rocky Gorge of the Jasenica.]
After many weary hours the valley began to open out a little, and the
stream allowed us room for passage on its margin. Further on we came to
little patches of meadow land by its side, and even, here and there, to
traces of a path, and another sign of man, the ashes of an old camp-fire.
Beyond this, again, the mountains grew more rocky, the trees smaller and
more scanty, and scenery of a bolder kind broke upon us. First, as if
to prepare us for what was to follow, a tall obelisk of rock started up
in the middle of the gorge; and having passed, as it were, Cleopatra’s
Needle, the rock-architecture took an appropriately Egyptian character,
and we found ourselves among what it only required a slight exercise of
imagination to transform into the ruins of the Pharaohs. Colossal walls
and columns towered on each side of the torrent, and scarcely allowed
it a passage; and, looking through these antique portals, the top of a
pyramid appeared in the distance—the limestone peak or Vlašić.
We made our way with some difficulty through the precipitous defile, and
were rewarded by a cheerful prospect of a maize-covered height beyond,
surmounted by wooden huts and the minaret of a mosque. A short climb
brought us to the village, called Zagredzi, hanging on the slope of
Mt. Mazulia. Here we thought to get something to eat, for we were half
famished; but we certainly were not prepared for the inhospitality of
the villagers, who apparently were all Mahometans. As we passed along
the street every door was slammed. The women scurried away and hid
themselves; even the men fled at our approach; and though we succeeded so
far as to parley with one, no entreaties or offers of money could induce
him to procure us bread or milk. So there was nothing for it but to
proceed on our way and shake the dust of this churlish village from our
feet. Just outside we passed what we take to have been an old _karaula_
or watch-tower, of rough masonry, square in shape, with barred windows
and an old circular arch now half buried in the ground, surmounted by a
plain round moulding. Happily, beyond this we came upon an apple-tree,
and, as the ground was strewn with apples, considered ourselves justified
in anticipating the vagrant swine.
We presently met a party of countrymen, and persuaded one, in return for
coin of the realm, to put us into the way to the village of Podove, there
to strike the path for the Franciscan monastery of Gučiagora, where we
purposed to throw ourselves on monkish hospitality. At Podove we found
for the first time some monuments of a kind which we were to meet with
again in other parts of Bosnia, and which are scattered over the whole
country.
[Illustration: Mysterious Sepulchres, Podove.]
These are large tombstones, some as much as six feet long by three in
height, of a tea-caddy shape, resting on a broader stone platform.
The impression they give you is that they are descendants of Roman
sarcophagi, and indeed their upper part is exactly similar to some Roman
monuments.[188] There is, so far as I have seen, no inscription on them;
but occasionally, as on some of those at Podove, they are ornamented with
incised arches at the end and side of a quasi-Gothic form, which may be
useful in determining their date. The erosion of the stone and mutilated
condition of many probably point to considerable antiquity, as also does
the fact that I have twice noticed them overturned and blocking up the
channel of streams which had undermined their original standing ground.
They certainly bear no resemblance to the turbaned columns of Turkish
cemeteries, and indeed an examination of those at Podove convinced me
that many had been purposely mutilated by the unbeliever.
All these facts point to the conclusion that they are, as the Bosniacs
express it when they want to indicate a date previous to the Turkish
captivity, ‘more than three hundred years old.’ On the other hand, if
not Moslem, neither are they like the memorial stone crosses, such as
one we were shortly to see at Gučiagora, which are the undoubted work of
Christians, and which date back at least to the sixteenth century.
There are, however, some modern monuments which we noticed at one place
in the Herzegovina which resemble these in outline; these were in a small
Jewish graveyard outside Mostar, and had Hebrew inscriptions on them.
But the Jews of Bosnia and the Herzegovina are all a Spanish-speaking
people, who took refuge from their Christian oppressors within the
borders of more tolerant Islâm in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Previous to this settlement there do not seem to have been any Jews in
the country, since in early Bosnian history, so occupied with religious
struggles, so blood-stained with fanaticism, there is not, so far as I am
aware, any mention of them. Even at the present day they are, as regards
numbers, an insignificant minority, domiciled almost exclusively in a
few of the larger towns.[189] It is hardly conceivable, therefore, that
in early times the Hebrews should have occupied the country to such an
extent as to have dotted it with these monuments, which are to be found
_passim_ throughout Bosnia. On the other hand, the stones that we saw
near Mostar were considerably smaller than these ancient examples; and
it seems quite possible that the Jews, with their national thriftiness,
should have simply used some of these old blocks which they found ready
to hand, cutting off the time-worn exterior or exposing a new surface for
their inscriptions, but for convenience sake retaining the original form.
Whatever the explanation of these Mostar monuments, I feel constrained
to give up the hypothesis that these older memorials are of Jewish
workmanship.
But to whom, then, are these mysterious blocks to be referred? A
better key to the solution of their origin and date is to be obtained
by comparing them with some monuments of more finished execution and
greater fecundity of ornament described by Sir Gardner Wilkinson,[190]
as existing near Imoschi and at other places on the Dalmatian frontier.
These, although not exactly answering to the ruder handiwork of the
Bosnian midlands, are yet so evidently allied, that what is true of
them must to a great extent be true of these before us. On the blocks
described by Sir Gardner there occur devices such as huntsmen with bows
and spears, knight’s holding sword and shield, and even occasionally rude
armorial bearings, all which fix the date of their execution between the
twelfth and sixteenth centuries.
There were other peculiarities about ‘these unknown sepulchres,’ as Sir
Gardner calls even the more storied Dalmatian monuments. On many appeared
a crescent moon with star or stars, and on others an arm holding a sword.
Now it is a curious fact that, of these two devices, one—the moon and
star—is the emblem of Illyria occurring in the middle of the old Bosnian
escutcheon;[191] the other—the arm of offence—is the ensign of Primorie,
the Serbian coast-land. These sepulchral devices seem, therefore, to have
been badges of nationality or clanship; unless, indeed, anyone prefers
to suspect that the moon and star possessed a superstitious, before they
acquired a heraldic, import.[192]
In the lonely gorge of the Želesnica, to the south-west of Serajevo, we
found one of these lunar monuments, which I mention here as it further
illustrates the connection between the Bosnian and Dalmatian tombs.
It was a sarcophagus of the same kind as those at Podove, but with a
crescent rudely engraved at one end. In juxtaposition with this was an
upright slab, I can scarcely call it a cross, about six feet high and
much mutilated.
But there is another point of resemblance even more important than the
half moon, to connect the sepulchres we saw with those described by Sir
Gardner.
Out of a large number of these Bosnian monuments which we examined here
and elsewhere, there was not one on which we could detect the remotest
semblance of a cross. Sir Gardner Wilkinson notices, with reference to
the Dalmatian tombs, that ‘it is singular that the cross should occur
so rarely,’ and supposes that those few monuments on which he found it
belong to a later date, when, owing to the Turkish conquests, there was
more reason to introduce the distinguishing emblem of Christianity. For
my part I cannot think this account satisfactory; but it seems to me that
an explanation lies at hand which will make the absence of the cross on
these monuments at once intelligible, and may serve as a clue towards
unravelling the mystery of their origin.
[Illustration: Ancient Monuments in Želesnica Valley.]
The Bogomiles—that strange Manichæan sect whose history has already been
touched on, and who appear to have formed the majority of the Bosnian
population during the very centuries in which these monuments were
erected—shrank with horror from representations of the cross. ‘They abhor
the cross as the instrument of Christ’s death,’ says Euthymius,[193] who,
from having been commissioned by the Emperor to extract the full tenets
of the sect out of its ‘heresiarch’ Basil, is peculiarly qualified to
speak on the matter. When pressed by Euthymius as to the reason why the
Bogomiles, when vexed with devils, ran to the cross and cried out to it,
he made answer that the evil spirits within them loved the cross, for it
was their own handiwork. It appeased them, therefore, or enticed them
forth. Is not, then, the absence of the cross on these monuments, coupled
with the fact of its presence on all undoubtedly _orthodox_ sepulchres
throughout these regions, and some of these of considerable antiquity,
strong presumptive evidence that they are the work of those old Bosnian
puritans?
This reasoning will perhaps appear the more significant when it is added
that the modern Bosniacs refer these hoary sepulchres to the Bogomiles.
Thus the voice of tradition, the remarkable conformity of these tombs
with a salient peculiarity of the Bogomilian religion, the approximate
date of their erection—all point to the same conclusion. Add to these
the locality of so many of these ancient graveyards. During the course
of our journey through Bosnia we came upon many spots where these
interesting monuments existed. They were generally away from towns—in
mountain gorges, by unfrequented paths—in the Wilderness, in short, where
the Bogomiles took refuge from their Romish oppressors. The secluded
position of these tombs recalls the words of Raphael of Volaterra, who
speaks of the Manichæan brotherhoods as living in hidden valleys among
the mountains of Bosnia.[194] It has already been noticed that the
peculiar situation of these sectaries, perhaps too their iconoclastic
tenets, made them ready to welcome Mahometan in place of Romish
rulers, and favoured that process of renegation which has given us a
Sclavonic race of believers in the Prophet. May not this account for
the preservation of so many of these monuments, when nearly every other
præ-Turkish memorial of Bosnia has been swept away? Is it not conceivable
that these renegade Manichees may still have looked with peculiar
tenderness on the tombs of their fathers, and have averted the hand of
the destroyer? Alas! neither heretic nor infidel has a _vates sacer_ to
enlighten us on these sepulchral mysteries; but we at least found it
pleasing to believe that the rudely hewn blocks, that we came upon amid
primeval forest or solitary mountain glen, were, as the Bosniacs assert,
‘the tombs of the Bogomiles’—the sole material memorials of those staunch
upholders of Puritan faith in the days of grosser superstition, whose
sweet spiritual influences every reformed church in the world feels
still, though it may not acknowledge!
We now crossed the river Bila, into which the Jasenica had debouched,
and, ascending the hills to the south-west, presently came in sight
of the lately erected Franciscan monastery of Gučiagora—a large white
barrack-like pile with a bulbous church tower, situate at the hollow of
the hill, at an altitude of 2,300 feet above the sea, according to our
reckoning. On a hillock just outside was a curious Christian monument,
of evidently considerable antiquity. On one side was a foliated cross
of some merit; on the other a Latin cross, showing that it was the work
of Roman Catholics, as indeed one would expect from the denomination
of the present inhabitants of this neighbourhood. But it belonged to
a period when the Illyrian church did not disdain to make use of the
national Serbian alphabet, for it presented an inscription, the Cyrillian
characters of which the present monks of Gučiagora were unable to
decipher.
Making our way through the entrance arch of the monastery, much as if
we were entering an Oxford College, we found ourselves in a quadrangle
with cloisters below. There a monk came up to us, and bidding us follow
him upstairs, conducted us to the guest-chamber, where others of the
fraternity soon made their appearance, and received us with right monkish
hospitality. They were not slow in perceiving, from our hungry plight,
that we stood in need of something more substantial than ghostly comfort;
and while some hurried off to their manciple with orders to provide us
speedily with a solid refection, others revived our drooping spirits for
the moment with native Bosnian wine—fresh from the goat—happily succeeded
by Turkish coffee.
The monks were Minorites, of that order of St. Francis of Assisi
whose services in combating Bosnian heresy of old have been already
recorded.[195] They were fourteen, all told; and certainly, so far as
room was concerned, they had power to add to their numbers, for their
church forms only one side of their quadrangle, the other three being
intended for occupation; and as there are three storeys, and each side
has thirty-nine windows looking into the quadrangle, it may be gathered
that the monks are not pinched for room.
The church itself, which completed the quadrangle in most appropriately
collegiate fashion, was a painful jumble of paint and stucco with
wooden pillars, and a few saintly gimcracks. For musical performances
it possessed a harmonium, and, like that at Comušina, it was completely
devoid of pews.
The monks were unfeignedly astonished at our appearance, and would
hardly believe that we had arrived on foot and without escort. They said
that to travel in Bosnia at present without Turkish guards was sheer
madness; that the state of the country was becoming more critical every
moment; and that the insurrection in the Herzegovina had roused Mahometan
fanaticism to such a pitch that all the Christians of the neighbourhood
were seriously dreading a massacre. The monks themselves certainly
seemed to share in the prevailing panic; for the day before, when the
Latins of the district were assembled at the monastery to celebrate the
feast of the Assumption, the brothers had sent off to the Mutasarìf, the
Turkish governor of Travnik, for protection. The Mutasarìf, recognising,
apparently, the legitimacy of their fears, had sent them a guard of
soldiers, and the Christian congregation had performed their devotions
under the tutelage of Turkish bayonets.
It may at first sight seem strange that people in fear of Turkish
violence should have had recourse to Turkish protection, and perhaps
stranger still that such protection should have been accorded them.
The explanation, in fact, lies at the root of much that is least
intelligible to the outsider in the present state of Bosnia.
It has been the policy of the Mahometan conqueror to favour the Roman
Church in the province, as a ready counterpoise to the orthodox
Serbians, who in numbers far outweigh the Mussulmans,[196] and who, in
contradistinction to the Latins, are imbued with national aspirations. On
the other hand, the Roman ecclesiastics as a rule entertain a far more
wholesome abhorrence of their fellow-Christians than of the infidel,
and so the alliance is compacted by mutual benefits. The Turks, from
the year 1463, when Sultan Mahomet granted the Franciscan monks their
great Charter of Liberties, the ‘Atname,’[197] have been politicly
liberal to them, exempting their monasteries and lands from taxation,
and freeing the brothers from the capitation tax which weighs on the
rayah. In return, the monks have exerted their influence in rendering
the Latins submissive to their rulers, and have backed up the Mahometans
in their oppression of the Serbs, as the members of the Greek Church
are significantly called. When the Latins have been ill used, it has
been principally owing to the weakness of the Osmanlì element and the
bigotry of the Sclavonic renegades of Bosnia, of whose almost independent
rule mention has already been made. When, in 1850, Omer Pashà dealt the
death-blow to Mahometan feudalism here, and practically recovered Bosnia
for the Sultan, he received support from many of the Latins. At the
present moment the danger which the monks were in such dread of, was not
from the Turkish authorities, but from the Sclavonic Mussulmans, the
representatives of the old provincial Janissarism, the descendants of
the Capetans and Begs, who eye the myrmidons of the Stamboul Government
with almost as much hostility as they do the rayah, and, true to their
conservative bigotry, draw far less subtle distinctions between one
Giaour and another.
We were naturally inclined to suppose the fears of the monks exaggerated,
and could not help thinking that if their situation were as desperate
as they would fain make it out, it would have been better if, instead
of praying, they had taken arms and instructed their flock how to defy
the Moslem in their mountain fastnesses. As for their lamentations, they
smacked of Gildas in their querulousness! The brothers were especially
apprehensive of a bloody anti-Christian outbreak in Serajevo, the capital
of Bosnia, where they doubted whether the Pashà—himself, in their
opinion, a tolerant man enough—could restrain the fanaticism of the
Mussulman population, which exceeds that of all other Bosnian Mahometans,
as much as the bigotry of Bosnian Mahometans in general exceeds that of
all the other followers of the Prophet in Turkey-in-Europe. Of the revolt
in the Herzegovina the monks knew but little, except that Mostar had not
fallen.
These alarmist outpourings were relieved by a hospitable diversion. The
brothers conducted us to the refectory—a spacious chamber, the size of an
average college hall—where we met with most sumptuous entertainment—as
we thought it at the time—consisting of some lumps of mutton, good brown
bread, eggs poached in cheesy milk, vermicelli, and a sweet melon—a sign
that we were advancing south.
Seated once more in the guest-room, we exchanged ideas with the monks
on a variety of interesting topics, and were much struck with the
amount of culture which many of them possessed. They comprised among
them a respectable acquaintance with modern languages—one knowing
German, another French, another Italian, and most possessed of at least
a smattering of Latin—so that we were able to hold a most polyglot
conversation. The German-speaking monks told us that they had received
their education at the monastery of Diakovar, in Slavonia. This was
founded in 1857 by the well-known Bishop Strossmayer, and endowed by the
present Emperor of Austria. It was intended as a theological seminary for
the brothers of the Bosnian order of Minorites, to whom it was handed
over. There is a certain fitness about its locality, as after the Turkish
conquest of Bosnia it was at Diakovar that her titular bishops fixed
their residence; and it was from there that, for a while, they exercised
a nominal control over their diocese, under Cæsarean influence. The
sheep among wolves, however, very naturally turned away from absentee
shepherds, and sought spiritual, guidance from the Minorites, who lived
in their midst and shared their vicissitudes. The establishment of this
seminary is therefore a very good move if it was sought to revive the
Imperial influence, for the Franciscan organisation in Bosnia, on which
the whole Latin population depend for their ghostly needs,[198] is thus
placed to a great extent under the tutorship of Austria; and if the
monks gain in culture, his Apostolic Majesty gains in goodwill. Add to
this that the Roman Church in Bosnia is in one way or another indebted
to the Imperial Government for pecuniary contributions, and that the
establishment of the Austrian Consulate-General at Serajevo in 1850 has
made it possible for Austria to play the part of patroness[199] of the
Catholics in Bosnia, and to carry into effect in the most emphatic way
in this part of the Sultan’s dominions the right of protecting the Roman
Catholic Church in Turkey, which she secured by the Peace of Carlovitz.
No one, after this, will be surprised to learn that the Roman Catholic
influence in Bosnia is a lever in the hands of Austria; and, to quote
the words of an attaché of the Austrian Consulate-General in Serajevo,
‘The Emperor of Austria is, in the eyes of Bosnian Roman Catholics, the
Emperor and supreme prince of the Catholic Church, just as in the eyes
of the Oriental Greek population the Russian Emperor is the head of the
Greek Church.’[200]
So we were not long in discovering the Austrian leanings of the monks
while discussing the possible eventualities of Bosnia. They were
extremely interested in the attitude of England—complained bitterly of
the way in which we had supported the Turk against the rayah, but at the
same time professed themselves extremely hostile to Russia. But they
betrayed a lively repugnance to the Great Serbian idea in any shape,
seeing in Serbian unity the triumph of their Greek rivals, who form the
large majority of the population of Bosnia, and who would at once become
the ruling caste,[201] if Bosnia were united to Free Serbia, Montenegro,
and the other fragments of the old Serbian Empire. As far as we could
gather their aspirations, they were willing to see the old kingship of
Bosnia restored under the suzerainty of Catholic Austria, thinking that
the Latins would thus recover their old dominant position in the country,
and the Catholic rulers obtain the same support of Austrian cannon as
their forefathers had of Hungarian battleaxes. Failing the erection of
a Roman Catholic principality under the wing of the double-eagle, they
were willing to see the whole country occupied by Austria, and actually
annexed. But rather than see Bosnia in any form a _Serbian_ state, they
would accept the continuance of Turkish rule.
These sentiments must not however be looked on as universal among the
Roman Catholics of Bosnia. In many parts they are yielding to a generous
sympathy with Greek fellow-Christians. Notably in Herzegovina, Roman
priests have appeared among the leaders of the insurrection; and Bishop
Strossmayer, whose influence among the Roman Catholics is very great, is
himself a warm champion of union with free Serbia.[202]