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| From Harry Hodgkinson's The Adriatic Sea |
I had the idea to have a Montenegrin interlude, after reading the
marvellous novel Catherine the Great and the Small by
Montenegrin writer Olja Knežević (the link takes you to my review ) and looking for images to go with the review reminded me of the time I spent there over a year ago, and then of the first time I visited that country, and then of things written about it by others. And since I'm not travelling these days this is surely the ideal time to look back at past travels and it seems I haven't yet written anything on this blog about Montenegro.
So the first part of this will be by way of background, followed (later, hopefully) by some of my own comments and travel experiences and even a brief look at contemporary literature by Montenegrin writers.
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| Budva, Montenegro. Photo credit: Harry Hodgkinson |
In his essay My Friend Edith Durham Harry Hodgkinson relates how Edith’s first journey to the Balkans brought her to Montenegro.
In 1900, at the age of 37, Edith made her first sally into those Balkans which were to become the bane and the glory of her existence.
She chose to go to Montenegro, which then had the great advantages of being remote but accessible, exotic but welcoming, Homerically wild in form but in substance amenable to the golden kronen of the tourist. In those days the solid bourgeois of Mitteleuropa, loyal subjects of Franz Josef and the Kaiser, in linen suit and Leghorn straw hat, was accompanied by his bosomy spouse, soberly resplendent in silks and sunshade. They spent their vacations cruising by Lloyd liner down the Dalmatian coast from Trieste, marvelling at the Roman ruins and Venetian campaniles en route, arguing at Zara over whether Vlahov's maraschino was better than Luxardo's, and coming to a halt amid the incomparable grandeurs of the Gulf of Kotor.
The more conscientious carried with them the guidebook issued under the auspices of the Union for the Encouragement of Local Economic Initiatives of Royal Dalmatia. This was a volume of magisterial proportions – two and a half pounds in weight and 622 closely-printed pages. In my early Balkan forays, Edith Durham presented me with her copy of this formidable Reiseführer, and although it was hardly at home in the pocket of a rucksack, it still has no peer for its indefatigable scholarship. …...
This definitive testament of Austrian thoroughness includes an exhaustive chapter covering the optional but popular Excursion to Montenegro. The more enterprising of the voyagers undertook the exhilarating ascent of the hairpin serpentines of the road the Hapsburgs had built to facilitate the eventual invasion of their neighbour, beyond the dazzling backward vistas of blue sea and pink-roofed towns, to the bleak stony grandeurs of the Black Mountain.
Montenegro had a pervasive fascination for Europeans reared, as all the rulers and scholars were, on parallels with ancient history. While the Greeks were seen with the eye of faith as corresponding with the urban Athenian, the Montenegrin mountaineer was presented as the reincarnation of the heroic barbarism of Homer's warriors. …… And Lord Tennyson hailed them in a furious sonnet of acknowledgement, marred only by a characteristically detumescent final line:
O smallest of peoples! Rough rock throne
Of freedom! Warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernagora! Never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.
The reality was rather less simple and more prosaic. Montenegro enjoyed a semblance of sovereign independence because the Turks had found that a small army sent into those hungry hills was massacred, and a large one starved. But the Ottomans claimed sovereignty, and Montenegro does appear to have paid tribute form time to time. Face was saved on both sides. The Montenegrins chose a Bishop, not a secular Prince, to rule them; and the Turks interpreted the Montenegrins, not as a nation in the modern sense, but as a millet, a religious grouping owing political allegiance to Constantinople, not Cetinje.
(I recommend Harry Hodgkinson’s The Adriatic Sea (published in 1955). He combines travel, history and geography with humour and erudition, and written in his engaging style.)
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| Cover of Marcus Tanner's excellent biography of Edith Durham |
I was recently editing and proofreading letters of Edith Durham, (1863 – 1944) sent from Montenegro in 1911 to members of the British Foreign Office. Edith, an accomplished artist, did not set out to be either a writer or an aid worker but when she was touring the Balkans, fighting broke out (which would turn into the Balkan Wars 1912/13) and she responded to the plight of refugees there. This began her life-long interest in the Balkan peoples, and particularly in Albania, a country oppressed for centuries by the Ottoman Turks, and which now strongly wanted independence.
Her letters show her to be a remarkable woman, who is not afraid to speak her mind. I’m struck by her courage and tireless work (singlehandedly it seems, and unpaid) to help Albanian refugees (mostly women and children) who had fled Turkish troops. There had been regular uprisings throughout the centuries, which were suppressed. But this time (1911) marked a weakening in Ottoman power, and the Turks agreed to terms (after inflicting horrible things on the population, burning homes and crops, pillaging, raping etc.) Many Albanians had fled across the border to neighbouring Montenegro. It was agreed that if they returned, money would be given to them, to rebuild their homes, and to buy corn to eat. But the Great Powers of the time (Great Britain, France and Austria-Hungary) refused to guarantee the Turkish promises, which infuriated Edith, as she knew how unlikely the Turks were to keep their promises. She wrote: ‘A terrible lot of quite unnecessary suffering was caused by hustling forcibly all these thousands of poor wretches back over the frontier in four days, before any preparations were made for them.’
It was very hot, water was scarce, there was no wood to replace the roofs on their houses and the rainy season was about to begin. None of the promised money had been given out and no steps taken to provide shelter and she wrote that it was unbearable to think ‘of those miserable people’ homeless in the streets in the ‘torrents of rain.’
A practical woman, she set to work, buying and distributing flannel for people to make clothes. Then to compound the miseries and difficulties, an outbreak of cholera meant that borders were closed, and the supplies necessary to provide shelters and rebuild homes, could not be shipped in. ‘There is now no way of escape from here’, she wrote. ‘The Montenegrin frontier is hermetically sealed’.
Probably Edith's best known book is High Albania, about her travels in the early 1900s through the mountains of northern Albania. Her letters detailing her efforts on behalf of Albanian independence, and the various fights, battles and atrocities leading up to the Balkan Wars and WWII, will hopefully be published soon. She is remembered with fondness and gratitude in Albania, and has a street named after her in Tirana.
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