Through the Land of the Serb

by M. E. Durham

The Albanian may be caught young, and tamed; he may wander into far countries; he does a good trade in Rome; he may even live years in England; but for him a glory always hangs over the capital of his country. He is rare in London; there are only two or three of him, and he was hard to find. I tracked him to a far suburb, and when he learnt whence I had come his enthusiasm was unbounded. The greatness and magnificence of his country made it not at all surprising that the whole of Europe coveted it, and he gloried in the fact. "Not that Russia, nor them Austria, nor nobody," he said, "was going to have it! English mans silly mans; no understand my people. My people all one week like that"; here he whirled his arms wildly round his head; "next week go back work. Olright. War with Turks? No, ain't going to be none." "Isn't the Turkish government a hard one?" I asked. "There ain't no government," said he gleefully. "What about the taxes?" "Oo pay?" said the Tame Albanian; "you tell me that." Money, he admitted, had to be raised at intervals, but you always lived in hope that it would be raised in some other district, and if you displayed a proper amount of spirit it was. In the days of his youth he had fought for the Turks. "I Bashi-bazouk," he said with pride; "reg'lar army all them Mohammedans. I Catholic. I good Christian. I Bashi-bazouk." To us Bashi-bazoukdom and Christianity are odd yoke-fellows. To him, quite right and proper.

Head of a flourishing business in London, and clad in a smart overcoat and a billycock hat, he sat down cross-legged on the floor, and his eyes sparkled as he thought of the good old Bashi-bazouk days. To London he came because, as everyone knows, "there is lot of money in London." He knew no word of English and but little Italian; had scarcely any money; his entire stock in trade consisted of some native costumes and some silver filigree work. Failure would seem to have been inevitable, but the pluck and enterprise of the ex-Bashi-bazouk overcame all difficulties. "You think my country wild country," said he; "now I tell you—London; it big bad place. Five million peoples in London. My God, what a lot of criminals! In my country no man starve. He knock at door. 'What you want?' 'I hungry.' 'Olright, you come in.' He give him bread, he give him wine. In London you say, 'You git 'long, or I call a p'leece.'" Wherever a Christian Albanian requires help, he has but to knock at the door of another Christian Albanian and say so. No payment is ever thought of. "How should we live," said a man to me, "if we did not help one another?" Compared with Albania, London, even now in the eyes of the ex-Bashi-bazouk, is a vast and uncivilised wilderness. Perhaps he is right. Nevertheless, he has found it an excellent place to get on in. His wife—"my Albanian missus," as he called her—had, he confessed, a very poor time. Knowing no language but Albanian, and sighing always for the sun and the shores of the lake of Skodra, she was near weeping when she heard that I had just come from the beloved spot. She wore a red cap with coins round it, and a medal dangled in the centre of her forehead. She seemed singularly out of place in a London back-shop. "By God," said her husband casually, "I'm sorry for that pore fem'le!" And he had a certain sympathy for her, in spite of his cheerful tone.

"Earth hunger," the fierce desire for a particular plot of ground, a plot which reason may point out to be barren, arid, lonesome, and in every way unlovable, but which is the cradle of the race, is and perhaps will always be one of the most unconquerable of human passions. The Tame Albanian says he means to end his days in "the finest city in Europe, Skodra."

It is not a salubrious spot. It is suffocating in summer and flooded in winter. It suffers from heavy rains, and lies low. Its one virtue is that it does not possess mosquitoes, but it makes up for this by being full of tuberculosis. Nevertheless, it grips one's imagination, it arouses the sleeping spirit of first one and then another long dead ancestor who lived in the squalid, glittering Middle Ages and before, and they point the way and they whisper, "Such and such we did, and this also—do you not remember?" and strange things that one has not seen before seem oddly familiar; three or four hundred years ago, they or something very like them were part of one's daily life.

In the bazaar down by the river, with its maze of narrow crooked streets, its crazy wooden booths and its vile pavement, life goes on much as it did with us ages ago. Each trade has its own quarter, as in all Eastern bazaars. And narrow ways, called Mercery Street, Butchers' Row, Goldsmiths' Alley, in many an English town, still tell of the time when so it was in England, in days when timber was as cheap, streets as crooked and narrow, and pavement as bad as they are now in Skodra. And then in England, as now in Skodra, people wore colours—red, blue, green, yellow—and those that could afford it were brave with embroideries. Their wants were few, luxuries there were few to be purchased, and they showed all their worldly goods upon their persons in a blaze of gold and finery on high days and holidays. Skodra does so still, and so does every peasant and many a nobleman in the old-world Balkan peninsula of to-day. Gorgeous garments solidly made they are, for they will not go out of fashion next season, nor the season after, never indeed until Albania is "civilised," and when will that be? So the finery is made to last, and is worn and worn till it descends to "Petticoat Lane" and is bought by the very poor. And when the stitchery is all rubbed off by the friction of years, still the garment hangs together, and is worn until it finally drops off piecemeal in squalid rags. All these garments, however gorgeous without, are lined with coarse materials, often pieces that do not match patched together, for the Albanian ideas of dressmaking are old-world. The modern modiste has invented cotton and linen costumes lined with silk or satin. Her ancestress, however, acted on the Albanian plan, and the beautiful silk and brocade costumes that have come down to us from Elizabeths and Charles I.'s time are finished within with coarse and unsightly canvas.

Near the entrance of the bazaar are the workshops of the carpenters, who make and carve great chests to hold the clothes, gaudy things painted peagreen and picked out with scarlet and gold, degenerate descendants of the beautifully carved and coloured chests in which all Europe kept its clothing in Gothic and Renaissance days. The makers of the chests fashion, too, wonderful cradles, coloured in the same gay manner, and in them the babies are packed and slung on pack-saddles or on women's backs. In a land of rough travelling, a strong box in which to pack the baby is a necessity, and doubtless our ancestors used the solid oak cradles we know so well in a like manner. Any day in the bazaar is interesting, for the shopmen nearly all make their own goods. The gunsmiths fill cartridges all day long, for they are an article much in demand, repair rifles and revolvers, and fit fine old silver butts, gorgeous with turquoise or cornelian, on to modern weapons. The silversmith squats cross-legged on the floor with a tray of burning charcoal, some tweezers, a roll of silver wire, and a little box full of silver globules. He works silently, deliberately, with long, nimble fingers picking up the tiny globules and arranging them, snipping and twisting the little bits of wire, building up and soldering with great dexterity the most effective designs—designs with sides that match, but are never quite symmetrical, like Natures own work, satisfying the eye in a way that no machine-made article ever will. However rough his workmanship, his idea is almost always good, and he produces daring effects with glass rubies and emeralds of the largest size. In work of this sort the Albanian excels. When he comes to larger constructions, his trick of working by eye and getting balance by instinct is not so successful; his rooms are all crooked, his houses out of the square. Perhaps this is the inevitable out-come of his odd-shaped mind. It is rumoured that three-sided rooms may be found in Skodra, for the simple reason that somehow the builders, owing to a nice confusion of angles, could not squeeze in a fourth wall.

They are an honest, civil lot, these Skodra tradesmen; and though your money will probably fly from hand to hand and disappear round the corner, the change always comes back correctly in the end, and you pass the interval drinking coffee with the shop owner. If your purchases are many, he will kindly send out to buy a piece of common muslin in which to wrap them; for Skodra does not supply paper, and when you have bought a thing, conveying it away is your own affair. We in London are used to having paper included lavishly with the goods, but an old lady once told me that in her young days the fashionable drapers of London would lend linen wrappers to those who bought largely, and the said wrappers had to be returned next day. In this particular Skodra is not more than eighty or ninety years behind London.

To see the bazaar in all its glory one must go on a Wednesday; that is "bazaar day," and all the folk of the surrounding country flock thither. "Which is bazaar day in London?" I have been asked any number of times by Serb, Montenegrin, and Albanian. And "Every day is bazaar day in London" is the one thing that gives them any idea of London's size. The five million inhabitants, railway trains, electric lights, and so forth, are all quite beyond their ken; but "bazaar every day" stuns and dazzles them, and at once calls up a picture of vast crowds and illimitable wealth. On "bazaar day" Skodra is thronged with strange types—costumes bizarre, grotesque, wild and wonderful, and the road from an early hour is crowded with flocks, pack-animals and their owners. Flocks as strange as their drivers, for the ram of the pattering drove of sheep is often dyed a bright crimson, and his horns instead of curling neatly round by the sides of his head are trained to stand up like those of an antelope with their tight twist pulled out to long spiral His fashion is an even older one than that of his masters, for we find the ram with the same head-dress in early Egyptian frescoes. For some of these people it is three, even four days' tramp down to the market from their mountain homes, and over the rough tracks the women carry incredibly heavy burdens; not only the bundles of faggots or hides that are for sale, but the baby in a big wooden cradle is tied on the top. The men march in front with their rifles and look after the flocks. Firearms have to be left outside the bazaar. It is true that a good number of people are still privileged to carry them, but I have haunted the bazaar quite alone so often that I have ceased to believe in the many blood-curdling tales about its murderous possibilities with which travellers are usually favoured. Nor, when you once know your way, do I think any guide or kavass necessary. It is very dull with a kavass, for no one comes to play with you. I tried it once for an hour or so, and never again. But though you see no murders, you may see cases where apparently vengeance has been satisfied with mutilation, and meet a man whose nose has been cut off so lately that a bloodstained rag covers the vacancy. And the mountain-man swaggers up to the cartridge shop and fills the many spaces that have occurred in his belt since last he came to market.