Through the Land of the Serb

by M. E. Durham

At last we arrived at the Sud, went into a yard full of zaptiehs and armed men, were sent into an office by the entrance, and told to wait a little. We did. A man came in and said he knew nothing about an English passport. The Iguman and I were sent up a ramshackle wooden staircase on to a large landing crowded with awful filthy people, stinking and a-buzz with flies, wild-eyed and apparently half starved. The air was hot and heavy, and the constant clamour of imploring voices ceased only when from time to time a zaptieh bounced in and bellowed. Streaming with perspiration, I pulled out my handkerchief, and with it a little hard crust of the day before yesterday's bread. A man snatched it almost before it touched the floor, and bolted it like a wild beast. It was terrible; but I dared not offer money, nor show that I had any. At last an official asked us into an office, a stuffy den, but better than the Inferno outside. Clerks who tried to look European on chairs, but spoilt the effect by sitting cross-legged, were scratching backwards writing, and passing it through "buttery hatches" with desperate energy. We were told to "wait," and were given coffee. The Iguman up till now had shown no signs of impatience. "They must give you permission; you are English," was his constant cry. Now he began to ask questions of everyone that came in. And no one had heard of an English passport. I told him I would give up Dechani. He replied that the Turks were always like this, "and you must see it, you must."

Then we were ordered to another office. This belonged to a very great personage, the Pasha himself, I believe. After a hurried and whispered conversation between several people, I was told to wait outside the door. A voice was loudly raised within, and the Iguman came flying out. We were to return to the first office again! We went. It was crowded, and we were told to wait.

By this time I felt so strongly that Oriental methods did not suit me at all that I said "No, thank you" to coffee, and told the official that if he did not give me my passport at once I would go back to Berani without it. This great linguistic effort amazed him so much that he explained the delay. They had sent a telegram about me, and were awaiting the reply. A voice from the crowd said suddenly in French, "Mademoiselle is without doubt English! They do not know what to do about you. They are afraid to stop you, but they dare not let you travel farther. They have sent for instructions to Uskub. I too am waiting for my teskereh, but you will have yours first; you are English. No one here understands French; one may talk. If you had been here a few weeks ago you could have gone to Uskub, and met the newspaper correspondents. Now they are all gone." He came nearer, and added in a lower voice, "They think it is all over, and it has not begun." I was aware of this, and hastily squashed his remarks on such a dangerous subject. The official was occupied in bellowing at the crowd of poor wretches who were applying for passes. And they were all told to wait. One luckless boy who had two women with him cried out wildly that they had nothing to eat, that they wished to go to work as reapers, and had waited many days. "By God, it is true," cried a voice from the crowd; but the official only bellowed at him, and he had to give place to the next applicant. They were all Serb-speaking peasants in the last stages of misery. Finally, I was told that my passport should be sent me very soon, and that I was to go.

We went to a house in the Christians' quarter of the town, where the men who had accompanied me were waiting with many others. Everyone was absorbed in a handful of newspaper cuttings that had just been brought in a dirty, much-worn envelope. They contained an account of the Servian murders. It was the 6th of July, and till then no details of the affair had come through! Even then the accounts were so meagre that they appeared to be some of the first published. They were grim and brief. "Death of Queen Draga," ran one. "Queen Draga is dead. The circumstances of her death are not exactly known, but there were many revolver wounds in her body." A piece of journalism which requires some beating.

Two mounted zaptiehs clattered into the yard at one o'clock, and I was told to start at once. They were to take me to Dechani and bring me back. I was to go nowhere else, and the Pasha would keep my passport. I had hoped to push right on to Prisren from Dechani, but was outwitted. As for returning across country to Andrijevitza, that, I was told, was out of the question. The Albanians were up, and even with an escort of Nizams we should probably not get through without a fight. We set off for Dechani at once. The school teacher and the student both rode with me, and the former most kindly lent me his horse, a very good one. We rode over the undulating plain, and they showed me where Kosovo lay, where Mitrovitza, and where Prisren. The two zaptiehs, both Moslem, were apparently as much interested in Kosovo as were the Christians. One, Yakoub, was a Bosnian, and his Mohammedanism sat exceeding light upon him. He was delighted with the job of riding about with me; his discourse was all of the Montenegrins, and their great valour, and of that hero, Milosh Obilich, who slew the wicked Sultan Murad. "He was a veliki junak! Come with me, and I will show you his grave," said Yakoub enthusiastically. But he wore the Sultan's uniform, and of his two uncles one was a Pasha and the other a Kaimmakam! He was a fair-haired, blue-eyed young fellow bubbling with animal spirits, singing songs and making his horse plunge out of pure light-heartedness. The conversion of his forefathers, doubtless for the sake of peace and quiet, to Islam had placed him in the class of the rulers and not of the ruled. It therefore naturally never occurred to him to doubt the superiority of Mohammedanism, but the heroes that he cherished in his heart were all Christian, and belonged to the days of Tsar Lazar and the great Servian empire.

The ride was a short and easy one. The land is rich and fertile but little cultivated, for it is constantly liable to be raided. Such crops as there were, were splendid, and the grass grew thick in the fields. It was hard to believe that the country had been impassable two months before, or that there was any present danger, but the few peasants who were going our way clung to our party carefully; all the houses, and there were very few, were more like blockhouses, had no windows on the ground floor and none larger than loopholes above, and Yakoub thought it necessary to assure us every few minutes that nothing would happen to-day. The monastery, which lies about 1500 feet above sea-level, appeared as a white church surrounded by outbuildings at the entrance of a magnificently wooded valley, through which flows a small river, the Dechanski Bistritza, the one slope rich with stately chestnuts and the other fir-clad. Robbed of its broad lands, which have been swooped on by the Albanians, who at the time of my visit made further progress up the valley impossible, it lies precariously on the bloody edge of things, and only the wonderful white marble church tells of its former glory. It was being used as a military outpost, and twenty-five Nizams and an officer were quartered on the monastery, which had also a guard of its own, a set of Mohammedan Albanians, who were said to be very loyal. They looked like a wild-beast show, spoke nothing but Albanian, had the most elegant manners, and I was never allowed outside the monastery gate without a couple of them.

Dechani dates from the palmy days of the Servian empire, and is its finest monument. The church, built by a Dalmatian from Cattaro, is of white and dull red marble, striped in the manner familiar to us in Italy, and would be a fine building anywhere. Here, a unique specimen in a land almostly entirely given over to barbarism, it is looked upon as something almost miraculous, and is regarded with a veneration which has not improbably worked upon the superstitious souls of the Albanians and saved it from destruction. And to the Serb it is an outward and visible sign that this land is his. Though it has been the Turk's for five hundred years, he has set no such mark upon it. Roughly speaking, he has spent those five centuries in camping out on it temporarily as an army of occupation! Nothing is more surprising about him than the speed with which all visible signs of his existence can be wiped out, but the stain he has left upon the souls of the people is, alas! harder to erase.

Stefan VII., King of Servia, known on account of his pious works as the Sveti Kralj (holy king), built Dechani in the first half of the fourteenth century. Mediæval Servia, like the rest of Mediæval Europe, was a place were careers were apt to be brief, bloody, and brilliant. The Turks did not find a highly civilised people and overwhelm them with barbarism. They found a people who, though steadily progressing, were no better than their neighbours, and they arrested their further development. Stefan VII.'s career as king was covered with glory—he subdued the Bulgarians and was successful against the Greeks—but it came to an abrupt and untimely end. He was murdered in 1336 in his castle, Zvechan, near Mitrovitza. It is said by some that he was strangled by order of his son Stefan, whose nickname, Dushan, has been interpreted to mean the Strangler (dushiti, to strangle). But the patriotic Serb, who cannot bear to cast a slur on the maker of great Servia, states simply that he "was murdered," and derives Dushan from "dusha," the soul, Stefan the Soul of the nation. The dead king was canonised as St. Stefan Dechanski and is extraordinarily celebrated as a miracle worker. His death is pictured upon his shrine; two men tug the ends of a cord that is twisted round his neck, and an angel fetches his soul. He is, I was told, exceedingly good, and it is of no use to approach him in prayer if you have any bad thought in your heart. He helps the poor and performs the most marvellous cures. The belief in his power is far spread, even Yakoub had a sort of sneaking respect for him, and I was bidden to prepare my mind for the visit to the Sveti Kralj even before I had left Berani. Nor does he, alone, protect the church. Once a Turk stole a jewel from a picture of the Holy Mother of God. Shortly afterwards he was found dead and unwounded! Then the jewel was found upon him, and it was known that the Holy Mother of God had slain him, for to die of anything but a wound was clearly a great marvel. I stood by the shrine of the murdered Sveti Kralj in the church that he had built, and thought of Alexander and his end as reported in the dirty newspaper cuttings of that morning. The school teacher talked of Stcherbina's death at Mitrovitza, and the old world and the new seemed very close together.

The whole interior of the church is elaborately frescoed. All the faces that are within reach from the ground have been poked out, but those above are very well preserved. The line of Nemanja kings that covers one wall of the narthex is especially interesting. The magnificent old Ikonostasis is of carved and gilt wood (cleverly restored). Its pillars are all wreathed and twined with plants, birds, and beasts elaborately coloured and carved in very high relief, and the whole mass of brown gold and colour is very rich in effect. The floor is paved with white and dull red marble, and the piers which support the roof are in several instances monolithic. The tomb of the Sveti Kralj's sister Helena (also, I believe, canonised) stands in the body of the church, and a big cross from Russia, recently presented.

The two marbles from which the church is entirely built were quarried in the immediate neighbourhood. It is thirty metres high to the base of the cupola. Doors and windows are all elaborately and splendidly carved, and the whole is in such a wonderfully good state of preservation that it is small wonder that the people have deep faith in the protecting power of the Sveti Kralj, and believe that in the whole world there is no building quite so beautiful. The treasures of the monastery are all dispersed, and its books and MSS. relating to the old kings of Servia are scattered. The folk at the monastery are now miserably poor, and toil in their few fields for a bare living. The feeding of the soldiers quartered upon them strained their resources sadly.