Croat Man.
Excepting the gypsy-like faces of these Sluin folk, the features of the Karlovac Croats agreed with those of the Agramers, to such an extent as emboldens me to delineate certain main characteristics. The nose is finely cut, but flattens out towards the forehead, between which and it runs a deep furrow, which I recollect noticing among many Roumans. The face is hairless save for a moustache on the upper lip, sometimes twirled into ferocity; and scanty whiskers under the cheek-bone, as in Serbia, Bosnia, and Dalmatia. The hair is often light, in the children sometimes quite auburn; the eyes are of varying shades of grey and blue, lurking, as so frequently among the Illyrian Sclaves, in a pan-like socket. Hence shadow surrounds the eyes below as above, which gives a peculiar character to South Sclavonic beauty from the Bocche di Cattaro to the Lower Danube. So deep at times is the surrounding shade that a poet of the race might compare his mistress’s eyes to turquoises chaliced in a setting of ebony! But the deepset roving eyes of the Croat, on which he prides himself so highly, are often at first sight repellent, suggesting suspicion and cruelty, though redeeming lines of good-humour eddy round. Taken as a whole, the face is wanting in the power and massiveness of the Teutonic. Contrasted with the Serbs, the Croats are neither so tall nor so finely proportioned; their countenance is less open, beauty rarer. The Croats bitterly lamented to us over the idleness of their peasants; their neighbours, Italian and Slavonian,[158] were much better workers. They are incorrigible drunkards; indeed we saw enough intoxication at Karlovac Fair, and all the wine shops of the town were filled to overflowing; wine, not slivovitz or plum-brandy, being here the drink. But with all their faults the Croats are kind and good-humoured, and certainly neither at Agram nor at Karlovac had we any reason to complain of a want of friendliness. The hospitality of a Karlovatzer was quite overpowering. We were passing his house during a slight shower, when he literally dragged us in and forced on us his native wine—on which for politeness’ sake, I will express no opinion—diluted with flat Seltzer-water from Croatian springs, till we begged for mercy. The Croats make flat Seltzer-water effervesce with a small wooden instrument rejoicing in the name of ‘Didlideilshek.’
But to return to the market, which was on a very large scale, embracing nearly the whole town and suburbs, and a scene of exceeding gaiety. The booths for similar wares were ranged together; here were mighty piles of crockery, the stutzas, the scalicas, and all the varied throng; there a store of glass ware from the Slavonian forests, light, hand-made, Venetian. Then the vegetable market embarrassed us with a choice of fine figs, peaches, pears, water-melons with salmon-coloured slices ready cut, rosy and beautiful apples, and delicious yellow plums like small Orleans; further on we saw what might be mistaken for row on row of gigantic black-beetles hung up like vermin in a wood, but on coming nearer they turned out to be black opankas, of which the peasants were laying in great stocks. At other shops you might procure wondrous leather wallets, or Turkish knives, from the famed Bosnian forges of Travnik or Serajevo; and beyond we came to the crowning glory of all—the clothes stalls, and the gold-embroidered Dalmatian fezzes glittering in the sunshine. But the chief attraction, for the peasants at all events, was the cattle-market in the field outside the town, where might be seen herds of small Arab horses, long-haired Merino-like sheep with spiral procerity of horn, soft-eyed strawberry-coloured cows, innumerable pigs, and throngs of brown long-haired goats, butting each other and pushing at each other as if they were playing the Rugby game of football! Over which animals, collectively and individually, the peasant farmers were shaking hands in the most orthodox manner, as each bargain was struck. The goats and sheep were driven in by Bosnian Rayahs from the distant mountains of Turkish Croatia, and the way in which they expended the profits of their sales in buying powder and bullets was anything but reassuring to those about to trust themselves to their tender mercies.
Of Karlovac and its inhabitants proper there is little to chronicle except that the inhabitants possess a certain gift of inventiveness; for a report spread through the town in no time that we had walked from Rotterdam for a bet, and the report did all the more credit to the fertility of the Karlovatzan imagination in that it had no particle of foundation whatsoever. The town is divided into the citadel and fortified part, containing the churches, official houses, and a chilling square; and the Varoš or suburb, which comprises the bulk of the houses. There is nothing here of interest; the churches are bare, with the usual bulbous spires; the houses are devoid of ornament, and guiltless of architectural pretensions. They are mostly wooden; but here there are none of the mediæval survivals of an old German town—none of the elaborate carvings that speak of ancient civilization and the taste of old merchant princes. Such relics one does not find in the Sclavonic East of Europe. Karlovac is situated well for trade. She lies on the Kulpa, which connects her with the Savian and Danubian commercial basins, and into which, hard by, debouches the Korana, opening out a valley route into the mountains of North-West Bosnia; while a little above the town the river Dobra performs the same service in the Dalmatian direction. She is situated on the chief pass over the Dinaric Alps, just where the watershed between the Adriatic and Black Sea is lowest. Karlovac is, in fact, the meeting-place of the three high roads which bind the interior of Hungary and Croatia with their seaports—the Carolina-, Josephina-, and Louisa-ways; and a new railway has opened out steam communication with Trieste and Fiume. But despite these advantages Karlovac has no commercial past, and her commercial present, if we except a little timber transport and rosoglio distilling, is confined to the petty huckstering of these peasant gatherings. Her very origin was military. She owes her name and foundation to the Austrian Archduke Charles, chief lieutenant of the Emperor Rudolf in the Croatian military frontier, who began building the town in 1577, and finished its walls in 1582. He planted here a colony of soldiers, for whom, ‘whether German or Hungarian or Croat, or of any other nation,’ he gained certain privileges and immunities from the Emperor,[159] the chief of which was the right to hold in perpetuity any house built here. It was peopled chiefly by refugees from Southern Croatia, then annexed by the Turks, against whom in 1579 the still unfinished town was successfully defended. For we are now on the borders of the Military Frontier, the nine-hundred-mile-long line of battle prepared by the Hapsburgh Cæsars against the Infidel.
CHAPTER II.
THE OLD MILITARY FRONTIER, SISCIA, AND THE SAVE.
The Military Frontier, its Origin and Extinction—Effects of Turkish Conquest on South-Sclavonic Society—Family Communities—Among the House-fathers—Granitza Homesteads—The Stupa—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—Contrast between Croats of Granitza and Slovenes—The Advantages and Defects of Family Communities—Larger Family Community near Brood—A little Parliament House—Croatian Brigands—A Serb Lady—Turkish Effendi and Pilgrim—Siszek—Roman Siscia; her Commercial Importance—Her Martyr—Remains of ancient Siscia—Destiny of Siszek—Croatian Dances and Songs—Down the Save—New Amsterdam—South-Sclavonic Types—Arrive at Brood—Russian Spies!—A Sunset between two Worlds—Marched Off—Bearding an Official—A Scaffold Speech—In Durance vile—Liberated!
It was the necessities of the Hungarian Kingdom and the Empire, when they had to bear the brunt of still encroaching Islâm, that some three hundred years ago created the Military Frontier—the Granitza, as it is known to its Slavonic denizens. The Hungarian and Imperial statesmen of the sixteenth century had just the same immense problem set before them as the Romans of the earlier empire—how to defend a long line of frontier from the perpetual incursions of barbarians—and they solved it much in the same way as the Western Cæsars of yore. The Roman Emperors, under parallel circumstances, parcelled out the march-lands of that awkward angle between the Rhine and the Danube among rude Allemannic tribes, to be held of the Emperor on condition of military service in their defence. So now the Hapsburgh Cæsars divided out the provinces bordering on the Turks among primitive Sclavonic house-communities, each of which held its allotment in common of the King of Hungary on condition that it provided, in proportion to the number of men in the family, one or more soldiers for watch and ward against the Infidel. The frontier was divided into territorial divisions known by the military appellation, Regiments. Every soldier when not on active service might change his sword for a spade, and sank into a peasant like the rest; and the officer, or ‘Ober,’ left the camp to preside as judge in the law courts. It was a peasant militia. To this day the Grenzer uniform is but an adaptation of old Croat costume; the military waggons are the simple village carts; the soldier transforms himself into a boor, the boor into a soldier, at a moment’s notice. Thus it was an organisation economical, self-supporting—and who would not fight bravely when his neighbouring homestead was at stake?—but military over-pride was tempered by the peaceful instincts of husbandry. Thus the Turk was successfully fended off, and a long watch-service sentinelled along the whole frontier. The watch-towers at intervals, with their wooden clappers, may be still seen in places, as well as the now unused beacons whose telegraphic chain could once rouse to arms the whole population from the Adriatic to the easternmost Carpathians in a few hours.
Thus the Military Frontier was originally the outwork of Christendom, the political sea-wall of her provinces painfully reclaimed. But the force of that flood had long been spent—Islâm had ceased to be militant. What had once been a military became merely a sanitary cordon, or was turned to account to protect the absurd tariffs of slow Swabian finance. Nay, it had even ceased in part to mark the boundary line between Frank and Osmanlì. Free Serbia had risen beyond it. It was superannuated—a mere survival. The Military Frontier, as it existed a few years ago, might be compared to an old Roman dyke that once marked the limits of the chafing North Sea, but now runs inland across the flats of Ouse—a monument of a vanquished ocean perverted to hedgerows, given over to the plough. And, indeed, about three years ago it at last struck the Austro-Hungarian Government that this unproductive rampart might be resigned to cultivation; for human culture in the Granitza was at a very low ebb, and the artificial clogs to social development produced industrial depression. Accordingly the military organisation was assimilated to that of the rest of the Empire, and by the Theilungsgesetze, which facilitates the transfer of land and the break-up of families, the old communal system has received its death-blow.