Nearing Tešanj we came upon, and partly followed, the remains of an ancient road, roughly paved in such an antique fashion as to remind me of the streets from time to time exhumed on the sites of Roman towns. Perhaps it really in some way represented the continuity of Roman engineering. Certain it is that the wooden bridges, such as the one on which we crossed the Ussora, and others that we were afterwards to meet with, with their beam-work arches and supports and their lattice railings, strangely recalled some of Trajan’s handicraft. The Bosnian waggons—not so unlike, either, in form, the gementia plaustra of antiquity—as they rumble along the old-world roads and bridges, with creaking so loud and stridulous as literally to make woods and rocks re-echo with their wailing, bring before you another feature in the country life of classic times, which in the England of to-day it is hard to realise. With such discord piercing your ears, there seems new point in those exquisite lines of Martial which describe his friend’s garden as not too near the highway—‘ne blando rota sit molesta somno.’[173] Heard from afar the sound is not so unpleasant, and might be mistaken for the plaintive whistling of the wind; but if any one wants to know what it is like at close quarters, he had better tweak a young pig’s tail and listen.
Castle of Tešanj.
The view which now broke upon us was the most beautiful that we had yet set eyes on in Bosnia. It is best seen by climbing the high rocks which start up above the little Tešanška Rieka. Below you winds the gorge of the shallow stream, its steeps and narrow meadowland shaded with orchards and plum-woods, amongst which peep out the chalet-like roofs and slender minarets of the truly Alpine town of Tešanj. But all this only forms an avenue to a bold rocky height which leaves the town clinging to the two sides of the valley and towers up in the middle in isolated grandeur, crowned with the old castle of the Bans of Ussora, whose walls on one side frown over an overhanging precipice on to the sources of the rivulet several hundred feet below. It is more perfect, but not so open to investigation as that of Doboj, being still made use of by the Turks. Like the other it is triangular, and ends in a polygonal tower, which here is capped by a conical roof. Below this tower are some subsidiary fortifications and a solitary tower, in general effect not unlike the Campanile of St. Mark at Venice on a small scale.
Parts of the castle are probably of great antiquity. Indeed the magnificence of the position would point it out as a stronghold in any age. Tešanj is in fact one of the earliest Sclavonic strongholds in Bosnia of which we possess any record, if we may be allowed to identify it with the Tesnec mentioned as a Serbian town by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century. It was the residence of the Bans of Ussora, and probably of earlier Župans, the former area of whose jurisdiction seems to be still indicated by the name Župa, which clings to this mountainous triangle between the Bosna and the Verbas. When Ussora became a province of Bosnia, and Bosnia a kingdom, Tešanj was therefore a royal castle, and it was probably one of the seventy strongholds ‘defended by nature and art’ which fell into the hands of Mahomet II. during those terrible eight days which followed the capture of the last Bosnian king in 1463. Soon afterwards, however, when Matthias Corvinus restored Northern Bosnia to Hungary and Christendom, and made of it the Banat of Jaycze, Tešanj was again set free from the Paynim yoke. But it fell into the custody of the Voivode, whose carelessness lost Zvornik to the Pashà of Upper Bosnia in 1520. The Pashà, regardless of terms of capitulation which he had conceded, ‘keeping,’ as the Bosniacs bitterly expressed it, ‘Turkish faith,’ butchered all except the young or the beautiful, who might be useful for the harem or the Janissary camp. When the people of Tešanj, and they of Sokol, another fortress held by this Unready, heard of the miserable fate of the Zwornikers, a panic seized on them, and, setting fire to the castle, they fled to the mountains, though it is said that few escaped the Turkish sword. With Tešanj[174] one of the keys of Lower Bosnia was lost, and the Banat of Jaycze did not long survive this disaster.
At present Tešanj has some importance as a centre of the corn trade, and though containing but 30,000 inhabitants at the outside, is a seat of a Kaïmakàm, a more exalted governor than a Mudìr, to whose sumptuous white Konak we now made our way. As we approached it we found the whole place buzzing with peasants, who were issuing from the Konak in troops, and we were obliged to wait some time in an antechamber, where we were at liberty to exchange a few remarks with a good-natured Italian-speaking official, before we were admitted to the great man’s presence. When we were admitted we found a very civilised being in thin white clothes of European cut, and who but for his fez might have been mistaken for an Italian. He looked dreadfully bored, and not without reason, for he had been reviewing hundreds of peasants all the morning; but he was extremely courteous, and treated us to the usual coffee and cigarettes. Paper cigarettes!—twenty years ago they would have been narghilés, ambery, Oriental, ablaze with gold and jewels, enchantingly barbaric; but their date is fled; the West advances and the East recedes; and now, even in Conservative old Bosnia, the pipe is degenerating into the symbol of a fogy! Sic transit gloria mundi. It was to be observed that the Kaïmakàm’s coffee-cup was twice as big as ours; but, as L⸺ remarked, ‘we could not well complain.’ We were able to converse with him, as we found that he could speak French ‘full feteously.’ On our enquiring what the large assemblage of peasants meant, he explained that he was collecting the Redìf or reserve, adding incidentally, for our information, ‘Nous avons une petite guerre dans l’Herzek.’ But why, we asked one another again, were the reserves to be sent to Banjaluka?
Turkish Café, Tešanj.
The Kaïmakàm attached a new Zaptieh to us, with orders to find us suitable lodgings in the town. What was our dismay when he led us into a dark and filthy stable!—but following him up a ladder we emerged on the landing of what we afterwards learnt by experience to be the typical Bosnian inn, in which the whole ground floor is set apart for horses. Our room was fairly clean, but infested with an ambuscade of carpeting; and our host, who was a Roman Catholic, soon provided us with a meal of which the principal features were hard-boiled eggs, flat cakes of very fair bread, and a curious Asiatic dish of clotted cream called kaimak, which in Bosnia varies according to the local cuisine, from an approach to Devonshire cream to the mere scum of boiled milk, and is sometimes mixed with little lumps of honey or sugar. From here I adjourned to a neighbouring café, discovered by entering another stable and climbing another ladder, leaving L⸺ to the safe keeping of our Zaptieh, who was snoring on the floor of our room. I found myself amidst a bevy of comfortable Turks, who were alternately sipping their mocha and smoking their long chibouks,—for they belonged to the old school, and were robed in flowing dressing-gowns and surmounted with pompous turbans.
In exploring the streets—which are narrow and filthy, though sweeter than those of many a North-German town!—I was struck once more with the extraordinary jumble of wares exhibited in each store. Instead of one shopman reserving his energies for haberdashery, and another for confectionery, and so forth, you would come upon a goodly row of Turks, squatting hopefully on what is equally the floor and counter of their several shops, each of whom set up to supply his customers with turbans, coffee-cups, knives, boots, tobacco, carpets, Turkish delight, gun-flints, water-melons, and amulets against warts; so that it was rather confusing to decide which shop to go to if you wanted to suit yourself with anything, and you could not be certain of getting the best tobacco where you had observed the nattiest sandals! Amongst the wares, wax, which is one of the principal articles of Bosnian export, formed an important item; and besides these miscellaneous stores there were others more exclusive, some of which were set apart for the sale of salt, exposed in massive cubes. But though there are prolific salt-springs not so very far off, at Dolnja Tuzla, towards the Serbian border, it must not be assumed that these were native products, for Bosnia prefers to import her salt from Galicia, Dalmatia, Sicily, and Wallachia. But the shop which most took my fancy was the blacksmith’s; it was quite irresistible to see a grimy old Turk in a majestic head-piece—there is something comically incongruous between a turban and a sledge-hammer!—alternately working the beam of his bellows and hammering away on a primitive anvil, fixed into a rough section of oak trunk.