A Turkish Cemetery—Arrive at Travnik—Taken for Insurgent Emissaries—The ex-Capital of Bosnia—New Readings of the Koràn—Streets of Travnik—Veiling of Women in Bosnia—Survivals of old Sclavonic Family Life among Bosnian Mahometans—Their Views on the Picturesque—Their Dignity, oracular Condescension, and Laisser-Aller—Hostile Demonstrations—Bashi Bazouks—‘Alarums Excursions!’—Insulted by armed Turks—Rout of the Infidels—Departure of Mahometan Volunteers for Seat of War—Ordered to change our Route—A Turkish Road—Busovac—Romish Chapel and Bosnian Han—The Police defied—Our Mountain Route to Foinica—Ores and Mineral Springs—Dignity at a Disadvantage—Turkish Picnic—The Franciscan Monastery at Foinica—Refused Admittance—An ‘Open Sesamé!’—‘The Book of Arms of the old Bosnian Nobility’—Escutcheon of Czar Dūshan—Shield of Bosnia—Armorial Mythology of Sclaves—The Descendants of Bosnian Kings and Nobles—The Ancient Lords of Foinica—The ‘Marcian Family’ and their Royal Grants—A Lift in the Kadi’s Carriage—Traces of former Gold Mines—Mineral Wealth of Bosnia—A ‘Black Country’ of the future—Why Bosnian Mines are unworked—Influence of Ancient Rome and Ragusa on past and present History of Bosnia, and on the distribution of her Population—A Fashionable Spa—Kisseljak and—Beds!
But it is high time to take leave of this hospitable brotherhood, and continue our way to Travnik, which we proposed to reach that night. The monks kindly found us a Latin peasant from the neighbouring village to set us in the right path, and we began a winding ascent of a foot of Mt. Vlašić. From the crest of this a fine mountain prospect opened out to the south and west, range overtopping range till they culminated in the far distance towards the Dalmatian frontier. But below we caught sight of what was then a more welcome prospect, the high-road, namely, leading to Travnik—it being now four days since we had seen anything which by a stretch of courtesy could be called a road! Taking leave of our guide, who was vastly gratified by a couple of ‘grosch,’ as the Bosniacs call piastres, we made our way to the highway and followed the telegraph wires—for it was actually lined with telegraph wires—in the Travnik direction. On one side of us flowed the little river Lašva, driving a succession of turbine-mills such as have already been described; and on the other the limestone heights of Mt. Vlašić rose above us, bare as regards vegetation, but as we neared the town planted tier above tier with Turkish gravestones: for throughout Bosnia—as generally in Turkey—the old-world fashion prevails of burying the dead by the roadsides outside the walls of towns. It was an impressive sight, that forest of turbaned columns. Some loftier headpieces spoke of the old days of Janissary rule. In places great stone sarcophagi were overturned and rifled by the mountain torrent; here and there lay marble slabs fretted with vine-leaves and interlaced devices, which still betrayed their Byzantine ancestry. On the left we passed another landmark of the East—a capacious stone cistern; and at last a turn in the road revealed to us the ex-capital of Bosnia—mosques, minarets, and chalet-like houses harmonizing with the Alpine precipices above; and, in the midst of the town, a craggy acropolis crowned with another castle of old Bosnian kings.
We had scarcely entered the town when an observant Zaptieh pounced upon us to know our business; and on our demanding to see the Mutasarìf,[203] or Governor, conducted us to the Konak. The Mutasarìf was at the time absent from the town at his country house—at least so we were informed, though considering the critical state of the country the statement seemed almost incredible. We were therefore obliged to show our credentials to his lieutenant; but this functionary, for some reason, which the small smattering of Italian of which he was master failed to convey to us, at once ‘smelt a rat,’ and, as the best court of inquiry at hand, hurried us off to the telegraph office, where one of the officials spoke French, and then and there put us through a severe cross-questioning as to our route and our objects in travelling.
‘How was it possible,’ he asked, ‘for you to have arrived at Travnik without escort? You say that you come from Tešanj over the mountains, but you don’t expect us to believe that you came on foot! Besides, where is the pièce de conviction? Where is your Zaptieh? You say that you are now on the way to Serajevo, but’—and this was regarded as the most damning fact of all—‘we see this order in the Vali’s handwriting was given at Serajevo, and you must therefore be coming from it; at any rate you must have been there, which you deny.’
It was a little embarrassing to know how to convince people who put both postal transmission and pedestrianism beyond the range of human possibilities! However, a circumstantial account of our itinerary, coupled with the awkward fact that they could not deny that our bujuruldu was in the actual autograph of the Governor-General, and that, however we came by it, we had it in our possession, brought our officials to reason, or at any rate to a wholesome perception that we were masters of the situation. So the Mutasarìf’s locum tenens being reduced to express himself satisfied with our explanation, our French interrogator changed his tone to one of apology. He explained that our arrival had been so mysterious that we seemed to have dropped from the clouds, and our being on foot and unattended convinced the authorities that we must be Austrian emissaries sent to excite the Bosnian rayahs to revolt! ‘You see, monsieur,’ he wound up, ‘you come in very delicate times’—and certainly, to judge by the un-Turkish bustle of the telegraph office, the times were ‘delicate’ indeed!
A Zaptieh was now told off to escort us to the ‘best hotel in Travnik,’ and after a little more stumbling and slipping through streets so terribly cobbled that they made one sigh for the mountain-side again, we arrived at our destination, a miserable han, where we were ushered into an upper room, and our wants attended to with due dilatoriness by the squalid hanjia and a boy rejoicing in the name of ‘Smily,’ who between them made up the whole personnel of the establishment. Here, while waiting for the pilaf and indescribables which compose our evening meal, we have leisure to reflect on the augustness of the town in which this is considered ‘first class accommodation.’
For Travnik, in the eyes of your Bosniac, is decidedly no mean city. Although at present, with its 12,000 inhabitants, only a quarter the size of Serajevo, and indeed at no period comparable to it either in populousness or commercial activity, Travnik was yet for nearly two centuries the political capital of Bosnia, and the seat of her Viziers. Their original seat was indeed Serajevo, but when the Vizierate of Bosnia stretched itself over Slavonia to the Drave, Banjaluka was fixed on as the city of residence, owing, it would seem, to the remoteness of the older capital from the new frontier. But when Buda was recovered in 1686, Banjaluka might be regarded as too much at the mercy of a coup de main, and the Divan of the Vizier was again transferred beyond the watershed and pitched at Travnik, as if the Turks were still loth to give up hopes of once more ruling on the Hungarian bank of the Save. At any rate they kept up the pleasing fiction that they ruled it still, for down to quite recent times the Vizier-Pashà who resided here clung to the vain title ‘Vizier of Hungary.’ The importance of Travnik is seen in the interesting ‘Account of the War in Bosnia,’ written in the first half of the last century by a native Bosnian historian.[204] Travnik is the seat of government and jurisdiction. It is here that a kind of parliament is ‘summoned by the Vizier, consisting of the magnates, judges, muftis, priests, and other learned effendis,’ to grant supplies in view of the invasion of Bosnia by the Austrians. It is outside the walls, on the ‘plains of Travnik,’ that the army of true believers assembles from all parts of the province. Serajevo, the seat of the native aristocracy, became indeed more and more the real seat of government, but the Sultan’s Lieutenant was obliged to content himself with his shadowy dignity at Travnik, till Omer Pashà in 1850 finally crushed the Capetans and transferred the Vizierial residence once more to the Serai.
Aug. 18.—Next morning, while we are still enjoying hard-earned rest—and let it be recorded, injustice to our hanjia, that our room was tolerably free from vermin—a most honourable exception in Bosnia!—in comes the acting Governor, whose acquaintance we had made the day before, leading his little boy, decked out in raiment of purple velvet and crimson silk, with gold brocade and elaborate arabesques of embroidery—more gorgeously bedizened than any princeling of our poor civilized West!—and begs me to photograph, or, failing that, to sketch the little man. As a camera I had brought with me had unfortunately come to grief at an early period of our tour, I was reduced—for all my disavowals of artistic skill—to attempt what portraiture I could. The child, like his father, was a true Osmanlì, unlike the light-haired offspring of the native Sclavonic Mussulmans, dark in eye and locks, and withal precociously endowed with something of the gravity of his race. His self-possession, indeed, was amusing. He could not have been more than six years old, but he leant quite quietly against his father’s knees, hardly shifting his position the whole while, and laid his little hand on the big hilt of his paternal scimetar—instructed, doubtless, to look all the future hero! The pride of the fond papa in his hopeful was an amiable study, though purblind Frankish eyes might detect little that was remarkable about the prodigy. Alas! the artist was uninstructed as to those points the insistance on which was most acceptable to his patron; and though the Turkish parent was on the whole satisfied with a scrutiny of my humble performance, he looked up from the paper with an air of profound art-criticism, and requested me, as I loved truth, to make the eyebrows darker. It was too true; I had not done justice to the raven pigment!
And the Koràn? it may be asked, what about the prohibition of the Prophet against the portrayal of living things? Actually it is observed about as rigorously in Bosnia as the prohibition against drinking wine. Within the last year or two a Dalmatian photographer has set up in Serajevo; and to prove the laxity of morals in this respect, it may be mentioned that Mahometan priests have their likenesses taken by him, and that in one case he was summoned to reproduce a whole group of Turks engaged in the interment of a fellow-believer.