We found much to interest us in the streets of Travnik, and indeed the superior architecture of the town still witnesses its old importance as the seat of government. There are some larger buildings besides the castle already mentioned—palaces of bygone Viziers, barracks for Turkish troops. Even the ordinary rows of wooden houses—with their latticed dairy-like windows, the central bays of their upper story, the blue pillars and other ornaments painted outside—are not without variety in hue and outline; and amongst these rise more solid edifices of stone. Here, for instance, is one such—the best in the town—supported on arcades of solid masonry, adorned with rosettes carved in the spandrils of the arches: perhaps an old Bezestan or cloth-hall—very possibly the magazine of some merchant prince from Ragusa, for the arcading below is characteristic of the street architecture of the old republic. Beyond this—we are surveying one of the most picturesque street scenes in Travnik—rises an old mosque of wood, time-stained, dilapidated, with pinnacle awry. At its side an elegant cupola, supported on four columns and ogee arches, encanopies the turbaned tomb of a Mahometan saint; for every true believer who falls in battle against the infidel ‘drinks,’ as the Bosnian historian expresses it, ‘the sweet sherbet of martyrdom,’ and passes from this ‘vale of tears’ to enter with saintly honours into the joys of Paradise. Beyond these rose a background of gardens and spreading foliage, and above, the naked precipices of Mount Vlašić.
View in Travnik.
Climbing round by the hills to rejoin the town on the other side, we gained a more general view of the city, and counted no less than thirteen minarets, besides two clock-towers, and—what we had not seen in a Bosnian town before—the stone cupolas of the bath and the larger mosques or dzàmias. The porches of some of these Mahometan prayer-houses had altered little from those of the early Christian church, and were in truth as Byzantine as their domes. The walls are most brilliant, not to say tawdry, outside—painted with what were meant to be delectable fore-glimpses of Paradise—palm-trees loaded with dates, fruitful vines sprouting forth from vases, or here a luscious melon with a knife ready inserted for the carving. Like devices might be seen on the spandrils of the kiosques that rose over the saints’ graves, but all in the most gaudy and inharmonious colours. Against the walls of some of the mosques were built the wooden booths of Travnik tradesmen, so that the disfigurement of sacred edifices by secular accretions is not confined to Christian countries. The most gorgeous of all the dzàmias had been converted into a kind of gathering-ground for the fruit and vegetable market—as if the fruiterers considered that the celestial fruits painted on the sanctuary walls above might be useful in suggesting to customers the propriety of enjoying the humbler fruits of earth, and serve generally as a good trade advertisement. It is, however, to be hoped that the faithful will be supplied with better plums hereafter than are to be obtained for love or money in the Travnik market.
Narrow rows lined with the usual open stores—varied and fascinating as ever. Armourers’ shops, with handshars or Bosnian cutlasses, yataghans, quaint ornamental guns and pistols; another store containing nothing but melons; grindstones next door; two or three watchmakers—glazed windows to these, and a goodly exposure of turnips; as elsewhere, many Jacks-of-all trades. Among the primitive arts practised here that of a rope-maker struck me. He held the cord tight with his great toe, while he twisted it with his fingers. The inhabitants of Travnik are mostly Moslems, with a small infusion of Spanish Jews and Serbs, or members of the Greek Church, some of whom are the most well-to-do merchants in the place, and have organised a company—the Kombeni, as it is known here—for facilitating traffic with Serajevo. Their wives were dressed in the style which distinguishes the Christian women of Bosnian towns from those of most country districts, and which approaches the fashions of Belgrade.
In strange contrast to these were the Mahometan women, several of whom we noticed in the streets towards evening. Their whole face was concealed but for the tiniest eyeslits imaginable; but their insatiable bashfulness is not contented even with this, for in passing a stranger they must needs bow the head so that the fringe of the upper veil which curtains the head falls forward far enough to eclipse their last loophole of humanity! Their hands they modestly hide in two front pockets of their dress. Their exterior envelopes are sometimes green, sometimes white, sometimes of a darker hue; those whose under veil is black and outer white, looking at a little distance strikingly like nuns. Besides the two ordinary veils—that which drapes the head and that which swathes the nose, mouth, and bosom—their forehead is often covered with an additional piece not unlike the half mask worn at masquerade balls, usually of black horse-hair, with the two eyeslits above-mentioned fringed with gold. The whole form is mummied in such a way that an Englishman who had travelled through a great deal of the Ottoman dominions, but who had not visited Bosnia, could hardly be induced to believe that the figure below represented a woman of European Turkey. To find her like, one must transport oneself as far away as Egypt. Outside the limits of conservative old Bosnia, her disguise would be laughed at by the Turks themselves!
Bosniac Mahometan Woman.
But what is still stranger is that in Bosnia should coexist the two extremes of veiling and not veiling. If the married women here veil themselves more than anywhere else, en revanche unmarried girls are allowed to display their charms in a way which, to the well regulated Turk of another province when he first visits Bosnia, is quite scandalous. There is a Turkish proverb, ‘Go to Bosnia if you wish to see your betrothed!’ It is actually a fact that in this reactionary land there are such things as Mahometan love-matches; and even when the mother is allowed to select the spouse in the usual way, by inspecting, that is, the ‘stock’ in the baths, even then—so demoralized are the customs of these Mahometan Sclaves!—the young people are allowed to converse together before tying the conjugal knot. On Fridays and Mondays—days of greater liberty to all the Mahometan women—lovers may steal up to their sweethearts’ windows and whisper airy nothings to them through the lattice. This Bosnian custom is called aschyklik, and has been compared with the Fensterln of Styria and Upper Austria.[205]
Mondays and Fridays, and through a lattice—what restrictions can be more judicious?