Expositus; sensumque malis detraxerat usus.[295]
Aug. 29th.—Dervish Pashà, the Vali, or Governor-General, of Bosnia, who has lately taken command of the troops in Herzegovina in person, returned here last night from Stolac, where he has been superintending operations against the insurgents. Our Consul, who visited him this morning, found him, outwardly at all events, well satisfied with the results of his campaign. He is certainly the most likely man to succeed against the insurgents, for not only is he by repute one of the best generals that Turkey possesses, but he is also well acquainted with the topography of the Herzegovina, and already, as far back as 1851, distinguished himself in the guerilla warfare in this country on the occasion of the last struggle of the native Mahometan aristocracy against the Sultan. His plan of operations in the present campaign has been to occupy the valleys with large bodies of regular troops, then, to draw the mountains with light-armed detachments, and so to drive the game. But to occupy the valleys and passes efficiently a body of troops is required out of all proportion to the number of the insurgents; and so, although Bosnia has been drained of troops for this purpose, and 6,000 regulars have already been landed at the port of Klek without hindrance from the Austrian government, the Vali still complains that his force is insufficient, and that the insurgents are perpetually escaping out of the toils prepared for them and doubling on their pursuers. He is, however, so well contented with the result of his operations that he was about to start for Tašlidzje and Novipazar in Rascia, where the insurrection seemed to be attaining dangerous dimensions, and where the commander was altogether incompetent.[296] To-day he sends three divisions of regulars to Stolac, Ljubinje, and Nevešinje.
The truth of the matter with regard to the insurrection here seems to be that neither party have gained any substantial advantage. The insurgents have burnt several block-houses along the Montenegrine frontier, and seized some stores. On the other hand, the Turkish garrisons have generally succeeded in making their escape, and the insurgents have never succeeded in capturing any considerable town, the Mahometan element being strong among the urban population here as in Bosnia. News, however, of a substantial success for the Turks arrives from Bosnia. The Vali has just received a telegram to say that the insurgents in the neighbourhood of Gradisca have been beaten across the Save, and that the rebellion in the Possávina has been virtually got under.
This morning our Consul kindly secured us an interview with the Vali, and deputed his Cavass to guide us to his Excellency’s Konak. We approached the official residence through a yard in which there were cannons and other warlike material, and making our way up a flight of rickety wooden steps, and thence along a carpeted corridor, were finally ushered by a gorgeous official into the hall of state—an airy chamber, about which the swallows were darting to and fro—in the extreme corner of which sat the Pashà, who graciously rose to receive us and shook hands. We were next treated to the usual coffee, while his Excellency conversed with us by means of a French interpreter. Our conversation was naturally of a personal and not a political character, so that I may confine myself to recording the amusement evinced by the Vali on our praising the scenery of the Narenta Valley. The beauty of mountain scenery was an aspect of the outside world which had evidently never even suggested itself to his mind, and it tickled his fancy immensely. Our conversation was every now and then interrupted by the appearance of couriers with despatches. The Pashà glanced at them rapidly, and signified his will about them to an attendant secretary; but we were much struck with the nice distinctions of rank observed, the officers who bore the despatches advancing so many paces from the door according to their official position, and the officers in attendance on the Pashà being seated, with due reference to their social espacement, at unequal distances from the arm-chair which served as his Excellency’s throne. The Pashà, in spite of his gracious smiles, looked worn and preoccupied, so that we hastened to cut short our interview, his Excellency rising and shaking hands again in the most polite way at our departure.
Dervish Pashà is a little man of a shrewd countenance, and though affable in his demeanour, not without a lurking cunning in his small grey eyes beneath his affected cheerfulness. It is indeed a melancholy stoicism that supports Turks like himself of ability and education. The fact is, that whatever his private opinion as to the issue of the present contest in the Herzegovina, Dervish Pashà is conscious that he is fighting for a lost cause. Like many other of the highest Turkish officials, he feels, and has confessed it to his friends, that whether the crash come to-day or to-morrow, the Ottoman Empire in Europe is irrevocably doomed. He is as well aware as any European that among the governing race of Turkey public honesty is as dead as private morality, that corruption has closed the door to progress, and that patriotism has almost ceased to exist; nor is he insensible that the master whom he serves is the source and seminary of these evils, and that nothing is to be hoped from the secluded youth and corrupt morals of him whom the Sultan would impose as his successor. The Vali, in spite of the characteristic indifference of an Osmanlì to the sufferings of rayahs, has not been without ambition of improving the material condition of his Vilayet; but he has seen himself thwarted from above by the corruption of Stamboul, and below by the impenetrable ignorance of his own officials. ‘What is the use?’ he would complain to consular sympathizers when desirous of introducing this or that reform. ‘What is the use of giving such orders to the Mutasarìf or Kaïmakàm? they cannot understand them, and if they did they could not carry them out; the people would laugh at their reforms or throw them off!’
Mostar, as a town, pleased us more than any we had seen in Bosnia. The houses are almost all built of stone, instead of the customary wood and plaster. Here, as at Tešanj, we noticed a Campanile. There are many gay kiosques rising over the graves of Moslem saints. The mosques, of which there are forty, are many of them domed, and the plate tracery of their windows is curiously Roman or Byzantine: the minarets—which, not taking their pinnacles into account, look like unfinished Corinthian columns—struck us as more elegant than those of Serajevo, and even the Byzantine church was in better taste. The impression which the streets of Mostar are perpetually forcing on us is that we have come once more on the fringe of Roman civilization. These stone houses are no longer the Turkish Chalet, but the Casa of Italy or Dalmatia. Some are roofed with a rough slate, others with tiles, Romanesque if not Roman. Every now and then an Italian physiognomy strikes us among the citizens; the auburn locks and blue eyes of the Illyrian interior are giving place to swarthier hues. The name of the mountain under whose barren steeps we passed on our way here—Porim—in the Sclavonic tongue means on, or over against Rome, and seems to indicate that this part of the Narenta valley remained Roman at a time when the mountain wilderness of the interior had passed into the hands of the Sclavonic barbarians.[297] Mostar indeed owes her name, and perhaps her very existence, to Roman enterprise. The situation of the present city has been identified with that of a Roman Castra Stativa mentioned in the Itineraries,[298] and certainly there are abundant traces here of Roman occupation. This morning I looked through two hundred coins, nearly all of them Roman, found in Mostar and its immediate vicinity, and from the number of these of Consular date one may gather that the Roman settlement dated back to the earliest days of their Illyrian conquest.[299]
Mostar Bridge.
But the most interesting monument of her early civilization, and that to which Mostar, even at the present day, owes much of her importance, is the magnificent bridge over the Narenta. It is a single arch, 95 feet 3 inches in span,[300] and rising 70 feet above the river when the water is low. According to tradition, this was the work of the Emperor Trajan, whose engineering triumphs in Eastern Europe have taken a strong hold on the South-Sclavonic imagination. Others refer its erection to Hadrian, and the Turks, not wishing to leave the credit of such an architectural masterpiece to Infidel Emperors, claim the whole for their Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. He and other Turkish rulers have certainly greatly restored and altered the work, insomuch that Sir Gardner Wilkinson declares that none of the original Roman masonry has been left on the exterior, but he was none the less convinced of its Roman origin; and anyone who has seen it will agree with Sir Gardner that the grandeur of the work, and the form of the arch, as well as the tradition, attest its Roman origin. In the gateway-towers at each end we also detected something Roman, as besides in some ancient archways and masonry on the river-bank by the side of the bridge. This sketch was taken looking down the stream from the left side, and indeed the view from this point needs not the spell of classic associations to fascinate the beholder! The soaring arch beneath which the emerald Narenta hurries—fuming and fretting amongst the boulders that strew her course in many a foamy eddy—as though after eighteen centuries she were still impatient of the yoke[301] imposed upon her by the monarch of the world; the steep banks tiered with rocks, contorted, cavernous, festooned with creepers and wild vines; above, the arcades of Turkish stores, with brilliant Oriental wares; the peaks and towers and gables of quaint old fortifications; two slender minarets, and further still a fainter background of barren mountain, against which the mediæval outlines of the city were relieved in the chiaroscuro of a Southern sun. The whole scene presented such a picturesque combination, alike of colours and outlines, as I have not seen the like of in any other town.
The very name of Mostar signifies in the Sclavonic tongue ‘the old bridge,’[302] and would be enough to prove that the bridge was already looked on as an antiquity before the Turkish conquest. Mostar was already a place of importance under the dukes of St. Sava. The town appears to have been much augmented in 1440 by Radivoj Gost, Curopalata or ‘mayor of the palace’ to Stephen Cossaccia, the first duke of St. Sava.[303] It was originally peopled by Latin Christians, and was the residence of their bishop, who afterwards emigrated to Narona. On the Turkish conquest, Mostar became the seat of residence of the Viziers of Herzegovina; and just as before the dukes of St. Sava had exercised an authority almost independent of their suzerains, the kings of Bosnia, so now the Viziers of Herzegovina succeeded in defying their Bosnian superiors, the lieutenants of the Grand Signior at Travnik. One of the latest and most representative of these Turkish dukes of St. Sava was the renowned Ali Pashà, who, for the valuable assistance which he rendered Sultan Mahmoud in his struggle with the Mahometan magnates of Bosnia, was rewarded with the Vizierate of Herzegovina, which in 1833 was separated from Bosnia and erected into an independent government for the benefit of this faithful servant of the Sultan.