About 9 in the morning we stopped at a hamlet called Tassorić, where the caravan made their next halt; but though we tried here and at other hovels on the road to obtain some food, we met with one universal response: ‘Nima chlébba! nima jaje!’—‘We have no bread! we have no eggs!’ And the only refreshment we could obtain in this terrible waste was the never-failing coffee; so that had it not been for the figs and grapes we had brought with us from Mostar, we might have fainted by the way. The Herzegovinian peasants who travelled with us had brought their food with them.
The seat on which we quaffed our mocha here was supported by two fragmentary bases of Roman columns; but in a graveyard hard by, which we had leisure to examine, were modern monuments of still greater interest. These were the gravestones of the Roman Catholic inhabitants of Tassorić, which were ornamented with incised crosses and floral devices of an elegance indeed surprising when it is remembered that these were the work of rude peasants, unable to write even the names of the departed kinsmen whom they wished to honour.
Graveyard at Tassorić.
The whole appearance of this graveyard was indeed one of the most curious sights that we observed in our Bosnian-Herzegovinian experiences. Here, in one God’s acre, alike the Infidel and Christian inhabitants of the hamlet had found their last resting-place, and the crosses of the departed rayahs were only separated by a narrow, and in places almost indistinguishable pathway from the turbaned columns of the Moslem. It was a striking proof that even in this land of bigotry and persecution both sectaries can live together in peace; and it afforded a melancholy contrast to the burnt villages whose ruins we descried a few miles further on the road.
The fact is, that the animosity of the rayahs of the Herzegovina has not been directed so much against their Moslem fellow-villagers as against the Begs, the scions of the renegade feudal nobility, who, besides exacting their own dues with the rigour that I have described, often—in the Herzegovina especially, where at present they seem to have retained more of their old power than in Bosnia—farm the government taxes. The tithe-farmers here are still called by the old ominous name of Spahi. These oppress the Moslem peasant almost as grievously as the rayah, and there have been instances during the present outbreak in which the Moslems of the country villages have made common cause with the rayah. It was primarily against the Begs that the Roman Catholic population of this part of the Narenta valley[314] took up arms last June.
A little further on we passed the Roman Catholic village of Draševo, whose inhabitants, with those of another village called Rasno, were the first to take up arms in this part of the Herzegovina. These assembled with arms in their hands at a bridge just beyond, where the high road crosses the little river Kruppa, and which, though the only means of transit for any stores and cannon that the Turks may land at their port of Klek on the other side of the hills, we found in a condition so dilapidated that we had to dismount from our horses and lead them carefully over the broken woodwork—the whole fabric being so cranky that it would only bear one man and beast at a time. At this bridge the assembled rayahs kept watch and ward, allowing travellers, and even Zaptiehs, to pass (for it was no part of the design of the insurgents at first to war against the Sultan), but declaring that they were keeping watch against the Begs alone.
But it was at a mill called Struge, which we left to the right on the further bank of the Narenta, that the first actual outbreak of hostilities took place. The miller here was a Mussulman, who, offended at the spirited attitude taken up by the neighbouring rayah villages, refused to grind the corn which the Christians, who depended on his grindstone for this part of their breadmaking, brought him for that purpose. Thereupon the Christians of the neighbouring village of Gorica resolved to take vengeance on the unbelieving miller. The miller, on his part, was aided by a division of Zaptiehs; and here the first shots were fired. The Turks were victorious, and the Zaptiehs signalized their victory by entering Gorica the following night, and burning, after first sacking, the houses of the rayahs, who had themselves escaped. They then defiled the church, and as a further insult dug up some dead bodies and left the naked corpses of a man and a child exposed in the churchyard. The insurgents of the Narenta valley and the country to the right of it were thus unfortunate from the beginning, so that when the Turks, by the murder of the prior of the Franciscan monastery at Livno, had terrified the Roman Catholic hierarchy of this part into submission, the Catholic Bishop Kraljević found no difficulty in persuading the Latin peasantry to follow the example of their spiritual governors.
A little way beyond the bridge where the rayahs first set their armed watch against the Begs, we came to the ruins of the village of Doliane, burnt, as we heard, by the Turks at a very early period of the insurrection. It was a miserable sight, the blackened shells of these little stone hovels—piteous at any time—clinging to the bare hill-side. The Turks were utilizing the ruins to build a guard-house, and were pulling down for that purpose the few homestead walls which had still been left standing. Yet this is but a single sample of the devastation which extends along the whole Dalmatian and Montenegrine borders of Herzegovina, over an area embracing many hundreds of square miles.
A mile more of jolting brought us to the Dalmatian frontier, and at Metcović we found ourselves once more within the limits of Christendom with whole skins, but quite worn out after (deducting rests) fifteen hours of excruciation on Bosnian saddles. Of this future emporium of Narentan trade there is little to record, except the filth of the inhabitants. The cleanliness of the Turks and Herzegovinians contrasts most strongly with the South-Italian squalor of the citizens of Metcović, which culminated in the family circle of the Bezirkshauptmann—an interview with whom was forced on us for the examination of passports. The Bezirkshauptmann’s table-cloth was so filthy that there was not a spot of anything approaching whiteness on its whole superficies!