An Observer in the Near East

by William Le Queux

I held my breath. Had the place actually revolted against the Turk just at the moment of my arrival? If so, I was in luck’s way. I knew that the Albanian hated the Turk, for Palok had told me that the revolution was only a question of time, and that one day his people would drive them out of Skodra. The place was once Servian, and captured by the Turks in 1479. Yet the Albanian still looks upon the Turk as a miserable intruder, and intends one day, ere long, to drive him out.

Around me, on every hand, pistols were being fired, the flashes showing red in the night, and I stood breathless, wondering what was happening. The man who had fired in my face was grinning at my alarm, when Palok dashed out to me.

“Signore! Signore!” he cried, in Italian. “It is nothing! Don’t be alarmed. It is only the vigil of the fast of Ramadan. It is our way of celebrating it!”

By that time every man in the whole town was firing off his revolver. The din was deafening.

“Very well,” I laughed. “Then I’ll celebrate it too,” and, raising my arm, I also emptied my weapon in the air.

The grinning Turk who had first fired and alarmed me saluted me by touching chin and forehead, and then we laughed together. It was certainly fortunate for him and for myself that I had not let fly, but he did not seem to heed at all the danger of firing suddenly upon a foreigner ignorant of what was about to happen.

The han, with the dignified name of “hotel,” was certainly an uncomfortable place. Cold roast pork, a trifle “high,” was all I could get to eat, and this was washed down by a light red vinegar, which was probably at one time wine. For five days running I had that very same pork served twice a day, until I sent Palok into the bazaar to buy me other supplies. A narrow camp bed, an iron washstand with tin fittings, a pail and a deal table, comprised my furniture, the best accommodation that Skodra could afford.

Yet the town is perhaps one of the most interesting in all the Balkans, and its people the most strangely mixed and wearing a greater variety of Eastern costume than even in Constantinople itself.

The bazaar, down by the river, is full of quaint types and most interesting. Its uneven pavement is quite as unclean and slippery with the dirt of ages as are the streets of Constantinople, but its dark little sheds are filled by workers, silver and copper smiths, embroiderers, armourers, weavers, jewellers—in fact, one sees every trade being carried on in the same primitive way and with the same tools as in the Middle Ages.

Skodra is not a town of progress, for there telephone or electric light is forbidden; machinery of every kind is against the law, and neither newspapers nor books are allowed to enter Albania. Therefore in those crooked streets of the bazaar the traveller is back in mediæval days, and the town of to-day is just as Florence was in the days of Boccaccio or Dante. Like the mediæval Florentines, many of the men from the mountains shave their heads, leaving a tuft of bushy hair at the back, which is cut square at the neck. With their tight-fitting black-and-white striped trousers, black woollen boleros, their belts filled with cartridges, and a rifle over their shoulders, they are a fine, manly race, with swaggering gait, clean-cut features—mostly Catholics, who spit openly at the lean, ragged, ill-fed soldiers of the Sultan.