Kastrati, Skreli, Gruda and Hoti

A han is generally a ramshackle shed that in England would not be thought fit for a better family’s cow. Its window is barred, and the wooden flap that closes it at night is let down by day, forming a kind of shelf on which the household and travellers sit cross-legged. Within, rows of bottles and a barrel or two loom out of the dark. There is no furniture, and the floor is bare earth. A friend in need is a friend indeed a hundred times over. Travellers love to rail against the “wretched Turkish han.” I have long forgotten all its shortcomings and remember only the many times I stumbled in soaked through and exhausted, and it warmed me and dried me and brought me back to life with coffee and rakia. It has done everything for me that it could—which is more than can be said of any hotel starred by Baedeker. Together with other travellers, all Skreli men, we squatted under a simple pergola of branches. The lively hanjee chattered away in Albanian and Servian. His predecessor, he told us, had been shot in a blood feud thirteen years before—there, beside the path, lay his grave. Talk turned to ghak (blood). They examined it from every angle, from the grave to the comic, but above all from the standpoint of a man for whom blood feud belongs to life.

And it is from this standpoint that one must see it, to understand it at all. It is fashionable, not only among journalists, to speak of the “lawless Albanians.” Yet probably no other people in Europe suffers so much under the tyranny of its own laws. The unwritten law of blood is to the Albanian what the Fury is in Greek tragedy. It drives him relentlessly to his doom. The curse of blood has lain upon him since the day of his birth, and it sends him to an early grave. An Albanian man is so used to shooting or being shot that it troubles his outlook on life no more than the sentence “all men are mortal” spoils the appetite of a well-fed businessman in Western Europe. A man whose honour has been sullied must cleanse it. Until he has done so he is degraded in everyone’s eyes—cast out by his friends, punished with contempt at every gathering. When people finally slip him the glass of rakia only furtively, he can no longer show his face among them, and to restore his honour, he kills. And should you, reading this book, be tempted to express horror at the “customs of savages,” I would remind you that we play the very same game, only on a far larger scale. We call it war. And neither “blood” nor war can be condemned wholesale. The hanjee told how, a few days before, two men—blood enemies, whom he named—had happened to meet at his han. Since they were in company with friends and under the same roof, it was not proper to shoot. They drank coffee together and took such a liking to one another that they swore to keep the peace for six weeks. The assembled company thought this an excellent joke and laughed heartily.

Once we had finished our scrambled eggs with slices of fried sheep’s cheese, we set off for Bratoshi in Kastrati Sypermi (Upper Kastrati) and soon entered Kastrati land.

The path wound up a mountainside of bare grey rock. The horses, wretched nags at best, were quite worn out and had to be led on a rein for the rest of the way. Below, like a garden, lay the fertile plain of Lower Kastrati, and Lake Scutari glittered silver in the afternoon light. When we finally reached the church of Bratoshi we had been thirteen hours on the road, and aksham, the hour of dusk, was past. The young Franciscan in charge there welcomed us most warmly, and his charming old mother bustled about eagerly to prepare supper. The name Kastrati is said to derive from the Latin castrum (fortress), which is not improbable, for the main road from Scodra to Dioclea must have run through Lower Kastrati, and guards would have been needed to secure it. The tribesmen themselves, however, say their name comes from their hero, George Kastrioti, the great Skenderbeg. “When Skenderbeg died we sat by the roadside and wept. The Turk came by and said: ‘Why do you weep!’, and we said: ‘We weep because we have lost our sword!’ And he said: ‘I will be your chief sword (Sergherdé).’ Then he read us the Sheriat (the Turkish law) and said: ‘You must end your grief. Take off your black ghurdi‘” (the black, short jacket that, according to tradition, is the mourning garment for George Skenderbeg and named after him) “‘and put on the Turkish Ghiube.’ ‘But,’ we said, ‘Christians are we, and Christians have we always been! We cannot live under Turkish law. Nor can we wear Turkish dress. We obey the Canon of Lekë Dukagjini.’ Then he handed us the waistcoat that we still call jelek, and said: Je Lek (You are Lek.) ‘And so we came under the Turks.'” This curious little tale, with its fantastical etymology, is of great interest in that it clearly links Skenderbeg to a tribe from the north. For it is rather more likely that he took his name from the place than that the place took its name from him.

Kastrati consists of a single bariak of five hundred houses and, like all tribal communities, has a concrete legend of origin. According to this it has its beginning in the famous warlike stock of the Drekalovich of Kuchi, who in turn descend from the Berisha, one of the oldest and most tradition-rich of all Albanian tribes. Kuchi has lain, since the war of 1876–77, politically within the Montenegrin frontier. In fact it had already joined Montenegro in 1835, yet—together with Piperi, another tribe of at least partly Albanian blood—rose in revolt in 1845, when Prince Danilo tried to force them to pay taxes. The revolt was put down, but Kuchi later rose again. Montenegro owes the subsequent acquisition of the territory to the courage and military skill of Marko Drekalovich, who, after making life difficult for the Turks of Podgoritza for years, joined the troops of Prince Nikola with his whole clan once war was declared on the Turks, being weary of Turkish rule. He lies buried on the heights of Medun, the Turkish stronghold he took after a fierce siege. His name is famous in both Albania and Montenegro. The Kuchi today speak chiefly (exclusively?) Servian and are Orthodox. Since when, I do not know. From Drekalovich there then came, “a long time ago,” a certain Delti with his seven sons into the land of Kastrati. They fought the people they found there, said to be Serbs, slew them, took their land, and settled there themselves. Today the descendants of these seven sons of Delti make up the three hundred houses of Kastrati. The remaining two hundred are of mixed origin. Some, no doubt rightly, are said to descend from the conquered Serbs. All are now Catholic or Moslem and speak Albanian, but the Serbian names, Popovich above all, betray that this was not always so.

The nearest thing to a date I was given was the information that the church of Gruda, the oldest in Maltsia e madhe, is 380 years old, and that the church of Bratoshi Kastrati—the third oldest—was built soon after the Delti settled. This clear statement, that the Delti arrived less than 380 years ago, is highly interesting in that it places their arrival, unlike the widespread Skenderbeg story, after Skenderbeg’s death (1467). Skenderbeg’s origin is shrouded in obscurity. Many places lay claim to him. According to recent research (see Ludwig von Pastor: Leben der Päpste, and G.F. Hertzberg: Geschichte der Byzantiner und des Osmanischen Reiches), Skenderbeg was of Slavic origin, spent his life in his native mountains, and rose to fame when he defeated the Turks at Debra in 1444 and led Albania into independence. The story of his captivity among the Turks is mythical. Dufresne du Cange, quoting Flavius Comnenus, names a certain “Constantinus Castriotus, cognomento Meserechus, Aemathiae et Castoriae Princeps” as Skenderbeg’s great-grandfather. Meserechus is surely the modern Mazreku, today a parish of Pulati. And if by Aemathiae one understands Matija, that would strongly suggest that Skenderbeg’s father was the lord of Kroja, since Matija lies just behind Kroja. These two names, together with the fact that he was a Catholic, connect him clearly with the North and make the widespread legend that he came from Castoria in the south-east highly improbable. If, on the other hand, the family originated in Kastrati, the tradition that the Slavic inhabitants there were overwhelmed and replaced by the Albanian Kuchi would explain why no more definite account of Skenderbeg than the one I have quoted exists there. It is an interesting fact that both Serbian and Albanian blood appears to have flowed in the veins of most of the celebrated leaders of North Albania and Montenegro. I met people in Kastrati who cursed the day on which the tribe had submitted to the mixed rule of the tribe combined with that of the Djibal, the law of the mountains. I had already learned at the han why Scutari had refused permission for a journey through the mountains. The tribes of Maltsia e madhe, angered at Schahir Bey, the then Sergherdé, stood in open resistance. Their grievances against him were many and bitter, and they swore they would put an end to his rule.

I had actually meant to stay several days in Bratoshi, but was strongly advised to travel on to Skreli at once, where the feast of the Translation of the tribal saint, St Nikolas, was to be held and the tribes would gather in their finest dress. And since all the world was setting out for Skreli, I set out for Skreli too. Among our party was a Kastrati man from Podgoritza in Montenegro, from where he had fled some years before over a matter of blood. He spoke good Servian and was in the best of spirits, for the fact that his visit to the feast risked his life evidently added a particular spice to the outing.

“How many have you killed?” I asked. “Eight—so far,” he said cheerfully. A Moslem had shot one of his sons, whereupon he had shot four of the Moslem’s close relatives and made off across the border. This pleased him greatly. It would trouble the Moslem far more than being shot himself. He made fun of his fellow tribesmen: “Wild people,” he said. “And are you not wild too?” I asked. “No, no,” he answered, adding with a beaming smile: “But I have killed many men. Christians and Moslems, and God willing I will shoot a few more. And now I am going to pray to St Nikolas.” He had a son training to be a Montenegrin policeman and was loud in his praise of Prince Nikola. His grandchildren will probably be Orthodox and Servian-speaking, and his great-grandchildren will swear they have been Serbs since the beginning of time. And in this way the Balkan peoples have been made for centuries.

The road to Brzheta led over loose stones up to the mountain ridge, where a rough wall marked the boundary between Kastrati and Skreli, and then down again in a stony zigzag—too steep for the horses, which had to be led. Church and priest’s house stood in the valley of the Proni Thaat. The priest of Skreli, whom his own bishop describes as “small but terrible,” fairly vibrated with energy and warmth and was in the midst of extensive preparations for the expected guests. On a feast day, the priest explained, three more or less made no difference; he would find lodging for me somewhere. Beyond the green hollow of the valley rose, snow-capped, the wall of mountains that separates Skreli from the Pulati tribes. The name Skreli tells a story of origin from Bosnia. I set off to visit people. Most were friendly and delighted to let me “write” their houses. The houses are of stone but have tiled roofs. The ground floor is the stable. The living quarters above are reached by an outside staircase of stone or wood, which often leads to a large, covered balcony. Windows are few and small. The fire is lit at one end of the room on an open hearth, the smoke escaping through the unsealed roof. Behind the hearth is a recess in the wall for cooking utensils. Many houses have a wattled larder standing on posts in the yard, used chiefly for keeping milk. Every house was expecting guests. Towards evening the priest’s guests began to arrive—two Franciscans, two priests, and, not least, the deputy Archbishop of Scutari—and the fun began. As soon as the visitors, with their retainers, were within shouting distance, they roared aloud to greet their host. The priest of Skreli then rushed wildly to the window, leaned dangerously far out, shouted back, and at the same time emptied his revolver. The approaching visitor answered with a volley, rode up to the house in a great clatter of hooves, dashed up the stairs, and joined in the shouting and firing to greet the next arrival. They were all young men and in the best of spirits—for a priest posted to the mountains has very little cheerful diversion in his life—when the Archbishop himself turned up. Finding them all gathered there, he was at first quite stern, since the feast day the next morning was a Sunday, and without his leave none of them was permitted to be absent from his own parish on a Sunday. But all the priests present swore that every one of their parishioners would be coming to the feast, and that it was therefore their duty to accompany and look after them. And soon the Archbishop was in as festive a mood as everyone else. Meanwhile guests were arriving at all the other houses too, and an unbroken rifle fire tore hissing through the silence of the valley. At last we sat down to supper and made up, all together, a thoroughly clerical company. I myself sat at the Archbishop’s right hand, the only woman among six churchmen. But they all spoke some language I too could speak, were endlessly kind, and every one of them invited me to visit his own tribe. After the meal there was communal singing of the typical Albanian songs, which are like nothing else. The Albanian scale does not correspond to the modern European one, but consists entirely of semitones and everything conceivable in between. Nor does the music follow any measured time. The rhythm is now quick, now drawn out, according to the singer’s feeling for the dramatic, and the words are stretched out unbelievably over endless tiny turns and rises and falls that scarcely any English throat could imitate. To the uninitiated the songs seem to begin nowhere and end nowhere, until, after a few weeks, the ear, grown accustomed as it were to a new language, begins to make out both melody and rhythm, and songs that at first all sounded alike become distinguishable. They are highly particular and individual, and not without charm. They are sung at the top of the voice and in an artificial register, high for men and low for women. The two sexes sing so alike that I once mistook the voice of a thirteen-year-old girl singing in the next room for that of a man. Her delighted parents said: “Yes, she really does have a very fine voice.” My Albanian companion Marko and the churchmen all had tremendous voices that set the roof shaking. One song told of a widow with two sons. The elder went into the mountains and became a bandit. His mother believed him dead. The younger stayed with her, but when his affairs took him across the mountains he was shot from ambush and mortally wounded. As he lay dying, the two brothers recognised one another. Horrified, the elder wanted to shoot himself, but the younger cried out:

“Do not kill our mother’s second son too. Go to her and tell her I have moved to a distant land and that you will stay with her now.”

He died, and the bandit returned home. Another song told of a young man who went to visit a friend. He knocked on the door with the butt of his revolver. It went off and killed him. The song lamented his fate.

The feast properly fell on the Saturday. It was kept on the Sunday instead, because Saturday is a fasting day and one cannot celebrate without roast mutton. Early on the Sunday morning part of the visitors streamed down the mountains in zigzags like a living waterfall, while another part approached in herds from the valleys—from Hoti, from Kastrati and Boga, all in their most festive dress—the men first, the women following. Whenever a group came within sight of the church it called out for the priest; and bang, bang, bang went fifty rifles at once; whoosh flew the bullets; pop, pop, pop answered the priest’s old six-shooter. And before midday the assembly ground around the church swarmed with the finest specimens of humanity. Anyone who visits only Scutari rarely sets eyes on the true man of the mountains—either he is at war with the government, or he owes blood, in which case he sends his womenfolk into town to see to his business. Etiquette demanded that the Skreli people, as hosts, should not wear their best clothes; the peacock’s display was reserved entirely for the guests. And peacocks they truly were. Many carried splendid weapons mounted in silver, and although they wore revolvers, they also thrust great silver ramrods into their belts “for show.” Snow-white headwraps flashed in the sun—scarlet and gold djemadans and jeleks, the short black ghurdi, and the wonderfully decorative black embroidery on the close-fitting chakshir (trousers), together with watch- and pistol-chains of heavy silver, richly set with the false rubies and turquoises the mountain man loves—all this showed the lean, supple figures off to the greatest advantage. Most belonged to the long-faced, aquiline-nosed type, with a strong chin, downward-sloping eyebrows, some with hazel eyes and brown hair, others with grey-blue eyes and fair hair. All had shaven heads, though the shape and position of the unshaven patch varied. To study these tufts of hair one must attend church festivals. Only there can uncovered heads often be seen. Of the headwrap, the Christians of Scutari always say: “They got it from the Turks.” But a certain Henry Blunt mentions, in 1650, a curious legend to the effect that the headwrap originated at the battle of Thermopylae, has been worn ever since, and was in turn adopted from them by the Turks. This is interesting, even though the Thermopylae part is doubtless a fable, for it shows that as early as 1650 people believed this kind of headwrap had existed in Europe long before the Turks came. The women, who followed behind the men, also cover their heads. They too are shaven around the temples. Their faces appear remarkably long and almost expressionless. Some women are also shaven in a strip along the hairline, but this shaven strip is often covered by a fringe. This is the only hair to be seen, and it is always dark, whether by dye or by oil. Unmarried girls often have quite fair hair. Girls and women dress differently. The girls’ dress is of thick, stiff white woollen cloth with black horizontal stripes. Skirt and bodice are joined, and the bodice is open at the sides. The outer garments of both men and women are usually open under the arms, to let air through. Beneath the dress, the women and girls of this region wear a long-sleeved shirt and nothing else besides the long knitted stockings in fanciful patterns of red and black, or black and white. Married women wear a black, bell-shaped skirt of stiff, heavy wool, striped in dull crimson (home-dyed) or violet (bought in Scutari). The bodice is open at the sides, and thick, heavily fringed shoulder-flaps cover the shoulders. Over the skirt sits a heavy striped apron of the same cloth. And around the waist is worn a great leather belt, thickly studded with small nails and between twelve and fifteen centimetres wide. It would be hard to devise a less suitable garment for a married woman. On the head there always sits a flat black cap, on which is embroidered, in silver-gilt filigree, a single or double crescent moon, or which is decorated with a similar pattern in gold thread. This crescent, the Christian women say, their caps have always borne; it is not Turkish. In this they are probably even right. Crescent and sun appear very often together with the cross as a tattoo pattern among these Christian tribespeople. These seem to be relics of an old, pre-Christian belief that has nothing whatever to do with Islam. The Moslems do not tattoo a crescent, but a double triangle. The bell rang, and the church filled to bursting. The seats had been left to the guests, and most of the Skreli tribe knelt outside before the church. For the feast, besa had been sworn for a week, so that all blood enemies could meet as friends. After the service there was a rush for the rifles stacked outside, and a shooting contest began, accompanied by general gunfire. Everyone was in the highest of spirits and utterly amiable, and it was hard to believe that almost every man there owed blood to another, whether as perpetrator or as victim. Around three o’clock the gathering dispersed with astonishing speed to dine with their Skreli hosts. The cheerful shooting continued well into the night, but no accident marred the festa. Not all festas among the wilder tribes end so happily, however. The Archbishop told how, during a feast of the patron saint outside his church—he was then still parish priest of a Pulati tribe—seven men had been shot dead.

Since there was neither hay nor corn, the horses of the whole company had meanwhile been sent out into the countryside to graze. And so we woke to a horseless dawn. The sturdy clerical steeds, finding it no fun to fast on a feast day, had all wandered far off in search of more nourishing fare, the Archbishop’s among them. My modest kirijee horses, having no surplus energy, were found again within the hour. And so we left the inconsolable, horseless churchmen behind on the balcony and set off for Lower Kastrati, together with a Kastrati man as guide, brother of the one who had brought us there—a lively fellow with shaven temples, his hair plastered in a smooth fringe over his shaven forehead. He had thoroughly enjoyed the festa and had fired off his entire supply of cartridges—forty of them. Most men own no more than that. They buy percussion caps and powder, cast their own bullets, and refill their spent cartridge cases again and again. The Martini rifle is popular chiefly because its cartridge cases are so easily refilled. As a rapid-fire weapon it cannot of course compare with the Mauser. But the Martini causes far worse wounds and actually brings its victim down, which the Mauser does not always manage. And since the mountains offer plenty of cover for a shot at close range, the Martini has no shortage of admirers. Many told me that for a truly good old-fashioned wound, the good old flintlock, well rammed with a charge of powder and loaded with a great bullet, along with nails and other objects of one’s choosing, was a sure thing at close range.

We walked down through the valley of the Proni Thaat, a narrow strip of cultivated land planted with maize and tobacco and flanked on both sides by grey, bleak karst. This bare mountain country will probably only ever be tamed by centuries of afforestation. Along the way we passed a Christian grave adorned with a cross and the crude relief of a saddled horse. The guide and my kirijee explained that it is the custom to carve a man’s favourite horse on his gravestone. Might this perhaps point back to the days when the war-horse was buried together with its rider? I saw further examples of such graves. At Ura Zais we left the river and crossed the flat plain towards Baitza. We passed rich fields protected against the Evil Eye by horses’ skulls set on poles, or their modern substitute, battered whitewashed petrol cans. A cross offered additional protection. The church and priest’s house of Baitza stand on a pleasantly level stretch of land, scarcely higher than the surface of the lake, abounding in crops, cherries, figs, and almonds, but plagued by malaria in summer. The church tower bears the name of its builder, Selim of Debra. The best builders in North Albania are indeed Moslems from Debra: small, dark, Albanian-speaking men. They wear, however, the dolama (the long coat) of the Slavs, girded with an orange sash. Though probably themselves of mixed blood, the Moslems of Debra are among the fiercest persecutors of the Slavs, and are largely responsible for the poor reputation of Albanians in England.

In the churchyard stands a cross of a kind found in many parts of the country. A crudely carved bird perches on each of the crossbars and one on the very top. The locals say the bird is a pllum (dove), and that it is per bukur (for beauty). In truth, though, it too serves only to ward off Syy kec (the Evil Eye). Elsewhere across the whole Balkan peninsula it is the cock that is entrusted with this office. Thus a bizarre little cock-like bird adorned the headbands of Herzegovinian women. It is entirely possible that the dove—traditionally the symbol of the Holy Spirit—has, on Christian graves, replaced the former magical bird. But dove-like bronze shaft-rings also occur on early Bosnian graves. Christians and Moslems—a good many of the latter live in Lower Kastrati—mix on entirely friendly terms. Within a single tribe people are never persecuted on religious grounds. Such things happen only between different tribes. We wandered about. The people were as curious about me as I was about them. We entered the first house that invited us in and climbed up to the dark living room. It was full of people complaining bitterly. Since all five of the large tribes had refused obedience to the Sergherdé, the men could no longer go to the bazaar. They were angry, discouraged, sullen. The previous year the Sultan had demanded that part of Kilmeni’s best grazing land be handed over to Montenegro, as a favour to the ruler. What right had the Sultan to give away their land? If he wanted to give land away, let him give away Stamboul, which belonged to him—not land that had belonged to Albania long before the Turks ever came. What had the Turkish government ever done for them? There was not a single road in the country. Give us a just government. We are poor and ignorant. The Turks do nothing for us except through bribery. From them we will never see justice. The men swore they would follow in loyalty any foreign prince who would lead them. Twenty-five years before, they had believed deliverance was at hand, but Austria had betrayed them. Now they no longer knew to whom to turn, nor where to get the ammunition with which they might fight their way to freedom. Two members of this melancholy household were guests, fleeing from a blood feud, and their protection lay with their hosts. One of the fugitives was only fifteen, from Skreli, and had just killed his first man. He was a big, dark boy who looked older than his years. I believe his first blood weighed heavily on his soul—not as a crime, but as an event that had suddenly confronted him with the brutal facts of life. He sat there in silence. The first intoxication of victory had worn off. We spoke with him. He had gone to school in Scutari and could read and write a little. Now he could never go back there. As an outcast he depended for his survival on the charity of others; his every movement was tracked by the avenger of blood. The situation left him numb. Why had he killed the man? The law had obliged him to. His hosts added that the Turkish authorities had ordered the tribe to burn down his parents’ house (since he had none of his own), but since the tribe was at feud with Turkish-administered Scutari, they had not obeyed. The second guest was an exhausted-looking man of about forty. He too said he had “been obliged to kill. There is no government. God help us! Under the old law you must yourself kill the man who has wronged you, or he will treat you worse and worse.” The family sheltering the two was itself caught up in a blood feud, and only the women were able to leave the house and move about freely. There was talk of which power might yet save them. The Austrian consul was no good, they said. He had visited them recently and was a coward. “We made him coffee, and he let his wife have the first cup. He was afraid of a woman!” “That,” said Marko, “is the custom alla franga.” “I would never let my wife eat with me,” said the man who owed blood. “She must stand and wait until I am finished. What sort of a consul is that!” And he roared with laughter—a brief flash of good humour in the midst of general gloom.

We left the gloomy, blood-poisoned house and walked on, only to be stopped almost at once by a group of men and women thoroughly alarmed by the appearance of a total stranger. They wanted to know what I was doing there. Obediently we sat down and made the solemn declaration that I had not come in search of treasure, nor did I intend to carry off untold quantities of gold by night. This reassured them, and an old man at once invited us into his house, a wretched one-room hut with a floor of damp earth and no window. The loom, with a half-finished length of cotton on it, stood in the doorway, since only there was there enough light to work by. The ragged old man led us in with an almost courtly grace, gave us the only two stools there were, and set his son to make coffee. Meanwhile I drew the loom. They were delighted. They had never seen a woman who could write, nor anyone at all who could “write” a loom. In the mountains people make no distinction between writing and drawing. I am not even sure they are aware that the two are different processes. One of them remarked that a “writing woman” would make a good match, but Marko pointed out that this sort of woman would never go and fetch wood and water, which dampened the enthusiasm. As I rose to leave, the old man asked whether we had a roof for the night. “We are poor. Bread, salt, and our hearts are all we can offer. But you are welcome to stay with us as long as you like.” It gave me joy to know that even in the most wretched corners of the earth there is so much human kindness.

Towards evening I sat with my three men on the grass before the church and watched the stars come out one by one in the cloudless sky. A woman passed by, whom people here jokingly called a “nun.” She was one of those women who had sworn virginity. This one had refused to marry the man to whom she had been betrothed as a child. The “nun” sat down with us and teased the men in a thoroughly worldly manner. The kirijee, roaring with laughter, told how a nun of this kind, in the neighbourhood, had once been servant to a priest. So spotless was her character and so devout was she that everyone said she would go straight to paradise when she died. And when the priest died, she shocked the whole tribe by marrying a Moslem from Gusinje! Now she could never return home with her husband, for that would mean blood. I asked how old she had been when she married. Forty, and her first betrothed had long since married someone else. I remarked that it seemed most unjust to hold a woman of forty to a promise made on her behalf at a time when she was scarcely even born. That, I said, had driven her into the sin—if it was a sin at all—of marrying a Moslem, since no Christian man had been brave enough to take her as his wife. Indignantly, everyone replied that she had all the same sullied the honour of her first betrothed, and that of the twelve witnesses before whom she had sworn virginity, and they hoped, with little sympathy, that by now the woman was suffering greatly and repented. But she was gone, on the far side of the Prokletija (the “Accursed Mountains”), and I never learned how the story of the woman who married a Moslem came to an end.

Our Kastrati guide offered to accompany us on to Bridzha in Hoti, our next destination. So we set off early in the morning. The road across the lower Kastrati plain is good—the red earth, carefully cleared of stones, has been sown wherever this was possible. In the rocky stretches grow mountain elms and scrub oak. We struck inland, riding parallel to the Licheni Hoti (the Lake of Hoti), a long, swampy arm of the lake that reaches into the plain and separates Kastrati from Hoti. On the Kastrati side it is lined by low hills, the scene of the unfortunate uprising of May 1883, to which people refer whenever they speak of Austria having “betrayed” them. And this is how the story goes. A “Hungarian,” who called himself now Delmotzi, now Lemass, travelled through the Great Mountains speaking everywhere of freedom. At the time a commission was on foot, surveying to fix the Albanian-Montenegrin border. He told the people that still more land would be torn from them. But if they rose up to save it, he said, they could count on the support of the Austro-Hungarian government, which had no interest in seeing the Slav borders extended. “I believed him,” said an old man who had served the “Hungarian” as a guide. “Oh God, I believed him! I believed we could free ourselves from Turkish rule in this way. He asked how long our ammunition would last, and we said: ‘Two weeks.’ ‘Help will come in four days,’ he promised us.” So the tribes of Kastrati and Hoti rose up and took the Turkish authorities by surprise. Had all the tribes risen at once, there is little doubt that, at least for a time, they could have swept aside everything in their path. But either the “Hungarian’s” promises had not been sanctioned from above, or Austria’s plans had changed. At that time most of the priests were foreigners and stood under Austrian influence. And they held back their flocks, who were desperate to join the rising in support, by telling them the order to resist had not yet arrived. Meanwhile Turkish troops rushed to the spot. The luckless rebels held the low range of hills and defended themselves with the ferocity of despair. When their ammunition was almost exhausted, they hurled themselves in one last assault on the soldiers, fell upon the dead, and tore cartridges from the belts of the living and the dead alike. The Austrian consul Lippich and the French consul intervened to prevent a final massacre. An armistice was agreed, and the survivors, under promise of safe conduct, were persuaded to go home. But the Turks then fell upon them one by one, slaughtered many, and burned their houses. “May God strike down the man who puts his trust in a Turk,” runs a Balkan proverb. What truly lay behind the whole affair we shall never know. That Austria was involved in the matter, the people say, is proven. For one of the leaders—furious at the betrayal—travelled at once to Vienna to demand compensation. A visiting card given him by the “Hungarian” secured him immediate access to Baron Kallay, who then offered him a post in the Bosnian gendarmerie (which he indignantly refused, as he had no wish to leave his homeland) and gave him a small sum of money. Nothing more was ever heard of the “Hungarian,” but people still like to talk of the railway and the roads he had promised them.

We crossed the border between Kastrati and Hoti. Far off at the end of the rising valley the church of Bridzha shone as a solitary white speck. It seemed miles away from everything. I asked whether one of the houses clustered at the foot of the mountain might give us a midday meal. We would not, said the Kastrati guide quite firmly, enter the house of the bariaktar, because he was a Moslem. But he knew of a large Christian house where we would be well received. We found a wild jumble of planks and posts, for the owner and the men of the house were busy extending it. We climbed a rickety staircase, crawled through a hole in the wall, and plunged into a vast, cave-like darkness. Only three Jacob’s ladders of sunlight, on which smoke-angels whirled up and down, broke through gaps in the broken tiles of the roof and lit the room. The two tiny peepholes at the far end looked like pale stars in the gloom. Our welcome was warm. Cushions and sheepskins were spread out for us, and a woman threw a great bundle of brushwood on the fire that glowed in a corner beneath an enormous hood. As my eyes grew used to the sudden change from blinding light to black darkness, I was able to take in the magnificent scene in detail. It was an exceedingly large room, crammed with all manner of goods—so vast that the twenty-seven people gathered at either end of it looked like two small clusters of people. Far away at the covered hearth the women, dark silhouettes against the flames, were preparing the midday meal. A red glow danced over the smoke-blackened ceiling beams. Crudely painted chests, twenty or more, holding the family’s possessions, were stacked in a long row on top of one another. Weapons and farm implements hung on hooks on the walls and crossbeams. Flour and almost all the other food supplies were stored in great hollowed-out tree trunks used as barrels. Old clothes, saddles, harness, and cartridge belts lay strewn about in indescribable disorder across the whole room. The bedding—thick sheets of white, home-made felt, cushions of red cotton, and plaited reed mats—was piled up on the chests. The floor was made of thick, short planks hewn with an axe, and the massive walls, against which nothing but heavy artillery would stand any chance, were built of bare, unworked stone. Dried meat, and long garlands of little dried fish for fast days, hung from the ceiling. It was really more a kind of huge cellar than a house. And in its size, its darkness, and its chaos it had something even sublime and primeval about it. Even cave dwellers can hardly have lived with much less comfort.

Towards midday the men came streaming in from the building work. Coffee and rakia flowed freely. A sofra (a low, round table) was brought in, and in the middle of it the women set down salted sheep’s cheese cut into pieces, meant to help the rakia go down more easily. The Kastrati man was pressed with particular insistence to drink; his presence caused great merriment. And the “joke” was a peculiarly Albanian one. Not only was Kastrati at blood feud with Hoti, but Kastrati had of all things sullied the honour of precisely the house in which we now sat, and so badly that both tribes as a whole had become entangled in the feud. Without the safe conduct of a Hoti man—or the protection of a stranger, which in this case was me—my cheerful young Kastrati guide could have crossed the border only at the risk of his life. And now he had chosen to walk straight into the lion’s den. Everyone found this “cheek” thoroughly delightful. They all drank to his health; he was the guest of honour, and there was cheerful discussion of just how much blood it would still take before peace could be restored. The master of the house was quite frank about it: five, he thought, would be needed. And the Kastrati man agreed that five would satisfy them too. He was told, however, that while his visit here was all well and good, if he was to carry out his task and bring me as far as Bridzha, he must go not one step further. Rather anxiously I asked how he was then supposed to get back, since I had no intention of turning round to protect him. They laughed and promised him safe conduct. That, they said, was “all part of the game.” Our host was an almost effusive host—proud to be a Hoti man, proud of his large house, and delighted to be able to tell us everything about it. Thank God, he said, he had enough not only for his family but for all his friends besides. I was warmly invited to stay as long as I liked. He had herds in plenty. His fields, if there was enough rain, yielded eight horse-loads of maize. (A tovar—a horse-load—is 100 okes. An oke is nearly two and a half pounds.) If only there were a decent government, and a man could be sure of what was his, they would all be very well off. The Turks?—he hated them. No justice was to be had from them. He disapproved of blood feud, but as long as there was no government, a man had to protect his honour and his property himself, according to the custom of the mountains. His household included eight armed men, six women, and eight children, as well as eight brand-new Mausers, each of which had cost twelve napoleons. (The sums spent on weapons and ammunition bear no relation to any other expenditure.) The Mauser rifles and the new belts, thickly hung with gleaming cartridges, were proudly displayed—chiefly, I suspect, to impress the Kastrati man and show him that Hoti was ready. Since he himself had nothing better than a Martini, he was deeply impressed. Four of the armed men were young and unmarried. Among the six women was a lively, wiry old lady, the grandmother of the family; another was the widow of our host’s brother, who had been shot only a few months before. Our host was master of the house and held the fate of everyone in it in his hands. I asked him the price of a woman in this region. “Twenty napoleons for one from my house,” he answered. “Some ask as little as sixteen. I call that giving a girl away. From me you will get none at that price. This one here”—he pointed to an eight-month-old baby lying tightly swaddled in a large wooden cradle—”is already sold. I have already received fifty florins, the rest to follow when I send her to her husband.” At what age did he give a girl away? “Never under sixteen. It isn’t healthy. Many give them younger. Not I.” “And when do you give a boy a wife?” “Never under eighteen. I would only marry off a boy of sixteen if there were not enough women in the house to do the work that needed doing, and I had to take on another one. But better not.” Nor was he willing to concede that there was anything wrong with the system of infant betrothal, even though Marko pointed out expressly that the Church had recently forbidden it. He regarded his women as movable property and allowed them no opinion of their own. Only a woman sworn to virginity did he grant the same rights as a man. He knew one who was now forty. Her only brother had been shot when she was ten. Since then she had always worn men’s clothing. She owned a house and a fair amount of land. I asked whether the men ate with her. He slapped his thighs and said: “Of course! She wears breeches just like mine, and a revolver.” He boasted a great deal of the strength of the mountain women. Each of them, he declared, could set off with a heavy load of wood to sell in the bazaar of Scutari, and along the way, without any help, give birth to a child, carry the child and the wood into town, sell the wood, do her shopping, and, as if nothing had happened, return home again. Someone told the story of the Pasha of Scutari. Meeting on the road one day a heavily laden woman carrying a newborn child, he questioned her, and at once returned to his own wife, who was soon to give birth. “Listen,” said the Pasha, “now I know exactly how it is. I want no more fuss! The mountain women can manage on their own, and so must you.” His wife, a clever woman, said nothing, but waited until the Pasha had gone out. Then she had the servant saddle the Pasha’s Arab horse with a wooden samar and ride it into the mountains to fetch firewood. When the Pasha came home, he found his splendid Arab with a raw back and a broken knee, utterly exhausted. Furious, he asked his wife how she had dared to treat it so. “My dear lord,” she replied, “you told me I should behave like the mountain women, so naturally I thought your horse could do what the mountain horses do.” Everyone laughed. The women brought warm water in an ibrik, along with soap and a clean towel for each of us. We washed our hands, and the sofra was laid with the men’s meal. We squatted around it (I am always counted among the herd of bucks), while the women withdrew and kept a respectful distance. The soup, poultry, eggs, and milk were excellent. We ate with wooden ladles from a shared bowl. The Kastrati man took the breastbone of the chicken and held it up to the light, examined its markings, and declared that it foretold nothing ill for this house—which was very polite of him. The Hoti received this stiffly and made no comment. We washed our hands again and rose from the sofra. The women hurried over and carried the leftovers to the other end of the room, where they devoured them eagerly. The grandmother oversaw the women’s work and gave orders without pause. Two women of the household spent the whole day, every day of the week, baking bread. The slap, slap of their hands beating the heavy maize dough never stopped. It was kneaded in a great hollowed-out trough, patted flat on a round wooden shovel, then slid onto the hot hearthstone (or into a dry clay dish reinforced with chopped pig bristles), and baked under an iron lid, over which hot wood ash was heaped. The bread was baked unleavened and eaten hot and steaming. While I was there, four loaves were made. Maize bread is eaten throughout the mountains—not because wheat is lacking, but because the people far prefer maize. They will even buy maize when it costs twice as much as wheat. The maize is very coarsely ground, and the bread is incredibly heavy. People eat it in very large quantities; it is their staple food. They are so used to its heaviness that they insist wheat bread is no good—you never feel properly full on it. Properly prepared, it was quite palatable and very nourishing. But badly made, it was a deadly mixture and, I suspect, the cause of the swollen bellies seen among the weaker children. The hot, only half-baked bread is always washed down with large quantities of cold water. The women’s work in such a house is extraordinarily hard. They have scarcely a free moment except when asleep. They fetch the firewood and all the water, and as they walk back and forth to the spring and home again, the heavy water barrel bound to their shoulders with woollen cords, they spin or knit without pause the whole way. They weave and sew all the elaborate garments, and produce, following the traditional pattern, the beautiful black braided trim for the men’s trousers. The braid itself is hand-plaited from eight threads over a half-cylinder of wickerwork, which the plaiter holds clamped between her knees while she throws the clicking bobbins from one side to the other and swiftly and skilfully coils up the growing plait as it forms. Dozens of metres are needed for a single garment, but once finished, it is a work of art. The black wool comes mostly from the natural wool of black sheep. The dull scarlet needed to trim married women’s dresses is dyed by hand in all manner of remote places. Around Scutari, however, people are already beginning to use imported dyed wool. The leather opanke (sandals) that everyone wears, made of dried animal hide, are always home-made. Only the heavy, nail-studded belts of the married women are always bought in Scutari. They form part of the bridal dress, are some twelve to fifteen centimetres wide, and as heavy as harness for a cart-horse. The very sight of such a belt on the body of a heavily pregnant woman pained me, though it seemed to trouble its wearer not in the least.

At last we crawled back out into the sunlight. Our host and his seven armed men wished us “Tun giat tjeter” (a long life), and we left his property, passing a row of bleached skulls of oxen, sheep, and horses meant to protect it from the unseen forces of evil. The climb up to Bridzha took place under a burning sun. The path led over stones far too sharp for riding, and my men set about it only reluctantly. Halfway up we crowded together on a small patch of shade that looked, against the white stones, like spilled ink, and the Kastrati man told us a story of blood vengeance. A young girl, the daughter of the very house where we had just eaten, had been married off to Kastrati a few years before. Her husband died a year later, leaving her childless. She was therefore returned to her father, whose property she was, and who wished to marry her off again—that is, to sell her—a second time. She refused firmly, and threatened that in that case she would flee to the Moslems and become a Turk. Rather than that, she wished to return to her parents-in-law in Kastrati, and to this both families eventually agreed. After she had lived with them for a year, her father in Hoti learned that she was pregnant by her brother-in-law. The men of her own family were furious at what they saw as a stain upon their honour and wanted revenge at once. One of the very men we had just been eating with hurried straight to Kastrati, found the brother-in-law alone in his house, shot him, and got safely away again. This had happened only a few months before, and the two tribes now lay in a deadly feud. The sullied honour of the Hoti had not yet been sufficiently washed clean, and Kastrati still owed blood. Yet the laws of blood vengeance are followed with such single-minded devotion that our man from Kastrati had even dared to enter the very house that stood at the centre of the feud. The child was not yet born, and whether boy or girl, the unborn child and its mother had to be protected from death, at Kastrati’s expense. I asked whether the woman had been blamed or punished, which surprised everyone. They regarded her as a piece of movable property, bearing no responsibility whatsoever. This Kastrati-Hoti tragedy shows that the custom of taking the widow of a brother or cousin as a concubine—if indeed it ever existed here—has been extinct in Maltsia e madhe for so long that it is now regarded, at least by the Hoti, as a disgrace.

Our exhausting trudge through the sun finally brought us to the priest’s house at Bridzha, which stands on a level base 380 metres above sea level. From there one can see the plains of Kastrati and Hoti, the Licheni Hoti, and Lake Scutari, and beyond, as far as the Rumia, the great mountain across the Montenegrin border. The priest was not at home, but had kindly left word that I should regard his house as my own. We parted from our Kastrati guide, who loudly lamented that the blood feud prevented him from accompanying me any further. The Hoti, he said, were polite enough, but very firm on this point. He then found us a new guide, a tall, lean old man with sharp grey eyes, a thick fair moustache, and a friendly smile. He was wiry and lively, said he was sixty-five, but seemed younger. Laughing, he said sixty-five was nothing at all. His uncle had lived to ninety-six, and his grandfather to a hundred and thirty. As long as people were not shot, he said, they reached a great age here in the mountains. This new guide proved a mine of traditional lore, and I found his accounts confirmed wherever I went. Hoti, he told me, was a single bariak of 500 houses, of which only three, those of the bariaktar’s family, were Moslem. Seven generations ago, all had still been Christians. Then, he said, there had been a great battle—he believed at Dulcigno, though he was not entirely certain. The Wesir of Skutari had held command and called the mountain tribes to arms. The town was unconquerable, until Hoti and Gruda attacked. Ulk Lutzi of the Hoti was the first to break in. All the Hoti and Gruda followed, and the town was taken. “Then the Wesir of Skutari said to Ulk (that is, Wolf): ‘You are a hero! You shall become a Moslem as we are, and may choose your own reward.’ Then,” the old man said, laughing, “Ulk declared he wished for the right to leave his horse standing at the entrance to the bazaar without having to pay tax for it. The Wesir granted him this and made him the first bariaktar of the mountains. Until then Kilmeni had led, but from that day Hoti was made the first, and Gruda the second, of all the tribes of these mountains whenever they went to war in the north. And so it remains to this day. In the south, Mirdita leads. But when Ulk became a Moslem, God did not bless him, and in seven generations his line has grown to no more than three houses.” This legend agrees fairly closely with the actual history. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, Mehemed Bushatli, the Wesir of Skutari, with the help of the mountain tribes, conquered Dulcigno, which had developed into an independent city of pirates, and burned its fleet of pirate ships. Early marriages mean that generations in Albania are shorter than in Western Europe, which explains the seven generations. “The tribe of the Hoti,” said the old man, “has many ties of kinship. Thirteen generations ago a certain Gheg Lazar came into this land with his four sons, and from them we Hoti descend. I cannot name the year in which they appeared. It was shortly after the church of Gruda was built, and that was 380 years ago. Gruda came before we did. Gheg was one of the four brothers. The other three were Piper, Vaso, and Krasni. From them descend the Piperi and the Vasojevichi of Montenegro, and the Krasnichi of North Albania. So we are four—all related to one another—the Lazakechi (we of Hoti), the Piperkechi, the Vasokechi, and the Kraskechi. All came from Bosnia, having fled before the Turks, though I do not know from which part of Bosnia they came. Yes, they were all Christians. The Krasnichi became Moslems only much later.” Of these four great tribes of common descent, Piperi and Vasojevichi today speak Servian and are Orthodox. In 1790 Piperi joined Montenegro, though I could not discover whether Servian was already spoken at that time. After the Treaty of Berlin, half of Vasojevich went to Montenegro; the other half remains under Turkish rule to this day. Vasojevich itself regards itself as purely Serbian and is a bitter enemy of the Albanian-speaking tribes beyond its borders. In Krasnich, Albanian is spoken, and the people are fanatically Moslem; Hoti likewise speaks Albanian, but is Roman Catholic. Why two of the tribes became Serb and two Albanian, and what their original language was, I cannot say. But most likely both Servian and Illyrian blood flowed in their veins, and their language was shaped by whichever religion they came to follow. It is said that the Albanian-speaking Krasnichi were Catholics before they became Turks. If I reckon back three hundred and eighty years from now,¹ I arrive at the year 1528. In 1463 the Turks conquered Bosnia and killed its last king. Yet the country as a whole was only finally absorbed into the Turkish empire in 1590 (by estimate). By tradition, the date given for the emigration is the period in which the Turks were steadily expanding, and so the date is probably approximately correct, for an entire community together with its herds would certainly have needed some time for the journey.

The old man said modestly that if I was truly interested in his family, he would gladly recite his family tree for me. And so he did—from Gheg Laz, through his second son, Djun Gheg, down to his own great-great-grandson, a sturdy little fellow and the apple of his great-great-grandfather’s eye. “I have been told,” I said, “that Nikaj too is a brother of the Hoti.” “No, no,” the old man replied, “not a brother. But part of the Nikaj is related, through a later generation, to the Krasnichi, and so to us too, which is why we cannot marry among ourselves. They descend from the houses of Bijeli-Krasnich and Mulo-Smaint. Shaban Benaku, the highly celebrated lord of Krasnich, descends directly from Krasni, the brother of Gheg Laz, my ancestor. And roughly half of the Triepshi tribe, the people of Bakechi, have Hoti blood. We cannot marry them either. The other half—the Bekaj—we are allowed to marry. Triepshi belongs to Montenegro today, but they are all Catholics. When Gheg Laz and his sons came here, there were already people living here.” One of the company suggested these had been Shkyar (Slavs), but the old man firmly doubted this. “They were a very ancient people. No one knew where they came from. Some said they were like Tartars. My grandfather said they were very strong and agile, that they could leap over six horses at once, and that they ate acorns and horseflesh. Twelve houses descend from them, and we are allowed to marry them. They have different blood. They are called Anas.” (In the Albanian dictionary of the Bashkimi Society, Anas means indigenous.) The old man, however, could not grasp that the descendants of the Gheg Laz and of the Anas, after thirteen generations of intermarriage, must by now be rather closely related to one another. They could not possibly share the same blood, he said. Female blood, after all, does not count. But the idea of marriage within the Gheg Laz families themselves struck him as so utterly impossible that he was firmly convinced it could never happen, even in the most distant future.

“We are brothers and sisters. That would be a great sin.”

To hear, in every detail, straight from the mouth of a native, the story of the origin of the tribes and their kinship with one another is fascinating in the extreme. Most Albanian tribes, and most Montenegrin ones too, tell similar stories of origin—always concerning the flight of their forefathers before Turkish persecution.

At about half past five in the morning we set out from Bridzha with the old man as our guide, bound for Gruda. The way led up a steep mountainside over loose scree. Then came the descent on the other side, and we came down into a wooded, cultivated hollow in which stood the second church of Hoti, the church of the men of Treboina, who trace their descent to Pyetar Gheg, the fourth son of Gheg Laz. The priest was not there; his servant lay down with fever, half dying of thirst. We gave him one of our few lemons, for which he was touchingly grateful, as we were for a little bread, since that morning—as is the custom of the country—we had set off with only two thimblefuls of black coffee. Riding further was impossible. We left the kirijee and the horses behind and set off again on foot. The air stood still. The cloudless sky, of hard metallic blue, closed over us like a lid. The sun burned and was thrown back in blinding brightness from the white rocks. The path was nothing but loose, sharp-edged stone or great boulders with clumps of scrub oak in the cracks between them. We struggled on to the edge of a huge ravine and saw below in the valley the green mountain stream of the Tsem. Far in the distance—shimmering white in the heat—something that looked like a large settlement lay on level ground at the far end of the valley. The sun caught on a white minaret rising needle-sharp into the sky. “Podgoritza!” the old man announced curtly. Podgoritza! I thought at once of the Hotel Europa—down there seemed to lie a little piece of heaven. I was drenched in sweat, dizzy with the heat, and had six days behind me, crammed with new impressions and new information—days of constant, hard physical and mental strain and very little sleep. Why suffer, then, in an inhospitable wilderness, when Podgoritza would receive me so gladly? I need only descend into the valley; the plain would be easy going. But never could I show my face in England again and admit that the mountains of North Albania had worn me down within six days. I did not dare look at the map, or ask how much further we had to go, for fear I might “chicken out,” and so I followed the old man in silence as we made our way in zigzags down the shadeless, stony slope to the bank of the Tsem. I was half dead by the time I reached the bottom. A single tree stood there. Beneath it sat a girl, plaiting braid on a wicker frame. There was no other shade to be had. The heat took one’s breath away—the valley was an oven. I thought we were almost there, that the worst was over, when Marko, who is truly tough, gasped: “And now, God help us, we have to climb up again on the other side!” We tried to scoop water from the stream, but the bank consisted of steep rock, and we could not reach the water. Necessity is the mother of invention. I held my open umbrella into the current and drew up a load of water. We drank, and I poured a whole umbrella-full over my head and shoulders. It set me back on my feet. We crossed the stream on a wooden beam. We could not stay down in the valley, since there was neither shelter nor anything to eat. It was the hottest part of the day when we set out again. The path zigzagged upward over loose stones, up a slope so steep that in England we would call it a cliff, and the rocks, when touched, were burning hot. The old man strode on ahead unwaveringly. Marko and I crawled and stumbled after him. Marko had nothing to protect his head but his fez and suffered terribly from the heat. By the time we were halfway up he was in such a bad way that I feared he would suffer sunstroke before we ever reached the top. A nearby cave in the rock face promised shade. We crowded into it. I opened Marko’s shirt and fanned him with my hat. Then the old man spurred us on again with the news that we were only half an hour from the church. One last effort brought us out onto a plateau, wooded and cultivated—but of a church there was no sign anywhere. The next twenty minutes were the hardest I have ever known. I was scarcely conscious any longer, but fortunately the path was good, and the church did indeed soon come into view. When we arrived there was no priest’s house—a half-built structure nearby was all we could see—and not a living soul! Behind the church was a kind of large shed with a locked door. The old man hammered against it. I leaned against the wall, utterly finished. A long exchange from above followed. Then a Franciscan opened the door. He spoke German and said he was very sorry, but he could not put us up. He was only staying there for the time being, while his house was being built. But Albanian hospitality can be relied upon. He was a son of the country, and as soon as he saw my plight he took pity and asked us to share what he had. Inside it was pitch dark. We crossed a filthy stable on a plank, climbed a rickety ladder, and came into a dirty, airless room full of labourers sitting at their meal. The priest set a wobbly stool at a wobbly table. I sat down. Suddenly a cold sweat broke out over me, everything around me dissolved into black and blue circles, my head sank onto the table, and with the last of my strength I managed only to say: “Give me something to drink. Open the window.” “You’ll catch cold,” said the Franciscan. “Open the window,” I repeated. Kindly, he did as I asked and also brought me a glass of very strong rakia. I poured it down. It burned holes in my empty stomach but brought me back to life. I knew again where I was and asked for something to eat. The poor Franciscan was appalled at my greed. He explained that patience was a wonderful thing. I knew that, but found bread better. He kept pressing more rakia on me. One glass had genuinely done me good, but I knew that only a little more would leave me thoroughly ill. I asked for bread. He was a kind man and gave me a piece. I dipped it in the rakia, and by the time the fried eggs were ready I was ready for a hearty meal. I do not think I have ever been so grateful to anyone as I was to this Franciscan—the more so as I must have been a considerable trial to him. He offered me his own bedroom—the only other room in the house—and I slept for three hours. Marko slept on a plank in the church, and the old man somewhere else again. We were all utterly done in.

When I woke, I went outside to dutifully look around the neighbourhood. But I had no strength left to question the many people who had come to see me—all but one, a lively fellow who had won great fame for having shot several Turkish soldiers from the nearest border fort. All the men of the local tribes resent having Turkish forts set up right under their noses. Supper, in accordance with local custom, was not served until close to ten o’clock, by which time I was almost falling over with tiredness. The Franciscan was especially delighted to meet the old man and invited him to eat with us. As he preferred, he sat down on the floor before a sofra—chairs and tables were not what he was used to—and ate enormous quantities, enjoyed the company, and told stories about the tribes with great enthusiasm. Gruda, he reckoned, numbered about five hundred families. Roughly half of them were Moslems. But there was no trouble between them and the Christians. I asked how long the people of Gruda had been Moslem. “They have stunk for seven generations now,” the Franciscan replied. “Stunk?” I asked. He explained—and the rest of the company agreed with him—that all Moslems stink. One could tell at once by the smell whenever a Moslem entered a room. He seemed surprised that I had not noticed it yet. I remarked that in some regions Moslems washed more often than Christians, but was told that their smell had nothing to do with washing. It was Islam itself that stank. And this is the general conviction of the mountain Christians. Some eighty houses of the Gruda trace their descent to the Berisha, said to be one of the oldest Albanian tribes, if not the very oldest—a tribe that tells no tale of migration, but claims to have always lived in its present place. The remaining Gruda are said to have come from Herzegovina three or four hundred years ago. The church of Gruda in Prifti is said to be the oldest in Maltsia e madhe. It was supposedly founded by the Herzegovinian branch that calls itself Djell and claims to have already been Catholic on its arrival. The labourers confirmed the old man’s account. He himself had heard all of it as a small boy from his grandfather. “It is true that we cannot write it in a book,” he said, “but we have written it all in here.” And he tapped his forehead. “We are an ancient people. The Romans were long in this land. They defeated the Mirdite tribe on the plain of Podgoritza.” The Franciscan laughed at him, but the old man stood by his story.

“I have it from my grandfather, and he had it from his. And the ruins of the Roman city are still there.”

While I noted all this down inside the cover of my sketchbook, I was aware of the sword hanging over me: the next morning I would have to make the tiring journey back on foot, to the place where we had left the horses. I could not go on imposing further on the Franciscan’s hospitality. It was almost midnight when we went into the house to sleep, and it was still grey dawn when we left it again. We climbed down the cliff and, before the first rays of sun reached the valley, were already up on the other side, reaching Treboina in less than half the time it had taken us the day before. Poor Marko never forgot the climb up to Gruda and later called it simply the “road to Golgotha,” for which the Franciscans firmly reproached him. Treboina welcomed us kindly with food and drink. The old man, greatly troubled by my collapse the day before, wrapped me the moment we arrived in a coat so that I would not catch cold, sat me by the window, gave me black coffee to drink, but no cold water until he judged I had cooled down sufficiently.

In Treboina people asked how we had slept in Prifti. I said my sleep had consisted of nothing but a dreadful dream, in which I had to climb cliffs and cling to burning stones, and kept waking with my hands cramped into fists. Nothing could be better, the assembled company declared. A dream of climbing is one of the most promising of all, even better than one about fishing. The way back to Bridzha led mostly uphill, and since the horses were rested, we were able to ride. A thin veil of cloud dimmed the sun. At one point a large sheltopusik (Pseudopus pallasii) darted away in front of us, and to my surprise the old man remarked, quite correctly, that this was not a true snake, only something that looked like one. There was also a smaller kind, he added (meaning the slow-worm)—entirely harmless and blind, though it was said that on Fridays it could see for a few hours. In the meantime the old man and Marko agreed that an ordinary land tortoise, cooked in oil, not only tasted good but was also very effective against diseases of the lungs. The Catholics of Dalmatia eat land tortoises too. The Orthodox peasants, on the other hand, I discovered, regard them as thoroughly unclean.

We reached Bridzha early, and I had only one wish left—to sleep an entire long night straight through. The Albanians have a custom that is cruel to anyone not raised with it. Whatever the season, they eat their first meal well before midday, and then not again until an hour after sunset, or even later. This means that in summer supper is rarely eaten before ten, so that eleven, or even twelve, hours can pass between meals. By Turkish time, however, sunset falls at twelve o’clock midnight. And so they are firmly convinced—and I could not persuade them otherwise—that supper must be held at the same hour throughout the entire year. No sooner have they finished eating than they go to bed, and rise again with the sun, or even before. In summer, then, one gets a meal just when one is too tired to eat it—but in return, almost no sleep at all. In winter, by contrast, supper stands ready for you at half past five or six in the evening, and your bewildered host, dead tired himself by eight o’clock, says reproachfully: “You said an hour after aksham was too late. And now you say it is too early!” How people manage on so little sleep in summer is a mystery to me; they do not even seem to need a siesta. My own need for sleep was a constant source of jokes—no one really believed it, and at first they tried to keep me from sleeping at all, having no idea what torment this caused me. In Bridzha I even had my own room and could undress properly. Supper was of course late again, but I resolved to get a proper night’s sleep at last. Yet it was barely half past five in the morning when I was woken by thunderous knocking at my door. “What is it?” I asked. “Are you ill?” “Ill? No. Why?” “The sun has been up for over an hour already. Why aren’t you up?” “Because I want to sleep. Please go away.” “But it’s so late already. You must be ill. I’ll bring you a little rakia.” “Go away.” I fell asleep again at once, only to be woken again around seven, this time by a whole troop of people. “Are you still ill? Here’s a little rakia. The sun rose long ago,” and so on and so forth. There was no point trying to sleep again. I got up and left the room. Great joy among all these good people that I was alive and well. They were sorry to have disturbed me, but they had been up since three in the morning—for no reason I could make out—and when hour after hour passed and they found I had locked the door and would not let them in, and did not answer their first knock, they had thought I might be dead! Thank God I was quite all right, they said, but it was very unhealthy to sleep so long.

The old man came to fetch me for a visit to his own house. I was to meet his grandson. And in that little hut with its bare earth floor—where almost everyone still living of four generations was crowded together—he told me the story of his life. His father had died when he was a child. An uncle had taken him in and set him to herd goats in the mountains. “And I always wanted to learn. I knew I could. I am not stupid. I feel that I have something in here.” He touched his forehead. “One day in Scutari a gentleman fell into conversation with me, a foreigner I think. He asked whether I would not like to learn something, and he said to my uncle: ‘The boy is intelligent. I will send him to school and pay for it.’ Oh, how I wanted to go with him! But my uncle said that was nonsense. He wanted to keep me for his goats. So I lost my only chance. And then there was war throughout my whole youth. Ah, those days, when I was young and we thought we were fighting for freedom! But it was all in vain. We are a lost people. The strength has gone from my arms. The land grows ever poorer and more wretched. I am a poor old man who can neither read nor write, and I shall die as I have lived, among the goats in the mountains.” Later, and from others—for the old man never boasted of his own heroic deeds—I learned that it was he who had rallied the men of the tribes and, with them, saved the town of Tuzhi, when Austria-Hungary had ordered that it be handed over to Montenegro. The Turkish troops had already been withdrawn by the time he began his seemingly hopeless undertaking. But the resistance he and his men put up was so fierce that Tuzhi has never, to this day, been ceded. The saviours of Tuzhi, however, never received the slightest reward from the Turkish government for whom they had saved the town. The old man spoke of this with sadness and deep bitterness. I ventured to ask whether it would not have been better to accept Montenegrin rule, since that would at least have meant law and order for them. “No,” said the old man. “Nikita is certainly a good man. For the Montenegrins he is very good. If we had a prince like him, we ought to be far more grateful than they are. But he is our enemy all the same. For thirty years now he has had Albanians as his subjects; their small children are forced to learn Servian. They are given no lessons in their own tongue. We would rather wait and go on hoping for freedom than submit to a rule that seeks only to destroy our faith and our nationhood. In all these thirty years he has not built a single church for Albanians in Cetinje.” And this was the general view held by all the Christian tribes. Had it not been for the looming threat of Slavicisation, very many people, whole tribes even, would probably long since have thrown in their lot with the Montenegrins. It is strange that centuries of history have still not made even the great powers understand that every attempt to suppress a language by force leads only to unspeakable bitterness—and to a racial hatred that never sleeps, but only waits for its chance. This land, for which they have suffered so much, is no iustissima tellus.² It scarcely rewards all their endless toil. Its vast stretches of bare rock, its dark valleys—they are a symbol of a lifetime of futile effort and unfulfilled hope.

At night we sat together with the priest, who had just returned, over supper, when suddenly four shots tore through the silence. “Oh,” he cried, “someone has been killed.” We leaned far out of the open windows. The bleak, trackless land lay silent under the cold moonlight, as if the whole world were dead. With a long, drawn-out howl that tore through the night like a shell, he called a question out into the land, and the answer came quickly. A family had just finished building a lime kiln, and the shots were in celebration of the event. The priest came back from the window and crossed himself with a sigh of relief. I remember that episode with a strange vividness, for to me those were the first shots I had ever heard. A few weeks later—such is the power of habit—I no longer even noticed the sound of shots at all.

¹ That is, from the year of travel, 1908.
² “the most just of lands,” Virgil.