Balkan Peninsula -- Description and travel; Eastern question (Balkan)
That evening I ate with the pair in a small lonely house on the
mountainside, and the moon had long risen before Palok and I returned to
Lûk’s.
My photographic camera was, from the first, regarded with a good deal of
suspicion, and it was with very great difficulty I persuaded anybody to
have his picture taken. Many surreptitious snap-shots I took with a
small “Brownie” camera, for unfortunately I had run out of films for my
own larger Kodak. But I was able to secure some photographs, which now
appear in this volume.
Early one morning, soon after sunrise, I was walking with Lûk and Palok
when a young woman passed us.
“That is Mrika Kol Marashut,” Lûk remarked.
“And who is she?” I asked.
“Mrika—the woman who carried on the blood-feud,” was his answer. “Two
years ago she was the most beautiful girl of our tribe, and had a dozen
men ready to marry her. She married Lez, a smart young man from the
Pulati side, and one of the _Baryaktar’s_ bodyguard, like myself. A
month after their marriage Lez was treacherously killed by his brother,
who lived down by the White Drin, and was violently in love with her.
When she received the news she became half demented by grief. But, by
slow degrees, she formed her plans for the blood-feud, and having no
male relatives, resolved to take it on herself. She therefore left us
and was absent nearly a year, during which time she persistently
followed her brother-in-law first to Ochrida, in Macedonia, then to
Skopia, Prisrend, and many other places, always awaiting her opportunity
to strike the blow. This came one afternoon when her husband’s assassin
was walking in the main street in Skodra, and she took Lez’s pistol from
her belt and blew his face away. It was valiant of a woman—was it not?
But not only that,” he went on. “Having killed the murderer, she went
straight to his parents’ house, three days’ journey, and shot them both
dead. Since then she has been back with us, for poor Lez’s death has
been avenged. I was sorry he died,” he added regretfully, “for he was
one of my dearest friends.”
Murder is hardly a crime in Albania, for life is cheap—very cheap. An
enemy or a stranger is shot like a dog, and left at the roadside.
Palok told me of an incident which truly illustrates the utter disregard
the Albanian has for other people’s lives. He was once with a man of the
Hoti—on the Montenegrin frontier—who had just obtained a new rifle,
probably from a murdered Turkish soldier. While he was inspecting it a
man passed close by, a stranger, whereupon the man with the new gun
raised it to his shoulder, took aim, and fired. The stranger fell dead.
Palok remonstrated, but his companion merely said that he was testing
his gun’s accuracy. Was it not better, he asked, to test it that way,
instead of waiting till face to face with an enemy?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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