Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family: or, A Residence in Belgrade and Travels in the Highlands and Woodlands of the Interior, during the years 1843 and 1844.Paton, A. A. (Andrew Archibald)
History
Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family: or, A Residence in Belgrade and Travels in the Highlands and Woodlands of the Interior, during the years 1843 and 1844.
Paton, A. A. (Andrew Archibald)
Serbia -- Description and travel
The last dish of our dinner was a roast lamb, served on a large
circular wooden board, the head being split in twain, and laid on the
top of the pyramid of dismembered parts. We had another jovial
evening, in which the wine-cup was plied freely, but not to an
extravagant excess, and the usual toasts and speeches were drunk and
made. Even in returning to rest, I had not yet done with the pleasing
testimonies of welcome. On entering the bed-chamber, I found many
fresh and fragrant flowers inserted in the chinks of the wainscot.
Krupena was originally exclusively a Moslem town, and a part of the
old bazaar remains. The original inhabitants, who escaped the sword,
went either to Sokol or into Bosnia. The hodgia, or Moslem
schoolmaster, being on some business at Krupena, came in the morning
to see us. His dress was nearly all in white, and his legs bare from
the knee. He told me that the Vayvode of Sokol had a curious mental
malady. Having lately lost a son, a daughter, and a grandson, he could
no longer smoke, for when his servant entered with a pipe, he imagined
he saw his children burning in the tobacco.
During the whole day we toiled upwards, through woods and wilds of a
character more rocky than that of the previous day, and on attaining
the ridge of the Gutchevo range, I looked down with astonishment on
Sokol, which, though lying at our feet, was yet perched on a lone
fantastic crag, which exactly suited the description of the collector
of Shabatz,--"a city and castle built on the capital of a column of
rock." Beyond it was a range of mountains further in Bosnia; further
on, another outline, and then another, and another. I at once felt
that, as a tourist, I had broken fresh ground, that I was seeing
scenes of grandeur unknown to the English public. It was long since I
had sketched. I instinctively seized my book, but threw it away in
despair, and, yielding to the rapture of the moment, allowed my eyes
to mount step after step of this enchanted Alpine ladder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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