When this building was made into a
mosque, the Moslem still permitted the Christian women to come and pray
there, while if a Christian man was sick they let him leave a jar of
water in the mosque all night, so that it might acquire certain
medicinal properties. It is the intention of the Serbs not to restore
the church to Christian worship, but to turn it into a museum.
With the frontier then being drawn along the Drin, towards the Adriatic,
the famous villages of Plav and Gusinje would definitely pass to
Yugoslavia, in accordance with the wishes of a deputation sent by them
to Belgrade in 1919. The well-meaning British champions of Gusinje, who
maintain that this village is furiously antagonistic to the Slav and is
ready to struggle to the uttermost rather than be incorporated in a Slav
kingdom, these champions do not, I think, draw a sufficient distinction
between Montenegro and Yugoslavia. Plav, with its mostly Christian
population, and Gusinje, where the Moslem preponderates, refused at the
time of the Berlin Congress to be given to Montenegro, with which they
had certain local quarrels. Nicholas reported to the Powers which had
awarded him these places that they were obdurate, for which reason he
was given in their stead a much-desired strip of coast, down to
Dulcigno, and nothing could have suited that astute monarch better.
Nikita--to call him by his familiar name--imagined that the two villages
would eventually fall to Montenegro, because of the formidable mountains
which divide them from the rest of Albania; the road from Gusinje to
Scutari is very long and very arduous. When Montenegro succeeded in
capturing Plav in 1912, a certain Muhammedan priest of that place joined
the Orthodox Church and was appointed a major in the Montenegrin army.
He acted as the president of a court-martial, and in that capacity is
reputed to have hanged or shot, some say, as many as five hundred of his
former parishioners, because they declined to be baptized. He told them
that their ancestors were all Serbs, and that therefore they should
follow his example. Since the Montenegrins did not restrain this
over-zealous man, the villagers were naturally not in favour of that
country. Montenegro had a very small number of good officials, owing to
Nikita's peculiar management which, in considering his favourites, did
not regard illiteracy as a bar to the highest administrative or judicial
post.... The people of Plav and Gusinje have, on the other hand, no
hostility against Serbia. In November 1918 a detachment of thirty Serbs
was stationed at Gusinje, what time certain Italian agents put it into
the shallow minds of some Albanians that Albania desired to be
independent under Italian protection. Nothing happened when a Serbian
force came from Mitrovica, except that these agents and a few of their
tools--be it noted that perhaps half the population is ignorant of the
Albanian language--withdrew to the Rugovo district, where they tried to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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