Through the Land of the SerbDurham, M. E. (Mary Edith)
History
Through the Land of the Serb
Durham, M. E. (Mary Edith)
Montenegro -- Description and travel; Serbia -- Description and travel
The modern modiste has
invented cotton and linen costumes lined with silk or satin. Her
ancestress, however, acted on the Albanian plan, and the beautiful silk
and brocade costumes that have come down to us from Elizabeths and
Charles I.'s time are finished within with coarse and unsightly canvas.
Near the entrance of the bazaar are the workshops of the carpenters, who
make and carve great chests to hold the clothes, gaudy things painted
peagreen and picked out with scarlet and gold, degenerate descendants of
the beautifully carved and coloured chests in which all Europe kept its
clothing in Gothic and Renaissance days. The makers of the chests
fashion, too, wonderful cradles, coloured in the same gay manner, and in
them the babies are packed and slung on pack-saddles or on women's
backs. In a land of rough travelling, a strong box in which to pack the
baby is a necessity, and doubtless our ancestors used the solid oak
cradles we know so well in a like manner. Any day in the bazaar is
interesting, for the shopmen nearly all make their own goods. The
gunsmiths fill cartridges all day long, for they are an article much in
demand, repair rifles and revolvers, and fit fine old silver butts,
gorgeous with turquoise or cornelian, on to modern weapons. The
silversmith squats cross-legged on the floor with a tray of burning
charcoal, some tweezers, a roll of silver wire, and a little box full of
silver globules. He works silently, deliberately, with long, nimble
fingers picking up the tiny globules and arranging them, snipping and
twisting the little bits of wire, building up and soldering with great
dexterity the most effective designs--designs with sides that match, but
are never quite symmetrical, like Natures own work, satisfying the eye
in a way that no machine-made article ever will. However rough his
workmanship, his idea is almost always good, and he produces daring
effects with glass rubies and emeralds of the largest size. In work of
this sort the Albanian excels. When he comes to larger constructions,
his trick of working by eye and getting balance by instinct is not so
successful; his rooms are all crooked, his houses out of the square.
Perhaps this is the inevitable out-come of his odd-shaped mind. It is
rumoured that three-sided rooms may be found in Skodra, for the simple
reason that somehow the builders, owing to a nice confusion of angles,
could not squeeze in a fourth wall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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