Twenty Years of Balkan TangleDurham, M. E. (Mary Edith)
History
Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle
Durham, M. E. (Mary Edith)
Balkan Peninsula -- Description and travel; Balkan Peninsula -- History; Eastern question (Balkan)
In Belgrade the first thing I learnt was that I was "shadowed" by
the police. To the uninitiated this is most uncanny. The same man
keeps turning up. He does it very badly as a rule. You sit and have
coffee on one side of a street and he sits and drinks beer at the
restaurant opposite. You wander on and think: "What an ass I was to
think he was following me!" and meet him at the next corner. Most
disquieting of all perhaps is to come suddenly out of your bedroom
and almost tumble over him in the corridor. All these and more were
my experiences in the first weeks of my tour. And always I said to
myself in triumph: "They can't do anything to me for I have not done
anything." I could not even buy a railway ticket for a day's outing
without being cross-examined as to my purpose, my father, my uncles
and other relatives. The officials in Vain assured me that there was
nothing to see in the place I wished to visit. I played the card
which had succeeded with Militchevitch and asked if it were
dangerous. I could not enter a village without being at once asked
by the local policeman for my passport. Blankly ignorant of what was
behind these proceedings I steadily pursued my way, smiling at all
questions and supplying at demand long biographies of various
members of my family. No; my father had not been in the diplomatic
service, nor my uncles, nor brothers, nor cousins. No; none of them
were officers.
"I have come to see Serbia," said I, in return to the enquiry of a
police officer. "But what do you see?" he asked, gazing wildly
round. "I see nothing!"
Every official I think in every village, saw my sketch book,
demanded an explanation of why I had selected such things as wells,
gravestones, carts and cottages to draw, and remained mystified. For
the common objects of Serbia were of no interest to them. I merely
looked on all these vagaries as so many peculiar and silly Serbian
customs--wondered what the Serbs would do if a hundred or so
tourists appeared, for then there would not be enough police to go
round--and did not allow myself to be ruffled even when three times
in one day I had to show my passport to individuals who pounced down
on me in the street.
When I arrived at the' least bad hotel in Nish the hotelier said he
did not wish to be mixed up in the affair; gave me the worst room in
the house and told me I had better leave by the first train next
morning. I said I was going to stay and did. And explored Nish
conscious of "guardian angels" at my heels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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