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)
Meanwhile, the' authorities of Andrijevitza were extremely anxious
to get me to go across the border. Though I was not aware of it at
the time, they meant to use me to cover a spy. That the expedition
was dangerous I knew. The Ipek district had scarcely been penetrated
by a foreigner for fifteen years, and was a forbidden one. The
danger I did not mind. My two months' liberty each year were like
Judas's fabled visit to the iceberg--but they made the endless vista
of grey imprisonment at home the more intolerable. And a bullet
would have been a short way out. I made the expedition and gained
thereby a reputation for courage which in truth I little deserved.
As I was being used for political purposes, though I did not know
it, I was, of course, shown only the Great Serbian view of things.
The plan was carefully laid. My guide, who was disguised, spoke
Albanian and some Turkish.
At Berani, our first stopping place, just over the Turkish border, I
met the first objectors to the murders--the monks at the very
ancient Church of Giurgevi Stupovi and a little company consisting
of a wild-looking priest clad as a peasant and with a heavy revolver
in his sash, and a couple of schoolmasters very heavily depressed.
They, too, had evidently expected "something" to happen soon. I
gathered, in fact, that an attack on the Turk had been planned, and
now with this revolution on their hands the Serbs would be able to
do nothing. In the town, however, I met the nephew of Voyvoda Gavro,
then Montenegro's Minister for Foreign Affairs--a decadent type of
youth on vacation from Constantinople, where he was at college. For
the Montenegrins, though always expressing a hatred of all things
Turkish, have never missed an opportunity of sending their sons for
Education--gratis--to the enemy's capital. His conversation--and he
was most anxious to pose as very "modern"--showed that Constantinople
is not a very nice place for boys to go to school in. He was furious
with me for daring to criticize the Serbian murders. He said no one
but an enemy of the Serb people would do so, and threatened to
denounce me to his uncle. Leaving Berani I plunged into Albanian
territory. This land, fondly called by the Serbs "Stara Srbija," Old
Serbia, was in point of fact Serb only for a short period.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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