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)
So through Pekinj, Kavaia, Durazzo Tirana and Croia, the city of
Skenderbeg and the stronghold now of Bektashism, I arrived at last
at Scutari, and was welcomed by Mr. Summa, himself a descendant of
one of the mountain clans, formerly dragoman to the Consulate, and
now acting Vice-Consul. He was delighted about my journey, and told
me he could pass me up into the mountains wherever I pleased. He
explained to me that on my former visit, Mr. Prendergast being new
to the country had consulted the Austrian Consulate as to the
possibility of my travelling in the interior, and that the Austrians
who wished to keep foreigners out of the mountains, though they sent
plenty of their own tourists there, had given him such an alarming
account of the dangers as had caused him to tell me it was
impossible. He arranged at once for me to visit Mirdita.
The Abbot of the Mirdites, Premi Dochl, was a man of remarkable
capacity. Exiled from Albania as a young man for participation in
the Albanian league and inciting resistance to Turkish rule and the
decrees of the Treaty of Berlin, he had passed his years of exile in
Newfoundland and India as a priest, and had learned English and read
much. He was the inventor of an excellent system of spelling
Albanian by which he got rid of all accents and fancy letters and
used ordinary Roman type. He had persuaded the Austrian authorities
to use it in their schools, and was enthusiastic about the books
that he was having prepared. His schemes were wide and included the
translation of many standard English books into Albanian. And he had
opened a small school hard by his church in the mountains.
His talk was wise. He Was perhaps the most far-seeing of the
Albanian Nationalists. We stood on a height and looked over Albania
--range behind range like the stony waves of a great sea, sweeping
towards the horizon intensely and marvellously blue, and fading
finally into the sky in a pale mauve distance. He thrust out his
hands towards it with pride and enthusiasm. It was a mistake, he
said, now to work against Turkey. The Turk was no longer Albania's
worst foe. Albania had suffered woefully from the Turk. But Albania
was not dead. Far from it. There was another, and a far worse foe
--one that grew ever stronger, and that was the Slav: Russia with
her fanatical Church and her savage Serb and Bulgar cohorts ready to
destroy Albania and wipe out Catholic and Moslem alike.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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