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)
We arrived one evening at Crkvitza, near the Austrian frontier. A
dree hole; a han filthy beyond all words; no horse fodder, the
Kapetan absent and his secretary drunk; a lonely schoolhouse to
which some fifty children descended daily from the surrounding
mountains. To spare me the horrors of the han, the schoolmaster
kindly offered to put me up. But even his house swarmed with bugs
and ticks. I rose very early next morning, saddled and packed, and
was about to flee from the place, when the secretary came
triumphantly waving a telegram and told me I was under arrest. The
drink-fuddled creature, thinking to "cut a dash" during his chief's
absence, had wired to the police at Nikshitch, "A man dressed as a
woman has come from across the Austrian frontier." The reply said,
"Detain him till further orders." The telegraph station was eight
hours' march distant, but he had sent some one in haste on
horseback. There was a terrible row. The populace was on my side. My
British passport was, of course, useless. Krsto thought his honour
impugned, and I feared he would shoot. Might I return under armed
escort to the village of the telegraph office where they knew me?
No. All I was allowed to do was to send a man on foot with a
telegram for the Minister for Foreign Affairs and await the reply.
So I was interned for nearly twenty-four hours in the han and spent
the night in a filthy hole with a man, a boy, a woman, a quantity of
pigeons, and swarms of lice and bugs. When the reply came from
Voyvoda Gavro saying I was free to go where I pleased, the secretary
was flabbergasted. It sobered him, and he was afraid of what he had
done. I went on to Vuchidol as I had promised, though the Prince
little knew what he was letting me in for.
The affair excited Cetinje wildly. Before I left every one had been
lamenting that there was now no English Minister in Montenegro. I
had been prayed, by Dushan Gregovitch and others, to write to The
Times on the subject, to arouse Parliament, and somehow or other get
England represented in the country. Now the cry was changed: "God be
praised," cried they fervently, "there is no British Minister in
Cetinje." "Thanks be to God, there is not even a British Consul."
Voyvoda Gavro put his head out of "Foreign Affairs," which was then
a cottage in the main street, and shouted for explanations. The
dismay was comical. Early next morning an officer pursued me in the
street and said the Prince wanted to see me, at once. He was sitting
on the top of the steps as he was used to do before the palace was
altered, and he too seemed quite overwhelmed with the international
complication. Krsto had already given the police a highly coloured
account.
The secretary of Crkvitza, the Prince hastened to assure me, would
be punished. I said that if he were punished the result would be
that when a real spy arrived he would Hot be arrested. For me the
affair was a mere travel episode, not worth troubling about.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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