CHAPTER VII
OF THE NORTH ALBANIAN
"The wild ass, whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the crying of the driver."
The difficulty of the "Eastern Question," as it is called, lies in the fact that it is not "a" question at all but a mass of questions, the answering of any one of which makes all the others harder of solution. Of all these, the Albanian question is the hardest to solve, and has not as yet received the attention that it calls for and will shortly compel. Few people in the West – none, I might almost say, who have not been to Albania – can realise that to-day in Europe there lives a whole race, a primeval lot of raw human beings, in a land that is not only almost entirely without carriageable roads, but in which in many cases the only tracks are even too bad for riding, the conditions of life are those of prehistoric barbarism, and the mass of the people have barely even attained a mediæval stage of civilisation.
When the Albanian arrived in Europe none knows, and authorities differ as to his possible relationships with other people, but there is no I manner of doubt that he is the direct descendant of the wild tribes that were in the Balkan peninsula before the Greeks and before the Romans, and have been variously described as Thracians, Macedonians, and Illyrians, according to the part they inhabited. They are described as having been fierce fighters and very wild, and they furnished Rome with some of her best soldiers. Nor were they lacking in brain power; men of barbarian Balkan blood arose who ruled their conquerors and provided the Roman empire with a list of emperors that includes Diocletian and Constantine the Great.
Empires have risen and empires have passed away, and the Albanian has remained the same wild thing. The might of Rome waned; the Servian, the Venetian, and the Ottoman have followed in turn. "Annexed" but never subdued, the Albanian merely retired to the fastnesses of the mountains and followed the devices of his own heart, regardless of his so-called ruler. The Albanian of to-day is nominally under Turkish rule, but nominally only.
The Albanian's position with regard to Turkey is a very peculiar one. The Turk, so his friends tell us, has many admirable qualities, but even those who love him best do not pretend that he has ever attempted to civilise, cultivate, or in any way improve the condition of, his subject races. Under the Turk all development is arrested, and nothing ripens. The Albanian, for the most part, remains at the point where he had arrived when the Turk found him, and except that he has adopted the revolver and breechloading rifle, he has not advanced an inch. He is the survival of a past that is dead and forgotten in West Europe.
His language has troubled philologists considerably. It is a soft, not unpleasant-sounding tongue, full of double "shshshes" and queer consonant sounds; such queer ones that it fits no known alphabet, and he has never found out how to write it down. Quite recently several attempts have been made, mostly by foreigners, to tame this wild language to an alphabet, and three or four different systems have been evolved, all more or less unsatisfactory, as no alphabet unaided can cope with its peculiar sounds. One in which Roman letters are used and plentifully strewn with accents, both above and below, is the most favoured in North Albania, but the Turk does not allow Albanian as a school language, the mass of the people speak nothing else, and Albania remains a land without a literature, without a history, without even a daily paper. To possess and use an unwritten language in Europe in the twentieth century is no mean feat It carries one back to remote prehistoric times, confronts one with blank unwritten days, and suggests forcibly that the Albanian is probably possessed of raw primeval and perhaps better-left-unwritten ideas. Our search for the live antique cannot take us much further. But the Albanians, in spite of their antiquity, are incredibly young as a people, and blankly ignorant of the outer world. They are still in the earliest stage of a nation's life history, and have not yet advanced beyond the tribal form of life.
At an early date – some say as early as the fourth century, but this seems doubtful – the Albanians became Christian. I have failed to discover what man or men succeeded in thus powerfully influencing this very conservative people. It is a remarkable fact that, though all the other Christians of the Balkans early declared for the Eastern Church and all the Pope's efforts to reclaim them failed, the Christian Albanians of the North have remained faithfully Roman Catholic.
The mountains of Albania, like those of Montenegro, are a series of natural fastnesses, among which a small army of attack is massacred and a large one starves. Moreover, a large part of the land was not worth the expense of taking. The tribes were exceedingly ferocious, and would have taken a great deal of conquering, but as they had no leader under whom they could combine and make organised attacks, they were not the danger to the Turks that the Montenegrins were. Moreover, the fact that they belonged to the Western and not to the Eastern Church prevented them from making common cause with the other Christian peoples. Once and once only were they on the point of obtaining recognised national existence, and this was under the leadership of the great Skender Beg. But Skender Beg died in 1467, and as yet no one has arisen capable of welding the semi-independent tribes into a solid whole. The Turks purchase peace from them by leaving them to do as they please among their mountains. The Albanians purchase privileges from the Turks by fighting for them and supplying the Turkish army, as they did formerly the Roman, with some of its best soldiers. And Albania to-day remains separated into a number of distinct tribes, which are governed by their own chieftains according to unwritten laws which have been handed down orally from a very remote past. The Turkish "Government" has practically no say in the matter. At any rate, what it says it has not the power to enforce.
The Albanian is ignorant and untrained, but he is no fool. His one ruling idea has been to go on being Albanian in the manner of his fathers. He perceived quickly all the points that would enable him to do so, and he seized upon them. The mountain people in the more inaccessible parts retained their Christianity. The Albanians who swooped upon the plains vacated by the Serbs found it greatly to their advantage to profess Mohammedanism, and both Mohammedan and Roman Catholic were ready to make common cause against the Christians of the Eastern Church. So indispensable have the Albanians made themselves to the Turkish Government that it has been forced to concede to them every license, lest it should lose their support. Far from making any attempt at civilising them, it has never scrupled to make use of their savagery in warfare, and in warfare the Albanian can be exceedingly savage. Never from the beginning of time has he been taught anything that the Western world thinks necessary; never in the majority of cases has the most rudimentary education come his way. His Mohammedanism and his Christianity he practises in an original and Albanian manner, and in his heart he is influenced mainly by traditional beliefs and superstitions which are probably far older than either. He purchased his freedom by making himself useful to the Turk, and the Turk has left him in the lowest depths of barbarism. The only schools that exist in the land are those of the Italian and Austrian Frati, and such civilisation as the Albanian possesses he owes to the labours of these devoted men. As for travelling and means of communication, it seems probable that the roads to-day are far inferior to what they were in the time of the Romans. And this is the land of the only one of her subject races with which Turkey has been "friends." The deplorable state of Albania is an even stronger indictment against Turkish "government" than that of Macedonia. To-day the country is practically in a state of anarchy. Little or nothing is done in the way of cultivation; blood-feuds rage, and men are shot for quarrels that are family inheritances and originated for long-forgotten reasons in the dark ages.
Human life is cheap, very cheap. An ordinary Englishman has more scruples about killing a cat than an Albanian has about shooting a man. Indeed, the Albanian has many of the physical attributes of a beast of prey. A lean, wiry thing, all tough sinew and as supple as a panther, he moves with a long, easy stride, quite silently, for his feet are shod with pliant leathern sandals with which he grips the rock as he climbs. He is heavily armed, and as he goes his keen eyes watch ceaselessly for the foe he is always expecting to meet. There is nothing more characteristic of the up-country tribesman than those ever-searching eyes. I have met him many a time in the Montenegrin markets, in the weekly bazaar in his capital, and on the prowl with his rifle far in the country. Up hill or down hill, over paths that are more like dry torrent beds, it is all the same to him; he keeps an even, swift pace, and he watches all the time. Dressed as he is, in tightly-fitting striped leg-gear and in a short black cape, his appearance is extraordinarily mediæval, and he seems to have stepped straight out of a Florentine fresco. His sash is full of silver-mounted weapons, he twists his tawny-moustache, and he admires himself exceedingly. He walks with a long rolling stride, planting his feet quite flat like a camel or an elephant – a gait which gives him an oddly animal appearance. His boldly striped garments, with their lines and zigzags of black embroidery, recall the markings of the tiger, the zebra, and sundry venomous snakes and insects. He seems to obey the laws that govern the markings of ferocious beasts; his swift, silent footsteps enhance the resemblance, and his colouring is protective; he disappears completely into a rocky background. The black patterns vary according to the tribe he hails from. If you ask his name, he generally gives you his tribal one as well, and points over the mountains towards his district. He is So-and-So, for instance, of the Hotti or the Shoshi. Most men, whether Christian or Mohammedan, have their heads shaven; sometimes on the temples only, the rest of the hair standing out in a great bush; sometimes the entire head, with the exception of one long lock that dangles down the back. There are two distinct types of Albanians – a dark type with black hair, brown eyes, and clean-cut features, and a very fair type, grey or blue-eyed, taller and more powerfully built. To this class belong almost all the shaven-headed men with the dangling locks, a row of whom, squatting on their heels, look remarkably like a lot of half-moulted vultures. According to popular belief, the long lock is to serve as a handle to carry home the head when severed. A head, it seems, can be carried only by the ear, or by inserting a finger in the mouth, and this latter practice the owner of the head, when alive, objects to!
But in spite of his wild-beast appearance and his many obvious faults, the Albanian is by no means all bad. I will almost say that he possesses the instincts of a gentleman. At any rate, he "plays fair," according to his own very peculiar creed. He boasts that he has never betrayed a friend nor spared a foe. It is true that "not sparing" includes torture and various and most horrible atrocities, but it is a great mistake in considering any of the Balkan peoples to make too much capital out of "atrocities." A century ago every race, including our own, considered the infliction of hideous suffering the legitimate way of punishing comparatively small crimes. At the risk of being laughed at, I will say that I do not believe the Albanian is by nature cruel. The life of the poor up-country peasant is hard and rough beyond what anyone who has only lived in a civilised country can realise, and the life of such a man's beasts is of necessity a hard one also. But though I have met him with his flocks on the hillsides and have watched him carefully in street and market, I have never seen the Albanian torturing an animal for the fun of the thing, as does the Neapolitan, the Provençal, and the Spaniard. The revolting "jokes" with lame and helpless animals which can be seen any day in the streets of Naples are not to be met with in the capital of the bloodthirsty Albanian.
I have trusted the Albanian somewhat recklessly, I have been told; I have given him plenty of chances of robbing me, and several of making away with me altogether; but he has always treated me with a fine courtesy, and has never taken a mean advantage. He is a brave man, and he is an intelligent man. When he gets the chance, he learns quickly and picks up foreign languages speedily. And when he succeeds in leaving his native land and escaping the awful blight of the Ottoman, he often shows great business capacity, and a surprising power of adapting himself to circumstances.
The ordinary Christian Albanian of the town is very different from the up-country savage, and is a pathetically childish person. He tries very hard to be civilised, but his ideas on the subject are vague. How far he is from understanding the prejudices of the twentieth century the following conversation will show. It is one of many similar. I was walking up the steep, cobble-stony bazaar-street of Antivari late one afternoon in the summer of 1902. The shop owners stood at their doors to see me pass. Presently a man came forward, a tall, fair, grey-eyed fellow. He spoke very politely in a mishmash of Servian and Italian. "I have never seen a foreign woman before," he said, "will you come into my shop and talk to me?" I followed him into his shop. As I was unmistakably from the West, he gave me a tiny box to sit on, and then squatted neatly on the ground himself, called for coffee, and started conversation. He was amazed at my nationality, and showed me some cotton labelled "Best hard yarn" among his goods. Otherwise "England" conveyed no idea to him. England, having no designs on Albania, does not count much as a Power with the ordinary Albanian, but is merely something distant and harmless that does not matter, whereas an eye is kept on Austria and on Italy, and Russia is regarded with extreme suspicion.
"And you have come all this journey to see us!" he cried. "It is wonderful! I am a Christian Albanian. I am Catholic." Here he crossed himself vigorously to show that he really was, for in these lands your position in this world and the next depends mainly upon how this is done. "Ah, but you should see Skodra!" I told him I knew it well, and he beamed with pleasure. We discussed its charms and the unsurpassed magnificence of its shops. "And it is in the hands of those devils the Turks. Ah, the devils! I came here eighteen years ago with my father, because this is a free land. Here all is safe, but it is a poor country. When I was a boy I was bad. I went to the school of the Frati, but I would not learn. Now I know nothing, and I speak Italian, oh, so badly!" He rocked himself sadly to and fro with his big account-book on his knees. Son of the race with the worst reputation in Europe and born in one of Europe's worst governed corners, he lamented (as which of us has not done?) the lost chances of his youth and his lack of book-learning. To comfort him, I told him his people in Skodra had been very good to me. He cheered up. "Why do you come here?" he asked. "Why do you not travel in my country?" I said that I was told that it was a bad time and the country very dangerous. He considered the question earnestly, and looked me all over. Then he said seriously, "No; my people are very good to women, they will not hurt you. But there is no government, so the bad people do what they like. There are some bad people; Turks, all Turks. But there is no fear. Truly they will take all your money, but they will not hurt you. That," he said simply, "would not be honest. My people are all honest. You must not shoot a woman, for she cannot shoot you. Now with a man it is different; you must shoot him, or he will shoot you first. Also you cannot take his money if you do not shoot him first." To all of which points I agreed.
"Truly it is a misfortune," he continued, "that there is no government. If we had only a king!" "Do you think you will have one?" I asked. He chuckled mysteriously. The air just then was thick with rumours of a Castriot descendant of the Skender Beg family who at that very moment was reported to be awaiting an opportunity for landing in Albania. Reports of his fabulous wealth were arousing much excitement in the breasts of his prospective subjects, but I fancy a rumour of their custom of "shooting first" must have reached his ears; for, so far, this middle-aged gentleman, whose life has been passed in Italian palazzos, has shown no hurry to take up his inheritance. My friend's ideas were vague and formless, and he could get no farther than "a king for Albania and death to those devils the Turks." After a little more talk, I got up to say good-bye. But he insisted upon my having more coffee first. "It is true that I am poor," he said, "but I am not too poor to give two cups of coffee to one who has come so far to see us. Some day in your country you will see some poor devil from Skodra, and you will be good to him because his people are your friends." Nothing could exceed the grace with which he proffered hospitality to a stranger guest, but he saw no objection to robbery with murder if committed according to rule; and he prided himself on his Christianity. He shook hands with me very heartily. "A pleasant journey," he said. "Remember me when you meet a Skodra-Albanian in London. I shall never see you again – never, never." The sun was setting rather dismally, and with "nikad, nikad" (never) ringing in my ears and the gaunt ruins of the dead city before me, I felt quite as depressed as the Albanian. Truly the Albanian outlook is not a cheerful one.
In the larger towns, where Turkish troops are quartered and there are plenty of Mohammedan officials, the Christians are in the minority, and their cowed manner makes it fairly obvious that they have a poor time. But the Christians of the mountains very much hold their own. The Mirdite tribe in the heights between the Drin and the coast is entirely Christian and one of the most fiercely independent. The town Christian who has picked up a smattering of education from the foreign Frati, has had a peep at the outside world and vaguely realises the blessings of life in a well-ordered land, sighs for some form of civilised government. Some have even told me that they wish to be "taken" by somebody – "by Austria, or Italy, or you, or anybody. It could not be worse than it is now." But the mass of the people resent most fiercely the idea of any foreign interference, and cling fast to their wild and traditional manner of life. Whether Christian or Mussulman, the Albanian is intensely Albanian. A Christian will introduce you to a Mohammedan and say, "He is a Turk, but not a bad Turk; he is good like me; he is Albanian." The Christian that the Albanian Mussulman persecutes is, as a rule, the Christian of another race. Between Christian and Mohammedan Albanian there is plenty of quarrelling, but then so there is between Christian and Christian, Mohammedan and Mohammedan. It is of the blood-feud, intertribal kind, played according to rule; for even in Albania it is possible, if the rules be not observed, for killing a man to be murder. When a common enemy threatens, a "bessa" (truce with one another) is proclaimed, and they unite against him. The chief tribes in Northernmost Albania are the Hotti along by the Montenegrin frontier and by the lake; the Shoshi and the men of Shialla and of Skreli in the mountains above the plain of Skodra; the Mirdites in the mountains between the Drin and the coast; and the Klementi on the Montenegrin frontiers by Mokra and Andrijevitza.
The Turks from time to time, when the Albanians have been more than usually lively, by various means (including treachery) have contrived to give the chieftains of one and another "appointments" in remote corners of Asia Minor, but with no results so far, except that the people, deprived of the only man who had any authority over them, became yet more unmanageable. Even the mildest of the town Christians takes a delight in pointing out in the bazaar the tobacco which has paid no duty and saying, "We pay no tax for tobacco; we are Albanian, and we do not like to." The Turks have been unable to enforce this tax, and have to content themselves by searching the baggage that leaves the country and opening the hand-bags of tourists to prevent tobacco from leaving untaxed.
The Albanians seldom do anything they "do not like," and they are quick to object to any interference. Just now they have been objecting to "reformation" on Austro-Russian lines. The so-called reforms were the laughing-stock of everybody – Servian, Montenegrin, and Albanian – when I was out there last summer. For the Albanian's "unreformedness" has always been his chief attraction in Turkish eyes, and in order to give him every opportunity to behave in an "unreformed" manner, when the spirit moved him, the Turk in recognition of his services in the last war supplied the Albanian lavishly with weapons. Christians throughout the Turkish dominions have always been forbidden to carry arms. The Christian Albanian alone has this privilege. Every mountain man has firearms of some sort, many of them fairly modern rifles. It is one thing to give a man a gun and quite another to take it away from him. When the weapons were merely used upon the wretched unarmed Servian peasants in the plains of Old Servia, not a soul in any part of Europe save Russia paid the smallest attention; but when Stcherbina, the Russian Consul, fell a victim, it was a different matter, and the Turks found themselves in the unpleasant position of having either to offend Russia or to quarrel with their best allies. They proceeded to "reform" Albania on truly Turkish lines. They chased the Albanians out of the territory they had had no business to have swooped upon, and they arrested a few leaders as a matter of form. The Albanians were astonished and rather aggrieved, for they had done very little more than they had always been given to understand they might do. Further interference might have alienated the Albanians altogether, but as for the sake of appearances and the "reform scheme" some non-Mohammedan officials had to be appointed, the Turks sent an Armenian and a Jew, called respectively Isaac and Jacob, to Skodra. Isaac and Jacob were shot in the main street in the day-time, and as far as I have heard their situations are still vacant. The affair caused some little amount of excitement, nevertheless the Albanians did not wish to resort to violence so long as the "Government" did not make itself disagreeable. There is an old tomb in Skodra, the last resting-place of some minor Mohammedan saint. Shortly after the deaths of Isaac and Jacob some mysterious writing was found upon the tomb. Though written in very ordinary charcoal, it was obviously of more or less divine origin, and the people anxiously waited the deciphering of the message. It proved to be merely a piece of a verse from the Koran conferring a vague blessing upon somebody. "Allah be praised!" said an old hodja, greatly relieved, "it has not told us to go and shoot any more reformers!"
There were a great many more soldiers in Skodra than before. I asked several people the reason of this, in order to see what they would say. They one and all said, with a smile, "The Turks want to reform Albania, but they are obliged to send the soldiers to the towns, because the people in the country do not like them!" The town swarmed with soldiers. An officer rushed at my old guide, whom I was employing to interpret for me in the bazaar, and abused him in a loud voice till I interfered; a soldier seized and beat very severely a wretched little boy who begged of me, and my efforts on his behalf were of no avail; and these were all the results of the reforms that I saw or heard of in Skodra.
But the idea seems gaining ground that the Albanian in the event of a war may cease to support a dying cause and elect to play a game of his own. When, as must inevitably be shortly the case, Macedonia is under a Christian governor, Albania will be yet more separated from the present seat of government (Constantinople), and the situation will become acute. I heard a good deal about "the king that is to be." Many Serbs even expressed their opinion that the Albanians would be a great deal better if their independence were recognised; saying that at present they are responsible to no one; the Turk incites them to commit atrocities, and washes his hands of all they do; and that left to themselves the Albanians would develop into a fine people. That they have the makings of a fine people is probably true. That they are now capable of self-government is quite another thing. Unlike the other Balkan peoples, they have no past, no former empire. Their history is all "years that the locusts have eaten." What is to become of the Albanians? is one of the hardest of all the Eastern questions. Austria desires to have the answering of it.