Sir Arthur Evans

“ Resistance, broken down in the gardens of Provence, buried beneath the charred rafters of the Roman cities of the Langue d’Oc, smothered in the dungeons of the Inquisition, was prolonged from generation to generation amongst the primeval forests and mountain fastnesses of Bosnia. There were not wanting, amongst those who sought to exterminate the Bogomiles, Churchmen as dead to human pity as the Abbot of Citeaux, and lay arms as bloodthirsty as De Montfort; but the stubborn genius of the Serbian people fought on with rare persistence, and held out to the end. ”

“ The market-place is a spacious studio. The beauty of the Croatian peasant costume is almost unique in Europe—possibly only rivalled at Belgrade. Seen from above, when the market-place is thronged, it looks almost like a bed of red and white geraniums; it is these prevailing colours which give the peasant groups a lightness and brilliancy which I have seen nowhere else. What is remarkable is, that this brightness should be shared in such equal proportions by men and women alike. In Serbia—even in Turkey—the men are not so gay. ”

“ We should never expect to find an Anglo-Saxon gleeman of our epic days likening, as does one of these unlettered Bosnian bards, the cheeks of the loved one to the flush of dawn and her eyelids to the silken wings of swallows. This airiness of phantasy, the brilliance of the imagery, seem to witness the close communion of the race with the Oriental world around them; but there is a national sobriety ever bridling the imagination, just as we have seen the Oriental gorgeousness of a Serbian lady’s dress tempered with something of the homely Serbian house-mother. ”

“ The steeps up which we now made our way were covered with forest more varied in its composition than those of Troghìr and Vučia. Beech, as there, was the predominant tree; but oaks and thorns, dark firs and pines, glaucous ashes and fountainous birches—often so happily blended and grouped as to transcend the planter’s art—disputed the sole dominion of the queen of the forest. The trees were perhaps hardly so large, as a rule, as those we had seen in the mountains of more northern Bosnia, but we noticed one pine no less than eighteen feet in circumference at a yard from the ground. ”

“ We passed an unquiet night, owing to swarms of gnats, which droned about our chamber and forced us to [110] cover our faces with nets; and were up, and, with a new Zaptieh who had been assigned to us by the Mudìr, on our way again almost before it was light, bound for Tešanj, the old capital of Ussora. For an hour or so we still followed the valley of the Bosna, which is here very beautiful, the timber finer than any we have yet seen in Bosnia, tall poplars and magnificent oaks crowning the banks or chequering the emerald pools with their shadows. ”

“ About two hours from Tešanj we left our valley and gradually ascended a wooded range which rises some 1300 feet above the Bosna, where the beeches became larger—a forest of thick pollard stumps, which gradually gladed out into [111] luxuriant heather-land, deliciously perfumed with ferny incense, from which opened out our first panorama of the mountain-peaks that form the heart of Bosnia. In the blue distance rose the dominating cone of Vlašić, but there were no grim Alpine giants, no glacier seas, no jagged horns of rock. The speciality of the mountains was rather their softness of contour. ”

“ Now, at a turn of the road, opens our first glimpse of the ancient duchy of St. Sava—or, as it is now more generally known, the Herzegovina—a magnificent vista of rocky mountains rising beyond the yet unseen valley of the Narenta, their dark blue shadows golden-fringed by the setting sun. The trees become more southern in their character; here and there are fine Spanish chestnuts; on a height to the right are the pines of an Italian landscape; wild vine becomes plentiful once more; we pass a Herzegovinian peasant in a peaked cap of Dalmatian character ”

“ Ragusa is the natural port of the Illyrian interior—the born interpreter between the Italian and Sclave. Those only who have traversed the barbarous lands between the Adriatic and the Save can adequately realise how intimately the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina is bound up with the future of Ragusa. The plodding genius of the Serbs needs to be fanned into energy by these fresh sea-breezes—their imagination languishes for want of this southern sunshine! ”

“ Dalmatian soil the flowers of Greek and Italian genius. This is the nursing mother of those enterprising merchants who in the Middle Ages laid bare the mineral wealth of the Bosnian mountains, and infused the spirit of commerce into their inmost recesses. This is ‘the Palmyra between great empires,’ the City of Refuge which received, within walls that never betrayed a fugitive, the hunted remnants of Christian chivalry who, when Bosnia was trodden down beneath the hoofs of the Infidel, preferred exile to renegation. ”

“ Whatever terms the Great Powers may wish to impose on Bosnia and the Turks, let England at all events exert her influence against any setting up of an ecclesiastical tyranny. In the interests of all the warring creeds which distract the country, let the secular character of the future government be beyond suspicion. Let an European guarantee secure to the Mahometan minority of Bosnia the free exercise of their religion and complete equality before the law, and half the battle of conciliation will have been won. ”

“ Were we, one kept asking oneself, passing through what some day may become one of the Black Countries of Europe? Would, as the world grew older, something of the tremendous energy of our Midlands burst forth upon this stagnant valley—blasting, boring, blackening, metamorphosing its every feature? Mountains rose around us overgrown with primeval forest—habitations were few and far between. What there were, were miserable hovels—each in its mangy patch of maize—more ruinous than any we remembered having seen in Bosnia. ”

“ In every direction rose low mountains, mere heaps of disintegrated limestone rock, bare of vegetation as a shingly sea-beach—a cruel southern Karst, aptly compared to a petrified glacier or a moon-landscape, the creation—as the old Bogomiles of these parts would have supposed it—of some Evil Spirit. Yet, like most things in nature, this desert prospect is not without its redeeming specialities of beauty. Where the colours of earth are so faint there is nothing to interfere with the most perfect development of atmospheric effects. ”

“ If the Turkish invasion can be likened to the encroachment of an ocean, it resembled it in nothing more than its denuding action. Throughout the whole of Eastern Europe there set in a great levelling of baronial peak-lands. The South-Sclavonic nobility fell at Kóssovo or Mohatch and a hundred other fields, or skulked away into foreign lands; and, indeed, this Feudal overgrowth was always more or less of an exotic among Serbs and Croats. The Turkish conquest was a fiery trial, in truth, and yet it had the effect of purging the sterling democratic ore of society from all this hæmatitic dross. ”

“ Why not then sever a connection as malign as it is artificial? Why not divorce Stamboul from Bosnia, and erect an independent State under an European guarantee? The democratic genius of the people would suggest a Republic as the best form of government, but the divided state of the country would preclude such a government to begin with, and a Principality after the model of free Serbia might combine Parliamentary government with the coherence of a monarchy. ”

“ This was the first occasion on which we came upon a dress the affinities of which were other than Serbian or Croatian. The multitude of decoration is overpowering. She is studded with Turkish coins as with a cuirass of scale armour, her arms loaded with bracelets, and her fingers with rings; ornamental patterns are crowded over her jacket and apron,—a gorgeous orange being the pervading colour. Her hair was spangled with coins in a way which we afterwards saw repeated among the unveiled Mahometan women of the Narenta valley. ”

“ Then it was that the survivors of the Roman population fled to the rocky site on the other horn of the gulf on which Ragusa stands. Every morning the same migration from Old to New Ragusa takes place on a smaller scale. A bevy of bright Canalese market-women, in their clean white crenellated caps, and their more sombre husbands—who, with their black turbans, jackets, and trouser-leggings, look like Turks in mourning—embark before dawn in the broad trabaccolo, that they may sell their fruit and vegetables in the Ragusan market. ”

“ Epic lays of the fatal day of Kóssovo are still sung every day to throngs of peasant listeners by minstrels of the people, whose rhapsodies, set to the dolorous strains of the ghuzla, resound in a great national dirge along the willowed banks of Save and Danube, through the beechwood glens of Bosnia, the dark recesses of the Balkan, the mountain strongholds of the Czernagora, till, far away across the Illyrian desert, they find an echo in that caverned waste of rock that frowns above the blue waters of the Adriatic. ”

“ The city is a vast garden, from amidst whose foliage swell the domes and cupolas of mosques and baths; loftier still, rises the new Serbian Cathedral; and lancing upwards, as to tourney with the sky, near a hundred minarets. The airy height to the East, sceptred with these slender spires of Islâm and turret-crowned with the Turkish fortress (raised originally by the first Vizier of Bosnia on the site of the older ‘Grad’ of Bosnian princes) , commands the rest of the city, and marks the domination of the infidel. Around it clusters the upper-town, populated exclusively by the ruling caste ”

“ From this period onwards the history of Bosnia for centuries consists of little more than a series of such bloody inroads; but there are here none of those details which secure for the heretics of Alby the commiseration of mankind. Cities are sacked, but there is not here a Beziers or Carcassonne; the first germs of a civilization are trodden under foot, but these are not the full-blown roses of Provence ”

“ The heroes of Ragusa are of the majestic Roman type, and her greatest is a second Regulus. Her peculiar genius reflects itself in her arts and sciences, which are severe and practical. Her Senate forbids the erection of a theatre. The fine arts here fall into the background, and mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy take the lead. Ragusan nobles are mathematicians, and her poets are also merchants; the masterpieces of her muse are stately epics. Her sympathies are with the dignified spirit of the East, and the noblest homage of her bards is rendered to a Turkish Grand Signior. ”

“ The dwelling-house had a kind of porch or atrium; that is to say, the thatched eaves, supported by two poles, projected almost as far in front of the door as the one room extended behind it. Under this canopy were seated two Bulgars, hard at work tying up bundles of onions, clad in their dark national costume—the brown tight-sleeved jacket embroidered with black, the dull red sash, the brown trouser-leggings which are equally Turkish and Tartar, and on their head the black sheepskin cap which had at first attracted my attention ”

“ We followed the current, and an hour’s winding ascent brought us to the summit of a mountain, normally lonely, and devoid of habitation, but now thronged to overflowing by a gorgeous array of peasants from the uttermost recesses of Christian Bosnia, and some even from beyond the Serbian frontier. The summit of the mountain formed a long flat neck capacious enough to accommodate many thousands, and rising to its highest point towards its north-western extremity. ”

“ For to cross the Military Frontier is to survey a phase of society so primitive that it was already antiquated when the forefathers of the English sate among the heaths and fens and forests of the Elbelands. It is to go back, not indeed into Feudal times—for to call this frontier organisation Feudal shows an ignorance of what Feudalism really means—but to wander beyond the twilight of history, and take a lantern as it were into the night of time. ”

“ At 8.30 we left Dervent, passing the shapeless ruins of an old castle, two walls of which can alone be traced now, and two mosques, one of them almost as dilapidated as the castle wall. Our march lay through a beautiful country, over the undulating hills which separate the valleys of the Save and Bosna, beyond which, in the exquisitely clear air, rose the lilac outlines of loftier ranges, while every now and then a gap in the hills would reveal to us the rich Possávina spread out below in dim vistas of forest and cornland. ”

“ The very darkness of the background, the dirty narrow street, the timber houses, the time-stained wooden minaret, acted as a foil to the Oriental brilliance of the dress and merchandise, the scarlet sashes, the gold embroidery, those gorgeous little maidens—doomed most of them by sweet thirteen to take the winding-sheets of Turkish matrimony, and bury their beauty in harems, where by thirty-five they are turned old hags ”

“ To have passed through the Slavonic provinces of Turkey in a travelling carriage, along the main roads, from city to city, and to have been the guest of Pashà after Pashà, would have been the ordinary fate of the English traveller, and such an experience would have revealed little or nothing of the character and condition of the rayahs. Mr. Evans, to the amazement of the Turkish officials, and not a little to their embarrassment, made up his mind to penetrate across the country on foot, and to see close at hand the common life of the Christian peasants. ”