An artist in Albania

I have just finished reading Edith and I , a book written by Elizabeth Gowing. I have reviewed it on https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/733589531 . It is about the life of Miss Mary Edith Durham (1863-1944), and concentrates on her visits to the area of the Balkans that is now the Republic of Kosovo. Miss Durham is known affectionately by modern Albanians, whose cause  she championed before and after the First World War, as Mbretëresha e Malësoreve  (the 'Queen of the Mountains'). 

Until I read Gowing's book, and then looked up Durham on Wikipedia, I had not realised that Miss Durham had been trained as an artist and illustrator long before she embarked on her travels to the southern Balkans. Long ago, I acquired an early edition of Durham's book entitled High Albania. It is a brilliantly written account of her travels in the rugged mountains of northern Albania  and neighbouring Kosovo and of the people whom she met there. 

I took a fresh look at my copy of High Albania, and realised that its author was indeed a fine illustrator. The rest of this article is dedicated to presenting a few examples of Durham's hand-drawn illustrations in her book. Her attention to detail was marvellous, as was her ability to capture the 'atmosphere' of a place. Despite the presence of her own photographs in her book, it is the drawings that help to make it really special.

Of this picture, Miss Durham wrote, "To study head tufts one must go to church festivals. Only then are a number seen uncovered."

The two pictures shown above are of anthropological and/or ethnographic interest. It is not surprising to learn that Miss Durham's inherent ability to observe the characteristics of people and to report on them scientifically was recognised by the Royal Anthropological Institute (of Great Britain & Ireland) who appointed her a Fellow of it. The next 2 pictures illustrate Durham's skills in capturing both great detail and also the genreal  'atmosphere' of places that she visited.

The first of these two shows the interior of a house in Skreli, in the northern highlands of Albania. The crosses drawn on the wall next to the hearth indicate that the house was home to some of the many Albanian Roman Catholics who lived in the area. The second of these, the kavajee or coffee-maker, shows him holding the jezva, in which Turkish-style coffee is brewed, in one hand and the cup into which it will be served in the other.  The next picture shows Durham's skill in depicting architecture.

The drawing above, although very competent must have been drawn at speed, as the accompanying text, which I have copied, suggests. It shows a couple of kulle or fortified tower residences that are not only typical of the lands inhabited by Albanians but can also be found in the Mani Peninsular that projects from the southern Peloponnese (see my picture below). 

As Gowing's book relates much about Durham' s visits to Kosovo, I have decided to include some of the pictures from High Albania that were drawn whilst Edith was there. Here is one showing a Serbian woman from Ipek carrying a cradle on her back:

And, here is another one showing two of the fine frescoes inside the Serbian monastery at Gračanica ( Graçanicë), not far from the Kosovan capital as well as the site of the Battle of Kosovo Polje where the Serbs were narrowly defeated by the Ottoman army on the 15th June 1389. 

Today, visiting the monastery is not as simple as it was when I visited in 1990 (see my recently published book about Yugoslavia Scrabble with Slivovitz - click here ). When Elizabeth Gowing visited it, the Serbian monasteries in Kosovo had become like tiny rocks in a vast sea of Albanians. Surrounded by razor wire fences and guarded by heavily armed militia to protect these islets of  Serbian culture from the Albanians, who rightly or wrongly lose little love for the Serbs, entry to them is subject to intensive identity checking and might be denied. The last of my examples of Durham's drawings brings us back to northern Albania, which is the main subject of High Albania. It shows an old man of Shoshi, which is somewhere north of Albania's River Drin that flows towards its mouth near to Shkodra.

I hope that this small sample of illustrations drawn by the intrepid  Edwardian traveller Mary Edith Durham serve to demonstrate her skills as an artist and illuminator.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED

IN ANY OF THE FOLLOWING: 

ALBANIA, KOSOVO, the BALKANS,

and TRAVEL,

then you need to read

"ALBANIA ON MY MIND"

by Adam Yamey.

This book is available on Amazon

&

by clicking HERE

PUNK ROCK, FRIENDSHIP, AND SARAJEVO

Between the years of 1967 and 1991, Adam Yamey visited Yugoslavia frequently, making many friends and enjoying a variety of interesting experiences. Recently, he wrote a book called SCRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ in which he relives and shares a diverse selection of his adventures. 

In the first excerpt, he relates an episode that demonstrates the warmth and friendship of the peoples of a country that has sadly been torn apart by a tragic series of civil wars.  

In the second excerpt, he describes how he attended one of the first ever punk rock concerts in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade.

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"Dubrovnik was the point of departure for my first visit to Sarajevo. I bought a ticket at the bus station just outside the walls of the old city, entered the bus, and headed for the seat, whose number was printed on my ticket. In those days, and maybe this is still the case today, passengers were assigned specific numbered seats on long-distance buses. Whenever I knew that I would be travelling a day or two ahead, I used to buy my ticket in advance in order to get one of the seats numbered 1 or 2, which were at the front of the bus, and therefore with the best view, and, incidentally, also with the highest risk of injury in a head-on collision.

On this particular occasion in the bus station at Dubrovnik, I found a young French tourist was sitting next to his girlfriend in my seat. I started explaining, in my poor French, that he was occupying my reserved seat. As I was doing so, a middle-aged woman, sitting near the rear of the bus, explained the situation in fluent French. The French couple vacated the incorrect seats and settled into their assigned places. These happened to be close to the woman and her friend. I could hear them conversing in French as we wound our way up along the valley of the Neretva River and away from the Adriatic coast. I felt a little miffed that they had found someone to converse with, but I had not.

After a few hours we stopped in a village perched high on a hillside. The young French couple said goodbye to their new friends, and left the coach. Our bus, which should have arrived in Sarajevo well before nightfall, remained parked on a steep slope in the small mountain village for hours. The few passengers who were continuing on to Sarajevo sat on a bench under a tree in the sultry afternoon sun. Eventually, I asked the lady, who could speak French, what was happening. She explained that one of the tires of our bus had been punctured, and that it was taking a long while to repair it. She revealed that she was an inhabitant of Sarajevo and that her travelling companion, an old friend of hers, was a school teacher from France. Finally, our bus was ready to depart. As it was now almost empty, I sat near to the two women and chatted to them. The sun was setting, and we were still only half way to our destination.

Soon after we began moving, the heavens opened. The mountainous region through which we were slowly making our way was filled with crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning. Torrents of rain made driving slow and difficult. I began despairing of ever reaching the city where the Hapsburg Archduke was shot in 1914. And, I was becoming concerned. I was heading for a city, which I did not know and where I had no accommodation arranged, and it was beginning to look as if would be almost midnight by the time we reached it. I asked Marija, the French-speaking lady from Sarajevo, whether she could recommend a hotel for me. She shrugged her shoulders and said that as she lived there, she did not know about hotels. At this point, her companion said to her in French,

“Whenever I meet foreign students in my home town in France, I invite them to stay in my home.”

Marija said nothing. It was my impression that she had not needed to hear this particular bit of information.

It was late at night when we eventually arrived in Sarajevo’s bus station. It was located far from the town centre on the main road that led to the spa at Ilidža. Miodrag was waiting for Marija, his mother-in-law, and her French friend. I was told to get into his car with them, and we drove along ill-lit rain soaked streets through the darkness of the night until we reached the end of a short, steeply inclined cul-de-sac in central Sarajevo. We entered Marija’s second floor flat, and Liljana, Marija’s daughter, served us a huge, tasty supper. At the end of the meal, I still had no idea where I would be spending the night.  Before I could ask where I would be staying, Liljana showed me her mother’s spare bedroom, and told me (in good English) that I should sleep there.

After breakfast the next morning, I set off to find a hotel in which I could stay for the rest of my visit. It did not take long to find one and to reserve a room. Next, I bought a bunch of flowers - they were stems of gladioli - for my kind hostess, and returned to her flat. I entered, gave my bouquet to Marija, thanked her for looking after me, and told her that I had found accommodation. She told me not to be ridiculous; I was to cancel the hotel and to stay with her and her family." 

"Every summer, there was a folk-music festival in Dubrovnik. We attended a few concerts, but these were never free of hassle. Most of my Yugoslav friends seemed to believe that it was beneath their dignity to buy tickets. Somehow, we used to smuggle ourselves into the concert without tickets, and then occupied seats which had a good view of the stage. Without exception, we managed to sit in seats that had been reserved by paid-up ticket holders. An argument would begin. There would be much swearing and even threats of violence. Eventually, a compromise was reached and everyone enjoyed the concert.

Whilst on the subject of concerts, let me whisk you away from the coast for a few moments in order to describe the occasion in Belgrade when Dijana invited me to join her and some of her friends to attend the first punk-rock concert ever to be held in the city. It was to be performed in the Students’ Cultural Centre (‘CKC’), an elegant late nineteenth century building in the heart of the town, which had once housed the Officers’ Club of Belgrade. We did not approach the main entrance, where a group of oddly dressed young people were queuing, but instead we went to a point on the pavement next to an open window. To reach the window it was necessary to cross a high cast iron fence topped with spikes. Dijana’s girlfriends scaled this easily, but I was unable to follow them; they had to return to carry me over it. We entered the building by climbing through the window, and stepped into the darkened concert hall, which was almost full.

 The young audience, dressed in outlandish punk clothing, sat as quietly as if they had been awaiting a classical chamber concert at a place as sedate as London’s Wigmore Hall. The band appeared on stage and began strumming their electric guitars enthusiastically. Within seconds of their beginning, after fewer than two or three strums, the electrical supply fused, and we were plunged into an eerily dark silence. Soon, the lights returned, and we were all told to leave. The concert was, like the one which I had attended some years before in Zagreb, terminated prematurely. It was not the only concert that I attended in Belgrade, which I had to leave precipitately. Once, I was invited to attend a rock concert in a huge stadium in the city. It was a pro-Sandinista event. We left in a hurry to avoid becoming involved with the riot control police, who arrived on the scene soon after the performance began."

AM I A CAMERA?

I knew that I had them. I knew where these foolscap (not even A4) pages were stored, stuffed into the pages of an old road atlas of Yugoslavia. But, I believed that they contained little more information than the list of places that I had visited with a friend when we drove around Serbia in 1990, the last time that I visited Yugoslavia. I was under the impression that the notes contained only the itinerary that we had followed when we visited lesser-known places in the heart of Yugoslavia, a country that was soon to be torn apart by uncivil civil wars.

However, when I did eventually take a look at these papers more than 20 years after having written them, I realised that I was wrong. These pages contained much more than a simple listing of where we had been and on which day; they contained extremely detailed notes about what we did at each of these places. At the insistence of the Yugoslav friend with whom I had made this trip in May 1990 I had kept a detailed contemporaneous record of our Serbian 'odyssey'.

I re-read these notes whilst I was working on the finishing touches to my book about Albania, "Albania on my mind", and it occurred to me that it would be interesting to write something about the numerous trips that I made to Yugoslavia between about 1967 and 1990. Thus, the idea of writing "Scrabble with Slivovitz - Once upon a time in Yugoslavia"  (which I shall now abbreviate to 'SWS') was born. At first, I thought of writing up my 1990 notes into a short book, but soon after this I decided that I would trawl through my memories and try to write about the decades of experiences that I gleaned from visiting Yugoslavia.

I knew that I had taken many photographs during my numerous visits to ths country and its neighbours, but I had not seen them for over 20 years. They were all colour transparencies taken on 35 mm film. When I moved house in about 1993, all of these pictures were placed, along with many other surplus goods, into a lock-up in a warehouse a long way from where I moved in with my wife. I had no idea what condition they were in and what was depicted on them. Consequently, most of the text of SWS was based on what memories that remained stored in my aging brain. The only part of the book that was based on more than pure memory was my description of the last trip that I made to Yugoslavia (that was in May 1990).

Just when the manuscript of SWS was nearly ready for publication, the company which managed the long-term storage of our goods contacted us urgently. The section of the warehouse in which our storage locker was located was due to be remodelled shortly. The company needed us to move our goods to a new locker, and felt that it would be best if we were present to supervise the moving. We agreed, and whilst the moving was in progress I decided to take a look at some of the numerous boxes of colour transparencies that I had not seen for over 20 years.In each box that I examined, the colour slides were in pristine condition. We returned home, and I ordered a slide scanner from Amazon. 

When the scanner arrived, I returned to our locker, and selected several boxes of slides including most of those that I had taken during my trips to Yugoslavia and its neighbours (SWS also describes excursions that I made from Yugoslavia to Bulgaria and Hungary). I scanned furiously for about 3 weeks until the scanner failed to function any more. I hasten to add that this was not due to over-use but to faulty electronics, which the supplier was gracious enough to acknowledge by making me a refund.  Since returning the scanner, I have devised my own slide scanning apparatus, which, incidentally, produces far better results than the one that I bought. I may describe its construction in a future blog.

I had originally decided to illustrate SWS with pictures 'borrowed' from the Internet, from old books and old tourist brochures in my possession, but the rediscovery of my slides made me change my mind.  I illustrated the book with my own photographs. And this is where the process of writing SWS became interesting. As I scanned the slides and turned them into digital images (.jpeg files), I realised that many of the things that I had written about, and which were based on what I could remember, were things that I had also photographed. It was if the act of taking the photograph not only made changes on the emulsion of the 35 mm camera film but also on my grey matter, or wherever it is that memories are stored in my head. Christopher Isherwood once wrote, "I am a camera...". Well, it appears that so am I!

The object of this little essay was to illustrate something of how my memory works, and I hope that I have succeeded in doing that. However, many of you may be wondering why Scrabble? Slivovitz or Slivovica almost everyone associates with the Balkans, and especially the lands which were once known as 'Yugoslavia', but few would have reason to associate Scrabble, a word game developed in the USA in 1938, with travels in the Balkans.  Well, if you want to know why I played Scrabble in Belgrade (sometimes after eating Chinese noodles in Novi Sad) as well as Sijarinska Banja and Studenica, you will have to read my book!

"SCRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ 

- Once upon a time in Yugoslavia"

by Adam Yamey

is available by clicking HERE

OR via Amazon's online stores, 

where it is also available as a Kindle version.

ICEBERG

The former headquarters of the White Star Line in Liverpool

A Chinaman and a Jew are sitting together in a railway compartment.

After a while, the Jew gets up and hits the Chinaman.

“Why did you hit me?” asks the victim.

“For Pearl Harbour,” the Jew replies.

“But I’m Chinese”

“Chinese, Japanese it’s all the same to me.”

The train continues on its way.

Some hours later, the Chinaman gets up, and hits the Jew.

“Why did you do that, already?”

“For the Titanic”

“But I’m Jewish.”

“Iceberg, Greenberg, it’s all the same to me.”

This afternoon (17 Aug 2013), we attended a performance of Titanic at the Southwark Playhouse. It is a musical drama written in 1997. It is based on a book by Peter Stone. Its lyrics and music were composed by Maury Yeston (born 1945).

This music drama rivals any that the Brecht/Weill team wrote. It is dramatic, powerful, incisive, interesting, informative, and brilliant musically.  Titanic addresses the important social problems of the class system such that existed just before the First World War (‘WW1’), and still linger on today. The cast directed by Danielle Tarento sing and act beautifully. They mesmerised the audience with their energy, acting skills, and, not least, their beautiful singing. This performance of a drama with great political significance is all of the following: humorous, tear-jerking, exciting, moving, thoughtful, and realistic. As the drama unfolded, it was difficult to believe that we were not aboard that ill-fated liner.

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 serves as an unintentionally true-life allegory of much of the 20^th century. The liner, built by Harland and Wolff in Liverpool for The White Star Line, was described as being unsinkable. As an Unknown Titanic crew member is supposed to have said to an embarking passenger, Mrs Sylvia Caldwell,

            “God himself could not sink this ship!” (see note  below)

Similarly, several years later, the words, “The war to end all wars” became well-known. Yet, this was not to be the case. Just as the captain of the Titanic failed to heed and act on the dangers posed by the icebergs towards which they were speeding recklessly, the leaders of the Western World and elsewhere failed to take seriously the clear warning signals coming from the likes of Hitler and Mussolini.

While we all live our daily lives distracted by trivial, yet important enough, problems and pleasures, we, like the passengers on the Titanic,  remain largely unaware that our world might be sailing towards yet another iceberg.

 Note: click here 

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about

Y  U  G  O  S  L  A  V  I  A

COQUETTE WINDOW

I used to visit the former Yugoslavia frequently before the country was plunged into a series of civil wars in about 1991. The purposes of my visits was to visit my Yugoslav friends as well as to explore their beautiful country.

In October 1989, I stayed in Belgrade where most of my friends lived. As was often the case, I made an excursion from the city with my good friend, the late Rasa Raicevic. One of the places that we explored was the town of Sremski Karlovci, which is not far from the city of Novi Sad. Both places are in the region of Serbia known as the Vojvodina. This region had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its demise at the end of the First World War.

While we were walking through the attractive streets of Sremski Karlovci, Rasa pointed out some special ground-floor windows. They differed from the majority of the windows in the buildings that lined the streets in that instead of being flush with the walls in which they were embedded, they projected over the pavement.

My friend told me that these windows were known as coquette Fenster. Their purpose was to allow the young ladies of the house to survey the street without having to open the window and lean out. No doubt, they also allowed young men in the street to view the young ladies positioned in the coquette Fenster.

Currently, I am writing a book about my experiences in Yugoslavia, while it still existed. I wanted to check whether I had remembered the naming of these windows correctly. I looked up 'coquette Fenster' on the Internet. However, despite using a number of variants on the spelling of 'coquette', I found nothing relevant to my quest.

Originally, I believed that I had seen these windows in Varazdin (Croatia), but then recently I discovered my photographs of these windows. They were labelled 'Sremski Karlovci' rather than 'Varazdin'. Having discovered this, I resumed my research, but looked-up information about windows in Sremski Karlovci, and discovered that people had posted information about these special windows, but had described them as 'Kibitz' windows.

Leo Rosten in his invaluable encyclopaedia, The Joys of Yiddish, explains that the word kibitzer, that is someone who kibitzes, is derived from Kiebitz the German word for the lapwing or peewit, an especially noisy and inquisitive bird. Further, he defines a kibitzer as someone who gives unasked for advice, and also someone who flatters. Additionally, he writes that a kibitzer can be used to describe someone who 'joshes or teases'. So, I wonder which of these definitions is particularly pertinent to the naming of these windows.

A coquette Fenster on the left with its 'normal' neighbour

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forthcoming book:

"Scrabble with Slivovitz -

Once upon a Time in Yugoslavia"

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TUBES

 

Gjirokastër,  Albania in May 1984

"That evening after dinner, a number of us sat with Aferdita and Eduart in the hotel’s night club. Each of the hotels in which we stayed had one of these. With the exception of our two guides and the musicians who performed in them, these clubs were out-of-bounds for Albanians. This evening we were entertained by a small band that played western pop music, mainly tunes originally performed by the Beatles. The noisy background of these clubs provided our two young guides with opportunities to ask us about life beyond their country’s tightly sealed borders. However, it was clear that Aferdita was trying to eavesdrop on Eduart and vice-versa. As the musicians strummed away in the semi-gloom of the club in Gjirokastër, Aferdita turned to me, rolled her lower lip away from her teeth, and asked my opinion of her gums. She wanted to know if they had been treated properly. I told her that I was unable to give her an opinion in such poor light.

The following morning, I spotted some tubes of Albanian toothpaste on display in a locked glass display case near the hotel’s main entrance. I tried to communicate to the receptionist (who did not understand English) that I wished to purchase a tube. I used to collect toothpastes from wherever I travelled, and was curious to taste its contents. Whilst I was doing this, Aferdita appeared, and asked me what I wanted. I told her. She explained my desire to the receptionist, and moments later I had become the proud owner of a tube of Albanian dentifrice."

This is a brief excerpt from my book "ALBANIA ON MY MIND" (Click HERE for more detail), published in 2012. Until two days ago, I had believed that I had lost or thrown away the Albanian toothpaste  bought in Gjirokastër,to which I referred in the excerpt.  Well, I found it amongst some goods that we had kept in storage for almost 20 years. The illustration below shows 2 of the tubes in greater detail:

These were not the only dental souvenirs that I discovered in our family storage locker. Here is an extract from the draft of my forthcoming book "SRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ - Once Upon a Time in Yugoslavia" about Yugoslavia before 1991:

"Between Niš and the dull, nearby Niška Banja, we encountered a large number of Russian and Bulgarian cars parked by the side of the main road. Each car had a stall - usually a folding table - set up beside it. Their owners were selling a wide variety of odds and ends. I bought tubes of toothpaste manufactured in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. For a long time these, and the dentifrice that I had bought in the Albanian town of Gjirokastër a few years earlier, shared pride of place in my large collection of toothpastes from all around the world. Sadly, this collection no longer exists, and I have also lost the Russian toothbrush, which I bought there."

This section is now going to need re-writing, as I have found the missing toothpastes...

Sadly, the Russian  toothbrush remains missing!

For more information about my forthcoming book about Yugoslavia as it was,

please click HERE

Also, do pay a visit to 

http://www.adamyamey.com