Authors: Tim Milne
From Dubrovnik we took ship southward to Kotor, at the head of a superb fjord, and trudged up the mountains towards Cetinje, the capital of the former kingdom of Montenegro. Kim had been at prep school with the sons of the Montenegrin royal family, and we visited the decaying so-called palace, part of which was known locally as ‘Biljarda’ because it had once boasted a billiards table. We spent three or four days walking in Montenegro, and finally took an ancient bus down to Bar, a small port not far from the Albanian frontier.
Our boat was due to leave at six the next morning for Durrës in Albania. This time, taking no chances, we kept awake in turns. I spent my hours trying to learn Albanian by candle-light from Archibald Lyall’s splendid little volume
Twenty-Five European Languages
. Lyall was obviously a humorist. In addition to a vocabulary of 800 words, there were some thirty conversational sentences, the same for each of the twenty-five languages. These included ‘Where is the water closet? On the fourth floor.’
In Albania, we found later, there appeared to be, as far as one could judge, neither fourth floors nor water closets. Albanian was clearly a primitive language, borrowing widely from others to deal with any invention or concept later than the Stone Age. But there was something endearing about a language which took seventeen words to say ‘Have you a cheap single room?’
Not many Englishmen have been to Albania – for lack of facilities and attractions before the war, and political reasons since (at least until about 1991). I liked it so much that I went again in 1938, not with Kim but with my wife, and got to know a few Albanians with whom we corresponded until Mussolini invaded the country in 1939.
Arriving in Durrës in the evening, Kim and I began our Albanian interlude in highly uncharacteristic fashion, knocking up the British consul to complain that we had been overcharged by the boatman who brought us from the ship. The poor consul, in dressing gown and slippers and suffering from malaria, could do nothing for us. Later we got into conversation with two British engineers staying in our so-called hotel, and listened with amused superiority to their ultra-conservative political views. Theirs were the last English voices we were to hear on our Balkan journey.
One of the likeable things about the Albania of the 1930s was its air of self-deprecating inefficiency and absence of nationalist self-importance. But there could be efficiency, too. In Durrës my shoes, which had been badly repaired in Montenegro, began to disintegrate. We found a little cobbler in an open-fronted shop, and within an hour they were not just repaired but stronger than when new. (I was truly sorry when later my mother gave them away to the Boy Scouts.) From Durrës we took a bus to Tirana, the capital, but there was no transport eastward to Elbasan, our
next objective. We would have to walk the thirty miles in a single day, which meant getting on the road by 4.30 in the morning. As we had to share our room in Tirana with four Albanians, and the beds were too dirty even to get into, we slept little and were glad to leave. Our plan was to divide the day into three: five hours on the road or track leading to the top of a 2,000-foot pass, five hours resting there in the heat of the day and five hours walking the remaining fifteen miles down to Elbasan. The map, which owed as much to imagination as to research, showed a spring at the top of the pass. Parched with thirst, we struggled up the rocky bed of a waterless stream, but no spring was to be found. It was some time before we came across a local inhabitant. Here was a chance to try my Albanian, and I pulled Lyall out of my rucksack. Splendid fellow, he actually gave the word for spring! ‘
Ku asht prendvera?
’ I asked eagerly. The man looked completely blank: two foreigners, plainly unhinged by some experience, had just asked him ‘Where is the springtime?’ Eventually all was explained and we were guided to a bubbling ice-cold spring in a green glade. When we finally reached Elbasan it was nearly dark. By the time we had eaten, we had had enough. I was attacked all night by mosquitoes and later counted seventy bites. The next morning, after buying a Flit-gun, we spent our time resting, washing our clothes in the river Shkumbin and walking around a town as oriental as anything in Asiatic Turkey.
There was a road of sorts eastwards from there to the Yugoslav frontier, a distance of some fifty miles. We managed to get a lift on a truck nearly full of merchandise; the small remaining space held six Albanians, two gundogs and ourselves. The journey, with many stops and minor breakdowns, took ten hours, and it was getting dark when they dropped us a mile or two from the
frontier. Knowing that it would be closed and the guards liable to shoot on sight, we had to call out continuously as we walked, ‘
Granica! Granica!
’ (It was the Serbian word for frontier, but we hoped it would do.) At last torches flashed on us from an Albanian frontier post, where, after identification, the commandant gave us a fine welcome. Soldiers were turned out of a small room and put in with the goats, straw palliasses and a meal provided, money refused. In the morning we crossed into Yugoslavia and walked down to Ohrid, at the head of the beautiful lake of that name. Here we spent three relaxing days. The insects still bit, but we took encouragement from a theory – probably false – that malarious mosquitoes were not found above 1,000 feet.
Things had changed somewhat from our previous journey. Kim was now even more of an ascetic, more serious without being pompous, determined not to make the slightest concession to tourism or even normal comfort. Wherever we went we automatically sought out the cheapest place to sleep; by train we always went third or ‘hard’ class, and would have gone fourth if it had existed (as it did in Bosnia, where Kim the previous year had travelled around in what amounted to cattle trucks). But he was as interesting a companion as ever. As usual he had taken the trouble to read up the history of the area. This knowledge was all the more valuable because we had no guidebooks (a French
Guide Bleu
to Yugoslavia was published later). So I came to know something of the conflict of Turk and Serb over the centuries, a subject we found more interesting than the sterile contemporary politics of Yugoslavia. But most of our thoughts, energies and discussions were devoted to the simple business of living: finding somewhere to sleep, food to eat, good water to drink, getting from one place to another. Alcohol we drank sparingly
in the Balkans: occasional beer when we could find it, a little local wine, the odd
slivovitz
. The whole trip, like the other two, was completely sexless. Asceticism was not the only reason for all this. We had little money – I was living entirely on my Oxford scholarship income, and Kim was certainly not well off. I kept careful accounts in a tiny notebook. It may all sound very joyless, but in truth it was a very full and satisfying time: to this day I can reconstruct practically the entire journey from memory. The greatest deprivation I suffered from was the absence of English newspapers.
For language we relied very largely on Kim’s Serbo-Croat, which was more than adequate for the minor traffic of life. I managed to learn a few of the essentials myself.
Ima li voda ovde?
Is there water here?
Imate li grozhdje/hleb/sobu?
Have you grapes/ bread/a room?
Gde je nuzhnik?
Where is the loo? (This last question was usually unnecessary. The
nuzhnik
, if indoors, was a noisome little den that proclaimed itself at a distance; if outdoors it was a sort of solitary sentry box, easily identified.) Very frequently, when we arrived in a village, the local ‘English speaker’ would be trotted out. This invariably proved to be someone no longer young who had emigrated to America in about 1910 and had returned some time after the war, leaving behind him most of the English he had acquired. We got used to being greeted in friendly but ancient American slang – ‘Hi, you son-of-a-bitch.’ Kim’s Serbo-Croat was really much more useful: he was able to make conversation.
The ‘hotels’ of the Balkans at that time were not those of today. Their names were in the highest traditions – Ritz, Bristol, Carlton – but they were, frankly, hovels. I think one or two had enough electricity for the occasional light bulb, but most did not.
There would be nothing like running water, and the so-called lavatories were too awful to describe. The beds were not too bad, although one was not always sure of the last occupant. But the food was surprisingly good, though perhaps more because of our hunger than anything else. I do not recall any bathrooms – indeed, I doubt whether I had a bath throughout the journey, certainly not after leaving Germany.
Primitive and lacking in amenities though the Balkans were, they were a friendly enough place. We never had any fears for our safety or that of our few possessions. Except for Dubrovnik and Kotor there was virtually no tourist trade in any of the places we visited. Often we were assumed at first to be Germans – I expect many people had never seen an Englishman before. Once or twice we were taken for brothers: there may have been a slight physical resemblance at that time, but it probably appeared more pronounced to people unused to English faces. We were thrown together so much for these few weeks, with so little company and so few other diversions, that we might have become seriously irritated with one another; but personal relations held up well, though I do remember one occasion when for reasons now forgotten we strode along for several miles, one slightly ahead of the other, not on speaking terms; each with his own cloud of flies and thoughts.
While in Albania we had had to abandon hope of getting Bulgarian visas and had settled instead for a short foray into northern Greece. The Greek legation in Tirana gave us visas on the spot (unusual in the Balkans in those days). Our plan was to walk the forty-odd miles from Ohrid through Resan to Bitolj, in the very south of Yugoslavia, whence we could get a train into Greece. The road was not well provided with villages and we had
done some twenty-seven miles before we found what appeared to be an inn, but turned out to be a brothel. Refreshed by a beer, and repelling all advances, we pushed on and even entertained thoughts of reaching Bitolj that night. This would have been overdoing things. We had been humping our rucksacks all day over rough roads and hill tracks, with the temperature in the nineties, and it was getting late. Fortunately after a couple of miles, and tiring rapidly, we found somewhere to stay. We made Bitolj the next morning, after three more hours of walking.
Two days later we were on our way by train to a village called Arnissa in Greek and Ostrovo in Macedonian, about halfway along the railway to Salonica. We had chosen it from the map because of its situation on a large lake, under the great massif of Mount Kaimakchalan. The scenery turned out to be as good as we had hoped, but I doubt if Arnissa had ever had much in the way of visitors before (it is now said to be an up-and-coming summer resort). There was not even what passed in those parts for an inn. Nor were there any roads; to get down to the lake, we had to walk along the railway line. At the little station restaurant we came across a peasant who offered us a room in his house. There we stayed four nights, paying the equivalent of about three (old) pence a night each. The room did not actually have any beds but there were two hard wooden chests covered with quilts of a sort. We slept on these, although I suppose we might have been just as comfortable on the floor. The lavatory was magnificent in its architectural simplicity. A small part of the first floor which jutted out beyond the ground floor was screened off; two floorboards had been prised apart so as to leave a small triangular hole, through which one could see the sunlit ground below. That was all. For meals we ate excellently at the
station restaurant. The local population was Slavonic, speaking Macedonian – a mixture of Serb and Bulgarian, close enough to Serb for our purposes – but there were a number of Greek soldiers with whom we talked mainly in French. It was a confusing area linguistically. The Greek for ‘yes’ and the Macedonian word for ‘no’ were both pronounced ‘nay’. Heads were nodded upwards for ‘no’ and from side to side for ‘yes’, again misleading for an Englishman. It was very easy to find yourself misdirected. There was nothing to do but sit peacefully by the lake, bathe in its medicinal-tasting waters, read Plato and Thucydides, eat at the restaurant and talk to the villagers and soldiers. My total expenditure in the four days was six shillings.
We took the train back to Bitolj. From now on we would do no further walking as a means of transport, but would make our way slowly up to Belgrade by rail. The first day took us from Bitolj to Skopje, or Skoplje as it was then spelt. Though only 120 miles, the journey took fully twelve hours. At that time a stretch of eighty miles lay over a superb narrow-gauge mountain railway, the kind which has a turning radius of about a hundred yards; one could – and did – get out of the train on one of those 180-degree turns, cut across a field and jump in on the other side. It was intensely hot. We ate grapes and bread and sweated. On the other side of the little wooden carriage a woman was coughing blood on the floor.
But we were about to rejoin civilisation, in a sense. Through Veles ran a main line connecting Salonica, Skopje and Belgrade. So from Veles to Skopje we enjoyed the experience of travelling at speed – perhaps forty miles an hour. A tremendous thunderstorm cooled the air and turned all to mud.
At Skopje my inside decided to rebel for the first time against
its unaccustomed dietary and physical regime. The last straw was a meal consisting of a whole melon and a glass of sour cream. Balkan peasants are supposed to live to 120 on this kind of diet, but I lay on the bed feeling terrible, while Kim, who seldom suffered from internal upsets, gaily called attention to what was happening in the street below. Only when a performing bear walked past did I manage to drag myself to the window. Next day things were better and we explored the town. Much of the attraction of Yugoslavia lay in the Turkish legacy – the mosques, the buildings, the little eating places where many varieties of food were kept hot in tureens displayed in the window. There were still a number of older people of Turkish descent to be seen, gravely courteous, writing Turkish in the Arabic script, which was now forbidden in Turkey itself. By comparison the Serbs seemed brash and unpolished.