Travels through Central Albania

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Victor Berard (1864-1931) was a French classicist and political figure from Morez in the Jura mountains. He studied at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris, specialized in Homeric studies and travelled much in Greece and the Ottoman Empire. In August 1880, he and his friend Emile Legrand (1841-1903), author of “Bibliographie Albanaise” [Albanian Bibliography], Athens 1912, travelled through Albania on their way to Macedonia. The following excerpts from this journey from Durres through Kavaja, Peqin and Elbasan are taken from his first book, “La Turquie et l’hellenisme contemporain” [Turkey and Contemporary Hellenism], Paris 1893.

 

Peqin – an Albanian Fief

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After four hours of travel over the plains and in the dust, we reached the Shkumbin [Skumbi] River and the village of Peqin [Pekini]. The Shkumbin, like all the other rivers on this plain, is too deep in its bed to be seen from a distance. But soon there appeared fields of maize and clumps of trees here and there. The track used by man and beast subsided more and more every day. Finally, there were thorn bush fences and cobblestone pavement that announced our approach to the village.

This cobblestone is, alas, to be found at the entrance to all Turkish villages. No one dares to use it. Neither men on foot or on horseback, nor women going to the fountain, nor buffaloes plodding homeward from their ploughing will walk on it. Everyone, locals, and foreigners, even the goats, avoid these narrow roads of slippery and awkwardly set stones. If one wants to avoid breaking one’s neck, it is advisable to use the paths at the side of the road. Why such a cobblestone nightmare, worthy of the Seljuks, in all the towns and villages from Aleppo to Shkodra? Let us be modest. Turkish roads were the envy of Europe in the seventeenth century. Lady Montague had not seen such engineering marvels in England, France, or Germany.

 

Peqin was a simple bazaar, a road bordered by temporary, ever temporary stalls that came to life once a week when peasants from the surroundings gathered to go to market.

Today, the village was asleep. Vendors crouched in the doorways of their shops in the shade of their canopies. Dogs and naked children played in the brazing sun. Here we encounter Albanians, some Christian Vlachs, a Greek from Vlora who spoke Italian and French, and, for the first time, Turks. […]

 

The large domed mosque here, similar to the one in Kavaja with the same portico, was in a similar state of ruin. The square tower of its minaret with a clock on it looked rather like a Christian bell tower. The kaza of Peqin, entirely Muslim, consists of about 3,000 inhabitants, of whom less than two hundred are Christian Vlachs. Aside from the sixty to eighty Ottoman families, these Muslims are very tolerant in their faith.

Near the bazaar in which cloth and European textiles are displayed, as are sacks of vegetables, horseshoes and some hardware, there are about fifty earthen huts under the cypress and walnut trees around the residence, or should one say, fortress of Demir Bey.

The ditches and earthen slopes of the fortress have been destroyed pursuant to a recent order from Constantinople. But the high surrounding walls made of good stonework are still standing. They form a square about one hundred metres in length, fortified in each corner by a ten-sided bastion. The cannons are missing from the gaping loopholes.

We were not given leave to enter as the bey had departed for one of his farms, but from the top of the walls covered in clematis and ivy, under old plane trees and poplars, we could see his wooden palace, its kiosks with raised roofs, pavilions, and sheds.

The corridors, balconies and windows evinced broken railings and rotten shutters. The outer walls were once covered in frescos. We could also see wood-paneled interiors with long couches around the sides of the rooms.

The decorations were simple and the colours were even more basic. In pale hues of yellow, blue, green, and red, the artist had endeavored to depict the Albanian environment – horses, cypress trees, minarets, rifles, sabres, roses, warriors cutting heads off, bodies from which rivers of blood was gushing, Constantinople, Mecca, boats on the sea, and red cannons firing green cannonballs.

The artwork had faded and virtually vanished. The rain diluted it and the exposed wood turned black. From the branches and black planks, a flock of crows rose with a cry.

Only one corner of the central building looked inhabitable.

Demir Bey was, however, one of the great landowners of Albania.

All the villages of this region belonged to him. His revenue probably exceeded 2,000 Turkish pounds (46,000 francs) and, according to Malik Pasha of Libohova and Fezul Aga of Delvina, his father-in-law, Omer Bey, the head of the Vrioni family in Berat, was the richest man in Albania.

But Demir Bey’s income came to him in kind. At harvest time, the peasants give him one-third or half of the harvest – a third when the peasant is paying his tithes and taxes to the government, and half when the tax goes directly to the bey.

This is normal practice in all of Albania. The standard crop that is harvested more or less throughout the country is maize. It is consumed by the Albanians and they grow nothing else.

In his fortress, Demir Bey also had large wooden sheds.

Between the planks caving in from the pressure hung ears of maize grown moldy in the rain. The harvest of the last three years was rotting here without Demir Bey able or willing to sell it. […]

No European nation has yet discovered this grain market.

The Austrian Lloyd that stops in Durrës exports none of it. The Greek ships that used to load grain for Corfu and Patras no longer sail in these waters. And the French companies, Fraissinet, Paquet and others, never show their flag in the Adriatic. Commerce has habits of its own. The merchants of Marseille still think there is nothing of interest to them in this Venetian lake.

But the real cause of ruin for Demir Bey is politics. Demir Bey has intimate problems in the Divan, problems with Albanians of rival families in hereditary vendettas that have been going on for centuries – robbery, rape, denunciations, fires, and sabre wounds. Demir has made his situation worse by refusing to take a post as a governor general (vali) in Asia Minor.

The Porte, wary of his influence, proposed this disguised exile for him, but Demir, who is stubborn and in ill health, refused.

 As such, a few days after his marriage, he and his father-in-law were accused of usurping public and religious land. The mosques of Constantinople and the Sultan’s mother possess large stretches of vakufs (religious endowments) in this region.

The farms of Demir Bey will probably enrich them more unless he agrees to be made pasha of Konya or Sivas or unless he accepts some honorary, though badly paid function at an embassy far away from here.

 

The kaymakam (sub-prefect) of Peqin refused to inspect our passports and did not recognize our gendarmes, saying that anyone could have a passport, a uniform, or the weapons of a zaptieh. 

He said he would have to contact Berat in writing. There was a telegraph office, but the kaymakam did not have a telegraphist available.

We replied to the sub-prefect that, being used to the ways of the world and of Turkey, we always carried clinking arguments in our purses, but that being French and friends of Dervish Pasha, we had too much respect for the Sultan to buy off his officials. The sub-prefect protested that he had taken us for Greeks.

Dervish Pasha, the former vali of Shkodra during the show of force in Ulqin [Dulcigno], is the supreme authority here. Having the confidence of the Sultan, he is a great minister of Albanian affairs.

He distributes positions and carries weight in court houses and government.

He is always on the lookout for affairs to his advantage. “He is a devil” or “he is a horned dog,” say the Christians in loud disgust, and the Pasha of L. swore only by this “sly fox.”

 

The sub-prefect, who had now become our friend, begged us to inform Dervish Pasha about all the progress that had been made in the kaza of Peqin: the roads that had been maintained and well paved; the Muslim school that had been opened (in the portico of the mosque) with twelve little children reciting the Koran around an old imam with glasses and a cane; and most of all that brigandage had been done away with. What a shame that we had not been there during last Bayram.

What a splendid gendarmerie the kaymakam would have shown is.

Thieves cannot do what they want here, as they can in Janina or Shkodra!

Yet the kaymakam urged us not to spend the night in town, where we would not be secure because his gendarmes were all with Demir Bey. Indeed, he even encouraged us to leave, in the midday heat, and to travel in the afternoon. As he was responsible for the respectable gentlemen that we were, he begged us not to stop under any circumstances before we reached Elbasan, a large town where we would find many hans and zaptiehs.

 

Leaving Peqin, we had a few hundred metres of cobblestone to get past, along dry earthen walls under walnut, plane, and cypress trees. In the dark and humid shade, we passed Muslim cemeteries among the ferns, with standing and toppled gravestones. Silence reigned here.

Suddenly we emerged once again into the glaring sun of the barren plain. The track, that had led us in a northwest to southeast direction since Durres, now turned and led us directly eastwards. In front of us, on the distant horizon, the plain began to narrow between high mountains.

Without realizing it, we reached the bed of the Shkumbin, with its wife, precipitous, and muddy banks. The water was brown with alluvial soil.

Its languishing, muddy flow continued the mighty work of erosion, transforming an ancient lake into land today. […]

 

[Extracts from Victor Berard: La Turquie et l’hellenisme contemporian (Paris : Felix Alcan, 1893, reprint 1911), pp. 1-75. Translated from the French by Robert Elsie.]