Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle

1912 dawned ominously. Montenegro worked ceaselessly to rouse the Maltsors, promising them that they should receive sufficient arms and, this time, gain freedom. Meanwhile the T...

DURING the winter of 1913-14 I gathered funds for Albania, and the American missionaries worked hard at feeding the refugees of Gostivar and Dibra. General Phillips, in command...

Europe was now definitely divided into two camps, each arming against the other. Plots thickened, and events crowded on one another. So knotted did the Balkan threads become, it...

THE events seen by the casual traveller are meaningless if he knows not what went before. They are mere sentences from the middle of a book he has not read. Before going further...

This holiday was eventful. On the steamer I was addressed politely by an Albanian who had read my name on my bag. He said he had seen me a week before in Venice, and proved it b...

Early in 1903 I received an invitation to stay with certain of the partisans of the Karageorgevitches in Serbia. The "something" that was to happen had not yet come to pass. My...

Twice had I visited Montenegro and had heard much of Great Serbia. Of the past as seen by Serb eyes I read in any number of cheap pink and blue ballad books. As for the present,...

In the summer of 1906, when I visited Bosnia, the plot was already far advanced. Petar Karageorgevitch was on the throne of Serbia, and Russia, who had had a bad set-back in the...

The summer of 1906 saw me no longer restricted to two months' travel, but free to go where I pleased for as long as I liked. I planned a great scheme for the study and compariso...

THE first thing I did in London was to send back to King Petav the Order of St Sava he had bestowed upon me, with a letter telling him I had heard the attack upon Austria freely...

Study of the Macedonian question had shown me that one of the most important factors of the Near Eastern question was the Albanian, and that the fact that he was always left out...

The Great Serbian Idea--the scheme for the reconstruction of Tsar Dushan's mediaeval Empire--now began to sprout and germinate. In truth that Empire had been constructed by Dush...

THE Macedonian rising of 1903 was a purely Bulgar movement. As is invariably the case with such risings, it was ill-planned; and untrained peasants and irregular forces never in...

It is a strange Desire to seeke Power and to lose Libertie. . . . The standing is slippery, and the Regresse is either a Downefall, or at least an Eclipse. Which is a Melancholy...

The thirteen days' difference between the Old and New Style enabled me to spend Christmas 1906 at Serajevo, and celebrate it a second time in old Serb fashion in Krsto's hut at...

Ill and crippled with sciatica, but hopeless of recovery in England, I managed to get to Scutari in April 1910, hoping there to find a sun-cure, and at least to learn what was h...

An accident and a long illness forced me to spend 1909 in London. In March came a significant change in Serbia. Prince George, the Crown Prince, in a fit of uncontrolled rage, a...

It was in Cetinje in August, 1900, that I first picked up a thread of the Balkan tangle, little thinking how deeply enmeshed I should later become, and still less how this tangl...

I arrived in Cetinje on May 5th, and found Italy had built a Legation bigger than that of Austria. France had erected a gay villa in the main street. Great Britain still only pa...

I ARRIVED in Cetinje with a Turkish trooper's saddle and a pair of saddle-bags that contained some flintlock pistols and some beautiful ostrich feathers given me by the Mutasarr...

such resentment. But the central authorities will not do it. We have to rely largely on the sale of timber to run the country. It is one of the most valuable assets."

In 1901 I visited Montenegro and went down the lake to Scutari. Scutari captured me at once. It had colour, life, art. Its people were friendly and industrious and did not spend...