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Edith and I: travels through the Balkans in a tam o’shanter
One hundred years ago, pioneering traveller Edith Durham introduced the English to the Albanians with a book describing her journeys around dangerous and little-known Balkan lands with only a tam o’shanter and common sense to protect her.
Until the age of 37 her life had been dominated by her responsibilities for nursing her mother, until she was near breakdown herself and her doctor prescribed Travel. The life-changing trip she took then to the Balkans gave her a view of horizons beyond Hampstead; on return to her mother’s bedside she set out her proposal for combining time in the land she had fallen in love with, and her duties as unmarried daughter. Every year for the rest of her mother’s life, Edith Durham traded 10 months of duties at her mother’s bedside for two months of adventuring in the Balkans.
Her travels led her on packhorses across the so-called Accursed Mountains, staying with Albanian families hiding out for fear of blood feuds, to medieval Serbian Orthodox monasteries, and Ottoman harems. (The latter she described with typical forthrightness as being full of 'awful pallid stout collopy females and a lot of children too. The children quite nice. The women terrible.’)
Today, although every Albanian school child would know the name of Edith Durham, in the UK she is largely forgotten. Since my return to live in London last autumn after two life-changing years learning Albanian culture (and the Albanian language) in Kosovo, I have been working to shed light on the life of this extraordinary woman. She was a traveller, anthropologist, watercolourist and reluctant humanitarian and was so loved by the Albanian Highlanders that they called her the 'Queen of the Mountain People'.
The book I am writing draws on Durham's personal papers, letters, photographs and the wax cylinder recordings she made in the field, as well as the insights of colleagues and friends who I worked with in Kosovo’s ethnological museum. It reflects the experiences of this tough Edwardian woman, and my own experiences in Kosovo and later in England, on Edith's trail.
An extract from the book is available on the website of the writers' group I belong to, Magnetic North.
I wrote the introduction for IB Tauris' forthcoming collection of Edith Durham's letters and articles, available for pre-order at Amazon.co.uk.
The Kosovan Post Office recently issued a stamp showing Edith Durham. I was interviewed on the BBC World Service about the stamp and what it means. The March 2010 issue of Stanley Gibbons' Stamp Monthly also contains my article about the stamp.
As well as writing biography in this new form, I have translated, from the Albanian, Shkëlzen Gashi's biography of Adem Demaçi, Yugoslavia's longest-held political prisoner, and the memoirs of Hasan Prishtina (reviewed in the Central and Eastern European Review). Both published by Rrokullia and available at bookshops across Kosovo. My approach to translation and views on the state of translation in Kosovo appeared in this article in Kosovan daily, Zeri.
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