Travels in Southeastern Europe

The burden of the Balkans / by M. Edith Durham.

ON THE SHORES OF LAKE PRESBA. i39 again. The land was raw with recent fighting-it was, so to speak, an aching wound, and either party lived in terror of the other. We started often before it was quite light in the morning, whether it were rain, snow, or storm, and we rode till sundown. In all, we visited nineteen villages and two monasteries. I went into more than a thousand houses, and interviewed deputations from four other villages. At night we arrived, if possible, at an uhbumt village, and slept and supped at the headman's house. The horses were stabled below. We climbed up a ladder into the family dwelling. A crowd of women, who called me their ' golden sister,' kissed me on both cheeks, unless I resisted violently. They spread rush mats on the mud floor. We took off our boots and squatted round the hearth, and the master of the house threw on brushwood till the fire blazed high, and I could see to write out the necessary lists. In the better houses there was a big hooded hearth of mediaeval pattern; in the poorer the rafters overhead glittered black with smoke, and were festooned with dried fish, and, in houses that had escaped looting, with onions and salt meat cut into dice and threaded on string; often with bunches of plaits of hair, hung on a nail-ends to prolong ladies' pigtails on bazaar days. Then the priest in his high black cap and shaggy locks and all the chief men of the village flocked in and settled down to hard drinking and tales of the rising. Even in burnt villages where it was hard to
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About this Item

Title
The burden of the Balkans / by M. Edith Durham.
Author
Durham, Mary Edith, 1863-1944.
Canvas
Page 139
Publication
London :: Nelson,
[1905]
Subject terms
Eastern question (Balkan)
Balkan Peninsula -- Description and travel.

Technical Details

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https://name.umdl.umich.edu/ans3900.0001.001
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https://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/bosnia/ans3900.0001.001/146

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"The burden of the Balkans / by M. Edith Durham." In the digital collection Travels in Southeastern Europe. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/ans3900.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 30, 2025.
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