Travels in Southeastern Europe

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

334 THE BURDEN OF THE BALKANS. killed, but four prisoners taken, all of them fresh ones. As the gendarmes were returning with them to Elbasan the escaped murderer (the shepherd of the Berat road) leapt up suddenly from behind a rock, shot a gendarme dead, and got clean away. The gendarmes, enraged by the deaths of both officer and comrades, shot all four prisoners dead there and then on the track, and there the affair ended. The shepherd was still at large when I left, and it was said he could not be taken without much bloodshed. We talked of murder, violence, and brigandage. Things look very different in the East and the West. You may travel among the Balkan people alone, and drop for the tirpe being every Western habit; you may eat with the natives, drink with them, sleep with them, ride with them, live as they do, and watch them patiently for months, you may visit and revisit their lands, and think that you are beginning to understand them, when something occurs that turns 4 sudden searchlight upon them, and you perceive in a flash that you were as far as ever from seeing things from their point of view. To do this you must leap back across the centuries, wipe the West and all its ideas from out you, let loose all that there is in you of primitive man, and learn six languages, all quite useless in other parts of the world. The difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of this task is probably the reason why, up till the present, all intervention by the Western Powers, however well intentioned, has, when loosening one knot of
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Title
The burden of the Balkans / by M. Edith Durham.
Author
Durham, Mary Edith, 1863-1944.
Canvas
Page 334
Publication
London :: Nelson,
[1905]
Subject terms
Eastern question (Balkan)
Balkan Peninsula -- Description and travel.

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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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