Edith Durham

(1863-1944)

 'Queen of the Highlanders'

 Edith Durham, it should be said, was a difficult woman.
The first entry for her in the British Foreign Office files, from 1908, reads
"Durham, Miss M. E., Inadvisability of Corresponding With".

Rebecca West, R. W, Seton-Watson, Henry Wickham Steed, and most other important writers on East European affairs between the two world wars thought her a woman to be avoided. An advocate of the national aspirations of the Albanians, she was vilified by her critics in Britain, who generally looked more favourably on the cause of Yugoslav unity than she did. Her polemics on Balkan politics and the retrograde culture of what she called the "Serb vermin" alienated her contemporaries. Many thought her at best wildly eccentric and at worst completely mad. Travelling and living among the clansmen of upland Albania, they said, had taken its toll on her judgment and sense of decorum. "The fact is that while always denouncing Balkan mentality", wrote Professor Seton-Watson in 1929, "she is herself exactly what she means by the word."
Durham was, however, the twentieth century's indispensable interpreter of Albania, and arguably the most important writer on that culture since J. C. Hobhouse journeyed through the Albanian lands with Byron. She was adored among the Albanians themselves, who knew her as "Kralica e Malësorevet" - the Queen of the Highlanders. "She gave us her heart and she won the ear of our mountaineers", the exiled Albanian king, Zog, wrote to The Times on her death in 1944 (even though she was not on good terms with him, either). The only other Briton to have been so lionised was, improbably, Norman Wisdom, whom the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha found uproariously entertaining.

Durham's most famous work. High Albania (1909), is valued by collectors. It is still the pre-eminent guide to the folk customs, social structure, customary law, religious beliefs and traditional tales of the Albanians, especially in the highlands north of the Shkumbin river, where tribal social organization and the distinctive Gheg dialect once set off the region's inhabitants from the lowlanders to the south.

Today, Durham is a figure sadly overshadowed by more widely known travellers and correspondents. Only one of her works is still in print and, even then, not easily available. Her papers and photographs are divided between the Museum of Mankind and the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. Her rich collections of Balkan jewellery and textiles are kept at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Bankfield Museum in Halifax, West Yorkshire, where a permanent exhibition on her life and work was installed in 1996. Two essays in the outstanding collection Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Balkan women travellers, now out in a revised edition edited by John B. Allcock and Antonia Young, provide introductions to Durham's complex personality and career. But unlike Freya Stark and other women adventurers in the Near East, she has not yet found her biographer.

The vehemence of Durham's well-placed detractors is remarkable. Even today, the cutting tone of their denunciations still shocks. In part, it was a reaction to Durham's own confrontational personality. Yet there is more to the Durham question than her personal relationship with other British intellectuals. The way she was perceived by her contemporaries - and especially her stormy exchanges with Seton-Watson - reveals something about how turmoil in the Balkans can infect the personal lives of those who interpret it and, more broadly, about Western intellectuals and their position as willing proxies for competing interests abroad.

Mary Edith Durham was born in 1863 in Hanover Square, London. Her father, Arthur Edward Durham, was a distinguished surgeon who sired a large Victorian family of eight children, all of whom went on to excel in respectable professions. Edith manifested artistic ambitions and, after being educated privately in London, attended the Royal Academy of Arts. She became an accomplished illustrator and watercolourist, exhibiting widely and contributing detailed drawings to the amphibia and reptiles volume of the Cambridge Natural History.

As the eldest child - and still unmarried in her thirties - Edith took on the task of caring for her ailing mother after her father's death. Filial responsibility turned out to be the unlikely impetus for her Balkan entanglements. At thirty-seven, Durham sailed from Trieste down the Dalmatian coast to Cattaro and trekked overland to Çetinje, the capital of the exotic principality of Montenegro. The trip was intended as a palliative, recommended by her doctor after years caring for her mother, but on this journey, she found her vocation.

Over the next twenty years, she travelled frequently in the south Balkans. working in various relief organizations, capturing scenes of village life in water-colour, and collecting folklore and folk art. She also began to write frequently, and during the Balkan wars and the First World War, became a fervent promoter of the Albanian national cause in periodicals in Britain, Germany and the United Slates. Over the next two decades, she wrote seven books on Balkan affairs, beginning with Through the Lands of the Serb (1904), a beautifully evocative if wide-eyed account of her first several trips to Montenegro and Serbia, through to Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs of the Balkans (1928), a useful compendium of now extinct folk beliefs and rituals. She also became a frequent contributor to the journal Man, and her dispatches and learned articles on Balkan folklore earned her a place as Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Durham called the Balkans "the land of the living past". For her, the region was not an alien, Oriental domain but rather a kind of mirror in which Western visitors might see themselves at a much earlier stage of development. As she wrote in High Albania, "For folk in such lands time has almost stood still. The wanderer from the West stands awestruck amongst them, filled with vague memories of the cradle of his race, saying, "This did I do some thousands of years ago; thus did I lie in wait for mine enemy; so thought I and so acted I in the beginning of Time.'" As for previous generations who journeyed south and east, the Balkans were for Durham a kind of proto-Europe, glimpse into the heroic age of Homer.

There is a professional hazard to studying other countries and peoples. No one who travels to faraway lands, managing to learn the language and something of the local culture, can be completely immune to the romantic thrill of being seen by the natives as their intercessor and interpreter to the outside world. Such was Durham's relationship to the Albanians. She came to see their plight - a nation whose territorial aspirations went largely unheeded after the First World War - as unique among the nested grievances in the Balkans. She had been well received in the Albanian uplands, and although it was unusual for a woman to travel to the remoter mountain districts, the notion of a lone female wanderer actually fitted with Albanian custom: the tradition of Albanian "Sworn Virgins"* - women who assumed the responsibilities of manhood and wore men's clothes and held a protected status in tribal society - meant that Durham travelled unmolested.
But her energetic promotion of the Albanians did not earn her many admirers in Britain. As Rebecca West wrote cattily in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Durham was a member of that class of Balkan travellers who come back "with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer".

Some of her stormiest exchanges took place with R. W. Seton-Watson, professor, editor, government adviser, and himself a kind of spokesman for Central Europe's national minorities. The Durham/Seton-Watson correspondence (housed in the Seton-Walson papers at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London) is important not merely for the light it sheds on two of the most important writers on Balkan affairs of the last century, but also for the fact that the exchanges reveal something deeper about the nature of intellectuals and the vicarious grievances they make their own.

During the First World War, Seton-Watson established the journal The New Europe to champion the emancipation of Europe's subject nationalities, especially those erupting from the Habsburg empire. The journal called for "la victoire integrale", a victory that would recognize national rights and thus secure a permanent peace for the Continent. Collaborators included, besides Seton-Watson as editor, Tomas Masaryk, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, and many other important writers on international affairs, including Durham.

In March 1920, Durham wrote to Seton-Watson complaining about what she saw as a pro-Serb bias in The New Europe and accusing the editors of wilfully ignoring the Albanians of Montenegro and Kosova:
"I have recent information that ever since the armistice the Serbs have burnt and pillaged Albanian villages, Catholic as well as Moslem. But New Europe, I know, would deny any such charge and imply the informant was a liar. If the truth is thus concealed, what wonder that things go wrong?"
Durham had earlier written a piece on Albanian Bektashi Sufism which, when printed, was accompanied by a note indicating that the editorial board did not necessarily agree with the author's points, including her opposition to the incorporation of Kosovo in the new South Slav kingdom. Seton-Watson apologized in a return note, mentioning that it was not the board's intent to insult Durham personally, but merely to dissociate the editors from the personal views expressed in her article.
Durham quickly wrote back. It was not an issue of personal insult, she said, but rather a superb illustration of the incredible arrogance of Western policy-makers in the Balkans. By effectively partitioning the Albanian lands between an independent Albania and the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes - eventually to become Yugoslavia - the European powers were creating the conditions for "a second Armenia". The Albanians, with no artillery and no planes, would be at the mercy of the Serbian army, "and the guilt will rest on the Peace Conference". The real tragedy, she continued, was the inability of those making policy to comprehend the depth of feeling and intricacies of everyday life in the Balkans. Their attempts to apply European standards of decency to a land rocked by war and poverty were doomed. Even when peace agreements were signed, there was no guarantee that petty officials would not continue to treat minorities as if they were, by virtue of their blood or religion, still enemies of the State:

"These men who have never lived months in the Balkans draw up elaborate clauses about religious rights and minorities which cannot possibly work .... Even though certain of the intelligentsia in all the countries have excellent intentions they are quite powerless to restrain small officials and gendarmes up country."

Durham argued that the solution was quite simply to draw the boundary lines so as to include as few people as possible under foreign rule. Otherwise, the threat of violence spreading across newly drawn frontiers was extremely high, as "half desperate people with little to lose will be ready to rush into a struggle on the off chance of getting something". Violence could sometimes turn out to be the most rational response to local oppression and the ill-conceived plans of foreign peacemakers, not simply a chaotic bloodletting.

Relations between Durham and Seton-Watson were strained already at the time of the Peace Conference, which reaffirmed the existence of an Albanian state but left much of the Albanian nation outside its borders. Over the years, the source of their disagreements evolved from matters of policy to more personal disputes over who was more qualified to comment on Balkan affairs, Durham viewed Seton-Watson as a pointy-headed parvenu. He had come to the Balkans from the north, through his interest in Slovenes and Croats in Austria-Hungary, and therefore had little to say about the very different races to the south. "You I take it made the acquaintance first of the pick of the Austrian Slavs who owed their culture to generations of Austrian civilisation", she wrote to him in December 1924, "and you did not grasp the danger of subjecting them to the Serb savage, whom you did not know."

Durham became even more anti-Serb as time passed. She was convinced that the Kingdom of Serbs. Croats and Slovenes was no more than a mask for Greater Serbia. The new South Slav kingdom was headed by the former Serbian royal house and guided largely by pre-war Serbian politicians. "Pashitsch & Co.'', she wrote to Seton-Watson in March 1925, referring to the Yugoslav prime minister, Nikola Pašic', "have not created a Jugoslavia but have carried out their original aim of making Great Serbia .... Far from being liberated the bulk of people live under a far harsher rule than before." Villages had been razed and atrocities committed, a record of offences that might well push the minorities in Yugoslavia into the arms of Bolshevik Russia. Her dislike of Serbian politics and politicians, though, was born more of disaffection than visceral disdain.
"For many years I supported more or less the idea [of a Greater Serbian state]. It was when I learnt the Serb from the inside and saw what a retrograde effect on Europe in general the Great Serb scheme might have that I gave it up and finally opposed it."

*****
Amongst Albanians she found view of life that was emotionally liberating and entirely different from that of her stifling London household. While she found her Albanian friends' characteristic humour and resilience an inspiration, she also observed their struggle for international recognition with increasing concern. She used every available opportunity to communicate her fine appreciation of Albanian culture to all those other Westerners (English and otherwise) who "didn't know anything!"
After the publication of her second book "The Burden of the Balkans" (1905) Edith Durham quickly establshed herself as an authority on Albanian matters. Having successfully accomplished several extended journeys across dangerous terrain, in defiance of restrictions imposed by the Ottoman authorities, and risking kidnap by brigands, she had earned a reputation as one "who could look death in the eyes". The country (including the spectacularly Albanian beautiful landscapes which remain just as remarkable today) and the dignity of its people had captivated her as a tourist and artist, her reactions were summarised by her rapturous comment "Here is Colour, Life and Art!" Through her growing involvement with the land and its people her knowledge and perception of those things which she came to regard as uniquely "Albanian" evolved, and thus her campaiging for Albania became more focused. She had become acutely aware that its destiny as a nation was an issue that had to be resolved.

While the 500 year old Ottoman regime was gradually tottering towards its grave, Albania had become a "debateable land" encircled by the predatory Great Powers (which included Britain). Edith's initial quest had been for exotic adventure (described in her book "Through the Lands of the Serb" 1904).

But during her first extended journey from the South to the North of Albania in 1904 she became impressed by the fact that "what Albania really wants is independence, recognised by Europe....People of all classes throughout the land hastened to explain their hopes and fears for their fatherland, and to pray for English recognition of its existence... People hailed me as a saviour ...I was quite unprepared for this and it appalled me". Around this time Edith Durham discovered a legitimate "voice" for herself through a passionate (but realistic) identification with Albania's struggle for self-determination.

Eventually in 1908 she was lured towards the "Malesia e Madhe", the North Albanian mountains. By then she had already transformed herself into an ethnographer and was intent on making a serious study of the Albanian mountain tribes, described in her book "High Albania" (1909). Accompanied by her loyal Albanian guide Marko Shantoya, together they scaled perilous mountain peaks and passes, travelling from one village to the next, where they received magnificent hospitality. In return Edith would amuse the 'highlanders' with her tales of an English life quite foreign to them, and sketch their houses, costumes and artefacts. She noted, sketched, and photographed nearly every aspect of life in the mountain villages, thereby amassing a rich archive of Albanian folk custom and tradition. In spite of her strenuous denials many believed she was "the sister of the King of England".

She had made the North Albanian town of Shkodër (Shkodra, Scutari) her base by the time the Balkan Wars broke out in 1912-13 (chronicled in her book "The Struggle for Scutari" 1914). From here she raised funds from abroad to distribute famine relief to thousands of desperate mountain tribespeople who had been burnt-out by the retreating Turkish army. The legend of Kraltise Durami was born. Her unique experience of the Highland people and their culture enabled her to become the first woman war-correspondent for three leading British newpapers; her inside knowledge made her the envy of the other journalists who flocked to the war zone, since they had to seek her advice.
After living in Albania for long periods of time she was forced to return to London by the outbreak of the First World War. In 1918 she became secretary of the Anglo-Albanian Society founded by Aubrey Herbert in London and with him she vigorously campaigned on behaf of Albania's rights. It was largely due to her unswerving committment that Albania became recognised by the League of Nations in 1920. When she was invited to visit Albania with a delegation in 1921, she was so overwhelmed by the street processions and banquets held in her honour that she fled in despair, realising that her failing health would not allow her to live up to the glorious accolades that were showered upon her. But in London, right up until her death she vociferously supported Albania's interests.
She continued her campaign throughout the 1930s and befriended many Albanians driven into exile in London. On "Black Friday" (Good Friday 1939) after hearing that Mussolini's forces had invaded Albania, the outraged 76 year old Edith Durham paraded the London streets wearing a placard with the slogan "Hands off Albania!" She died in November 1944, two weeks before Enver Hoxha took power. An obituary containing an emotional tribute written by a leading Albanian politician appeared in the Daily Telegraph:-

"Open-minded and generous as she was, she speedily understood Albania's soul ... Fearlessly and without compromise she told the world and its rulers what she had learned... Albanians have never forgotten, and never will forget this Englishwoman. In the Albanian mountains she knew so well, the news of her death will echo from peak to peak, the news of the death of one who was loved there".

 
With thanks to

www.albania.co.uk/culture/edith.html
whence this text has been adapted.

 
* see WOMEN WHO BECOME MEN: Albanian Sworn Virgins, by Antonia Young. Oxford and New York, Berg, 2000.

* The Bektashi were a liberal and unorthodox Islamic sect who incorporated some aspects of Christianity into their doctrine, and who were expelled from Istanbul by Mustafa Kemal 'Atatürk'. They found sanctuary in the multi-faith tolerance of Albania. A few adherents carry on their remarkable tradition.