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Bismarck, with his brutal disregard of facts which did not suit him, asserted at the Berlin Congress in 1878, "There is no Albanian nationality." The Albanian League, even while he was speaking, proved that he was wrong; and now, more than thirty-four years later, when the work which the Congress of necessity left unfinished has to be taken another step towards its logical end, the Albanian nation provides one of the most serious of the questions to be solved by the Court of the Great Peoples. Fortunately for Europe, the agreement of the Powers is so overwhelming in its unanimity that Servia, the one Balkan State which ventured to proceed on the lines of Prince Bismarck's mistaken dictum, has been forced to withdraw her pretensions. There is now no questioning the decision that Albania is to be autonomous; the further questions: 'What is to be the status of the prince or ruler?', 'What are to be the exact boundaries of the newcomer into the European circle?' and 'Whether the new State is to be shadowed by the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan?' are mere matters of detail which can be settled amicably by the Powers. The central and important fact is that Albanian nationality has been recognised by the European conscience, and that civilisation has been spared a twentieth-century Poland. Between the Albanian and the Slav there stand centuries of hatred and blood feud. The Albanian regards the Slav as an intruder and a robber; the Slav looks on the Albanian as an inconvenient person who, though occasionally beaten, has always refused to be conquered; and, having the inestimable advantage of being more skilled in literature, he has consistently represented the voiceless Albanian as a brigand and a plunderer of Slav villages. As a matter of history, the boot is on the other foot. Setting aside the fact that both Albanian and Slav can be, and are, brigands on occasion, the Albanian and his kindred had been for centuries quarrelling comfortably among themselves when the Slav hordes poured across the Danube, and drove the old inhabitants by sheer weight of numbers from the plains to the uplands, and from the uplands to the mountains. Among the inaccessible crags on the western side of the Balkan Peninsula, facing the Adriatic Sea, the remnants of the old autochthonous peoples of Illyria, Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace, have for centuries held their own against the recurring floods of Kelts, Goths, Serbs, Bulgars, and Turks. Like the Montenegrins who hold the northern part of their mountains, the Albanians have been defeated, and have seen their villages burned and their families massacred, but they have never been finally conquered. The only difference is that while the Albanians had been defending their fastnesses for many generations before the Slavs of Montenegro came south of the Danube, they have never had the good fortune, or it may be the intelligence, to acquire a really powerful literary advertiser. Even Lord Byron passed them over in favour of the Greeks, though he credited the 'wild Albanian kirtled to his knee' with never having shown an enemy his back or broken his faith to a guest. It is unlikely that the liberation of Greece would have been obtained had it not been for the Albanian warriors who supplied the best fighting material for the insurrection. Admiral Miaoulis, the Botzaris, the Boulgaris, and many other heroes of the beginning of the last century, were Albanians, or of Albanian extraction, but the modern Greek lives on the literary achievements of the ancient Hellenes, while the strong men of Albania, like their ancestors who lived before Agamemnon, are relegated to obscurity because they have no one to focus the gaze of Europe upon them. Byron, Finlay, and a hundred others, did their best to make Europe believe that the modern Greek is the true descendant of the ancient Hellene, but none of them ever gave the Albanian the credit due to him. Then the fashion changed; the Slav came to the front, and Mr. Gladstone, Lord Tennyson with his Montenegrin sonnet, Miss Irby of Serajevo, and a host of writers, came forward to extol the Serb and the less sympathetic but still Slavised Bulgar, with the result that the average man believes that the Slavs were the original owners of the Balkan Peninsula, and that the Turks took it from them at the battle of Kossovo in 1389. The Albanian proud and silent on his crags, without even a disastrous battle to serve as a peg for advertisement, has through the centuries asked nothing of Europe, and has been given it in ample measure. Perhaps the Greeks did not live up to the glory that was expected of them, and so slipped into the background, but it is certain that the Slavs came to the front in the mid-Victorian days, and by 1880 were the pampered children of hysterical Europe. The Slavised Bulgar is a dour, hard-working man, self-centred and unpolished, and it was a little difficult to keep up the enthusiasm on his behalf to fever heat. But the Serb is outwardly a pleasant and picturesque creature, with a keen sense of dramatic values. Constantine, the last of the Byzantine Emperors, fell even more dramatically at Constantinople than did Lazar, the last Serbian Czar, at Kossovo-Polje, but the national mourning for the black day of Kossovo seems to have struck the imagination of Europe, while the historically far more important death of Constantine Palæologus inside the gate of St. Romanus on May 29th, 1453, has left it untouched. The Serb is sympathetic in the passive sense of the word; he attracts people with his easy philosophy and his careless way of treating and looking at life. The modern Bulgar does not attract. He inspires respect, perhaps, but not affection. In racial characteristics the Serbs are akin to the Western Irish and the Bulgarians to the Lowland Scotch; and the more plausible man naturally makes the more favourable impression on the passing observer. So it is that writers on the Balkans often unwittingly inspire their untravelled readers with the notion that the Serbs, now represented by the Servians and Montenegrins, were the original owners of the Balkans, but shared the eastern part with the Bulgars, while the Turks were intruders who unjustly seized the country and are now justly surrendering it to the rightful possessors. In reality, the Albanians, or Shkypetars, as they are properly called, represent the original owners of the peninsula, for the Serbs did not cross the Danube until about 550 A.D., nor the Bulgars till 679 A.D., when the Shkypetars had enjoyed over eleven hundred years' possession of the land, enlivened by petty tribal fights, battles with or under the Macedonian kings, and struggles with Rome. In every town and district which the Slavs can claim by right of conquest under some nebulous and transitory Empire, the Albanians can oppose the title of original ownership of the soil from ages when neither history nor the Slavs were known in the Balkans. The Romans, unlike most of the invaders who came after them, were administrators, and a province was usually the better for their rule. The Thrako-Illyrian tribes, now represented by the Shkypetars or Albanians, were, however, not seriously disturbed by the Roman governors and colonists, or, rather, they were neglected and allowed to lapse into a state of lethargy from the turbulent sort of civilisation to which their own kings had raised them. The Romans policed, but did not open up the country. But when the Slavs and the Bulgars swept over the land like a swarm of locusts, the original inhabitants were either exterminated or fled to the mountains, where they led a fighting existence against what was termed authority, but which, to their minds, was the tyranny of the supplanter and usurper. The five hundred years' struggle of Montenegro against the Turks has often been told in enthusiastic language. The more than a thousand years' struggle of the Shkypetars against the Slav and the Turk has always been passed over as an incident of no importance. The very name "Albanian" lends itself to prejudice. To the Western European it recalls the travellers' tales of Albanian brigands, and the stories about the Sultan Abdul Hamid's guards. The name sounds, and is, modern; whereas Serb, as admirers of the modern Servians very wisely write the word, has an ancient flavour. The tribes that are now known as Albanian do not recognise themselves by that name. They are Shkypetars, the Sons of the Mountain Eagle, and their country is Shkyperi, or Shkypeni, the Land of the Mountain Eagle. They have a legend that Pyrrhus, when told by his troops that his movements in war were as rapid as the swoop of an eagle, replied that it was true, because his soldiers were Sons of the Eagle and their lances were the pinions upon which he flew. If this story has any foundation in fact, it goes to show that the name Shkypetar was known to, or adopted by, the people and their king about 300 B.C., and one can only marvel at the modesty which dates the name no further back. At any rate, Pyrrhus, the greatest soldier of his age, was a Shkypetar, or Albanian, and beside him the Czar Dushan is a modern and an interloper.