The Balkans in Travel

Writing
The Balkans in Travel
Writing
Edited by

Marija Krivokapić
The Balkans in Travel Writing

Edited by Marija Krivokapić

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by Marija Krivokapić and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7637-2

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7637-7
 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Marija Krivokapić

Part One: The Balkans in Travel Writing until the 1990s

Earliest Travel Writings about Southeast Serbia and their Characteristics ... 15
Dragana Mašović

Adolfo Rossi on Montenegro .................................................................... 29

Olivera Popović

Macedonian Women through the Prism of the British Travel Writers ...... 39
Tatjana Panova-Ignjatović

Onomasticon in the Mountain Travelogues Collected in Montenegrin

Mountains—Travelogues and Records ..................................................... 55
Draško Došljak

Montenegro on Old Maps .......................................................................... 67

Goran Barović

Part Two: Travel Writing on the Balkans after the 1990s

Distortion and Reality in Travel Writing on the Balkans .......................... 79

Antonia Young

Reconstructing Empire or Striking Against it? Contemporary

Travelogues of the Balkans ....................................................................... 97
Maja Muhić

Personality Coloured Renderings ............................................................ 119

Bojka Đukanović

The Ex-Yu as the Other in Anglo-American Travel Writings ................. 127

Ljiljana Mijanović and Saša Simović

 
vi Table of Contents

Depicting the Region of Sandžak ............................................................ 137

Amela Lukač Zoranić and Jahja Fehratović

Mid-1990s Albania in the Memoirs of a Former Peace Corps

Volunteer ................................................................................................. 155
Armela Panajoti

Translating besa: Encounters with Complex Cultural Phenomena ......... 171

Tom Phillips

Dervla Murphy’s Through the Embers of Chaos..................................... 185

Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević and Marija Krivokapić

Tony White’s Another Fool in the Balkans: In the Footsteps

of Rebecca West ....................................................................................... 201
Marija Krivokapić

Part Three: Travel Writing Produced by Balkan Authors

since the 20th Century

“A Balkan Cleaning Up”: John Sofianopoulos’ Balkan Travels

during 1920s and His Social Insights ...................................................... 225
Michael Sarras

Literary Form as an Expression of Private Life: A Travelogue

by Radonja Vešović ................................................................................. 237
Sofija Kalezić-Đuričković

The Travelogue as a Literary Genre in Contemporary Macedonian

Literature ................................................................................................. 247
Jovanka Denkova

Josip Novakovich’s Reminiscences from the Balkans ............................ 263

Nina Sirković and Aleksandra V. Jovanović

Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 273

Index ........................................................................................................ 281

 

 
 INTRODUCTION

MARIJA KRIVOKAPIĆ

This book revisits images of the Balkans in the travel writing of the
twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century from the
perspective of recent developments in travel writing critical theory and in
the humanities in general. The twentieth was a turbulent century for the
region. It witnessed two world wars and several civil and regional wars,
the creation and destruction of countries, emergence of new political
parties, rebellions and consensuses, but also peaceful decades productive
in all the spheres of human effort. All these moments have been recorded
in travel writing. We believe that pointing out how these changes of the
regional historical, political, social, and cultural contours are reflected in
travel writing from different periods, i.e. in the eyes of the foreign
travellers, would be beneficial for the development of travel writing
studies, as well as for the broader field of humanities and social sciences.
Although a lot of travel writing about the Balkans has been produced
after the “opening” of Eastern Europe, the collapse of the communist
system, the breakdown of Yugoslavia, and the beginning of the civil wars
in the 1990s, it has not been paid enough academic attention. This also
applies to the well-known authors, such as Paul Theroux, Robert D.
Kaplan, and Bill Bryson who travelled through the region in the 1990s and
wrote about the dramatic happenings trying to understand their logic.
Another reason for compiling this study, which makes it an even more
valuable contribution to the development of travel writing studies, is a
close analysis of the travelogues created by less known authors, such as
Elizabeth Gowing, Robert Nagle, or Emma Fick, who vividly recorded
certain moments in the lives of our peoples and the general social
dynamics.
Apart from this, the second decade of the twenty-first century, which is
facing a collapse of theory in general and, therefore, no longer provides a
comfortable trust in the critical tools of the past, is high time to re-address
this sensitive subject. It is especially so because the prevailing twentieth-
century criticism on similar matters was primarily made from the
perspective of postcolonial theory. When it comes to the region, the
2 Introduction

studies have been heavily drawn from Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes
(1992), Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997), and Vesna
Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of Imagination
(1998). As the postcolonial does not really apply to the subject of the
Balkans, which is also one of Todorova’s main arguments, we may still be
using some of its approaches and methods, such as its focus on the culture-
bound perspective of the traveller, for example. However, globalisation
and cultural hybridity have strongly affected the authenticities on which
the travel writing in the previous periods relied, so that a different kind of
traveller, one more cosmopolitan, can be met on the roads worldwide. The
same integrations have also caused the appearance of travel that leaves the
established routes and seeks the less known, unbeaten tracks of the world’s
geography. The Balkans still provides ample material for this kind of
traveller. Although criticism likes to ironize tendencies to “discover” the
hidden and the authentic, we find these recordings equally worthy of our
efforts to make the mosaic of how the Balkans has appeared to foreigners.
We have approached the subject through three major parts in the book.
The first part, analyzing the complex images of the Balkans developed,
mostly, in the course of the 20th century (but also with the examples from
previous eras), provides the basis for the development of the commentaries
that follow in the second part and also gives a chronological frame to the
book. The second part deals with the travel writing about the Balkans
produced since the 1990s. This is an important corpus that offers as
divergent and contradictory views on the region as was our recent past. It
ranges from moral and political criticism to a delight in the rich heritage
and the still “undiscovered” Balkan paths. Its narrative style also
comprises striking variations from the objective and well-researched
approaches to quick impressionist sketches. The largest part of this
material is authored by travellers from the West. Therefore, it provides a
vital basis for the research into the necessity and the variety of
possibilities, or obstacles, that are on the way of the region’s accession,
when its unique heritage will have to be reconciled with the European one.
Moreover, because travel writing is never only an account of travel, but
also a story about the travelling subject, it is, therefore, as much about the
culture that produced it as it is about the visited region. Finally, in the third
part, we provide a reverse look and observe Balkan travellers’ writing
abroad and about foreign regions. We conclude by analyzing insights and
impressions of a Balkan author upon his return home from the West.
The first part of the book opens with a paper by Serbian scholar
Dragana Mašović, from the University of Niš, who focuses on the
geographical, political, social and cultural setting of Niš and south Serbia.
 Marija Krivokapić 3

In her paper “Earliest Media Reports: Travel Writings and Other Accounts
of Southeast Serbia from the 4th Century onwards,” Mašović assumes that
contemporary Southeast Serbia is still a challenge for travellers and travel
writers in view of its great variety of landscapes and pluri-cultural and
multi-lingual population. The region of Niš, in particular, used to play a
prominent role in the history of the Balkans because of its geostrategic
location as crossroads on the former “imperial highway“ leading from
Venice via Dubrovnik and the region of Sandžak to Sofia and
Constantinople. This is how it happened that the main reporters travelling
this way were the earliest “media” men: envoys, agents, and spies—least
of all tourists or poets. Yet, it is the latter ones who are most often
mentioned because their reports were of a much wider scope and more
favourable to the country they described. The reason for this lies in their
focus on ethnography, i.e. on the people and their customs and mores
rather than facts, as well as in threats and dangers that the imperial agents
might have faced or had to report on for the sake of trade enterprises,
political interests or military campaigns. This paper deals with the travel
discourse of authors both anonymous and well known. Some of these
“media reports” are very short indeed, yet today they are understood as
reflective of these unknown and not sufficiently explored humans of the
past: peasants living in Southeast Serbia in the days when no one stopped
long enough to meet and get to know them, or assign to them any
important role in the making of their own history on the troublesome
Balkans or, for that matter, in the travel writing itself.
Olivera Popović, from the University of Montenegro, approaches the
image of Montenegro in the travel writing produced by Italians in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. This is a period when Montenegrin
streets saw many an Italian depicting Montenegrin cultural, political, and
economic developments. Observing the alterity as a fundamental category
of social experience, but also as a fundamental category for social analysis
(cf. Todorova), Popović’s paper tries to pin down the referent concepts
which the Italian travellers used to describe and value Montenegrin
cultural space.
Tatjana Panova-Ignjatović, from the “Ss. Cyril and Methodius”
University in Skopje, Macedonia, devotes her research to “Macedonian
Women Through the Prism of British Travel Writers.” This paper offers a
comparative cultural analysis on the travel writings by British authors,
such as G. F. Abbott (The Tale of a Tour in Macedonia, London 1903),
Henry Noel Brailsford (Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future, London
1906), Mary Edith Durham (The Burden of the Balkans, 1905) and Lucy
Mary Jane Garnett (Balkan Home Life, London 1917), focusing on the
4 Introduction

position of Macedonian women and providing different interpretations

according to their personal view towards certain norms of conduct.
Actually, they were direct witnesses to the events that took place in
Macedonia in the period before and after the Ilinden uprising and in the
course of the First World War, which was an exceptionally critical period
for the future of the Macedonian people. Their observations regarding
Macedonian women reflect the specifics and the values of Macedonian
cultural identity and tradition. Moreover, they were deeply moved by the
subordinate position and the primitive lifestyle they witnessed and the
stance that prevails in their works was, in fact, an outcry against the
subjugation of the Macedonian people.
Draško Došljak, from the University of Montenegro, provides an
analysis of the onomasticon in the mountain travelogues collected in the
book Montenegrin Mountains—Travelogues and Records (Crnogorske
planine—putopisi i zapisi), covering the period from the late nineteenth to
the late twentieth century. The travel writers are both Slavs and foreigners,
such as Zuvdija Hodžić, Miroslav Đurović, Nikola Vučinić, Miloš Bojanović,
Jovan Laušević, Branislav Cerović, Antonio Baldacci, Pavel Apolonovic
Rovinski, Kurt Hassert, Željko Poljak, Ante Sharin, Fran Tuchan, and
others. They travelled the mountains Lovćen, Orjen, Rumija, Durmitor,
Bjelasica, Komovi, Prokletije, and Hajla, and offered rich onomastic
material. They recorded a variety of toponyms and anthroponyms, whose
meanings are sometimes explained through the legends the travellers heard
on their trips. This work discusses these examples after their motivational,
semantic, and morphological characteristics.
Goran Barović, from the University of Montenegro, approaches the
image of Montenegro under foreign lenses from the perspective of a
cartographer, observing map-making as another way of writing about the
place. He sees cartography as a measure of cultural and spiritual life and
discusses those maps of Montenegro made by foreigners that obviously
project the power politics. The intention of the old mapmakers is mostly
reflected through the neutralization of geographical orientation markers
and invalidation of the status of the Montenegrin state. Although there are
numerous cartographic resources tracing Montenegrin existence long
before its international recognition as a nation-state, Montenegro never
had its own school of cartography, i.e. until it became a part of Yugoslavia
at the end of the First World War. It was only foreign geographers who
mapped the country in its relation with European powers, often presenting
it as a border zone of those powers. Some of the maps discussed in the
paper were based on the sketches or memories of travellers or accidental
visitors.
 Marija Krivokapić 5

The second part of the book opens with the paper by Antonia Young,
from the University of Bradford, Yorkshire, UK, and Colgate University,
Hamilton, NY, USA, titled “Distortion and Reality in Travel Writing on
the Balkans.” In her paper Young claims that it might be reasonable to
expect a travel writer to focus on their particular fields of interest, and also
to gain and keep the readers’ attention through a certain amount of
embellishment and exaggeration. However, she asks, with those
reservations in mind, how much can a reader still believe? In any writing
about the Balkans, Young argues, the first step is to be clear what region
the author means by the term, as there is never consensus concerning the
exact boundaries of the geographical area known as The Balkans. Nor
have boundaries or content of the countries within that region remained
constant. These are societies deeply affected by the extremes of the
geography and overlaid by ever changing, strong ethnic, political, and
religious influences. Young is following the common notion that there
have been three phases in the evolution in Balkan travel writing. The first,
reflecting colonial attitudes, with a feeling of superiority of the writer’s
social background, led to a reactive acceleration of nationalism. In the
second phase, travel writers became optimistic in their observations of
these societies with a tendency to exoticize cultural aspects of Balkan
social life disproportionately. In the third phase, with which we are
especially concerned here, starting with the period of the Cold War, by the
l960s, this romanticization faded with the increase in volume of both
travellers and travel writing. These writers reflected and demonstrated a
return to feelings of superiority, and contempt for the perceived failure of
Communism, and the return of conflictive relationships across the region.
Maja Muhić, from South East European University, Macedonia,
contributes with a paper “Reconstructing Empire or Striking Against it?
Contemporary Travelogues of the Balkans” as another attempt to look at
contemporary travel writing through a double perspective. She also
perceives different tendencies in the travelogues she deals with. While in
the past writing, the most obvious was the travelogues’ dominant colonial
legacy, the contemporary travelogues are trying to dismantle that legacy
and bring in a fresh air of cosmopolitanism, through a perspective that
does not resemble the notorious “epistemological dictator” approach.
Several contemporary travelogues are scrutinized in this paper, including
the works of Chris Deliso. Unlike certain very ideological travel writings
of the Balkans produced in the past two decades (R. D. Kaplan’s Balkan
Ghosts, for instance), Deliso’s travelogues of Macedonia bring in a new
tension between the colonial legacy of travel writing and the attempt to
engage with local stories and histories. To a certain extent then, his work
6 Introduction

aims to speak on behalf of locals about their contemporary perceptions of

identity, history and common culture in a region (and a country)
historically known for fractiousness, conflict, and identity denial from
neighbouring countries. This however, does not mean that his travel
writing does not anchor itself in certain politically laden agendas. Some of
the dilemmas and questions that D. Lisle (2006) comes across regarding
contemporary travel writing, such as the competence of travel writing to
tell us anything relevant about contemporary global life or how it comes to
terms with its colonial past, are shared and looked at in this paper.
Similarly to Lisle’s attempt to argue that contemporary travel writing is
torn between its colonial and cosmopolitan visions while trying to grasp or
reflect on global politics, this paper tries to see if samples of contemporary
travel writing about the Balkans might deliver this genre from its sinful
legacy. It also aims to see if some pieces of contemporary travel writing
about the Balkans might serve as a powerful tool to counter the notion of
the Balkans as “marginal” and in some sense irrelevant, rendering it
instead, as Fleming (2001) points out, as “liminal” and thus, in a sense,
central.
“Personality Coloured Renderings,” by Bojka Đukanović from the
University of Montenegro, discusses the controversial approaches to the
region from examples of Joyce Cary’s sojourn in Montenegro and
Christopher Hope’s stay in Belgrade. Đukanović begins from the fact that
Cary originally took part in the 1912 Balkan Wars for two reasons: one is
that he was yearning to be with his beloved and the other was his anxiety
that the rest of the twentieth century may not provide more opportunities
for such a noble engagement as fighting for a cause. This point is
especially interesting when observed against the larger background of
Montenegro being for centuries almost absolutely isolated from the rest of
Europe. Christopher Hope, on the other hand, came to Yugoslavia to
witness the atmosphere on the eve of its complete disappearance as a
political entity at the end of the twentieth century. Both of the novelists
stayed in the Balkans during the period of struggles and hard times, but the
different periods, different motives of their stay, and different personal
dispositions resulted in the narratives of contrasting tones.
In their paper “The Ex-Yu as the Other in Some Anglo-American
Travel Writings,” Saša Simović and Ljiljana Mijanović, from the
University of Montenegro, assume a multidisciplinary perspective and use
a number of examples to examine how the region was “constructed” in the
Western imagination as uncivilized so much that its name turned into an
adjective and a verb. Since the 1990s, the prevailing image is that of the
region irrevocably standing between the West and the East. While
 Marija Krivokapić 7

Todorova insisted on a distinction between the Balkanist and the Orientalist

discourse, and Goldsworthy explored the Balkans as the potential alliance
between postcolonial, post-communist, and Eastern European influences,
the Balkans still cherished an otherness—such as in the form of socialist
architecture or deficient tourist services—that prompted prejudices. The
final part of the paper focuses on the East-West dichotomy that played
itself out in the opposition between Greek Orthodoxy and Catholicism and
on the examples of a traveller’s reaction to the varying architecture.
Amela Lukač Zoranić and Jahja Fehratović, from the International
University of Novi Pazar, Serbia, are concerned with the depictions of the
Sandžak region. Relying on Goldsworthy’s hypothesis in Inventing
Ruritania, they situate the Sandžak in “the heart of darkness,” the “dark
vilajet,” of the Balkans. Namely, since the end of the rule of the Ottoman
Empire, different military and rhetorical strategies were activated seeking
to reinforce the power of the West and to subjugate the region. These
strategies were intended to negate the region’s cultural landscape and its
infusion with meanings and practices of the West. Finally, this paper
emphasizes how the Sandžak region, as a cultural product of European/
Ottoman heritage, has always been in the clench between the East and the
West, as an exceedingly hidden Europe.
Armela Panajoti, from the University of Vlore, Albania, contributes
with “Mid-1990s Albania in the Memoirs of a Former Peace Corps
Volunteer.” Panajoti first describes the 1990s as difficult years for
Albania, a country that had just left behind a harsh political system, the
communist regime, often considered the toughest of all in the former
Communist countries. While the country and its people were trying to
smoothly get through what is known as the transition period, many
foreigners, probably driven by a sense of curiosity, came to work and live
in Albania. Peace Corps volunteers were among these. They usually came
to live and work in Albania for a couple of years and then would leave to
go back home. They also usually taught English in Albanian schools. This
paper was inspired by the memoirs of one of these, Robert Nagle, a former
Peace Corps volunteer and writer, who worked at the University of Vlora
between 1995 and 1997. He recorded his experiences in short stories
written during and after his stay in Albania. These stories, at times funny
and at others sad, touch upon several aspects of Albanian life. Their focus
is everyday life, that is, aspects of neighbouring life, the trash system, the
daily dilemmas of many intellectuals, university life; and the pyramid
schemes whose fall led the country to civil uprising and the evacuation of
all Americans soon after in 1997. The paper is an attempt not simply to
8 Introduction

analyse these stories in the light of their perspective on and representation

of Albania, but also to contrast all these from a 2014 perspective.
Tom Phillips, from Reading University, UK, is focused on interpreting
besa as an example of complex cultural phenomena. Namely, the Albanian
word besa is difficult to translate into English in a way which preserves
the unique combination of values and behaviours it signifies. The absence
of a single equivalent word for it, however, does not mean that this
complex cultural phenomenon cannot be described in terms which are
comprehensible to a non-Albanian speaker. Therefore, Phillips looks at
how English-language travel writers have approached the subject and
written about their encounters with besa and Albanian customary or kanun
law. In doing so, he explores why it might be that, in the last twenty years,
the subject appears to have exerted a fascination for travel writers such as
Dervla Murphy, Edmund Keeley and, in particular, Robert Carver.
Phillip’s overall contention is that, when encountering besa and kanun
law, the different strategies these writers adopt in their attempts to
interpret and represent these phenomena often result in partial, sometimes
contradictory, sometimes imposed interpretative and evaluative
descriptions—which, in themselves, can be traced to frequently repeated
assumptions about Balkan culture in general. Most commonly, writers tend
to treat besa and kanun law as if they are wholly separate phenomena—
usually in order to differentiate between the “good” tradition of hospitality
and the “bad” tradition of blood feud. In identifying such descriptions as
potentially problematic, however, Phillips also acknowledges that they are,
of necessity, partial or preliminary, and that they become problematic only
when presented as definitive and authoritative “truths” about Albanian or
Balkan culture. Connecting assertions of authoritativeness with the
conceptualisation of any culture as a relatively stable construct, he
concludes by suggesting that acknowledging that something has always-
already been lost in translation makes possible the representation of besa
as a fully complex phenomenon whose significance is not fixed, but open
to multiple, negotiated interpretations.
Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević and Marija Krivokapić, from the
University of Montenegro, are focused on Dervla Murphy’s Through the
Embers of Chaos. They explain how Murphy’s writing belongs to the
tradition that recognizes travel writing as an urgent political engagement,
both when it comes to gender and to global politics. In the extremity of her
endeavors to understand the political, social, and, most of all, human
destiny of the Balkans, Murphy bicycles through the region for months
and thus, in the first place, subverts the traditional idea that movement
predominately belongs to the powerful Western male. Avoiding this
 Marija Krivokapić 9

typical trope of progressive mechanistic civilization, she has an

opportunity to explore the unbeaten tracks, to stop and observe the
ordinary and, therefore, to provide unique aesthetic observations.
However, despite her original promise, i.e. that she wants to see with her
own eyes what has happened in the Balkans, Murphy cannot avoid the
intentionality of her gaze which is primarily anti-NATO. But also, despite
her biting criticism of militarism as the chief reason of contemporary
conflicts and of “humanitarian intervention” as “an exercise in hypocrisy,”
(Mcdonagh 2002) nowhere in the Balkans at the turn of the century does
she find hot water for baths or showers or good food to substantiate her
hard trips up the winding mountain roads. Especially when she comments
on the local people’s surprise to see a grandmother bicycling can we notice
the attitudes of the western feminist. The numerous sites of atrocities, the
dire roads, the malnourishment, and the recognizable eastern negligence,
all combined in the production of a controversial narrative, which, while
abounding with sympathies to human suffering, is also always on the edge
to veer away.
In her paper “Tony White’s Another Fool in the Balkans: In the
Footsteps of Rebecca West (2006),” Marija Krivokapić claims that few
books are so courageously acquiescent to the generic limitations of travel
writing as is Tony White’s book, and, therefore so aware of the
inescapable influence of a better known writer. Prepared to cross the
border by Rebecca West’s book, and also by a virtual walk from the UK to
Belgrade performed by an expatriate Serbian artist in his art gallery in the
East End of London, White travels by train from Zagreb to Belgrade in the
party of FAK-YU artist, an alternative writers collective (“Festival
alternativne književnosti—Yugoslavia,” “The Festival of Alternative
Literature—Yugoslavia”), to take part in a short story festival in Belgrade.
A long tunnel before the Zemun part of Belgrade darkens the train, diverts
his sight from the surrounding nature, allows him time to reflect, and
announces his entrance to another zone. But, he is acutely conscious of his
privilege to be thus formatted as a traveller through Yugoslavia and taken
care of by its literary vanguards, and thus he assumes a humble pose.
These artists’ uncompromising denunciation of the new Balkan politics
and nationalisms (which many equate with ex-Yugoslav nostalgia)
obviously impacts White as he too rejects the “universal” truths and the
Balkanist discourse, and, instead, points out to the regional potentials of
affluence in every sense. Yet he still calls himself “a fool” not only
because he hopes he could reach the yet indiscernible truth about the
region, or how it reflects contemporary Europe, but maybe more because
he still hopes his own writing can escape the theorizing urgency of
10 Introduction

international academia. Finally, he produces a book that is less an account

of travel than a meditation on the possibilities of travel, but mostly an
essay on the nature of art.
The third part of the book opens with “‘A Balkan Cleaning Up’: John
Sofianopoulos’ Balkan Travels during 1920s and His Social Insights.”
Michael Sarras, from the University of Ioannina, Greece, looks at the work
of John Sofianopoulos (1887-1951) who was an outstanding 20th-century
Greek intellectual, lawyer, and statesman. He travelled throughout the
Balkan Peninsula and, quite early after the October Revolution, to the
USSR. His impressions were published, as feuilleton, in the Athenian
liberal newspaper Eleftheron Vima. Later on, his articles related to his
Balkan travels were collected and published in a book entitled How I
viewed the Balkan Peninsula (1927). Sarras briefly analyzes
Sofianopoulos’ views and insights, formulated while travelling, on the
current crucial issues, like the interwar social-economic questions; he was
especially concerned about the social development of the peasantry and,
generally, about, as he called it, “the Balkan cleaning up.”
Sofija Kalezić-Đuričković, from the University of Donja Gorica in
Montenegro, talks about literary forms as expressions of private life in the
work of Radonja Vešović. In 1979 Vešović published a book of travel A
Sword Cutting Swords (Mač što mačeve siječe) that depicts his 1974 visit
to Vietnam. The paper reviews Vešović’s sojourn in this “strange” country
of tragic history, at the time when it was still suffering the wounds
inflicted by the American military. In the seventies of the previous
century, in line with the official political stand of the country, the author
found Vietnam as the embodiment of his own ideas on socialism and
liberty. More than thirty five years after the emergence of his text,
Kalezić-Đuričković concludes that some aspects of his work, ideological
in the first place, do not stand the test of time, especially when it comes to
the author’s anticipations about Yugoslavia’s future and prosperity.
However, keeping in mind that the book sprouts from the pen of an
acclaimed man of letters, the literary and poetic aspects of this book make
it an interesting testimony about a country whose fight the author
perceives as replicating globally, as an attempt at reinforcing the
proletarian idea that found its strongest voice in the October revolution,
the Spanish civil war, and the Yugoslav liberation war.
Jovanka Denkova, from “Goce Delčev” University in Macedonia, deals
with the travelogue as a literary genre in contemporary Macedonian
literature. Her research begins by comparing the numerous attempts to
define the genre made by Macedonian literary theoreticians, and presents
an overview of its topology and classifications along with their features.
 Marija Krivokapić 11

All these critically theoretical deductions are discussed through the works
of Slavko Janevski, Tome Momirovski, Slave Nikolovski-Katin, and
Trajan Petrovski. Denkova especially focuses on the travelogues by Tome
Momirovski, about his visit to Australia, and Trajan Petrovski’s
impressions from the United States of America.
The book closes with a co-authored paper by the Croatian scholar,
Nina Sirković, from the University of Split, and the Serbian scholar
Aleksandra V. Jovanović, from the University of Belgrade, titled “Josip
Novakovich’s Reminiscences from the Balkans.” In his travel essays,
writing about other countries, Novakovich also deals with his homeland
Croatia, recalling memories and emotions from the past when he used to
live there. The times have changed as well as the country, but history has
strongly intruded in the present. The authors observe three of
Novakovich’s essays and impressions about encounters with different
places in Croatia and new perceptions about them. “Vukovar” and “Two
Croatias” are essays dealing with the post-war period. In “Vukovar” the
author expresses personal moments visiting the city after the massacre and
asks himself if there are lessons to be learned from the atrocities. “Two
Croatias” is an essay about other people’s completely different perceptions
of a country which has gone through war and is now in recovery.
Travelling on a train from Zagreb to Sofia, which used to be called the
“Balkan Express,” Novakovich recalls events, scents and tastes from the
past, concluding that a whole era has passed, the trains in the Balkans are
almost dead and one cannot only blame the war. The author’s associations
and reflections inspired by the visit to his former homeland remind the
reader of the past times which are gone forever.

Being a multi-generic form, travel writing demands to be observed

from a multidisciplinary perspective. Therefore, our contributors are not
only academic specialists, practitioners, and professionals in the field of
travel writing, but they also come from broader fields of literature,
linguistics, history, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, political sciences
and international relations, and geography. This nomadic perspective on
the body of texts that observe the Balkans as a subject of travel proves our
thesis on the importance of the genre in the contemporary world. Opening
his Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (2013), Tim Youngs argues
that “[t]ravel writing […] is the most socially important of all literary
genres” and concludes the book saying that its “ethical importance […] is
12 Introduction

stronger than ever,”1 because “[i]t throws light on how we define ourselves
and how we identify others.” 2 This “we” becomes the most interesting
subject when it travels with an intentional mind, recollects and narrates the
experience with an intention, but especially when it reveals a pronounced
discomfort with the prevailing metonymy—“the Balkans.” Therefore, as it
has always done, travel writing may enforce mutual understanding of
peoples and cultures. More importantly, as we argue in this book, its
generic potentials prove to tend to overcome both the discourse of power
and the discourse of apology.

1
Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013): 189.
2
Ibid., 1.
 PART ONE:

THE BALKANS IN TRAVEL WRITING

UNTIL THE 1990S
 EARLIEST TRAVEL WRITINGS
ABOUT SOUTHEAST SERBIA
AND THEIR CHARACTERISTICS

DRAGANA R. MAŠOVIĆ

1. Introduction
1.1 “I left Europe. I was in the East”
The protagonist of Henry James’s Travelling Companions, Mr.
Brooke, on his Italian travel, finds himself in the Venice Church of St.
Mark’s, and while studying and commenting on its atmosphere of “the age
of a simpler and more awful faith,” he concludes that he had “left Europe;
I was in the East.”1 This remark draws a neat dividing line between the
West and the East, the latter comprising some of the “drawn and indexed”2
elements of the usual representations of the East, especially the Balkans:
evocations of the past, the exotic, the pre-civilized, the untamed and—why
not—“a simpler and more awful faith.” These and many similar views
have been objects of contemporary studies, i.e. of the deconstruction of the
representations of the Balkans as the Other, namely, the preconceptions
often implied in the kind of writing known as travel literature. Moreover,
this intricate and many-faceted form of writing in itself has been an object
of study for literary (and other) analysts who have tried to define it in
terms of a (literary) genre3—a highly demanding task since many of the
respective texts tend to be composites of numerous genres, writing styles,

1
Henry James, Travelling Companions, 1919: 11. Retrieved from
http://www.munseys.com/disktwo-/travcom.pdf.
2
Cf. Chris Rojek, “Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist
Sights,” in Rojek, C. and Urry, J., eds., Touring Cultures. Transformations of
Travel and Theory (London: Routledge, 2003).
3
For instance, Vasilisa Aleksandrovna Šačkova, „Putopis kao žanr umetničke
književnosti: Pitanja Teorije,“ Putopis. Časopis za putopisnu književnost, Year 1,
No. 1-2, 2012: 195-202.
16 Earliest Travel Writings about Southeast Serbia and their Characteristics

traditions (including political, sociological, cultural, philosophical and

other inserted commentaries).

1.2 General Framework

In this paper travel literature is approached with respect to a latitude of
forms far beyond one single genre or one single structure, although such
attempts are considered as useful and revealing.4 Rather, travel literature is
defined as a wide-ranging term comprising literal and metaphorical works
(writings) about travel. In other words, it comprises a variety of texts, from
factional to fictional, about a journey or journeys, of a single man or a
group, written on the basis of his (or their) experience, understanding and
intentions, and addressed to a wide array of audiences.
Though this definition is not by any means exhaustive, it still points to
three elements—experience, understanding and intentions—which figure
out in some forms of travel literature with the third one turning out to be
the controlling one of the previous two. This can be shown with reference
to the texts under study in this paper. They are excerpts from the writings
of the travellers who explored the Balkan countries in the 17th, 19th and
20th centuries, at the time before the world and Balkan wars disrupted the
cultural profiles of the respective regions and gave rise to different
approaches and, consequently, to different travels and travel writings as
well.

2. Analysis
2.1 Travel Writing Is Itself in Motion
Travel writing is by far a much wider concept than a literary structured
travelogue; that is why it is used here as more suitable if we want to
embrace all sorts of texts produced in the last centuries. It comprises, as
said above, a variety that ranges from non-fiction (faction) or factual
reports to fiction or fictional accounts,5 that is, to more or less fabulated
genres.6 In-between are many mixed forms, either leaning towards more

4
Ibid.
5
And, likewise, between “personal memoir and ethnography, science and
romance,” Bendixen, A. and Hamera, J. The Cambridge Companion to American
Travel Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 2.
6
It does not, of course, end here. In many analyses of the contemporary forms, the
“fiction“ as situated on the pole of a diverse and rich facto-fictional writing is
approached from avant-garde, modernist and postmodernist traditions. In these
 Dragana Mašović 17

factual reports or to more structured fictional narratives (though the

borders between them are often murky and hard to define), or combining
them.
The same stands for some of their component elements, each of them
covering up a range of possibilities. Thus, the explored country can be, at
one pole, real, rooted in more or less historical space and time, while, at
the other pole, an imaginary or fantasyland. In between we can find a
territory of romance, dreams, speculations—for instance, we can find Mr.
Brooke brooding upon an “imaginary” yet factual East with its “more
awful” religion as well as its presumed rural idyll. Or, as for the
traveller/narrator, he can choose his narrating position on a large scale,
from a seemingly detached or distant observer (analyst, scientist, explorer,
administrator, reporter) to a more or less involved witness or participant in
the events described. Again, the traveller can take an in-between posture,
for example, in a mélange of autobiography and travelogue (a popular 18th
century genre), when his journey becomes a more personal and intimate
affair, with elements “indexed and drawn” from the Bildungsroman
discourse. Or, the travel could shift from one pole, or the description of a
journey in given space-time coordinates, to the other pole, a more inner
(spiritual) experience, as in pilgrimage—which leads to a variety of
journeys, with the dominant motifs of a quest, or escape, etc.
The shift from one pole (faction) to the other (fiction) implies that
travel writing “is itself in motion,”7 meaning it is malleable enough to fit
the changing experience, understanding, and intentions of both the author
and the audience. In this paper, in view of the complexity of trying to
delineate traits of a variety of travel writing options—which would exceed
the scope of this paper—we have opted to analyze only one pole of the
scope of travel literature, that is, the factual prose or those texts that claim
(or are regarded) to be based on the “real experiences of actual travellers
rooted in the specific factual details of both history and geography,” 8
showing that even this kind of writing can reveal a certain prejudiced

context, the traditional form is subverted for the sake of its opening up to self-
conscious and metafictional elements which, in addition to introducing other
innovative (post)modernist elements, turn it into a mode of introspection,
reflection, meditation, philosophical/metaphysical exposition. See, for instance, an
essay on the Serbian avant-garde travelogue (Jaćimović, 2012: 7-15). That is how
the journey has become more inner than “outer,” the soul-searching I-travel
overreaching the (f)actual sights to the point of being locked up in another
solipsistic self, this time a metaphysical outcast of the “real” world.
7
A. Bendixen and J. Hamera, op. cit., 2.
8
Ibid.
18 Earliest Travel Writings about Southeast Serbia and their Characteristics

colouring on the part of the authors, as well as similar readings on the part
of the audience, then and now.

2.2 Home as the Norm

The analysis of the non-fictional travel writings in this paper points to
three characteristics prominent in a context of the relations established
between the author, the object of his writing, and the readers: namely, the
distance between the traveller and the land of his travel, its objects and
people; the (mental) luggage he carries in terms of his preconceptions
about the referential configurations he is about to explore, as well as to
judge according to the “home” standards (norm), and, in conclusion, his
own personality as an immutable and established fact.
The texts under study in this paper are taken from a collection of texts,
fragments and excerpts about Southeast Serbia, or, more precisely, the
region of Niš.9 Due to a great variety of discourses used in describing this
part of the Balkans, it can serve as a good illustration of the ways many
different people (travellers)10 have constructed their representations of the
area, from the fourth century onwards. Of them all, three texts are chosen
as revealing in terms of the attitudes taken towards the country in question,
namely, 1) part of the report about the given region by the Ottoman Turk,
Mehmed Zilli, better known as Evliya Çelebi, administrator,11 chronicler,
historian and geographer, author of the seventeenth-century Seyahaname
(Travelogue) (in ten volumes), 2) part of the text by the French writer, poet

9
Vidosav Petrović, ed., Niš u delima putopisaca od IV do XX veka (Niš: Punta,
2000), and Vidosav Petrović, ed., Niš in the Travel Writings from the Fourth to the
Twentieth Centuries, translated by D. R. Mašović (Niš: Vidosav Petrović, 2002). In
many ways, in much of its history Niš has been regarded as a “gateway to the
Orient.” This geo-strategic position has made it such an important place for many
people, most of all military strategists, in the well-known turbulent history of the
Balkans.
10
Though some of them are anonymous or known only from the secondary
sources, the majority of authors, either Serbian (or from former Yugoslav
countries) or foreign, are varied in the professional sense (traders, agents,
politicians, diplomats, adventurers, and the like). A small but ever increasing
number of them includes poets, writers, and intellectuals. A taxonomy would
categorize them as a “military strategist,” or “a spy,” or “a bureaucrat” whose
assignments were to prepare a report on the Balkan regions in terms of their
resources or simply as spoils, or military goals, etc., for interested parties
(colonizers).
11
According to some sources, the name is just a pseudonym because Evliya means
“government official” and Çelebi means “gentleman” (Genealogy).
 Dragana Mašović 19

and politician Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine referring to the

Tower of Skulls, one of the local cynosures, in the first half of the 19th
century, and 3) an excerpt from the travel writings of Mary Edith Durham,
a British traveller, artist and writer who described, among other countries,
the given region in the early 20th century. The three of them may stand for
the attitudes implied in the selection of the material, its construction into a
respective form of travel writing and in their views of the people and
objects represented.

2.3 Two Gentlemen and a Dame in (Balkan) Distress

All the three texts, at the same time, can be taken to illustrate what
Maria Todorova emphasizes in her study on Imagining the Balkans,
namely “great descriptive effort [...] immense erudition, and the tireless
labor that went into these works.”12 This is especially true when it comes
to Çelebi’s report on the then Ottoman town of Niš.13
Çelebi’s report is that of the “Empire official” who visited the region of
Niš in the year of 1660 and prepared a full-scale and comprehensive
account of the given area. Though with some inaccuracies,14 it comprises
detailed information about the things presumably of the state interest, such
as geographical and historical background, region/town administration,
description of the downtown (varoš) with the exact number (two thousand
sixty) of “ground penurious houses,” as well as (also carefully counted)
“lofty one-story saries” surrounded with vineyards and gardens, etc.
Special attention is paid to the religious (Islamic) objects, as expectedly, in
a wide range from mosques and schools to the turbes (stone tombs) and
water fountains, with their inscriptions fully quoted. 15 As for what
Todorova calls “preconceived ideas or outright prejudice,” they do appear
in the form of “occasional flashes” 16 but with no evident intention to
denigrate the indigenous population. To put it simply, Çelebi’s “gaze” is
that of a man of his times, his religion, and his ethos. His remarks such as
that “women wear colourful dresses and go out for a walk” may be taken
as observations arising from his way of life and (religious) attitudes to

12
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009): 80.
13
The things pointed out here refer only to the part of his travel book describing
Niš.
14
Referring to local Serbs as Bulgarians, for instance.
15
In view of the importance of water in Islam and communities, the water
fountains also enjoy their share of literal and symbolic significance.
16
Maria Todorova, op. cit., 80.
20 Earliest Travel Writings about Southeast Serbia and their Characteristics

women. Or, that “men are generous givers and devoted to pleasure”
probably comes from the same tradition. Definitely, his report is written by
someone who considered himself as a norm (and this tendency is to
become more prominent in later times), embodied in a posture of an
imperial gentleman-official. Well-informed and cultivated, he is an
administrator whose intentions, that is, tasks, are controlling his experience
and understanding of the Balkans, the objects and people he is describing
and listing. His sentences are short, compact, and factual. They are to
provide for the audience of his time and later, a much needed view of the
then society. Among other things, enough data is stored about the early
cultural markers, such as the bridge, the fortress, and, in general, people’s
cultural habits. Disregarding “occasional flashes,” this is the most
appreciated aspect of his travel book.
What can be, yet, concluded about the early travel literature using the
Çelebi text is that the distance between him (“us”) and “them” is
considerable, which classifies him as a precursor of what contemporary
theory calls a “stroller” or observer with no close contact or involvement
with the objects of his gaze.17 They remain as Others in his side remarks
and only once (as far as Niš is concerned) do they come closer, in a single
sentence, when referred to as scary haiduks18 (which might be one of rare
references to the enslaved Christians), but no other groups or parts of the
population are mentioned apart from the general “men” and “women” with
no defined ethnic or religious affiliation. Yet, since this was at a time an
Ottoman town, presumably its different layers are subsumed under the
Muslim one or pushed to the (negligible) social margins.

17
In his analysis of the “stroller,” Bauman compares him to a theatre goer who is
separated by the “fourth wall” from the scene of action: “for a stroll as one goes to
a theatre […] (in the crowd but not of the crowd), taking in those strangers as
‘surfaces’—so that ‘what one sees’ exhausts ‘what they are,’ and above all seeing
and knowing of them episodically […] rehearsing human reality as a series of
episodes, that is events without past and with no consequences […] the fleeting
fragments of other persons.” In its later form, as a paparazzo, the stroller spins off
the fragments into stories at will. However, not only a modern paparazo but old
travel writers also do the same, turning the strangers they see “into actors in the
plays he scripted, without them knowing that they are actors, let alone the plot of
the drama they play” (Eeva Jokinen and Soile Veijola, “The Disoriented Tourist.
The Figuration of the Tourist in Contemporary Cultural Critique,” in Jugoistočna
Srbija, Skull Tower, eds. C. Rojek J. and Urry (2003): 80. Retrieved from
http://www.jugoistocnasrbija.rs/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id
=308&-Itemid=379&lang=en.
18
The name is of Hungarian origin, here referring to a member of the medieval
(Serbian) brigand gangs, robbers as well as fighters against the Ottomans.
 Dragana Mašović 21

A few centuries later we find ourselves in what historians like to

designate as “semi-independent Serbia”19 and with the traveller, this time
French, Alfonse de Lamartine, another cultivated gentlemen “of many
hats” as his compatriots described him.20 He visited Serbia in the years
when it was stormed by liberation fights, including the Battle of Čegar
near Niš, which ended with the Ottoman commander Hurshid Pasha
ordering that the skulls of the killed Serbian soldiers be gathered from the
battlefield and skinned before being mounted in rows on a 3m high tower.
For many travellers, the Tower of Skulls is a monument of barbarity
and cruelty. For others, though, in the past and today, it has been a horrid
expression of hatred. Still, at the same time, many of its visitors, including
Lamartine, turned its horror into its opposite, a monument of love for
freedom on the part of the Serbian rebels. In other words, its discourse of
hatred is turned into that of love—patriotic, though.
Travelling as Lamartine did—overland—back from Constantinople,21
he wrote a semi-autobiographical travel narrative, full of commentaries,
reflections, social and political projects in the spirit of a liberal and social
Christianity, and—the last but not the least—his Romantic views of liberty
and liberation. The result is a mélange as befits an erudite, free to insert a
variety of genres, cultural and literary quotes and allusions, into what he
considers a literary project. Part of it was a description of the land of
“highlanders with innate manners, shepherds who live for freedom and
women as beautiful as ladies from Swiss cantons,” in other words, Serbs.22
But this is not all.
In a separate chapter entitled “Notes on Serbia” (Journey to the East,
1833, Jugoistočna Srbija) Lamartine establishes the Tower of Skulls as an
icon of Serbian liberation fights. He recounts how, pausing, at one
moment, under what seemed to be a marble tower, he suddenly realized
that its walls were made of rows of human skulls—some fifteen or twenty
thousand (at that time, presumably no more than a thousand). He was, of
course, exaggerating but this exaggeration was part of his prevailing

19
Serbia became independent in 1878. By that time it had already negotiated and
somewhat modified its status within the Ottoman Empire.
20
The reason for this might be “his persistent taste for wearing many hats: as poet
and politician, philosopher and teacher, landowner and business inventor.” C. W.
Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012): 120.
21
Obviously, such a decision was a curiosity at that time; it is noted that he was
“the only Romantic writer who chose to return overland from Constantinople to
Vienna.” Ibid.
22
Cf. Serbia.com. How Serbia Stunned Alfonse de Lamartine.
22 Earliest Travel Writings about Southeast Serbia and their Characteristics

Romantic rhetoric of excitement and “poetic inebriation” with brave

“highlanders.” Enchanted, upon learning the history of the ghastly tower,
he intensified and magnified the whole experience, turning it, first, into
poetry (when “a strong and fresh breeze blew from the mountains and by
blowing through numerous holes on these heads, faces and skulls, created
a piteous and sad whistling”23) and then into poetry of martyrdom and,
finally, full-fledged ideology. His message to the Serbian rebels soon
became a patriotic appeal to the Serbs, of all times—“This monument
must remain! It will teach their children the value of independence to a
people, showing them what price their fathers paid for it.” In this way,
Lamartine praised, glorified and heroized the rebels’ fate and the Tower,
which, in the times to come, became a first-rate cultural, historical, and
patriotic monument. Preserving not only its own tragic fate but also
Lamartine’s commentary as national heritage (“with eye and heart (greeting)
the remains of these brave men whose decapitated heads became
foundation of their homeland”), the Tower of Skulls today is an object for
tourist as well as schoolchildren’s pilgrimage, referred to every time an
example is needed to stir up nationalist feelings.
Yet, though in his emotional outbursts, Lamartine expressed his pride
and love of the brave Serbs who had endured so much pain in their fights
for liberty, concerning the projects he had in mind, he also posited as a
“norm” defining the tragedy of a remote nation within the framework of
his own political vision.
Moreover, for the (political) culture of the region, what is more
important, at least in this context, is that Lamartine and the Tower became
inseparable on the grounds of their contiguity, i.e., metonymically-bound.
Finally, in the context of travel literature, the Tower and Lamartine’s
poetic outburst have proven how the travel writer can inscribe his own
persona upon the monument, thus assigning to it a semiotic implication
anticipating, stimulating and manoeuvering political (nationalist)
engagements in the decades to come.24
The third text, Durham’s, is different from the first two. It is removed
in time from Çelebi’s travel book, with its detailing of the Ottoman
presence in Niš and its distance between the “reporter” and the “men and
women” which could be compared only to that of two mutually alien
species, mutually “untouchable.” It is also removed from a warm-hearted
Romantic attitude cherished by Lamartine who, with his travel account,

23
C.W. Thompson, op. cit., 121.
24
In this way we can read, for instance, the title of the respective chapter in
Petrović’s book, “The Tower of Skulls: The Foundation of Serbian Independence.”
Obviously, it owes a lot to Lamartine and so do many other similar titles and texts.
 Dragana Mašović 23

engraved his name in the Serbian history book, i.e., his literary statement
became part of the history of Southeast Serbia. This time the author is a
lady of sharp wit and sharp tongue who, in her travelling (writer’s) life,
later changed her attitude towards the Serbs blaming them for the onset of
the Great War.25
But, before expressing an open disgust for the raw and primitive people
of the Balkans, most notably the Serbs, she described her visit to Niš in a
less dark-coloured manner. Just in the case of Lamartine, whose unusual
decision to travel overland through the Balkan “wilderness” caused so
much surprise among his contemporaries, the appearance of an English
lady, on her own (hence her narrator’s profile could be “a lonely, brave
and cultivated English lady”), caused a real surprise among the people of
Niš, including the hoteliers. Even more so, since—and this is a moment
also noted by Todorova—it is the first travel report that mentions how well
the native people were acquainted with the prejudice against them in the
West.26
Without going into details about the rest of her Serbian (and later
Albanian) adventure (books), in this particular fragment referring to Niš a
new trait appears in the early twentieth century: a dialogue between the
lady and the local people (though more for its anecdotal value). The
distance is shortened and encounters/contacts suggest possibilities of
interaction and communication. Only this time, with the whole stage
dramatized, preconceptions and prejudices are not in flashes but in
outpourings.
The construction of Niš is a matter of careful selection: through
Durham’s eyes, we see a culture in three close-ups: of a fair, a cattle
market, and a cemetery. Highlighted is the cattle, unexpectedly tame (most
surely “brought up together with the family,” as Durham remarks 27 ),
unlike untamed people who, in the heat of the day, eat hot sausages and,
hot-tempered as they are, dance a rather hot dance: kolo. To crown it all,
there is a report on the local people mourning their dead and performing a
memorial service, as Durham remarks, more pagan than Christian, at the
local cemetery.
All in all, the picture of the Niš population, as given by Durham, is that
of the “nation struggling to become the West and to become modern.” But
this is only one side of it, claims Durham, the side it turns to the rest of the

25
Cf. Maria Todorova, op. cit.
26
Vidosav Petrović, Niš in the Travel Writings from the Fourth to the Twentieth
Centuries, 235.
27
A detail often found in the British travel writings about Ireland. The implication
is that people and cattle share the same premises.
24 Earliest Travel Writings about Southeast Serbia and their Characteristics

world from which “it had been cut off for so long.” The other side, says
Durham, can be revealed only after considerable efforts are made to come
upon “something typically Serbian and for this I was not to wait so
long”—for the Serbian religious practice. 28 Obviously, regardless of the
factuality of her account, what comes first is her intention to discover the
“other side” of Serbia for which she knew, a priori, that it was there. In
this case, as well, intention precedes experience, or, in other words,
intention dictates the nature of her experience and understanding of the
local ethos.
This leads to an assumption about travel literature, even in the days
when it was useful and informative: that its authors did not travel without
“luggage.” The main thing they carried from “home” was a sense of
difference, established a priori. It does not arise from perceived varieties
of history, culture, language, etc., but from a preconceived notion about
the countries they are setting out to visit: they had to be different if not
opposite or inferior to their “home” ones. As for the “travelled country,”
apart from the possibilities of being understood as “a rural idyll” or “exotic
and wild East,” there is also another one: that it is understood less as a
specific country with its own ways but more like a deviation from the
norm—the (superior) West.
This attitude can be seen in many other features picked up by Durham
and other travellers. For instance, many descriptions (strangely enough)
start with remarks about women: the ways women in the East dress or

28
A more sympathetic traveller would try to devote some time to think about the
Orthodox Christian Church and its “more awful traits” in religious worship as,
among other things, signs of devotion to the endangered tradition. Yet, Durham
acts as a norm, judging the rites only on the basis of what she sees thus confirming
the hegemony of the visual in the early travel writings. Thus, her visual experience
and her intention (to prove the other side of the Serbian “pro-European” face)
control her understanding. Namely, she underlines that from the Ottoman invasion
till the 19th century a great majority of these peoples (Macedonians included) were
cut off from the rest of the world and thus deviated from the norm (otherwise, their
worship would have been similar to her “home” ways). That is why their church is
anachronistic, paralyzed in time, much more similar to the church of the 4th or 5th
century than the contemporary one (Catholic or Anglican). She describes how the
Serbs read a funeral service in the cemetery (just as Macedonians slaughtered a
sacrificial lamb on the altar)—both of these acts being equal in terms of their
deviation from the norm. Moreover, she spots beggars in front of the cemetery
gate—just like in England in the 14th century, or five centuries ago. Finally, the
most deviating practice refers to the women loud in their weeping for the dead and
offering not symbolic but literal heaps of food laid out on the graves, as noticed by
Durham.