Albania's Mountain Queen by Marcus Tanner

Author:Marcus Tanner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857735041
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

‘Boom – our big gun rang out’

I looked at my watch. It was 8am. And we were at war.

(Edith Durham, 9 October 1912)1

SPRING COMES EARLY in the Balkans. With the advent of warm weather in March and April 1912, Durham felt able to cut back on her relief work with refugees. She dared take a holiday. Boarding ship in mid-May for Italy, she headed for Rome, and to meet Nevinson, who was also holidaying there. If any embarrassment lingered between the adventurers as a result of the love letter that Durham had sent him the previous year, the two of them put that behind them. Fortunately, she had other business to occupy her. Crowds of Italian journalists were waiting to interview her about the worsening turmoil among the Albanians, and there was even talk of obtaining a private interview with the Pope, though this tête-à-tête did not materialise.2

While trying to avoid a scrum of reporters and awaiting the call that never came from the Vatican, Durham and Nevinson toured the Colosseum, walked the Appian Way and took in other sights. The Roman holiday went on. But Albania called and in mid-July Durham packed, hurried to Bari and took a boat to Montenegro, alerted by the news that a fresh Albanian revolt against the Ottomans had broken out in and around Gjakova in the west of Kosovo. Once again Montenegro was back on a war footing. As was ever the case in the Balkans, an explosion in one area caused turbulence in several others. Tension all the way along the Ottoman–Montenegrin border had resulted in several frontier incidents in which Montenegrins had been shot dead. In Podgorica, the Montenegrins were up in arms and this time Durham was certain that war was unavoidable. She hurried up to Cetinje to confer with the royal family and with the British minister, Count de Salis. For years she had predicted the imminent destruction of the Ottoman Empire-in-Europe and each time it had survived. Was it finally about to self-destruct? Durham likened herself to a cat that had been sitting for too long in front of a hole, waiting for an elusive mouse to emerge. ‘Something must happen soon, and something serious,’ she wrote to her sister in July, at the start of a long, hot, tense summer of alarms, shootings and mobilisations.3

The Albanian revolt the previous year in Kosovo had, in fact, brought matters in the Balkans to a head. The four Christian states bordering the outer rim of Turkey-in-Europe – Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece – were now convinced that the Young Turk regime was too weak to survive another rebellion in Kosovo, and resolved to strike before an independent Albanian state emerged and seized the lands they coveted. The apparent ease with which Italy had overrun Ottoman Libya acted as a spur.

Russia was watching closely. Cheated by Austria-Hungary over the matter of the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, the Russians had decided to bring to an end Ottoman rule in Europe without regard to the interests of Austria-Hungary.

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