Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [129]
However, amid all the battles and gore of the books, only one thing terrified me. In a dull gray-blue tome called With the Colours, or, The Piping Times of Peace, R. Mountjoy Jephson described the adventures of a young officer in the 1860s. He overcame the natives in the Ionian Isles, Hong Kong, India, China, and Japan, and his trusty revolver saved him in many sticky situations. But in Corfu he nearly met his end. A huge Albanian dog attacked him:
In a moment, I am dashed to the ground, and the infuriated beast is over me. He struggles to get at my throat, but fortunately my hands are already at his and I hold him off … His hot breath fans my face, his eyes gleam like pieces of live coal, and the saliva streams from his cruel powerful jaws. Those sharp white teeth have already met in my flesh, for my hands and the sleeves of my coat are crimsoned with blood and I feel the warm current trickling down my arms as I hold him from me.
Fortuitously young Bob Foyle has a hunting knife and manages, with difficulty, to kill his adversary. Then he faces the dog’s avenger: “The Albanian with his long yataghan naked and uplifted in his hand, his face livid and distended with fury, is within three paces of me.” Trusty Sheffield-steel hunting knife parries yataghan, but
the sharp blade of the yataghan glances off the handle of my knife and rips my forearm from wrist to elbow … I now grapple with him, for the closer we are the better for me … I notice how strong he smells of garlic; and even to this day a whiff of that redolent bulb always brings to my mind the deadly perils of that savoury embrace.1
All ended well. Bob’s chums rescued him in the nick of time, and bound the Albanian hand and foot. But Bob, mindful that he had killed the man’s obviously beloved dog, turned him loose. Simkin’s engraved illustration of this event terrified me at the age of nine, and still has the power to frighten. The Albanian rushing from the woods, with dark cruel eyes, tight lips, and a bristling beard, was the stuff of nightmares. To this day it remains my first instinctive and childish understanding of the Balkans. But I was not alone in my terror: fear of the East is common to many nations. For the English, the barbarians began at Calais, and according to Prince Metternich, Asia began at Vienna’s high road, the Rennweg, which led east to Hungary.2 Yet this cultural map was never exact nor precise. The lands south of the rivers Danube and Sava had a double character. They were both part of Europe and part of the East; the same was true farther north. Poland and Russia were Christian, but they were also savage. The heart of this paradox lay in Greece: indubitably Balkan, part of the Ottoman world, yet also the cradle of Hellenism and of Western civilization. How could Greece have fallen so low, from its ancient glory to the decayed state described by European travelers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
The answer was the Ottomans. “Turkey in Europe” had begun in the fourteenth century, had occupied the Christian lands from the Aegean to Budapest by the 1530s, and then slowly diminished from its apogee until it included only the plain of Adrianople, its first European center, and the city of Constantinople (Istanbul) by the 1920s. Almost five centuries of Ottoman rule became the whipping boy for everything that had gone awry in these lands. There was a wildness and rugged strength in both the peoples and the topography of the Balkans; the Turks made the people into savages and the landscape became, if anything, even more untamed. In his remarkable book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (1994), Robert D. Kaplan talks