Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [131]
Windt and Kaplan were saying roughly the same thing. The Balkans were irredeemable, cursed by their collective past. A “journey through history” becomes a tour through the heart of darkness, a catalog of horrors. Thus, set into the context of this dark past, the present—in either 1907 or 1993—seems explicable. The same stories inevitably appear in both books in different guises: the (improbable) blinding of 14,000 captured Bulgars by Emperor Basil II Bulgaroctonos “the Bulgar Slayer,” Vlad the Impaler with his forest of twisting bodies, the grim battlefield of Kosovo Polje. Kaplan was able to add the nightmare events of the 1990s. Harry de Windt had rushed through on a whirlwind tour, but Robert Kaplan moved more methodically, recording the authentic voices of nemesis, such as Mother Tatiana, who had, like Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, seen everything and suffered it all.
“I am a good Christian, but I will not turn the other cheek if some Albanian plucks out the eyes of a fellow Serb or rapes a little girl or castrates a twelve-year-old Serbian boy.” … My eyes adjusted to the darkness and for the first time I got a good look at her face. She had a strong, lusty appearance, with high cheekbones and fiery maternal eyes. She was a handsome old woman who was clearly once attractive. Her eyes, while fiery, also appeared strangely unfocused, as though blotted out by superstition.11
Here is a deeper truth. Blindness of superstition, old stories embellished, retold, and then made still more bitter in the retelling, lie at the heart of these journeys through history.
By contrast, the Irishman James Creagh, author of A Scamper to Sebastopol and Jerusalem in 1867, presented himself as a species of tweedy fool, for whom everything turns sunny side up.12 Just as the Muslim inhabitants of the Balkan provinces of Herzegovina and Bosnia were taking up arms against the reforming sultan in Constantinople, he set out on a leisurely tour down the Danube to Belgrade, thence west into Bosnia and Croatia, and finally meandering south to the mountains of Herzegovina, Montenegro, and the Albanian lands. His book, published in the following year, was entitled Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah: A Journey Through Hungary, Slavonia, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia, and Montenegro, to the North of Albania in the Summer of 1875.
Creagh’s principal preoccupation seems to have been “tall and well-made girls in gaudy bodices and petticoats [that] gave them, at a distance, the appearance of Affghan maidens.”13 But beneath the jovial banter, Creagh saw things in a very different perspective than many other Western travelers. He quoted an old and much-traveled Magyar whom he met on the journey down the Danube.
The travelling philosopher will find men and women, at bottom, the same everywhere. There is the same ambition in every heart; the same credulity in every mind; the same roguery in every priest; the same desire to domineer in every woman; and the same selfishness among all. Their languages and education are alone different.14
Unusually he made few distinctions between Muslims and Christians. In Belgrade, he described a panorama of the “graceful minarets of the deserted Turkish mosques, the church steeples, and the wide red-tiled roofs”; the mosques were “now closed or used for the vilest purposes; and in a place once considered sacred by the Turks, their temples are defiled and desecrated by a people who were once their slaves.”15
However, in some respects, Creagh offered much the same overall picture as other writers. Outside the towns and cities the Balkans were lawless, as Ottoman government had little authority in its borderlands. Creagh described a Turk who told him that it was extremely dangerous to travel in Bosnia, and pointed to a wound in his side, which he said had come from an