Travels in Southern Bessarabia

Southern Bessarabia had fascinated me long before I ever went there. A sliver of land south-west of Odessa, sandwiched between Moldova to the north, Romania to the west, and the Black Sea to the south. Located on the Danube delta, its marshlands are among the richest wildlife havens in Europe. But Bessarabia is also notable for the diversity of its population, formed by migrations and the vicissitudes of international politics and warfare over the preceding two centuries. This piece of territory in southern Ukraine is only part of historic Bessarabia, the majority of which today forms the Republic of Moldova to the north. Southern Bessarabia is also known as Budjak, a name that derives from the Turkish word for borderland. Its character was forged in the repeated shifting of borders between the medieval principality of Moldavia, the Ottoman and Russian empires, Romania, the Soviet Union and independent Ukraine.

Southern Bessarabia is linked with the rest of Ukraine by just two roads at either end of the delta, or ‘liman’ in Ukrainian and Russian, of the Dniester river. The route to the north passes briefly through Moldovan territory. As you leave Ukraine, if you are transiting through to southern Bessarabia and not planning to enter Moldova, you are handed a chit by a border guard, which notes the time and the number of people in the vehicle. You are then supposed to drive straight through, without stopping. When you re-enter Ukraine, the border guard checks the time on the chit to verify this. The southern route goes along the seashore, crossing a bridge over the entrance of the liman at the seaside resort of Zatoka. Neither route has a high capacity, and at Zatoka the bridge over the liman opens every so often to let ships pass, closing it to traffic for half-an-hour at a time. During the summer season, Zatoka is choked with tourists, slowing traffic on this southern route to a crawl. As a result, Southern Bessarabia feels isolated from the rest of Ukraine. The main road through the region had been notoriously bad until former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, during his controversial stint as Odessa regional governor in 2015-16, pressed for repairs. There was also talk of a new bridge across the liman, to link Odessa with Romania to the west by a new highway.

Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi fortress

On my first visit to Bessarabia in November 2015, I went to Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, on the western side of the liman. The town is notable for its massive fortress. There had been a fort here for centuries, a strategic hilltop position overlooking the liman. Much of what can be seen today dates from the Ottoman period, which finally ended in 1812, although Russian forces had captured the town more than once in the preceding decades. A striking memento of the Ottoman period is a minaret in the castle grounds, which once formed part of the Bayezid Veli mosque. A stone tablet nearby recalls that an Orthodox church had stood on the site before the Ottoman conquest. Today, Bilhorod-Dnistroskyi has a Ukrainian majority, but historically it was more diverse. Before the Second World War, when southern Bessarabia was part of Romania, the town contained significant Jewish and German populations, as well as Romanians (or Moldovans), Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians and Greeks. There is also an old Armenian church.

Bessarabia’s Jews were mostly victims of the Nazi holocaust. The Germans were deported by Stalin to Central Asia. But southern Bessarabia nevertheless retains its diversity, a fascinating patchwork of nationalities. None forms an overall majority. In some districts, such as Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi and Tatarbunary, Ukrainians predominate. Elsewhere, notably Bolhrad, it is Bulgarians. In Reni, in the far south-west, it is Moldovans. Gagauz, Orthodox Christians who speak a Turkish dialect, are also a significant presence in several areas, especially in the south-western districts of Bolhrad and Reni. Russians are found in significant numbers in several districts, including Izmail, southern Bessarabia’s most important town. There are also smaller groups. Roma are present in many areas, and often face the same kind of disadvantages and discrimination that they experience in so much of central and eastern Europe. Perhaps most surprising of all is the small Albanian community in the village of Karakurt, close to Bolhrad.

Izmail, with statue of Suvorov

Unusually in southern Ukraine, Izmail retains its Ottoman-era name. One of the Ottoman Empire’s most important fortresses was on this site. The fort was first built in the 12th century by the Genoese, who dominated much of the trade in the Black Sea region during the golden era of the Silk Road. In the 15th century, the region was conquered by the Ottomans. The fortress at Izmail was strategically one of the most important in the Empire. Having been briefly captured by the Russians in 1770, it was heavily refortified by the Ottomans, and was supposed to be impregnable. When the great Russian general, Alexander Suvorov, attacked it again in 1790, the Sultan ordered the Ottoman defenders to stand their ground and on no account surrender. Suvorov’s successful storming of the fort in December that year is commemorated at the diorama, a three-dimensional model of the assault on the fortress. It was a terribly bloody affair, and most of the Ottoman defenders were slaughtered. Suvorov later reported that he wept following the victory.

Izmail, surviving mosque

The diorama is located in the only surviving building from the Ottoman period, a small mosque that had stood next to the fortress wall, on the bank of the Danube. The fortress itself was later razed to the ground, and all that can be seen of its once massive fortifications are the remains of ditches that once stood before the ramparts. A statue of Suvorov on horseback stands in the town centre, and one of the town’s many well-preserved 19th-century houses contains a museum with exhibits about Suvorov, and about the great battle for the fortress.

The symbolism of statues is particularly significant in Izmail, as elsewhere in Ukraine. When I first visited the town in November 2015, a huge statue of Lenin dominated the square in front of the administration building. However, here as all over Ukraine in the coming months, in compliance with a new law requiring the removal of all symbols of Communism and Nazism, the statue was taken down. The law caused division and anguish in many places in Odessa Region, as many people mourned the removal of ‘dedushka’, ‘grandfather’ Lenin. But removing Lenin from Izmail proved tricky. The base of the statue was so solid, that when I visited in April 2016 heavy machinery had been brought in methodically to smash it. By that August, the statue had been replaced by a flowerbed, and another smaller Lenin statue had also disappeared without trace. A city government official explained that they decided it was better to erase Lenin altogether than to put up another statue in the place where he had stood.

Izmail, with Lenin

Izmail is an attractive town, its old buildings in good condition, its flowerbeds well-maintained. In this it is a marked contrast to the shabbiness of Odessa. The mayor, a former KGB man, won with more than 90 per cent of the vote in local elections in 2015. Such an outlandish margin invites scepticism, yet even the mayor’s critics among journalist and NGO workers in Izmail acknowledged, when I asked them, that he did a good job, and was genuinely popular. He typifies Ukrainian politics, a chameleon who changes his party affiliation with each change of the political wind direction, and maintains his grip on power. But as an effective advocate for the town, and a successful administrator, his support remains strong. No doubt Izmail’s success is also down to the presence of money. The port is an important employer, and many locals work as sailors, a well-paid profession.

The port in the nearby town of Reni, further up the estuary, is in a less healthy state. When I visited in April 2016, the port was quiet, buildings mainly empty, equipment idle. A manager from the port told us that in Soviet times a larger part of the port’s activity was connected with Yugoslavia. For example, Soviet cars were transported along the Danube to Belgrade. But all that had come to an end. The small amount of activity at the port today is mainly grain from Moldova. The port at Reni is a beautiful spot, especially at sunset, walking along the east bank of the Danube, while the sky blazes red on the opposite, Romanian side of the river. We once had a barbecue on the river bank, grilled trout washed down with red wine from the Shabo winery, close to Zatoka, while the sun gently sank beneath the horizon.

I enjoyed Bulgarian hospitality on several occasions in Bessarabia. The region is renowned for its fine sheep’s cheese, ‘bryndza’, and for lamb, which does not generally feature prominently elsewhere in Ukrainian cooking. On a visit in November 2015 to the town of Artsyz, where Bulgarians are the most numerous ethnic group, two prominent local Bulgarians entertained us to lunch and local wine, toasting us with the words “peace to the world, and money to the Bulgarians.” It was in a way a fitting motto for Bessarabia. While war raged elsewhere in Ukraine, here the various different nationalities continued to live peacefully alongside each other, getting along with their lives. There had been attempts to stir up trouble in 2014, when nearby Odessa teetered on the brink of open conflict, its streets a battleground between pro-Russian forces and Ukrainian nationalists. Leaflets appeared; a Russian flag was painted on the road outside Bolhrad; there was online propaganda. Amid the fear that conflict engenders, scared people in multi-ethnic lands can all too easily be persuaded to draw in on themselves, to band together to confront the feared other. But it didn’t work in Bessarabia. True, most members of minority ethnic communities there did not identify with the Ukrainian nationalism that exploded into revolution in Kyiv. The sympathies of some were undoubtedly with Russia. Yet they continued to rub along together much as before.

Bessarabia’s Bulgarians appeared content to be left in peace. Politically, they dominate in the areas where they are concentrated. In Artsyz, I met a local Bulgarian priest. Full of energy and enthusiasm, his big project was the construction of a large basilica, its architectural style inspired by an ancient church in Bulgaria. I visited it in November 2015. It had been under construction for four years already. He had found investors, and the basilica was being built partly by volunteers. While we were there, a football team from the nearby ethnic-Bulgarian village of Zorya were working on the site. We later heard they were champions of an amateur Ukrainian league. A few months later, in July 2016, I met this indefatigable priest again. This time his attention was focused on building a new clock tower on the town square, where until recently a statue of Lenin had stood, to mark the upcoming 200th anniversary of the town. Behind such projects lay an irresistible optimism, that despite the country’s problems, in Artsyz they could make their lives better.

Bessarabia’s Bulgarians came to the region in the early 19th century, invited by Imperial Russia to fill the empty spaces left by the Muslim population that had departed following its capture from the Ottoman Empire. In many villages, people knew exactly where in Bulgaria their ancestors had come from, which at that time was still under Ottoman rule. A local official in Zorya told me the village had been established in 1830, and had originally been called Kamchik after a river in Bulgaria from where the original inhabitants had migrated. There had already been a village on the site, but it had been abandoned by its Muslim inhabitants. At the beginning, there had been 34 families, and almost all the village’s inhabitants are descended from them. There is a small Bulgarian ethnographic museum in Zorya. The director had originally come from Russia, and had married a local man.

While Zorya’s population is almost entirely Bulgarian, its churches reflect the diverse past of the region. In addition to the Orthodox Church, there are three protestant churches. These had only appeared since the end of the Soviet Union, the museum director told me, but she thought Protestantism may have had deeper roots. Nearby Sarata had been a German-inhabited town until the Second World War, and their influence may have spread to Zorya.

The region’s Bulgarians have close connections with Bulgaria. Many villagers have Bulgarian citizenship, the local official in Zorya told me, giving them the possibility of working in the EU. Many also go to university in Bulgaria. In the village of Kubei, close to Bolhrad, I was told they have a Bulgarian-language school on Sundays. Bulgaria supplies textbooks, as well as funds for traditional costumes and musical instruments.

Holding dual nationality appeared to be a matter of pragmatism for Bessarabia’s Bulgarians. But for the Moldovans it was more controversial. Bessarabia, including present-day Moldova, had been part of Romania in the 1920s and 30s. The Romanian and Moldovan languages are virtually identical, and some in Moldova openly express hopes for reunification. Some see Romania’s offer of passports to Moldovans as an irredentist ploy to take back the territory lost in World war II. Crossing the border into Ukraine from Moldova near the town of Mayaki, an advertisement gave a phone number people could ring to enquire about Romanian citizenship. A local official in an ethnic-Moldovan village near Reni insisted that Romania’s offer was illegal, and that despite the attractions of an EU passport, local Moldovans would not sacrifice their Moldovan identity. A representative of the Moldovan community in Odessa insisted to me that Moldova had its own separate historical identity, and was worried about the influence of Romania in Moldova and in Ukrainian Bessarabia, promoting the idea that all are Romanians. But a shopkeeper in the village close to Reni expressed ambivalence as to whether they were Moldovan or Romanian. More importantly, they were poor. Many would take Romanian citizenship in order to be able to work in the EU, she said. But it was expensive, and few could afford it.

Visiting several ethnic-Gagauz villages in February and September 2016, there was plenty of discontent in evidence, as well as worry about the future. But everyone I spoke to, whether officials or members of the public, said they had no interest in any supposed Gagauz autonomy in Bessarabia, or link-up with the Gagauz autonomous republic across the border in Moldova. Bessarabia is multi-ethnic, they said, with different national groups in neighbouring villages. Such notions about Gagauz autonomy were attempts by outsiders to stir things up. Much of the discontent was economic in origin. A group of farmers in one Gagauz village told me they feared the village was dying. In Soviet times, they had produced a variety of agricultural products. But now they felt isolated from potential markets, unable to compete. People were leaving the village, many of them going abroad, to Turkey and elsewhere. Houses in the village were being abandoned.

Bulgarian-Gagauz village of Kubei, Bolhrad district

There is pro-Russian feeling in Bessarabia, for sure, and evidence of the influence of Russian propaganda. An official in one Gagauz village told me he blamed the EU for interfering in Ukraine, and the United States for funding those behind the Maidan revolution. He said force should have been used to stop them. Either the EU should accept Ukraine as an equal partner, or let them go with Russia, he said. He believed Ukraine had been destabilised by western interference, but that the EU would not accept Ukraine, as it falls short of western standards and is too corrupt. There had been agitation in some Gagauz villages in 2014 about young men being drafted to go to fight in eastern Ukraine. An official in one village told me the military commissioner there had wisely not pressurised people to join the army. But in some villages, he told me, where the military commissioners had been more forceful, there had been conflicts. In another village, a Gagauz official told me people from that village would not go to fight in the east. They had relatives on the other side, he said, so why would they shoot at them?

In one mixed Gagauz-Bulgarian village, a school teacher acknowledged that there was pro-Russian sentiment in the village. They could not forget that two centuries earlier, Russia had given their ancestors sanctuary. But most people kept such feelings to themselves now, he said. That probably summed up the widely held view among Bulgarians and Gagauz, especially the latter. They might harbour pro-Russian feelings, and they might be antagonistic to the Maidan revolution, but as they had no possibility of influencing events, it was wisest just to keep their heads down and carry on trying to live as best they could. Thus had it ever been in Bessarabia. Borders changed, states and empires came and went, but the people who lived there had no say in the matter.

Much the same could be said for the Russian population. I visited the picturesque little town of Vilkovo three times during 2016. The majority of Vilkovo’s population are Russian Old Believers, a breakaway sect from the Russian Orthodox Church following a 17th century schism. Built on marshland on the Danube estuary, and criss-crossed by canals, Vilkovo is somewhat exaggeratedly known as the Ukrainian Venice.

Vilkovo

On a glorious late-summer weekend that September, I took a boat trip through the canals from Vilkovo to the outer edge of the Danube littoral. Among the willow trees and the reed beds, here and there are weekend homes with jetties, moored boats, gardens with fruit trees, and men fishing. The farthest point of the delta is known as ‘Zero Kilometre’, the mouth of the Danube. A map shows how, over the decades, the ‘0 Km’ shoreline that marks the end of the delta has gradually extended out into the Black Sea, as sediment carried down the great river gradually creates new land. As the waters open up at this furthest point, a profusion of birds take advantage of the rich fishing, including swans, herons and pelicans. Later I ate a tasty meal of freshwater fish at a riverside restaurant. My evening meal was accompanied by the croaking of frogs, a particular speciality in the area of Vilkovo and nearby Kiliya. I enjoyed eating them on several occasions, especially cooked in a garlic sauce.

Persecuted in the Russian heartlands, the Old Believers had settled in the outer-reaches of the empire, in places like Bessarabia. There are three churches in Vilkovo, one of them a regular Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), and two others Old Believer. The director of the privately-owned museum in Vilkovo, not himself an Old Believer, told me the town had been established in 1746, while the region was still under Ottoman rule. It had been settled both by Russian Old Believers and by Ukrainian Cossacks from the Zaporizhian Sich, the semi-autonomous Cossack realm which many Ukrainians regard as an antecedent of the modern Ukrainian state. The Sich was dismantled on the orders of Catherine the Great in 1775. Ukrainian settlement of Bessarabia began under Ottoman rule, when the Sultan offered Cossacks from the Zaporizhian Sich refuge in his realm.

In June 2016, we visited one of the Old Believer churches in Vilkovo, and spoke with an elderly lady who was cleaning the church. The priest was not there, she said, and would soon be leaving to join his wife in Italy. They were looking for a new priest, but it was not easy. She clearly asserted that she was Russian, but said the Old Believer community had no problems with the Ukrainian inhabitants in the town. Old Believers who had been called up to go to fight in the east had refused to go she said. If everyone in Ukraine had done likewise, there would be no war, she added. A local official told us the Old Believers had preserved their religious beliefs more faithfully than other religious communities under communist rule. But struggling to replace their priests, how well they would survive the post-Soviet era is another question.

Another endangered minority in southern Bessarabia is the Albanian community. In February 2016, I visited the village of Karakurt, and met local officials and teachers from the village school. They told us the village had been founded in 1811 by migrants from a village close to Varna, on the Black Sea coast in present-day Bulgaria. They said there were around 1,300 Albanians in the village, about half of the population. As with the Bulgarians and Gagauz who came to Bessarabia at that time, they were Orthodox Christians who had accepted Russia’s invitation to settle the newly conquered lands.

The people I met were proud of their Albanian heritage, and determined to preserve it. But it was evidently challenging. Until Soviet times, they said, people did not marry out of the Albanian community. But now there were many mixed marriages, and in such marriages, the children did not generally grow up speaking their native language. The children playing on the school playground, I noted, were speaking Russian. Still, efforts were being stepped up to preserve their language. Following a visit by an Albanian-embassy official, one of the school teachers had spent a month in Tirana, learning how to teach modern, standard Albanian. Now they were planning to include Albanian language as a subject in the curriculum of the village school. However, they acknowledged that their dialect was quite different from the standard Albanian spoken in Albania. The teacher who had visited Tirana had been inspired by her trip, but she had found it hard to understand the language spoken there. She reckoned only half of the vocabulary in their village dialect was the same as in standard Albanian. Lacking words for modern appliances and technologies, they borrowed words from Russian or Bulgarian. But, they noted, standard Albanian also included many foreign borrowings.

I wondered what chance they had of preserving their Albanian heritage among such a small population, many of whom had only a limited grasp of the language, and felt more comfortable in Russian? Not only were there many mixed marriages, but many young people were leaving for nearby towns such as Izmail and Odessa. And if they studied standard Albanian at school, what then of their unique dialect, presumably a lost remnant of the rich profusion of Albanian dialects once spoken around the Balkans, in present-day Bulgaria and Greece as well as the heartland of the language in Albania and neighbouring regions?

The hardship and dislocation that had afflicted all of Ukraine following the breakup of the Soviet Union had hit Southern Bessarabia acutely. Collective farms that had employed thousands had been replaced by modern agricultural enterprises that needed few workers. People are leaving the land, and many villages are dying. What hope then for the intricate fabric of this diverse land, if its people leave?

On top of that are the pressures to conform to the mores of the Ukrainian nation amid a determined surge to homogenise and build a more avowedly Ukrainian state. Among the multiplicity of nations of Bessarabia, Russian has long been the lingua franca. But reforms being introduced since the Maidan revolution seek to promote, even impose, Ukrainian. This policy, perhaps understandable given Russia’s assault on Ukraine since 2014, has introduced new strains. Bulgarian and Gagauz officials and teachers told me in early 2017 that they had no objections in principle to the use of Ukrainian in official documents, or to the switch to Ukrainian as the language of instruction in the region’s schools. Ukrainian is, after all, the state language. But why the rush? There were not enough teachers able to teach in Ukrainian, they said. For them Russian was already their second language, and Ukrainian their third, or even fourth. Such rapid change was simply too demanding. They expressed fears that teachers might under proposed new laws be punished for speaking to children in Russian. One teacher noted that under Romanian rule in the 1920s and ’30s, people had been punished for speaking languages other than Romanian in public. Such heavy-handed attempts to impose linguistic conformity brought back unhappy memories in multi-national Bessarabia.

Southern Bessarabia’s longer-term economic prospects may be better than appear now. The marvels of the Danube delta, the profusion of wildlife, will surely bring tourists. Some already come. Danube cruises bring people down the river from Germany and Hungary. Beach resorts are popular with holidaymakers from Moldova. And the national parks of the Danube delta, around Tuzli and Vilkovo, already bring tourists. In 2016, I twice visited the picturesque ethnic-Moldovan village of Orlivka, near Reni. The energetic head of the village council had big plans for the development of tourism. He was cooperating with a town across the river, in Romania, to boost tourism. Supported by a leading member of the regional administration, a Gagauz, they were planning to establish a ferry crossing. He was pinning his hopes on ecological tourism. He planned to build bird-watching towers, and a hotel complex and sanatorium. Most exotically, he was introducing water buffalo, which, apart from being an attraction in themselves, would, by eating vegetation in the water, improve irrigation and make Orlivka’s streams and lakes cleaner. He also envisaged milk and cheese production.

Many of Bessarabia’s people stand to benefit from such enterprise. However, adaptation is proving difficult. The Tuzli Liman national park has seen violent clashed between the park authorities and local fishermen who claim their traditional rights are being trampled. The future is probably brighter than these disgruntled locals appreciate now, although it may be that not everyone will benefit equally. Southern Bessarabia’s isolation may soon come to an end. What that will do for the delicate ethnic balance of this rich and beautiful land remains to be seen.

Haji Bektash Veli

Cappadocia is a popular tourist destination. Visitors are drawn by its striking rock formations, its houses, medieval churches and towns carved out of the rocks, its troglodyte underground settlements. It is all very compelling. A different sort of visitor is attracted to the little town of Hacibektaş, a site of pilgrimage for Muslims from around Turkey and beyond. This was once the centre of the Bektashi dervish order, inspired by the medieval sage Haji Bektash Veli, after whom the town is named.

Haji Bektash Veli is believed to have come from Turkmenistan. After his travels, he settled at this town in central Anatolia. The mystical Sufi order he inspired became very influential over centuries throughout Anatolia and the Balkans. It was the official sect of the Janissaries, the elite Ottoman troops recruited among the Sultan’s Christian subjects through the ‘Devşirme’ system of blood tribute. Some have suggested that the eclectic belief system of the Bektashi, with its wide-ranging influences, may have appealed to men who had in their early childhood been Christian. When the Janissary corps was abolished at the order of Sultan Mahmud II in the so-called ‘Auspicious Incident’ in 1826, and thousands of its members massacred, the Bektashi too were driven underground. Although the sect experienced a revival during the ‘Tanzimat’ reform period during the 19th century, it was finally driven out of Turkey in 1925 by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, along with other Sufi orders.

Haji Bektash Veli, with gazelle and lion

The Bektashi sect’s headquarters was moved to Tirana. The Bektashi had long been influential among Albanian Muslims. Ali Pasha Tepelena, the early 19th century ruler of southern Albania and most of Greece, is believed to have been an adherent. Bektashism thrived in Albania until the communist takeover in 1945, following which many dervishes and babas, the heads of the Bektashi Tekkes (communities somewhat akin to Christian monasteries), were executed. With the banning of all religious practice in 1967, the Bektashi, like all religious communities in communist Albania, were shut down. But since the end of communist rule in 1990, the Bektashi have experienced a revival. While I was working in Albania in 2011, Hajji Reshat Bardhi, the Dedebaba, the overall head of the order, died. Leading politicians and foreign diplomats were among those who paid their respects, indicating the influence of the sect in the country.

A dervish in the early 20th century, Hacibektaş

The pilgrims visiting Haji Bektash Veli’s mausoleum in Hacibektaş when I visited bore witness to his continuing influence outside Albania. The former centre of the Bektashi order is now a museum. Although Ataturk had closed down the sect in Turkey, a sign at the entrance asserts that the ideas of Haji Bektash Veli were applied by Ataturk in establishing the Turkish Republic. Indeed, Haji Bektash Veli’s enlightened teachings were in many ways ahead of his time. He was a noted advocate of the rights of women, arguing that a society that did not educate its women could not progress. Among sayings attributed to the sage in the museum is one that states that ‘In the language of conversation, you cannot discriminate between man and woman. Everything God has created is in order. To us, there is no difference between man and woman. If you thing there is, you are mistaken.’ He was also a pacifist, and in the most famous painting of him, he is depicted holding a gazelle and a lion, illustrating his words quoted in the museum that ‘Greed and malice disappear by love in our midst, Lion and gazelle are friends in our embrace.’

The Hacibektaş complex

The 14th century ceremony and meeting house holds an exhibition of artefacts and photographs, including a group picture of some of the last dervishes and babas when the order was closed down in 1925. In the kitchens, the famous black cauldron of the Bektashi is exhibited. The cauldron symbolised fellowship, and also held a symbolic importance for the Janissaries. In his novel The Janissary Tree, Jason Goodwin describes a murderous plot in the 1830s involving surviving former Janissaries against the modernising reforms of the Sultan. As an ominous warning of their intent, the Janissaries bang their cauldrons, their traditional protest and precursor of violent demonstrations.

The Master House, which contains the mausoleum of Haji Bektash Veli, included the oldest part of the complex. The ‘Cilehane’, or ‘Suffering Place’, is a small room where dervishes would withdraw for prayer and fasting, and is believed to originate from the time of Haji Bektash Veli himself. Pilgrims, the majority of them women when I visited, shuffled around the mausoleum, praying before the tombs of the holy men, reaching out and touching them. One group of men whispered in Arabic among themselves, reading the explanatory plaques in English rather than Turkish. The scene was very much reminiscent of Christian pilgrimage sites, with the veneration of saints. One could see why more orthodox Sunni Muslims might look askance upon Bektashism. The legacy of Haji Bektash Veli is complicated and controversial. Many Muslims claim he did not found any distinct Bektashi order, which only emerged after his death. Alevis claim him as a teacher of Alevism. Whatever the truth, which is by now lost in the mist of the past, I found his humanism, his tolerance, his espousal of women’s rights, attractive, and a valuable counterpoint to so many of the trends in modern Islam.

Preveza and the struggle for Greece

Preveza, at the mouth of the Amvrakikos Gulf, in southern Epirus, is a pleasant little town. In a maze of narrow streets between the Venetian clock tower, built at the end of the 18th century, and the seafront are lots of little restaurants selling simple, fresh seafood, packed with locals and a handful of foreign visitors during my weekend stay. It is a sleepy, peaceful place in autumn, but it is expanding fast, new villas springing up along the coast, international flights now arriving at the airport. But the proliferation of crumbling fortresses, overgrown with greenery, attest to a time when Preveza was strategically important and bitterly fought over. Now that importance has gone. Inside the walls of the Agios Andreas and Agios Georgios fortresses, which flank the town, stand derelict military barracks, empty guard huts at the entrances, evidence of more recent, but now ended military use.

The Venetian clock tower, Preveza

Preveza changed hands many times during the Middle Ages, and, after a long spell of Ottoman rule, was held by Venice from 1717 until the Venetian Republic was snuffed out by Napoleon in 1797. The small French garrison stationed in the town, together with local Preveza guards and a band of Suliote warriors, were no match for the army with which Ali Pasha marched on the town the following year. The massacre of the defenders and the local Christian population that accompanied Ali Pasha’s capture of the town was one of the most notorious episodes in his cruel reign. He then called on those who had escaped to the mountains to return to the town, promising they would not be in any danger. When they returned, many of them were immediately put to the sword. Surviving prisoners were marched up to Ioannina, many of them perishing on the journey. Those who made it were paraded through the streets of Ali Pasha’s capital carrying the severed heads of their dead comrades, to the taunts of the town’s Muslim inhabitants. A handful of the French prisoners were afterwards sent to Istanbul.

Lord Byron briefly stopped in Preveza a few years later, when he first arrived in Greece, dining with the British consul in the town. It did not make a favourable impression. Byron’s companion, John Cam Hobhouse, was appalled by the hole-in-the-floor privy, later admitting that ‘had the commander of the brig been very pressing, I believe we should have consented to go back to Patras.’ The sorry state of Preveza in the years following Ali Pasha’s conquest was attested by another British traveller, the Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes, who visited a few years after Byron and Hobhouse. He wrote of a deplorable change in the town, whose population had been reduced from 16,000 to 3,000, a monument to the worst afflictions of arbitrary power. The remaining inhabitants stalked like spectres through its vacant and deserted streets, many of the buildings and all the churches raised to the ground. Yet despite all that, Hughes wrote, Preveza was ‘a very favourite residence of the pasha, his great naval depot, fortified by the strongest works and adorned by the finest palace in his dominions.’ But Ali Pasha cannot have cared much for Preveza. He removed the clock mechanism and bell from the clock tower, and took them back to Ioannina.

Pantokrator fortress, Preveza

Ali Pasha beefed up the defences of the town. He substantially rebuilt the Venetian fortress of Agios Andreas, and built the Agios Georgios fort on the other side of the town. He built the Pantokrator fortress, named after the church on the site, a little to the north of the town, and a small fortress on the other side of the gulf, next to where the airport now stands. This is a region of many castles, up and down the coast. The fortresses around Preveza are all decaying, neglected. Modern buildings and streets have breached the walls of Agios Georgios. Sitting a little distance from the town, and only recently surrounded by new suburbs, the Pantokrator fortress has been better preserved. Jutting out into the sea, from a distance it looks rather fine. But inside, it is much decayed. Some more modern constructions inside the fort have also been abandoned, and vandals and graffitists have done much damage. There appears to be little interest in conserving the town’s past.

With the fall of Ali Pasha in 1822, the town reverted to direct Ottoman rule, which continued until the First Balkan war of 1912. Later in the 19th century, as the emergent Balkan states vied for the territory of the decaying Ottoman Empire, Albanians struggled to assert their interests. Preveza had a significant Albanian population in the 19th century. In 1878, as the Congress of Berlin considered a further carve up of Ottoman territory, and Greece pressed its claim to Epirus, Albanians began to organise their resistance. In January 1879, the Albanian Committee of Preveza, a branch of the League of Prizren, organised the Assembly of Preveza, a meeting of local Albanian delegates and supporters from elsewhere in the Albanian-inhabited Ottoman lands. This Assembly determined to oppose the cessation of Epirus from the Ottoman Empire to Greece. The following month, Albanian representatives from around the Ottoman Empire signed a petition in Preveza, threatening to take up arms to prevent the town being transferred to Greece.

On this occasion, the Albanians prevailed. But it was only a temporary reprieve. In the First Balkan War, in 1912, Preveza was taken for Greece. There is no visible sign of the former Albanian presence now. The statues and monuments are for Greek heroes, the victors. By the best preserved section of the wall of the fortress of Agios Andreas is a memorial to the fallen defenders of the homeland from 1912-1940, the Greek homeland. Their victory meant this would not be a homeland for Albanians. The Albanian story in Preveza has been rubbed out. Prominently placed on the seafront is a statue of Odysseus Androutsos, one of the several rival leaders of the Greek revolt against the Turks, whose mother was from Preveza. Shortly before his death in Missilonghi, just down the coast from Preveza, in April 1824, Byron had accepted an invitation from Androutsos to attend a congress in Salona, in eastern Greece, to try to unite the different Greek factions. He hoped his presence might help bring accord. He never made it, dying before he could set out.

Ioannina to Tepelena

When Lord Byron visited Ioannina in 1809, he travelled for three days from Preveza, on the coast, with an entourage of servants, guards, an interpreter and ten horses, carrying beds and linen with them, among many other necessities. I travelled with a rucksack by bus from Igoumenitsa, having first taken the ferry from Corfu, and was in Ioannina in time for lunch. Travel is less arduous today, and less romantic.

When Byron visited, Ioannina was the capital of Ali Pasha Tepelena, the Albanian despot who controlled a large territory, including most of present-day Greece, southern Albania, and the south-west corner of Macedonia. Nominally subject to the Sultan, Ali Pasha ruled largely autonomously in his domain. Arriving at the town, the first impression of Byron’s companion, John Cam Hobhouse, was almost fairy-tale: ‘The houses, domes and minarets, glittering through gardens of orange and lemon trees, and from groves of cypress – the lake spreading its smooth expanse at the foot of the city – the mountains rising abruptly from the banks of the lake – all these burst at once upon us...’ The impression was marred by the sight of the severed arm of an executed robber hanging by a finger on a piece of string from a tree as they approached the town.

Ioannina, the Aslan Pasha Mosque

Another British traveller who visited Ioannina not long after Byron and Hobhouse was the Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes, a Cambridge don, who published an account of his travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania in 1821. Approaching the city, he described it as having a noble appearance, crowned with palaces and mosques. The palace of Ali Pasha, and those of his two sons, were, he wrote, in the best Turkish style of architecture, bursting on the sight with great magnificence. Like Byron and Hobhouse, Hughes’s party stayed in the house of Niccolo Argyri. Hughes tells how Ali Pasha, on the death of Argyri’s wealthy father, had appropriated most of his property, which, fearing for his life, Argyri had been unable to oppose. As a result, he was left with a fine house in Ioannina, in which Ali Pasha had ordered him to accommodate the British guests, but with hardly the means to maintain it. This was not an uncommon fate for the city’s Greek merchants. Hughes met one of them, the richest in the city, who had built a house so splendid that Ali Pasha had seized it for his nephew, banishing the merchant and his family from the town.

Like Byron, Hughes was received by Ali Pasha, who at the time was assiduously courting every British visitor, hoping to gain territorial advantage, perhaps an Ionian island, having bet on them during the wars with the French. Hughes, like Byron and Hobhouse, had heard much of the tyrant’s cruelties, including his penchant for roasting alive, impaling and skinning those who crossed him. Not long before Byron’s arrival, Antonis Katsantonis, the leader of a rebel band that had long been a thorn in Ali Pasha’s side, had been captured, together with his brother, Yorgos, and cruelly executed by having his bones broken with a sledge hammer. One of Ali Pasha’s most notorious acts of cruelty was the drowning in Lake Pamvotis of some 17 Greek women for alleged adultery. Among them was Kyra Frossyni, who had apparently been accused of adultery by the jealous wife of Ali Pasha’s son. Some have suggested she may also have been a mistress of Ali Pasha himself. The event was commemorated by a painting, which now features on postcards sold in souvenir shops in Ioannina.

But, as Byron had discovered, Ali Pasha had great charm when he chose. Hughes struggled to recognise the brutal tyrant when his party was received by him in Ioannina: ‘Here it is very difficult to find any traces of that bloodthirsty disposition, that ferocious appetite for revenge, that restless and inordinate ambition, that inexplicable cunning, which has marked his eventful career: the mien of his face on the contrary has an air of mildness in it, his front is open, his venerable white beard descending over his breast gives him a kind of patriarchal appearance, whilst the silvery tones of his voice, and the familiar simplicity with which he addresses his attendants, strongly aid the deception.’

As I walked from the bus station, along a road that followed the shore of Pamvotis lake towards the historic city centre, I caught my first glimpse of a minaret through the trees, and felt perhaps an echo of the excitement of earlier travellers. Ioannia is nowadays a big, modern town. But the historic centre still has charm. Although the lake is polluted, one cannot tell that looking over it towards the same mountains described by Hobhouse. Walking alongside the lake, beneath the great walls of the citadel, as men sit with their fishing rods, it is still a beautiful scene.

When Byron arrived, he found a message awaiting him from the forewarned Ali Pasha, inviting him to come up and visit him in Tepelena, where he was conducting a ‘little war’, besieging Berat. While they stayed in Ioannina, they were looked after by two of Ali Pasha’s grandchildren, Byron describing the boys as ‘the prettiest little animals I ever saw’.

Ioannina was taken by Greece in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, much to the chagrin of the Albanian community there. Abdyl Frashëri, one of the founders of the League of Prizren, formed to prevent the annexation of Albanian-inhabited Ottoman territory to other newly emergent Balkan states, had been the head of the Albanian Committee of Ioannina. This sought to preserve the city and the Epirus region from inclusion in Greece. There is little sign nowadays of the once significant Albanian presence in Ioannina. A friend in Tirana told me his grandmother was originally from Ioannina, and that he still had some relatives there, although most had moved to Albania. Of those who remained, the elderly ones could still more or less speak Albanian, but the younger generation not. Expulsion or assimilation under pressure have been the lot of national minorities in Greece.

Ioannina as it once was

But there is still much evidence of the Ottoman past, including the bazaar area, with its narrow lanes and low houses, some dating from that period. There is also a Jewish quarter, although few Jews remain. A memorial to the Jews deported under Nazi occupation commemorates the extinction of their once flourishing community. Within the citadel walls, many of the buildings are modern. But some of the former public building remain. These include an Ottoman-era library, as well as the now-ruined and overgrown baths. Byron and Hobhouse had wanted to visit the baths, but had been put off by the sight of the elderly masseur at the entrance. Argyri told them it was a pity, as they would have been served by ‘belli Giovanni’.

Above the library and the baths stands the Aslan Pasha Mosque, now a museum, but, unusually in Greece, retaining its minaret. Following a revolt against Ottoman rule in the 17th century, the Monastery of St. John the Baptist, which had stood on the site, was demolished and replaced by the mosque, and the Christian populace, those that had not been slaughtered for their participation in the rebellion, was banished from the citadel, the ‘castro’, and forced to live outside the city walls. Following the inclusion of the city in Greece, the mosque continued to function as such until 1924, when the Muslim population was expelled as part of population exchange with Turkey that followed Greece’s ‘Asia Minor Disaster’. The abandoned Mosque was turned into a museum in 1933. Alongside the Mosque is a long, low building that had once been a Medresa.

The museum is organised into sections exhibiting artefacts from Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities, the last of these in the main part of the Mosque. It is a fine collection, amply, even generously given the historically poisonous relations between Greece and Turkey, demonstrating the once cosmopolitan nature of the city.

Among the exhibits that attracted my attention was a Damascus sword that had been presented to Georgios Karaiskakis, a klepht, insurgent against Ottoman rule, one-time commander of Ali Pasha’s personal guard, and hero of Greece’s independence war, by the British naval Captain Thomas Cochrane. The Scot Cochrane was one of Britain’s most dashing and successful naval officers during the Napoleonic Wars, and some have seen him as one of the inspirations for the fictional naval officers, C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubry. Disgraced in Britain following his conviction for his part in the Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814, he continued his seagoing career in command of the Chilean and then Brazilian navies during their respective independence wars. Then, in 1827-28 he took part in Greece’s independence war, which is when he must have presented the sword to Karaiskakis, who was killed in battle shortly after Cochrane’s arrival. Cochrane, having become the Tenth Earl of Dundonald following the death of his father, returned to the British navy as an admiral in 1832.

My attention was also drawn by the display in the Christian section of the museum of the costume of a Suliote woman. The Suliotes were a warlike people who long resisted Ottoman rule from their mountainous region to the west of Ioannina. Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians, they were in time assimilated as Greeks. At the height of their power, in the second half of the 18th century, the Suliote Confederacy was an independent territory comprising numerous villages and several thousand souls. After seizing power in Ioannina, Ali Pasha carried on a relentless war against them, eventually abandoning direct assault and resorting to siege and attrition. In 1803, the Suliotes finally capitulated and went into exile. In his usual style, Ali Pasha reneged on his promise to let them pass unmolested, and many of them were massacred. In a famous episode described by the Rev. Hughes, a group of Suliote, women trapped near the monastery of Zalango, in desperation threw their children over a steep precipice, and then, singing and dancing, whirling furiously, with a shriek they hurled themselves to their deaths.

A Suliote

Many of the Suliotes who escaped made it to the Ionian isles, where some entered Russian military service during the period of the Septinsular (Seven Island) Republic. When that came to an end, and the Ionian islands reverted to French control in 1807, many entered French service, including in a unit known as the Albanian Regiment. While the French hung on to Corfu until Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the other Ionian islands fell into British hands, and some Suliotes ended up in British service, in the Greek Light Infantry Regiment they formed. Byron took some of them on as his guards on Cephalonia in 1823, before he embarked for Missolonghi to take his part in the Greek independence war. Suliote warriors also featured prominently in his efforts once he got there. He penned some verses in honour of the wild, unruly and often troublesome, yet brave Suliotes, to whom he was much attached:

Up to battle! Sons of Suli –

Up, and do your duty duly –

There the Wall – and there the Moat is

Bourrah! Bourrah! Suliotes!

The Suliote identity is hard to fathom in modern terms. While they spoke Albanian, identities in the Ottoman Balkans were generally defined by religion rather than nation, and the Suliotes, like the Greeks, were Orthodox. Hughes appears to have confused religious and ethnic identity, in his account referring to Ali Pasha’s troops as ‘Albanians’, perhaps unaware that the Suliotes too were Albanian. They fought hard against Ottoman Muslim oppression, including against their fellow Albanian, Ali Pasha. But when the Sultan sent an army to subdue the recalcitrant Ali Pasha in 1820-1822, he formed an anti-Ottoman alliance with his former Suliote foes, promising them a return to their lands. Ultimately, Suliotes distinguished themselves in the Greek independence war, and in the Greek military following independence. As such, whatever their ethnic origins, they finally identified with Greece. In the small museum of the independence war on the island of Nissi, in the lake at Ioannina, are pictures of Suliote warriors in their strikingly fine costumes which so captivated Byron.

Fethiye Mosque and Ali Pasha's tomb

A short distance from the Aslan Pasha Mosque, on a plateau surrounded by high walls, is the former inner citadel, Its Kale, where Ali Pasha’s Seraglio used to stand. Alas, the palace that so impressed Hobhouse and Hughes was destroyed in a fire in 1870. In the place where it stood is now a Byzantine museum and a large open space. The fortifications at Ioannina go back to the Byzantine period, although they were much extended and strengthened by Ali Pasha. The austerely simple Fethiye Mosque, built at the end of the 18th century, next to the site of the palace, still stands tall, and well preserved. Next to the Mosque are the tombs of Ali Pasha and his first wife, covered by a wrought iron bird cage like structure, an imitation of the original, which was removed during the Second World War. Ali Pasha’s body was buried without its head, which was sent as a trophy to the Sultan following his defeat and execution in 1822.

As the Sultan’s forces closed in on him, following a long siege, Ali Pasha, tricked by offers of a pardon, sought refuge in the monastery of Agios Panteleimon on Nissi island, together with his favourite wife, or mistress, a Greek Christian woman called Kyra Vassiliki. Trapped in the upper room, but defiant until the end, he was shot through cracks in the floor boards before being beheaded. The little monastery now houses a museum dedicated to Ali Pasha. The monastery had to be reconstructed after a tree fell on it some years ago. Nevertheless, a glass square in the modern floor of the upper room reveals what are claimed to be the holes in the original floor through which Ali Pasha was shot.

Visiting castles, old buildings and other sites associated with famous historical figures, one rarely gets a sense of how they were in their heyday. Great stone palaces of the Muslim world, even when they survive, such as the Alhambra in Granada, shorn of the carpets, divans, cushions, all the colour that gave them life, are impressive, but evoke nothing of what they were like, of the world that once existed within the now bare stone walls. Nowadays, there is nothing left of the opulent palace described by Byron, Hobhouse and Hughes. Their accounts, and others like them, are all we have left of the vanished world. And yet, in the little museum on Nissi, surrounded by artefacts and pictures from Ali Pasha’s own time, I felt I caught just a glimmer of the Ioannina of the past.

Seeing a picture of the citadel with Ali Pasha’s palace in all its glory recalled something of the wondrous sight that so impressed earlier visitors. Among the many pictures off Ali Pasha, most of them shrouded in a voluminous cloak, is one by a British visitor, Joseph Cartwright, who met him some years after Byron. Cartwright was paymaster of the British forces based in Corfu, then the capital of the British protectorate of the Ionian Isles. He was a member of the delegation negotiating the transfer of the town of Parga to Ali Pasha. His picture shows Ali Pasha as he really was, and as described by Byron, as immensely fat. In his hand is his favourite, long pipe. And there, in a case in the middle of the room, is the pipe itself; the pipe held and smoked by Ali Pasha. And in the next room, the dress allegedly worn by Kyra Vassiliki on the day Ali Pasha was killed. Vassilki herself had been taken as a prisoner to Istanbul, but was later released and allowed to return to Greece.

Ali Pasha, with pipe

After spending a few days in Ioannina, Byron and Hobhouse set out on an eleven-day journey to Tepelena, there to meet Ali Pasha. The first night, as Hobhouse forged on ahead with some of their party, Byron was lost in an enormous storm, only arriving in the village of Zitsa in the middle of the night. The next day, Byron was enchanted by Zitsa, describing it as being ‘in the most beautiful situation (always excepting Cintra in Portugal) I ever beheld.’ They were entertained at the local monastery by the prior, who, according to Byron’s servant, Fletcher, tried to teach him Greek and kissed him. The Dutch author Tessa de Loo, who made a journey from Ioannina to Tepelena in the 1990s, which she described in her book In Byron’s Footsteps, was disappointed with Zitsa, which she found to have been thoroughly modernised. With luck, she was able to enter the monastery, now abandoned by the monks and only used on special occasions.

I decided rather to head for the Zagori region, slightly to the east of Zitsa, renowned for its spectacular scenery and picturesque villages, carefully conserved according to regulations put in place by the authorities. The only bus to Monodendri, at one end of the Vikos Gorge, left Ioannina well before dawn. I arrived just as the first dull light began to illuminate the stone buildings of the village. My first day in Zagori was washed out by a violent storm that must have been something like the one that overtook Byron. Thunder rumbled from one side of the sky to the other, and then back again throughout the day, and the rain came down in sheets. I ventured out during a brief lull, wandering along the slippery cobbled paths of the old village. At one end of the village, where the tarmacked road arrives, where the buses stop, there are newer buildings, small hotels and shops, built for the burgeoning tourism industry. While they are built in the traditional stone style of the region, they do rather disfigure that part of the village. But walking into the heart of the old village, it is still very charming.

When I reached the village square, dominated by a huge old tree, the storm got going again, unleashing the biggest hail stones I had ever seen, like good sized stones. I sheltered in a little taverna, which was promptly plunged into near darkness as the electricity went out. Having already eaten, I asked for a glass of local grappa, which was warming and pleasant. Even better, the lady brought me a little plate of delicious spit-roasted pork, with some bread and onion, on the house. It seemed, for a moment, I was not just a customer, but, together with an elderly man in the corner, a guest who had sought refuge from the storm. This was the heart-warming kindness of strangers that I experienced many times during my travels in Greece.

Historically, Zagori was a multi-ethnic region, and many of the place names have Slavic or Vlach origin. The name Zagori itself might indicate a Slavic origin. Similar names – Zagora, Zagorje, meaning behind the mountain, are found in many South Slav regions. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was a prosperous region, as can be seen in the fine, large stone houses, most of which date from that period. A number of schools were founded in the 19th century, sometimes with help from Greek émigrés, which fostered the eventual triumph of Greek language and identity, which was finally resolved by the mass expulsions of Slavs and Albanians from northern Greece in the first half of the 20th century.

A bridge in Zagori

It is a lovely region. During two days of bright sunshine following my arrival, I visited the old village of Vitsa, not far from Monodendri. Both are set on hillsides, in the kind of beautiful situations that so beguiled Byron at Zitsa. Until the 1950s, when modern roads were built, the villages of Zagori were linked by stone paths, with 18th century stone bridges crossing the rivers and streams. It makes for wonderful trekking country, and the high-arched bridges that dot the valleys are a delight to see. Perhaps most splendid of all is the Vikos Gorge, nearly 1,000 metres deep in places, and all the more spectacular for its narrowness, sheer walls of rock rising up high from the riverbed at its bottom. The gorge is in virgin, pristine state, with no buildings, and just a path along which trekkers can walk. In summer, it is a popular destination. In October, I saw almost nobody as I walked.

Returning each day in mid-afternoon to the same little taverna in Monodendri where I had sheltered the first day, I sat under the huge plane tree and ate delicious simple food, washed down with Zitsa wine, the wine which Byron and his party must have drunk at the monastery there. Close to Monodendri, sitting perilously on the edge of the precipice of the Vikos Gorge, is the little 15th century Ayia Paraskevi monastery, much renovated, with bearded monks pottering about. On the day I visited, there were parties of Greek pilgrims, come to pray, light candles and bow before its icons.

I made the journey from Ioannina to Tepelena by bus in half a day, getting out at the border crossing at Kakavia, walking across, and catching a minibus on the Albanian side. When Byron and Hobhouse made the journey, taking a route a little to the east of today’s road, there was no border. This was all the territory of Ali Pasha. Ali Pasha was born in a village near Tepelena, and it was here that he had started his career of brigandage and war-making. Byron wrote of the arrival at Tepelena in the poem he wrote during his travels, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Childe Harold saw, like meteors in the sky,
The glittering minarets of Tepalen,
Whose walls o’er loom the stream; and drawing nigh,
He heard the busy hum of warrior men
Swelling the breeze that sighed along the lengthening glen.

He passed the sacred harem’s silent tower,
And underneath the wide o’erarching gate
Surveyed the dwelling of this chief of power

Where all around proclaimed his high estate.

He was much impressed by the sight of the throngs gathered outside the palace, ‘a new & delightful spectacle to a stranger…’ In a letter to his mother he described ‘the Albanians in their dresses (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold worked cloak, crimson velvet gold jacket & waistcoat, silver mounted pistols and daggers)…’ Hobhouse wrote of a first night in the castle disturbed by ‘the perpetual carousal which seemed to be kept up in the gallery, and by the drum, and the voice of the muezzin…’

Statue of Ali Pasha, Tepelena

The minibus dropped me in the square at the entrance to Tepelena, in front of the statue of the town’s most celebrated son, a reclining Ali Pasha, his beard flowing, pistols tucked into his belt. There is no palace now, but the fortress still stands. Inside its walls are modern houses, higgledy-piggledy along scrappy litter-strewn streets, some of them derelict. Tepelena is a modern town now, most of its buildings the poorly constructed blocks of the Hoxha period. I stayed at the communist-era Hotel Tourism. Every town in Albania had one like it. It wasn’t too bad, simple but adequate. The window frame in the bathroom did not fit into the hole in the wall, leaving a gap of about half an inch on one side, not uncommon in Hoxha-period construction. Thankfully the October nights were still warm. I slept well, no muezzins to disturb me now.

Seen from the river, the long fortress wall stretches along the ridge above. It is a fine sight on a sunny morning. The turquoise river winds through the valley, the fortress on one side, hills rising on the other. A rickety wooden bridge, slung between stone pillars, is the only link with the town for villagers on the other side. I stood at one end, half of the planks rotted away or missing, as many gaps as solid boards, and decided I did not need to cross. Halfway along the castle wall above the river is an entrance. Was this where Byron and Hobhouse arrived? It is piled high with earth, rubble and rubbish now.

The fortress, Tepelena

There is a plaque marking Byron’s visit on the town-side wall of the fortress, with the famous picture of the poet in one of the Albanian costumes he bought in Tepelena, and some verses roughly translated from Childe Harold. But little has been done to show off Tepelena to its best advantage. However it looked when Byron visited, nothing has been preserved except for the stark fortress walls. Perhaps it was never as beautiful as Gjirokaster to the south and Berat to the north, both now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Few tourists stop here, despite the name of the hotel. But the site is magnificent, the river lovely, the castle impressive. Tepelena could be something more.

Lord Byron in Albanian costume

Byron wrote to his mother that he had spent £50 on Albanian costumes. In his portrait, painted back in England, he looks less like an Albanian warrior than an English lord in fancy dress. When, the day after his arrival in Tepelena, they were received by Ali Pasha, Byron was dressed in uniform with a sabre. The meeting took place in a room paved with marble, with a fountain in the middle. Ali Pasha paid them the unusual compliment of greeting them standing. He was highly attentive, telling Byron to regard him as a father while in Ottoman lands. Perhaps a little disconcertingly, he told Byron he could tell he was well-born by his “small ears, curling hair and little white hands”. He asked Byron to visit him often, especially at night, when he was more at leisure. During their stay in Tepelena, Ali Pasha sent gifts of almonds, sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats.

Byron admired the Albanians, seeing in them primitive virtues, bravery and honesty. They appealed to the romantic poet. In Childe Harold he wrote of them:

Land of Albania! let me bend mine eyes
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!
[…]
Fierce are Albania’s children, yet they lack
Not virtues, were those virtues more mature.
Where is the foe that ever saw their back?
Who can so well the toil of war endure?
Their native fastnesses not more secure
Than they in doubtful time of troublous need:
Their wrath how deadly! but their friendship sure,
When Gratitude or Valour bids them bleed,

Unshaken rushing on where’er their chief may lead.

Byron kept a couple of Albanians as his guards throughout his travels in Greece. His lasting affection for them probably explains his indulgence of the unruly Suliotes he took under his wing when he joined the Greek independence struggle more than a decade later.

Venetians, Serbs and others on Corfu

The idea of visiting Corfu in October held many attractions for me, not least the chance to extend summer, cheat the seasons and escape the autumnal weather of northern Europe. Corfu city is a very attractive town, if rather overwhelmed by mass tourism, even outside the main tourist season. Monstrous cruise liners stand off the new harbour, mercifully some distance away from the historic quarter of the town, spewing off their crowds day after day. What do they come for? As I waited for information at a tourism office by the entrance of one of the town’s two massive fortresses, the man behind the desk tried to point out some of the town’s sites to two elderly ladies. Their response? And where do we go for shopping? For some, it seems, tourism is an enhanced shopping opportunity.

Corfu looks quite different to other parts of Greece, reflecting its very different history. Unlike the rest of the country, it never fell to Ottoman rule. For centuries it was a key stronghold of the Venetian Empire, guarding the mouth of the Adriatic. That Venetian heritage is evident in the town’s architecture, with its narrow streets and multi-storied buildings, often with colonnaded fronts. It is said that the Veneto dialect, once spoken alongside Greek, could still be heard in Corfu within living memory, and a small Roman Catholic population remains on the island, some of them descendants of Maltese immigrants and others of the old Venetian families.

The Ottomans tried repeatedly to capture the island, but the Venetian and Corfiot defenders held on. Looking at the two colossal fortresses that stand at either side of the old town, you can see how. At the entrance of the Old Fort stands a statue of Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg, a German who led the successful defence against the final Ottoman siege in 1716. Schulenburg had had a distinguished military career, including fighting under Prince Eugene of Savoy and the Duke of Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession.

The Old Fort, Corfu

The Old Fort is a bit of an architectural hotchpotch today. Atop the massive bastions of the Venetian citadel stand square, brick 19th century British barracks that would be more at home in Woolwich than on a Mediterranean island. The island was governed by Britain for half a century after the Napoleonic wars, and it too has left a lasting mark. Even more bizarre is the mock classical St. George’s church, built by the British in the fort’s grounds. Several cannon are displayed inside the fort, with information about where they were made and to which armies they belonged. Some are British, some Venetian, and one is Russian, from the brief period when Russian forces occupied the island during the Napoleonic Wars. Some of the mortars, dating from the 17th century and used by the army of the Serene Republic, were also made in England. Behind St. George’s, I came across several other cannon lying around. On closer inspection, there was the crest with ‘G R’ below a crown; George III.

The vast walls of the New Fort loom over the old port. Built by the Venetians, it is in fact only a little newer than the Old Fort, which was originally built during the earlier Byzantine period. Both have been repeatedly restored, enhanced and rebuilt over the centuries. If anything the New Fort is the more impressive, with its huge curving walls. I looked in vain for the Lion of Saint Mark, emblem of Venice, which I had been led to believe could be found in the New Fort. The lady at the ticket office said there were none. However, at the Old Fort, a stone plaque of the Lion was on display, removed from the wall to which it had once been fixed. The Lion, with its mouth curled in a rather odd, friendly smile, can be seen above the entrance to the reconstructed Venetian barracks that had been destroyed in the German bombing in 1943. Under British rule, the building housed the Ionian Academy, the first such institution of higher education in modern Greece. In front of it stands a statue of Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first head of state of modern Greece, and a native of Corfu. In an illustrious career, Kapodistrias had earlier been Russian foreign minister, but he did not do so well as Greek head of state, and was assassinated in 1831.

After Napoleon rubbed out the Venetian Republic in 1797, Corfu passed to French control. It did not last long, and in 1799 the French were ousted by a Russian-Ottoman force, and Corfu became the capital of the autonomous Septinsular (Seven Island) Republic, under Ottoman suzerainty, with Kapodistrias as Chief Minister. The Russian action is commemorated by a plaque on the little island of Vido, just across from Corfu city. The plaque, unveiled in 2011, and flanked by Russian and Greek flags, has a pointed message for the Greece of today, with its troubled relations with the western-dominated European Union, about the historical ties between the two countries,: ‘To the Greeks and Russians who died for the Orthodox faith of their fathers…’ The French returned in 1807, and remained until the arrival of the British, following the defeat of Napoleon. The French tenure was brief, but they left a lasting mark, notably the colonnaded Liston, nowadays crammed with cafes, that gives on to the Esplanade, a large expanse of green, beyond which is the Old Fort.

The British established a protectorate, the United States of the Ionian Islands, with its capital in Corfu, with a British Lord High Commissioner and an advisory parliament. The former parliament building has a stone plaque outside the entrance commemorating the parliament’s vote in in 1863 in favour of the union of the Ionian isles with Greece, ‘by will of the Ionian people and with the consent of the protecting power Great Britain.’ The islands formally united with Greece the following year. Many signs of the British period remain, not least the Ionian Academy and the grand former residence of the British High Commissioners, the Palace of Saints Michael and George, at one end of the Esplanade, now a museum. In front of the palace stands a statue of Sir Fredrick Adam, one of the High Commissioners, while at the other end of the Esplanade, close to the Ionian Academy, is the Maitland Rotunda, commemorating another British High Commissioner, Sir Thomas Maitland. But perhaps the most poignant memento of British influence is a cricket pitch on the Esplanade, in front of the palace on one side and the Liston on another. I watched a group of local youths playing cricket on the pitch, very badly, it must be said.

Among the various foreign rulers and visitors who left their mark on Corfu, in 1916 the Serbian army came, not as conquerors, but as refugees. Defeated by combined Austrian, German and Bulgarian attacks, the Serbian army retreated through Montenegro and Albania in the winter of 1915-16, together with their elderly King and numerous civilians. They died in their thousands during their journey, from cold, disease, exhaustion, starvation, and the attacks of Albanians who harried them all the way. This terrible death march, known to Serbs as the ‘Albanian Golgotha’, ended when allied ships transported them from the Albanian ports of Durres and Vlora to Corfu. Some 150,000 arrived, but their sufferings had not ended. Adequate provision for them had not yet been made in time for their arrival on the island, and they continued to die.

The Serbian Mausoleum, Vido, Corfu

The Serbian House in Corfu city is a museum dedicated to this not widely known episode in the history of the First World War. As well as artefacts from the time, it contains numerous photographs of the retreat and of the time spent on Corfu. Many of the photos are harrowing. Some of the newly arrived soldiers, as well as the corpses, look like mere bags of bones, reminiscent of holocaust photographs from World War II. Thousands ended their lives in a hospital on the island of Vido, from where they were taken in boats for burial at sea, the ‘Blue Graveyard’ commemorated in a poem by Milutin Bojić, who took part in the retreat. A plaque below the Serbian Mausoleum on Vido contains lines from the poem. At the spot where ferries from Corfu now arrive on Vido, another plaque, next to the one commemorating the Russian capture of the island in 1799, marks the place from where boats laden with their grisly cargos put off in 1916. In fact, the coat of arms on the mausoleum is not that of Serbia, but of the pre-World War II Kingdom of Yugoslavia, combining the emblems of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. An inscription in large letters over the entrance reads ‘Serbian Heroes Yugoslavia.’ In 1918, when the Serbian army stormed northwards and westwards from the Salonika Front, winning a state more than twice the size of their pre-war kingdom, it might have seemed that the sufferings in 1915-16 had been rewarded.

The tragedy of the retreat across Albania and the arrival on Corfu was not given much attention during the communist decades in Yugoslavia. The communist regime, basing its legitimacy on the partisan struggle against foreign occupation during the Second World War, preferred to avoid discussion of events earlier in the century, beyond damning stereotypes of Great Serbian nationalism and Croatian Fascism. The connection with the elderly King, who comes across as a heroic figure, sharing the sufferings of his troops, whose frailty at times meant he had to be carried over the mountains, was also awkward for the communists. But nowadays Serbia has been rediscovering its past, and has begun to pay greater attention to this both heroic and tragic episode in its history. Serbian leaders regularly visit the island to pay homage to the heroes of the past. Standing on the walls of the New Fort, I watched the little Vido ferry returning with a group of Serbs on a historical tour, a large Serbian flag flying proudly from the mast. Opposite the Serbian House, a Serbian souvenir shop sells mementoes of the Serbian army’s time on Corfu to the numerous Serb tourists who visit the island.

After the first difficult weeks, the Serbs’ stay on Corfu became more tolerable for the survivors, as some of the photos attest. Naked soldiers were photographed frolicking in the sea. Officers stroll in the town, and go on outings with Corfiot friends, many women among them. One photo shows a wedding between a Serbian officer and a Corfiot woman. In the meantime, the troops paraded and trained for their return to the front.

In the spring of 1916, the Serbian army left Corfu, travelling eastwards to re-join the war on the Salonika Front. But the Serbian government and parliament remained on Corfu until 1918, basing themselves in the grand municipal theatre, which was destroyed by the German bombardment in 1943. The theatre was replaced by a nondescript concrete box typical of post-World War II architecture. I walked round the graffiti-covered, crumbling building, its bare concrete colonnades stinking of urine and smothered in pigeon shit. No one cares about such a building, and even the vandals recognise its worthlessness. The local government has considered pulling it down and replacing it with a replica of the old theatre. In any case, they should pull it down.

The signatories of the Corfu declaration,

Nikola Nikola Pašić (with beard) and Ante Trumbić in the middle

In 1917, a key meeting took place on Corfu between representatives of the Serbian government and the Yugoslav Committee, a group of South Slav politicians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire who had been lobbying the western powers in favour of the formation of a united Yugoslav state. The so-called Corfu Declaration was signed by Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić and Ante Trumbić of the Yugoslav Committee, committing to post-war unification. The Serbian House exhibits photographs of the participants in the discussions. But it was a flawed agreement. The Yugoslav Committee had a very tenuous mandate to speak on behalf of the South Slavs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the Serbs were only lukewarm about the idea, preferring the expansion of Serbia to include all Serb-inhabited lands, leaving out Slovenia and rump bits of north-west Croatia in which they were not interested. The idea of a union of equals never attracted most Serbs.

The Serbian army was joined in its retreat to Corfu by several foreign medical staff. One of them was a remarkable lady called Flora Sandes, who became the only British woman to serve as a frontline soldier in the First World War. In 1914, together with numerous other women, she went to Serbia with a St. John’s Ambulance unit. As the retreat got under way, she was enrolled in the Serbian army. The Serbian House exhibition contains a photograph of her, with others, on Corfu. In 1916 she published An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army, to help raise funds for the army. She was seriously wounded by a grenade during hand-to-hand combat against the Bulgarians defending Bitola, in Macedonia. She was the first ever woman to be made a commissioned officer in the Serbian army, and was awarded Serbia’s highest military decoration, the Karadjordje Star.

Flora Sandes, in Serbian Army uniform

Flora Sandes is one of several extraordinary British women in the early decades of the 20th Century, who travelled through some of the remotest, harshest regions of the world. Among the others were Edith Durham, who travelled through Albania and other regions of the Balkans, and became a heroine of the Albanian national cause during the First World War; Gertrude Bell, whose unmatched experience and knowledge of the Middle East prompted the British foreign policy establishment to overlook her sex and take her on and make use of her expertise; and Rebecca West, who achieved celebrity status, among other achievements, for her accounts of her travels through Yugoslavia. Their experiences and achievements were remarkable by any standards. But for women, in the conservative, misogynist environments of those places and those times, what they did was heroic beyond anything that any man of their times accomplished.