On the Shores of the Mediterranean. Eric Newby

at each of its angles, more like a fort than a palace, built as his residence by Petar II Petrović Njegoš, who reigned from 1830 to 1851 and was six feet eight inches in his socks. Previously he had lived in the Monastery. Besides being a prince and bishop of this country half the size of Wales, and before that having been a monk, he was also a warrior who led his people in resisting Austrians and Turks, a traveller, crack shot, player of the guslar and author of an epic poem, the ‘Gorski Vijenac’, otherwise ‘The Mountain Wreath’. As a result of being all these things, he was naturally also the hero of the Montenegrins, and is to this day. The Palace was called the Biljarda because it was to it that the Prince, in the face of what might have appeared to anyone else something of insuperable difficulty, had a very large slate-bedded billiard table from England manhandled three thousand feet up the mule track from Kotor to the Lovčen Pass – at that time the road did not exist – then downhill to his birthplace, up again to the Krivačko Žvdrelo Pass and then 2000 feet down through a chaos of limestone to the Palace, where it was installed without the slate being broken.

      Not much more than a bomb’s toss away from the Biljarda was an elegant palace, painted in sangue-de-boeuf picked out in white, the residence of King Nikola I Petrović, the first and last King of Montenegro, a cultured, ruthless despot of a sort the Montenegrins were perfectly prepared to put up with providing they were allowed to destroy Muslims and one another. He ruled for fifty-eight years, from 1860 to 1918, having assumed the title of king in 1910. Forced to flee the country in 1916, when it was occupied by the armies of Austria-Hungary, Montenegro having entered the war against them in 1914 on the side of Serbia, he never returned, dying in exile in Antibes in 1921. After the war, in 1919, as a result of a Balkan version of a free vote, Montenegro became part of Yugoslavia and remained part of it until 1941 when the Italians occupied it and proclaimed a new kingdom. In 1945 it again became part of Yugoslavia.

      Now the Palace of King Nikola, which had been seriously shaken by the earthquake, stood swathed in plastic sheeting, a hollow shell, awaiting restoration. Outside it was the tree under which the King used to sit, dispensing Montenegrin justice.

      At the Art Gallery of the Socialist Republic of Montenegro, which is housed in the former Government House, the Vladin Dom, the largest building in Montenegro, we were kindly received by the Director, a cultivated man who was very upset about the siting of the ‘Obod’ electrical appliance factory, which had been plonked down in a prominent position in the town and had done nothing to improve its appearance. He himself, as director of the gallery, had suffered an almost worse aesthetic misfortune in the form of an enormous inheritance of paintings known as the Milica Sarić-Vukmanović Bequest which, although it did contain a number of good paintings, including works by foreign artists, was largely made up of post-war kitsch of a particularly awful sort which he had not only been forced to accept but put on permanent display, completely swamping what was otherwise an interesting and representative collection of Montenegrin art from the seventeenth century to the present.

      Then, having admired the outsides of various buildings, some of which had once housed the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, French, English and Italian diplomatic missions, some of them wonderfully eccentric buildings, and having failed to find the Girls’ Institute, one of the first girls’ schools in the Balkans, founded in 1869 by the Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, with which Montenegro had a close relationship before the First World War, we left Cetinje with genuine regret, and took the road to Albania.

       Albania Stern and Wild

      From Cetinje we travelled down to Virpasar on the shores of Lake Shkodër by a very minor road through the Kremenica Mountains. There we waited for Tour Group ALB 81/6, the group with which we were to visit Albania, group travel being the only permitted form of travel in the country, to arrive in a bus from the airport at Titograd, which they did at a quarter to eleven at night. We now numbered thirty-four people – English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish from both sides of the border who didn’t mix with one another, three Canadians, a New Zealand lady and a German boy with a fine, full beard, apparently anxious to try out the Albanian barbering facilities. No Americans were allowed into Albania, no Russians, no Chinese, no Yugoslavs, nobody with ‘writer’ or ‘journalist’ inscribed in his or her passport, no males with long hair or beards, unless ‘with a large shaven area between sideboards and start of beard … should authorities not be satisfied in this respect beards will be cut by the barber on arrival’. No mini-skirts, maxis, flared trousers, no bright colours (‘People may be asked to change,’ although a couple of girls defiantly flaunting forbidden, folklorique maxi-skirts were not). No Bibles, since a bold band of Evangelists, having pondered the possibility of dropping Bibles on the by-that-time officially Godless Albanians in a free fall from a chartered aircraft, had decided to join a tour and deliver them in person. No Korans, either.

      While eating dinner – soup with what looked like weeds in it from the lake and the worst sort of Balkan rissoles – we observed our new companions, wondering, as they were too presumably, who among us were revisionists, anti-revisionists, who was representing MI6, the CIA and similar organizations, and which ones were writers and journalists in disguise.

      Meanwhile, the Tour Leader went over all the other things we weren’t to do in addition to wearing beards and skirts of forbidden lengths while in Albania. There seemed an awful lot.

      ‘What happens if I die in Albania?’ asked a fragile septuagenarian with her mouth full of rissole.

      ‘There’s a hot line to the French Ambassador in Tirana [Tirana is the capital of Albania]. He takes over. It shouldn’t hold us up much.’

      Next morning the sun rose out of the mist over the lake, looking like a large tangerine, silhouetting the rugged peaks of Albania the Mysterious, away on the far side of it.

      It was market day at Virpasar and the market was taking place under the trees at the end of a causeway which crossed a little arm of the lake. Every moment more and more people were arriving with their mules and donkeys, driving or riding them along the causeway, the women wearing white head-dresses, and white skirts with white pantaloons under them. Others, fishermen and their wives, all dressed in black, were arriving by water in narrow, pointed boats with their outboards roaring. There were also a number of young Albanian men with the same razor-sharp noses with moustaches to match that had made the late King Zog of Albania such a memorable figure. With their white felt skull caps they looked rather like bald-headed eagles. Two of these young men were being subjected to a prolonged interrogation by a couple of grim-looking Yugoslav policemen. There are large numbers of expatriate Albanians living in Yugoslavia on the periphery of Albania and at this particular time most of these areas were in a state of ferment. In fact much of Kosovo-Metohija, an autonomous region in southwest Serbia, abutting on northern Albania, with a population of about a million Albanians, was in a state of revolt, under martial law, and foreigners were forbidden to enter it.

      Within a matter of minutes I, too, found myself being subjected to an equally severe interrogation, having been arrested for photographing the naval base when in fact I had been photographing a rather jolly-looking lady who was crossing a bridge on a donkey on the way to the market.

      We set off for Albania in a Yugoslav tourist bus, crossing the lake by a causeway which carries the main road and the railway from Bar, the port on the Adriatic coast, to Titograd, the present capital of Montenegro. Then after a bit we turned off on to a lesser road, which leads to the frontier between Yugoslavia and Albania. It ran through a wide plain at the foot of bare limestone mountains in which sheep were being shepherded by women wearing the same white outfits the women had worn in the market at Virpasar, and there were a lot of market gardens. We sat in front next to the driver and he said that most of these people were Albanian Catholics and very hard-working.

      The road crossed a saddle and an inlet of Shkodër Lake was revealed. Green watermeadows extended to the water’s edge, in which willows were growing in the shallows.