The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1

Henry Baerlein

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• Publié par: vuwyar
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 15
• Langue: English

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Project Gutenberg's The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1, by Henry Baerlein This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 Author: Henry Baerlein Release Date: August 26, 2007 [EBook #22414] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIRTH OF YUGOSLAVIA, VOLUME 1 *** Produced by Jason Isbell, Irma Spehar and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE BIRTH OF YUGOSLAVIA BY HENRY BAERLEIN VOLUME I L O N D O N L E O N A R D P A R S O N S DEVONSHIRE STREET First Published 1922 [All Rights Reserved] LEONARD PARSONS LTD. PORTIONS of this book which deal with YugoslavAlbanian affairs have appeared in the Fortnightly Review and, expanded from there, in a volume entitled A Difficult Frontier . NAMES AND PRONUNCIATION The original Serbo-Croat names of the Dalmatian towns and islands have been commonly supplanted on the German-made maps by later Italian names. But as the older ones are those which are at present used in daily speech by the vast majority of the inhabitants, we shall not be accused of pedanticism or of political bias if we prefer them to the later versions. We therefore in this book do not speak of Fiume but of Rieka, not of Cattaro but of Kotor, and so forth. In other parts a greater laxity is permissible, since no false impression is conveyed by using the non-Slav version. Thus we have preferred the more habitual Belgrade to the more correct Beograd, and the Italian Scutari to the Albanian Shqodra. The Yugoslavs themselves are too deferential towards the foreign nomenclature of their towns. Thus if one of them is talking to you of Novi Sad he will almost invariably add, until it grows rather wearisome, the German and the Magyar forms: Neu Satz and Uj Videk. These names and those of persons have been generally spelt in accordance with Croat orthography—that is to say, with the Latin alphabet modified in order to reproduce all the sounds of the Serbo-Croatian language. This script, with its diacritic marks, was scientifically evolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The chief points about it that we have to remember are that c is pronounced as if written ts, ć as if written tch, č is pronounced ch, š is pronounced sh, and j is pronounced y. So the Montenegrin towns Cetinje, Podgorica and Nikšić are pronounced as if written Tsetinye, Podgoritsa and Nikshitch, while Pančevo is pronounced Panchevo. It will be seen that this matter is not very complicated. But we have not in every case employed the Croat script. We have not spoken in this book of Jugoslavia but of Yugoslavia, since that has come to be the more familiar form. The full list of Croat letters, in so far as they differ from the English alphabet, is as follows: c, whose English value is ć, " " " č, " " " š, " " " ž, " " " dž, " " " gj (or dj), " " " j, " " " lj, " " " nj, " " " ts. tch. ch, as in church. sh. s, as in measure. j, as in James. j, " " y, as in you. li, as in million. ni, as in opinion. [7] [8] PREFACE On a mild February afternoon I was waiting for the train at a wayside station in north-western Banat. So unimportant was that station that it was connected neither by telegraph nor telephone with any other station, and thus there was no means of knowing how long I would have to wait. The movements of the train in those parts could never, so I gathered, be foretold, and on that afternoon it was uncertain whether a strike had prevented it from leaving New-Arad, the starting-point. Occasionally the rather elegant stationmaster, and occasionally the porter with the round, disarming face, raised their voices in prophecy, but they were increasingly unable—so far, at least, as I was concerned—to modify the feelings of dullness that were caused by the circumstances and by the dreary nature of the surroundings: a plain with several uninteresting little lakes upon it. There was time enough for meditation—I was wondering if I would ever understand the people of the Balkans. One hour and then another slipped away, and the lakes began to be illuminated by the setting sun. A handful of prospective travellers and their friends were also waiting, and as one of them produced a violin we all began to dance the Serbian Kolo, which is performed by an indefinite number of people who have to be hand-in-hand, irrespective of sex, forming in this way a straight line or a circle or a serpent-like series of curves. They go through certain simple evolutions, into which more or less energy and sprightliness are introduced. The stationmaster looked on approvingly and then decided to join us, and after a little time he was followed by the porter. Our violinist was in excellent form, so that we continued dancing until some of us were as crimson as the sun, and presently, while I was resting, what with the beauty of the scene and the exhilaration of the dance, I found myself thinking that, after all, I might within a reasonable time understand these people. Then a new arrival, a middle-aged, benevolent-looking woman with a basket on her arm, came past me. "Dobro veče," said I. ["Good-evening."] [9] [10] "Živio," said she. ["May you live long."] Nevertheless, I hope in this book to give a description of how the Yugoslavs, brothers and neighbours and tragically separated from one another for so many centuries, made various efforts to unite, at least in some degree. But for about fifteen centuries the greater number of Yugoslavs were unable to liberate themselves from their alien rulers; not until the end of the Great War were these dominations overthrown, and the kindred peoples, the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, put at last before the realization of their dreams—the dreams, that is to say, of some of their poets and statesmen and bishops and philologists, as well as of certain foreigners. But listen to this, by the censorious literateur who contributes the "Musings without Method" to Maga: "We do not envy the ingenious gentlemen," says he, "who invented the two new States Czecho-Slovakia and JugoSlavia. Their composite names prove their composite characters. That they will last long beneath the fanciful masks which have been put