CHAPTER V.

TRAVNIK AND FOINICA.

A Turkish Cemetery—Arrive at Travnik—Taken for Insurgent Emissaries—The ex-Capital of Bosnia—New Readings of the Koràn—Streets of Travnik—Veiling of Women in Bosnia—Survivals of old Sclavonic Family Life among Bosnian Mahometans—Their Views on the Picturesque—Their Dignity, oracular Condescension, and _Laisser-Aller_—Hostile Demonstrations—Bashi Bazouks—‘Alarums Excursions!’—Insulted by armed Turks—Rout of the Infidels—Departure of Mahometan Volunteers for Seat of War—Ordered to change our Route—A Turkish Road—Busovac—Romish Chapel and Bosnian Han—The Police defied—Our Mountain Route to Foinica—Ores and Mineral Springs—Dignity at a Disadvantage—Turkish Picnic—The Franciscan Monastery at Foinica—Refused Admittance—An ‘Open Sesamé!’—‘The Book of Arms of the old Bosnian Nobility’—Escutcheon of Czar Dūshan—Shield of Bosnia—Armorial Mythology of Sclaves—The Descendants of Bosnian Kings and Nobles—The Ancient Lords of Foinica—The ‘Marcian Family’ and their Royal Grants—A Lift in the Kadi’s Carriage—Traces of former Gold Mines—Mineral Wealth of Bosnia—A ‘Black Country’ of the future—Why Bosnian Mines are unworked—Influence of Ancient Rome and Ragusa on past and present History of Bosnia, and on the distribution of her Population—A Fashionable Spa—Kisseljak and—Beds!

But it is high time to take leave of this hospitable brotherhood, and continue our way to Travnik, which we proposed to reach that night. The monks kindly found us a Latin peasant from the neighbouring village to set us in the right path, and we began a winding ascent of a foot of Mt. Vlašić. From the crest of this a fine mountain prospect opened out to the south and west, range overtopping range till they culminated in the far distance towards the Dalmatian frontier. But below we caught sight of what was then a more welcome prospect, the high-road, namely, leading to Travnik—it being now four days since we had seen anything which by a stretch of courtesy could be called a road! Taking leave of our guide, who was vastly gratified by a couple of ‘grosch,’ as the Bosniacs call piastres, we made our way to the highway and followed the telegraph wires—for it was actually lined with telegraph wires—in the Travnik direction. On one side of us flowed the little river Lašva, driving a succession of turbine-mills such as have already been described; and on the other the limestone heights of Mt. Vlašić rose above us, bare as regards vegetation, but as we neared the town planted tier above tier with Turkish gravestones: for throughout Bosnia—as generally in Turkey—the old-world fashion prevails of burying the dead by the roadsides outside the walls of towns. It was an impressive sight, that forest of turbaned columns. Some loftier headpieces spoke of the old days of Janissary rule. In places great stone sarcophagi were overturned and rifled by the mountain torrent; here and there lay marble slabs fretted with vine-leaves and interlaced devices, which still betrayed their Byzantine ancestry. On the left we passed another landmark of the East—a capacious stone cistern; and at last a turn in the road revealed to us the ex-capital of Bosnia—mosques, minarets, and chalet-like houses harmonizing with the Alpine precipices above; and, in the midst of the town, a craggy acropolis crowned with another castle of old Bosnian kings.

We had scarcely entered the town when an observant Zaptieh pounced upon us to know our business; and on our demanding to see the Mutasarìf,[203] or Governor, conducted us to the Konak. The Mutasarìf was at the time absent from the town at his country house—at least so we were informed, though considering the critical state of the country the statement seemed almost incredible. We were therefore obliged to show our credentials to his lieutenant; but this functionary, for some reason, which the small smattering of Italian of which he was master failed to convey to us, at once ‘smelt a rat,’ and, as the best court of inquiry at hand, hurried us off to the telegraph office, where one of the officials spoke French, and then and there put us through a severe cross-questioning as to our route and our objects in travelling.

‘How was it possible,’ he asked, ‘for you to have arrived at Travnik without escort? You say that you come from Tešanj over the mountains, but you don’t expect us to believe that you came on foot! Besides, where is the _pièce de conviction_? Where is your Zaptieh? You say that you are now on the way to Serajevo, but’—and this was regarded as the most damning fact of all—‘we see this order in the Vali’s handwriting was given _at_ Serajevo, and you must therefore be coming from it; at any rate you must have been there, which you deny.’

It was a little embarrassing to know how to convince people who put both postal transmission and pedestrianism beyond the range of human possibilities! However, a circumstantial account of our itinerary, coupled with the awkward fact that they could not deny that our bujuruldu was in the actual autograph of the Governor-General, and that, however we came by it, we had it in our possession, brought our officials to reason, or at any rate to a wholesome perception that we were masters of the situation. So the Mutasarìf’s _locum tenens_ being reduced to express himself satisfied with our explanation, our French interrogator changed his tone to one of apology. He explained that our arrival had been so mysterious that we seemed to have dropped from the clouds, and our being on foot and unattended convinced the authorities that we must be Austrian emissaries sent to excite the Bosnian rayahs to revolt! ‘You see, monsieur,’ he wound up, ‘you come in very delicate times’—and certainly, to judge by the un-Turkish bustle of the telegraph office, the times were ‘delicate’ indeed!

A Zaptieh was now told off to escort us to the ‘best hotel in Travnik,’ and after a little more stumbling and slipping through streets so terribly cobbled that they made one sigh for the mountain-side again, we arrived at our destination, a miserable _han_, where we were ushered into an upper room, and our wants attended to with due dilatoriness by the squalid _hanjia_ and a boy rejoicing in the name of ‘Smily,’ who between them made up the whole personnel of the establishment. Here, while waiting for the pilaf and indescribables which compose our evening meal, we have leisure to reflect on the augustness of the town in which this is considered ‘first class accommodation.’

For Travnik, in the eyes of your Bosniac, is decidedly no mean city. Although at present, with its 12,000 inhabitants, only a quarter the size of Serajevo, and indeed at no period comparable to it either in populousness or commercial activity, Travnik was yet for nearly two centuries the political capital of Bosnia, and the seat of her Viziers. Their original seat was indeed Serajevo, but when the Vizierate of Bosnia stretched itself over Slavonia to the Drave, Banjaluka was fixed on as the city of residence, owing, it would seem, to the remoteness of the older capital from the new frontier. But when Buda was recovered in 1686, Banjaluka might be regarded as too much at the mercy of a _coup de main_, and the Divan of the Vizier was again transferred beyond the watershed and pitched at Travnik, as if the Turks were still loth to give up hopes of once more ruling on the Hungarian bank of the Save. At any rate they kept up the pleasing fiction that they ruled it still, for down to quite recent times the Vizier-Pashà who resided here clung to the vain title ‘Vizier of Hungary.’ The importance of Travnik is seen in the interesting ‘Account of the War in Bosnia,’ written in the first half of the last century by a native Bosnian historian.[204] Travnik is the seat of government and jurisdiction. It is here that a kind of parliament is ‘summoned by the Vizier, consisting of the magnates, judges, muftis, priests, and other learned effendis,’ to grant supplies in view of the invasion of Bosnia by the Austrians. It is outside the walls, on the ‘plains of Travnik,’ that the army of true believers assembles from all parts of the province. Serajevo, the seat of the native aristocracy, became indeed more and more the real seat of government, but the Sultan’s Lieutenant was obliged to content himself with his shadowy dignity at Travnik, till Omer Pashà in 1850 finally crushed the Capetans and transferred the Vizierial residence once more to the Serai.

_Aug. 18._—Next morning, while we are still enjoying hard-earned rest—and let it be recorded, injustice to our hanjia, that our room was tolerably free from vermin—a most honourable exception in Bosnia!—in comes the acting Governor, whose acquaintance we had made the day before, leading his little boy, decked out in raiment of purple velvet and crimson silk, with gold brocade and elaborate arabesques of embroidery—more gorgeously bedizened than any princeling of our poor civilized West!—and begs me to photograph, or, failing that, to sketch the little man. As a camera I had brought with me had unfortunately come to grief at an early period of our tour, I was reduced—for all my disavowals of artistic skill—to attempt what portraiture I could. The child, like his father, was a true Osmanlì, unlike the light-haired offspring of the native Sclavonic Mussulmans, dark in eye and locks, and withal precociously endowed with something of the gravity of his race. His self-possession, indeed, was amusing. He could not have been more than six years old, but he leant quite quietly against his father’s knees, hardly shifting his position the whole while, and laid his little hand on the big hilt of his paternal scimetar—instructed, doubtless, to look all the future hero! The pride of the fond papa in his hopeful was an amiable study, though purblind Frankish eyes might detect little that was remarkable about the prodigy. Alas! the artist was uninstructed as to those points the insistance on which was most acceptable to his patron; and though the Turkish parent was on the whole satisfied with a scrutiny of my humble performance, he looked up from the paper with an air of profound art-criticism, and requested me, as I loved truth, to make the eyebrows darker. It was too true; I had not done justice to the raven pigment!

And the Koràn? it may be asked, what about the prohibition of the Prophet against the portrayal of living things? Actually it is observed about as rigorously in Bosnia as the prohibition against drinking wine. Within the last year or two a Dalmatian photographer has set up in Serajevo; and to prove the laxity of morals in this respect, it may be mentioned that Mahometan priests have their likenesses taken by him, and that in one case he was summoned to reproduce a whole group of Turks engaged in the interment of a fellow-believer.

We found much to interest us in the streets of Travnik, and indeed the superior architecture of the town still witnesses its old importance as the seat of government. There are some larger buildings besides the castle already mentioned—palaces of bygone Viziers, barracks for Turkish troops. Even the ordinary rows of wooden houses—with their latticed dairy-like windows, the central bays of their upper story, the blue pillars and other ornaments painted outside—are not without variety in hue and outline; and amongst these rise more solid edifices of stone. Here, for instance, is one such—the best in the town—supported on arcades of solid masonry, adorned with rosettes carved in the spandrils of the arches: perhaps an old Bezestan or cloth-hall—very possibly the magazine of some merchant prince from Ragusa, for the arcading below is characteristic of the street architecture of the old republic. Beyond this—we are surveying one of the most picturesque street scenes in Travnik—rises an old mosque of wood, time-stained, dilapidated, with pinnacle awry. At its side an elegant cupola, supported on four columns and ogee arches, encanopies the turbaned tomb of a Mahometan saint; for every true believer who falls in battle against the infidel ‘drinks,’ as the Bosnian historian expresses it, ‘the sweet sherbet of martyrdom,’ and passes from this ‘vale of tears’ to enter with saintly honours into the joys of Paradise. Beyond these rose a background of gardens and spreading foliage, and above, the naked precipices of Mount Vlašić.

[Illustration: View in Travnik.]

Climbing round by the hills to rejoin the town on the other side, we gained a more general view of the city, and counted no less than thirteen minarets, besides two clock-towers, and—what we had not seen in a Bosnian town before—the stone cupolas of the bath and the larger mosques or dzàmias. The porches of some of these Mahometan prayer-houses had altered little from those of the early Christian church, and were in truth as Byzantine as their domes. The walls are most brilliant, not to say tawdry, outside—painted with what were meant to be delectable fore-glimpses of Paradise—palm-trees loaded with dates, fruitful vines sprouting forth from vases, or here a luscious melon with a knife ready inserted for the carving. Like devices might be seen on the spandrils of the kiosques that rose over the saints’ graves, but all in the most gaudy and inharmonious colours. Against the walls of some of the mosques were built the wooden booths of Travnik tradesmen, so that the disfigurement of sacred edifices by secular accretions is not confined to Christian countries. The most gorgeous of all the dzàmias had been converted into a kind of gathering-ground for the fruit and vegetable market—as if the fruiterers considered that the celestial fruits painted on the sanctuary walls above might be useful in suggesting to customers the propriety of enjoying the humbler fruits of earth, and serve generally as a good trade advertisement. It is, however, to be hoped that the faithful will be supplied with better plums hereafter than are to be obtained for love or money in the Travnik market.

Narrow rows lined with the usual open stores—varied and fascinating as ever. Armourers’ shops, with _handshars_ or Bosnian cutlasses, yataghans, quaint ornamental guns and pistols; another store containing nothing but melons; grindstones next door; two or three watchmakers—glazed windows to these, and a goodly exposure of turnips; as elsewhere, many Jacks-of-all trades. Among the primitive arts practised here that of a rope-maker struck me. He held the cord tight with his great toe, while he twisted it with his fingers. The inhabitants of Travnik are mostly Moslems, with a small infusion of Spanish Jews and Serbs, or members of the Greek Church, some of whom are the most well-to-do merchants in the place, and have organised a company—the _Kombeni_, as it is known here—for facilitating traffic with Serajevo. Their wives were dressed in the style which distinguishes the Christian women of Bosnian towns from those of most country districts, and which approaches the fashions of Belgrade.

In strange contrast to these were the Mahometan women, several of whom we noticed in the streets towards evening. Their whole face was concealed but for the tiniest eyeslits imaginable; but their insatiable bashfulness is not contented even with this, for in passing a stranger they must needs bow the head so that the fringe of the upper veil which curtains the head falls forward far enough to eclipse their last loophole of humanity! Their hands they modestly hide in two front pockets of their dress. Their exterior envelopes are sometimes green, sometimes white, sometimes of a darker hue; those whose under veil is black and outer white, looking at a little distance strikingly like nuns. Besides the two ordinary veils—that which drapes the head and that which swathes the nose, mouth, and bosom—their forehead is often covered with an additional piece not unlike the half mask worn at masquerade balls, usually of black horse-hair, with the two eyeslits above-mentioned fringed with gold. The whole form is mummied in such a way that an Englishman who had travelled through a great deal of the Ottoman dominions, but who had not visited Bosnia, could hardly be induced to believe that the figure below represented a woman of European Turkey. To find her like, one must transport oneself as far away as Egypt. Outside the limits of conservative old Bosnia, her disguise would be laughed at by the Turks themselves!

[Illustration: Bosniac Mahometan Woman.]

But what is still stranger is that in Bosnia should coexist the two extremes of veiling and not veiling. If the married women here veil themselves more than anywhere else, _en revanche_ unmarried girls are allowed to display their charms in a way which, to the well regulated Turk of another province when he first visits Bosnia, is quite scandalous. There is a Turkish proverb, ‘Go to Bosnia if you wish to see your betrothed!’ It is actually a fact that in this reactionary land there are such things as Mahometan love-matches; and even when the mother is allowed to select the spouse in the usual way, by inspecting, that is, the ‘stock’ in the baths, even then—so demoralized are the customs of these Mahometan Sclaves!—the young people are allowed to converse together before tying the conjugal knot. On Fridays and Mondays—days of greater liberty to all the Mahometan women—lovers may steal up to their sweethearts’ windows and whisper airy nothings to them through the lattice. This Bosnian custom is called _aschyklik_, and has been compared with the _Fensterln_ of Styria and Upper Austria.[205]

Mondays and Fridays, and through a lattice—what restrictions can be more judicious?

Lamentable to record, the day was a Wednesday and the place a public fountain in the street of Travnik. A Mahometan girl, very slightly veiled, was drawing water, when up comes a young fellow with the ostensible purpose of doing the same. He was a gay deceiver!—she might have told it from his roguish look,—but for the honour of Islâm my pen refuses to chronicle the rest. Of course the artless maiden gave vent to a ‘_Haiti!_’ but in a tone so soft, so insinuating, as abundantly to prove that that word of dismissal is capable of as many interpretations as ‘get along, do!’ among certain she-Giaours, and to be the natural prelude to more mutual oglings, and squeezes, and gigglings, cut short by the appearance of an unwelcome third party in the distance—retributive Propriety herself, advancing like a walking sack.

Not many years ago a tragic love romance had Travnik for its scene. In the days of the last struggle of feudal Bosnia for her provincial liberties, a young Osmanlì sergeant of Omer Pashà’s army, who was stationed here, fell in love with the pretty daughter of a Bosniac Mussulman, and was betrothed to her. Before they could be married, however, the sergeant fell in battle, and the maiden, when she heard of the death of her beloved, rather than survive him and be forced to marry another, blew out her brains with a pistol. The moral drawn by Omer Pashà, in relating this tragic story, was admirable. ‘It all comes of not wearing the veil, and letting affianced couples see each other. If she had always kept her _yashmak_ on her face she might have married another man, for there would have been no great love in the matter.’[206]

This approach towards natural relations between the two sexes is doubtless, as much else among the Bosniac Mussulmans, a survival of the old Sclavonic family life. The Mahometan house in Bosnia more nearly approaches our idea of _home_ than in any other part of Turkey. We learnt that polygamy was almost non-existent throughout the province. It has been dying out, it is true, in other parts of Turkey, but here it appears never to have taken. What is still perhaps exceptional among the wealthier Turks, the richest Bosniacs have only one wife. Some of them are said to have concubines, but public opinion here denounces the Moslem who concludes more than one marriage. A few years ago a representative of the old feudal nobility, Ali-Beg Dzinić, one of the richest landholders in the country, set all Bosnia in an uproar by taking a second wife in the lifetime of the first.[207] Another peculiarity of these Mussulman Sclaves, illustrating the vitality of the family tie, is to be found in their names. Mahometans elsewhere, with the exception of Persians and Arabs, have no family name; but here, after the orthodox personal appellation, as in the instance above, to the Ali, or Méhchmet, or Selim, these descendants of the old Bosnian nobles add their ancestral patronymic. This, however, is confined to the grandees, and is rather an instance of the tenacity with which the Bosnian aristocracy has clung to its old feudal attributes.

After all, one ought rather perhaps to wonder that these Sclavonic renegades have received so much of the impress of Islâm. Considering the difference of race—how strange it is to see a bevy of blue-eyed light-haired Mahometans!—it is curious what thorough Turks these Travnik burghers make. Towards evening many of these grave merchants seated themselves in the gardens of a café just outside the town, and, while alternately purring their narghilés and sipping their coffee, contemplated, without uttering a syllable, the beautiful scene before them—the mountains, the green valley, the foaming mill-stream murmuring at their feet.

We were assured by ‘Europeans’ in Bosnia that the Turks do not care a rap for nature—that they are utterly callous as to scenery; that if anything charmed, it was the peace, the silence—not the beauties of the landscape. It is this, they say, which allures the Turk to seek as his greatest luxury the gardens of his country house. Yet old Edward Brown,[208] in his ‘Travels in the Levant,’ in the seventeenth century, records how the Grand Signior passed two months on Mount Olympus, not only for the coolness of the air in summer, but also for the sake of enjoying the prospect of the fair champaign of Thessaly on one side and the blue expanse of the Ægean on the other. For flowers at least, all Bosniacs, Mussulman as well as Christian, display an extraordinary love; not only do they adorn their persons with them on every possible occasion, but so great is their craving for them, that at Serajevo it is not unfrequent for mendicants to station themselves at the doors of our Consulate to beg not for bread, but for a single flower from the pretty little garden.

Meanwhile there sit our Turks, to all outward appearance rapt in the enjoyment of the picturesque. What sapient big-wigs, too, they look!—how profoundly versed in all the Law and the Prophets!—of what superfluity of braininess are those capacious turbans suggestive! It is hard to realise that these gentlemanly beings have been engaged all day in peddling trades. And indeed it is true that they forego with lordly disdain the petty chicaneries of their calling; it is notorious, among foreigners in Bosnia most hostile to the Mahometans, that wares are, as a rule, to be bought cheaper and of better quality with them, than at stores kept by Christians. The true believer will not wilfully cheat, and disdains to bargain. This is always put down to their fatalism; but I doubt if it be n