When Dreams Collide: Travels in Yugoslavia with Rebecca West

By Nicholas Allan

When Dreams Collide is Nicholas Allan's intimate pilgrimage across the former states of Yugoslavia. Diving far deeper than the headlines, he explores the splintered co-evolution of these lands over the last ten centuries, guided by the inimitable Rebecca West's masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Written 80 years in the pa

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Elms Books Ltd
• Release date: Jun 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781910533642

Nicholas Allan

After graduating from Cambridge in the History and Philosophy of Science, Nicholas Allan spent thirty years working in finance. For much of this time he was travelling, with long spells in each of Asia, London and the US, latterly as an Asian specialist. His main business interest now is in boutique Indian hotels.He has a deep love of music. Formerly Deputy Chair of the English National Opera, he is the Chair of the National Opera Studio, Britain's leading operatic training organisation. He is also involved in a number of local charities around Devon, where he lives with his wife Sarah. They have four children and two grandchildren. In his spare time, he enjoys walking in the hills, singing and cryptic crosswords.

Book preview

Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Author’s Note

Introduction

Montenegro

Cetinje

Budva

Andrijevica

Podgorica

Kosovo

Prishtina

Peja

Gjakova

Prizren

Mitrovica

Kosovo Polje

Prishtina II

Serbia

Belgrade

Topola

Belgrade II

Novi Sad

Fruška Gora

Valjevo

Mileševa

Novi Pazar

Studenica

Kraljevo

Kruševac

Niš

Ravanica

Kragujevac

Požarevac

North Macedonia

Skopje

Tetovo

Ohrid

St Naum

Bitola

Prilep

Skopje II

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Trebinje

Mostar

Jablanica

Sarajevo

Višegrad

Kraljeva Sutjeska

Travnik

Jajce

Banja Luka

Croatia

Osijek

Vukovar

Djakovo

Zagreb

Rijeka

Senj

Rab

Knin

Split

Trogir

Korčula

Dubrovnik

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

List of Key Events

List of Selected Rulers

Nemanjić Dynasty

Petrović-Njegoš Dynasty

Karadjordjević Dynasty

Obrenović Dynasty

Bibliography

Illustrations

Index

List of Illustrations

1. Rebecca West, 1934

2. Bay of Kotor

3. King Nikola of Montenegro and his family, c.1910

4. British Embassy in Cetinje

5. Statue of Njegoš on Mount Lovćen

6. Gravestone with hanged patriot at Andrijevica

7. Lake Skadar

8. Adem Jashari (l) of the Kosovo Liberation Army and comrades

9. National Library of Kosovo, Prishtina

10. Gračanica

11. Remains of Lazar’s mine at Novo Brdo

12. Monks awaiting the bishop at Visoki Dečani

13. Tombs of chief dervishes, Bektashi Tekke, Gjakova

14. Gazimestan monument inscription: "Whoever is a Serb…"

15. The Serb army retreat over the Drina, World War I, 1915

16. Ibrahim Rugova, 2001

17. Yugoslav women bear the lintel of Mestrović’s Monument to the Unknown Hero, Mount Avala

18. Prince Paul of Yugoslavia with Hitler, 1939

19. Grave of Arkan, Belgrade

20. Assassination of Draga Mašin, 1903

21. St Sava Temple, Belgrade

22. Tito meets Winston Churchill at Caserta, near Naples, 1944

23. Death of Lazar, Monastery of Sremska Ravanica-Vrdnik

24. Draža Mihailović statue at Ravna Gora

25. Tito statue in Užice

26. St Sava and Stefan Nemanja at Mileševa

27. Grave of Nikolai Rayevski at Gornji Adrovac

28. Concrete fists of Niš

29. Slobodan Milosević, 1997

30. Entrance to Bambiland, Požarevac

31. President Aleksandar Vučić of Serbia, 2017

32. Statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje

33. Market Street in Skopje, early 20th century

34. Painted mosque, Tetovo

35. St Jovan Kaneo, Ohrid

36. King Edward VIII and Kemal Atatürk, Istanbul, 1936

37. Serb soldiers embark in Corfu for Salonika, 1916

38. Pepper stall in Bitola

39. Treskavec Monastery

40. Katerina and Elena Tsilka with Ellen Stone shortly after their release

41. Saint Panteleimon in his monastery near Skopje

42. The bridge at Mostar

43. Santica Street, Mostar

44. The bridge over the Neretva

45. Sarajevo Town Hall

46. The Latin Bridge at Sarajevo

47. Resting place of Gavrilo Princip and fellows, Sarajevo

48. Alija Izetbegović, 1997

49. Radovan Karadžić, 1994

50. The Bridge over the Drina at Višegrad

51. The author at Bobovac

52. Coloured Mosque at Travnik

53. Museum of the 2nd AVNOJ session, Jajce

54. Milorad Dodik, Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2016

55. Vukovar water tower

56. Vukovar war cemetery

57. Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer by Meštrović, Zagreb

58. Blessed Alojzije Stepinac, c.1937

59. Hitler and Ante Pavelić listen to Goering, June 1941

60. St Mark’s Church, Zagreb

61. Grave of Franjo Tudjman, Zagreb

62. D’Annunzio’s palace, Rijeka

63. Deposition of Christ at Rab

64. Bellflowers at Rab

65. Knin Fortress

66. Franjo Tudjman

67. Split

68. Job by Meštrović

69. Marmont’s gloriette at Trogir

70. Fitzroy Maclean and partisan

71. Siege of Dubrovnik, November 1991

72. Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos, Greece

Author’s Note

I have followed Rebecca West’s journeys in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as thoroughly as I was able, but like her I have at times combined multiple trips to the same place into a single narrative and ordered the travels to help continuity. I also copied her decision to exclude Slovenia from my itinerary. In an effort to improve readability, any unattributed quotes, including those on the chapter title pages, are West’s.

Unless otherwise indicated, I have tried to use current place names throughout, as referred to in the relevant countries.

I have chosen standard Anglicisations of local words where I feel they aid comprehension or are widely accepted international standards, such as Yugoslavia or Chetnik.

Various terms are used as shorthand, so I tend to refer to Bosnia and Herzegovina as Bosnia, unless trying to make specific points about their combined nature or internal differences. I often describe Bosnian Muslims as Bosniaks; they have also been known as Turks over the years, but that would now be considered pejorative.

Kosovan means a resident of Kosovo. Kosovar and Albanian I use interchangeably in the context of the majority Kosovan population.

Given the recent history of the name change, Macedonia may appear for what is now officially North Macedonia. When I refer to Macedonian in ethnic terms, this means Macedonian Slav.

In historical sections, I often write Austrian, Austro-Hungarian and Hapsburg interchangeably, as I do Ottoman and Turk. The Sublime Porte is commonly used as a variant on the Ottoman government in Istanbul.

I have used Chetnik as shorthand for the broad grouping of royalist resistance groupings in Yugoslavia in the Second World War, also known as the Ravna Gora movement.

Various towns have changed their names over history, among them Rijeka/Fiume, Dubrovnik/Ragusa, Thessaloniki/Salonika. I have tried to pick the one that makes the most sense in context and hope not to have added confusion.

I often use The Hague as shorthand for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Serbian and Croatian are descriptives for the nationals of those countries, while Serb and Croat refer to those who claim the relevant ethnicity, especially if they live outside the relevant country’s borders, such as Croatian Serbs.

Where relevant, I have tried to render names in their most commonly accepted transliterations.

The following table should aid pronunciation in Serbo-Croat:

Somewhere far away in the world the dice had been thrown, the battles fought, and it was there that the fate of each of the townsfolk was decided.

Ivo Andrić

The Bridge over the Drina

Introduction

In 2012, I called a halt to my 32-year career and tried to picture what the rest of my life might look like. I had a comfortable middle-class upbringing – privately educated, followed by a career in finance that included long spells in both America and Asia. There was one slight area of obscurity. My mother’s family was Anglo-Saxon and my father’s Jewish, a fact that I was still unaware of in my early teens when I came home from school one day and repeated an off-colour anti-Semitic joke. My mother pulled me up sharply, telling me that it was both unfunny and unacceptable, and all the worse for my being half-Jewish.

I subsequently learned that my grandfather had Anglicised his family name of Abrahams in the 1920s, and that he and his two young sons had later converted to Catholicism, to the great distress of my still Jewish grandmother. A major cause was the prevalent anti-Semitism of the time, but its continuing undercurrents meant that my father was always reluctant to discuss his family background. Sadly, both my father and uncle died young, so now, with time on my hands, I thought that I would try to learn more about my unknown paternal family with the help of a researcher. The informative report that emerged traced each line of my father’s family back to the early 19th century. Some of my ancestors were from longstanding Anglo-Jewish families, but around half had come to England in the early parts of the 19th century from the Azov region of Russia, from Russian Poland, and much the biggest concentration from villages around Posen in Prussia (now Poznan, Poland).

For as long as I could remember in my working life, my diary had been programmed for months in advance, in 30- or 60-minute chunks. I felt that, subconsciously, I had begun to measure my worth by the number of meetings that I could achieve in a day. As I looked at the yawning gaps in my diary and felt the stirrings of inadequacy, I decided that I should tackle this conditioning head-on, while also investigating my family roots. I booked a flight to Krakow, a hotel on arrival, a hire car and a flight out of Poznan two weeks later. I thought that, armed with a guidebook and a history of Poland, I would explore at my leisure and refuse to even think about the details of my trip more than a day in advance.

I would also visit three of the ancestral villages to see what I could glean. This latter part of the trip proved a disappointment – there was no sign of a Jewish presence in the unremarkable villages. Any trace had been obliterated by the horrors of the Holocaust and the destruction of war and time. The great synagogue at Poznan, which had once seated 1,200 of the faithful, had been turned into a communal swimming pool during the war.

In other cities, there was more to see. In the cemeteries in the old Jewish quarter in Krakow, small stones were balanced on antique gravestones with pieces of paper rolled up and stuffed in their nooks and crannies in a way that spoke of ritual and an active connection to the past. As I wandered around the overgrown Jewish cemetery in Wrocław (formerly Breslau in eastern Prussia), I marvelled at the abilities and achievements of the dead buried there: professors, doctors, artists and civic leaders commemorated by monuments of real grandeur. It brought home to me the criminal stupidity of the Nazi regime in addition to its evil; not only determining to exterminate an entire race but wiping out so many of its most capable and educated citizens in the process. At Auschwitz, the scale of the horror became even more apparent. The size of the platform at Birkenau, where the trains pulled in bearing their death-bound cargoes, was such that it was hard to make out one end from the other. The remains of the rows of huts that housed the one-in-five arrivals selected for work – over instant extermination – stretched to the horizon. The ruins of the gas chambers were the size of factories. The industrial process of the slaughter was almost beyond comprehension.

Outside my personal quest, Poland was enlightening. The grand town squares of what had once been eastern Prussia were exquisite, and I was intrigued by the turbulent past of the region. In the 16th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been one of the largest countries in Europe, ruling the present-day Baltic states, Belarus and much of Ukraine. It even briefly controlled Moscow. However, the Polish heartland is a broad plain, hard to defend and sandwiched between powerful nations. Since its peak, it had suffered repeatedly as each of the Swedes, the Russians, the Prussians, the Hapsburgs and the Germans sought at different times to control or partition it. For the last 300 years, being trapped between great or would-be empires had been a very painful place to be.

I marvelled at the beauty of the historic buildings: ruined castles on hilltops, the grandness of the heart of Wrocław around its canals and the quirky architecture (to my eyes) of the old buildings in many towns. Most of all, I found myself profoundly moved by some of the churches, with their faded frescoes and ancient icons and relics. The intensity of devotion over the years, still evident today, imparted a physical energy to these spaces and instilled in me a sense of awe as I seemed to glimpse something beyond humanity. As I gazed on the image of the Black Madonna at Częstochowa, most likely a Byzantine icon from the 6th-9th century, but ascribed by some to St Luke, I felt a real sense of peace and a spiritual connection to a greater force.

On a more mundane level, travelling through Poland was a delight. There were very few other tourists, which meant that local people with whom one fell into conversation were charming and communicative. The food was mostly simple, but fresh and delicious. I enjoyed discovering dishes like sour rye soup and pierogi (Polish dumplings), and occasionally found real treats like baked goat’s cheese with rowanberry mousse. After a single attempt, I resolved never to eat carp again.

I found my mood improving and my anxiety about the future subsiding by the day. I returned home with a new sense of calm but also an intense curiosity about Eastern Europe. I had seen how rich and different its culture and history were to that of my upbringing, but also how that history shed new light for me on the received wisdom of my Anglo-centric education.

I also reflected on the spirituality that I had encountered in Poland and the moments when I had sensed a dimension beyond day-to-day planning and cultural exploration. If I were to evolve from the well-ordered life of my past, it felt necessary to explore further some of the new threads that I had relished on my recent travels. Reading more widely, I turned my compass south to the Balkans, with Rebecca West’s magnum opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, as my guide. First published in 1941, its 1,150 pages chronicled a history of ancient empire, the trials of domination by the great imperial powers over centuries and the almost Ruritanian manoeuvrings post-independence, all set against a background of a world moving inexorably towards war. I found it completely absorbing. Given the Slavic connection, much of it resonated with what I had learned in Poland, but there were some very different angles too, not to mention West’s astonishing turn of phrase.

Six months later, I set off again, this time flying into Dubrovnik with a plan to explore the mountainous highlands of Montenegro next door. I had assumed that Cetinje (the old royal capital) would be a good starting point in terms of both convenience and interesting local colour.

Little did I suspect that this tucked-away town above the Adriatic would also mark a watershed in my own personal quest. The past and present seemed to merge here in a way that made me long to know more about this tiny nation, but also its large extended family.

Serbia, like Poland, had been a great power in its time, although its peak had been in the 14th century. The Balkan peninsula sat between both the great powers and the great religions of the region. Much of its Slavic population are closely related ethnically but live on the border of East and West, divided by the schism in the Christian Church between Byzantium and Rome. In fact, Slav population migrations into the peninsula towards the end of the first millennium CE are one of the elements that helped to prompt the split by separating the two traditions geographically. Later, the rise of the Ottoman Empire added another creed to the mix.

Over time, each religion came to be associated with a great power – Catholic Austria-Hungary, Orthodox Russia and Muslim Turkey. Other outside political influences played their parts. The Venetians and Italians, and even briefly Napoleon, had interests on the Adriatic coast. Britain meddled more in the heartland, particularly from the late 19th century onwards, as it sought to balance the interests of its imperial rivals. The growth of distinct nationalisms in the 19th century and their increasing identification with specific religions created opportunities for politics of division and sowed the seeds of the tragedies of the last hundred years or more. Much of the militarisation of the broader peninsula in the early 20th century was enabled by the imperial powers, who had also set the examples that the Balkan powers sought to emulate in their own ways. The ethnically separate Muslim Albanian populations in the south added yet another layer of complexity to the whole.

Despite these divisions, the myriad religious buildings throughout the region demonstrate how closely and for how long these various faiths have cohabited. Each has its own energy. I, although a Catholic, find myself deeply moved by Orthodox frescoes. There is a power and almost savagery about the best examples that engage me in character and emotional understanding in a way that many idealised images of the Western Church do not. At the other end of the spectrum, the peace and harmony of an ancient mosque can convey an essence of pure spirituality that transcends denomination. In the atmosphere of many of the old places of worship around the region, I find something deeper imbued by the centuries of prayer and contemplation that have taken place there. The sense of competition with other faiths can add an intensity and at times a discordancy, but the spirituality rises above by and large. West’s major underlying theme was the tension between the purity and strength of tradition and religion on the one hand, and their darker aspects on the other. This seems as relevant as ever.

As I made my initial foray into inland Montenegro, I was again charmed by the friendliness of the people, the absence of foreign tourists, the fresh local food and the variety of landscapes. I wanted to travel further and understand better the turns of history, not least as West’s account finishes on the brink of the Second World War. I could still see much of the charm that she had described, but the ravages of that conflict, the Tito years and their bloody aftermath have since left strong footprints. I read several exceptionally interesting and well-written histories of the region and its constituent parts, but they failed to convey to me the beauty or delight of travelling in this relatively underexplored region.

I resolved to retrace West’s travels to see what remained and what had changed in the 80-year interlude. The ancient traditions of the region are evident from her writing, and she brings humanity to the protagonists of her narrative, whether 14th-century monarchs, 19th-century prelates or the people whom she met along her way. As I acquired more knowledge of my own, I found myself disagreeing with her views on some key figures (most notably the regent Prince Paul, whose attempts to protect his country in the early stages of the Second World War she viewed through the blinkered eyes of one on the receiving end of the Blitz). She did, however, always add interest and often humour. She was captivated by the romance of Serbia’s Nemanjić dynasty in the Middle Ages and the legend surrounding the death of its successor, Prince Lazar. She celebrated the second coming as the royal families of Montenegro and Serbia re-established their countries’ independence from the Ottomans in the 19th century. In the process, she forgave certain nationalistic behaviours that we ourselves, with decades more history under our belts, would struggle to overlook, especially as their calamitous reverberations became more apparent.

I also loved West’s fascination with the deeper roots of history; she could divert into the romance of Illyria, the destructive nature of the Roman Empire or the appeal of Manichaeism, sending me off on quests for knowledge that I have tried to ration sensibly in this book. I read a couple of her novels, which I enjoyed, but she seemed to have invested herself in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in a different way. After a while, I would try to anticipate West’s take on a particular subject only to be left surprised, not least with her ability to define an emotion or a scene with breath-taking acuity. If I were to continue travelling alone, she would be the great companion that, given the extent of her literary friendships she must have been in real life. Indeed, along my journey, I found myself at times falling into conversation with her, often in agreement, but also pointing out things that she had missed or mistaken.

I hope that, in the process, I have managed to update the history that she told and anchored it in the landscape that now exists, while also giving some sense of the joys and occasional difficulties of travelling there. There are some startlingly beautiful parts of the former Yugoslavia: the Dalmatian coast, the great religious treasures of southern Serbia, Kosovo and North Macedonia, the Turkish bridges, the wild mountains. But the scars of history are visible too: the tumbledown streets where no one has lived for decades, countless memorials and encounters with people whose lives have been almost impossibly hard. It is still difficult to believe that countries that have shared so much of Europe’s history over the centuries could have seen such shocking violence in the 1990s, a decade when so much of the continent’s east was tracking more positively. Although more recent events in Ukraine suggest it may not have been quite the anomaly that one had hoped.

The series of wars that were fought as Yugoslavia disintegrated after Tito’s death were unimaginable to most of the world. The confusion between the institutions of Yugoslavia and those of its constituent states meant that the world failed to condemn an aggression masquerading as an attempt to preserve the status quo. President Milošević of Serbia claimed to be a peacekeeper as he sought to establish a Serbian territory that extended not only beyond his country’s existing borders but beyond even those that the broader Serb population of the Balkans inhabited. As he launched repeated offensives in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, he and his henchmen frequently laid claim to the historical mantle that West had so admired.

In following West’s route, I would visit many locations where I would learn more of recent history, but I expanded my itinerary to include others that would fill in obvious gaps, and one or two with particular cultural appeal. I wanted to understand better how West’s version of these lands had unfolded in the late 20th-century. I also hoped to get a sense of whether peace could persist.

In a 1941 letter to American journalist Alexander Woollcott, West wrote:

Why should I be moved in 1936 to devote the following 5 years of my life, at great financial sacrifice and to the utter exhaustion of my mind and body, to take an inventory of a country down to its last vest-button, in a form insane from any ordinary artistic or commercial point of view – a country which ceases to exist?

There are moments when I have wondered something similar. Why did I decide to visit every identifiable destination in West’s book, creating an inventory of my own in the process? All I know is that, once I had started, it gained a momentum of its own. I think that the contrast between the observations of another age and those of a contemporary eye can add a perspective not just historical, but also human, aesthetic and at times spiritual. This is not a history book, although it contains much history. It is a personal journey, and I have inevitably dwelt longest on those aspects of the journey that interested or appealed to me most. Where I have expressed opinions about events or individuals, they are just that, and they are my own. Nonetheless, I hope that in the pages that follow, I can deliver an inadequate appendix of sorts to Rebecca West’s magnificent original, as well as an accessible introduction to an area whose natural appeal to travellers has been tarnished by recent history.

Montenegro

"Though it was airy as Heaven, …

it was stony like a cell …"

Flying into Dubrovnik, it seemed incongruous to be going in search of relics of the past when so many of my fellow passengers appeared to be embarking on a drink-fuelled tour of the southern Croatian coast. Thirty or so men wore matching red polo shirts emblazoned with Slỉpperў Gîpsÿ, Síçk Nötè and the like. As the flight progressed and cans were cracked, the noise grew ever louder, and apparently random phrases bounced around the cabin eliciting guffaws and shouts of acclamation with each repetition. Even the middle-aged couple beside me managed to consume a gin and tonic and two small bottles of red wine apiece before we landed at 10:30 am. It seemed that I was on an entirely different mission to the rest of the plane.

Exiting the airport, most traffic turned right to Dubrovnik, while I turned south to drive down a typically Mediterranean coastal road with brilliant blue sea on the right, the shore studded with white-walled, red-tiled villages and stone churches basking in the sun. The land rose steeply to the left, initially to the mountains of Herzegovina, and before long to those of Montenegro. Already a sense emerged of one of the many divides of the former Yugoslavia (literally, land of the southern Slavs). The coastal belt of Dalmatia (the Illyria of ancestry) is part of the wider Mediterranean world, looking out towards Italy over the Adriatic Sea, with a history of occupation by the Venetians, Napoleon, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Mussolini and others. Meanwhile, in the mountains to the left, occupation had never been effective. The Ottomans had nominal control for a few centuries, but the Montenegrins had long had a reputation for independence and warlike behaviour. Their rulers had been adept at using this reputation to play great powers against each other and so preserve a high degree of self-determination.

Before long, the landscape opened up on the approach to the Bay of Kotor, shaped like an over-enthusiastically pinned butterfly. The twin islets of the Monastery of St George and the Church of Our Lady of the Rocks floated far out in the water like mirages. Time paused.

At the furthest corner of the bay is Kotor. High on the town wall was the winged lion of St Mark, signalling the earlier presence of the Venetians. Wandering through the alleys and handkerchief-wide squares, this was still a world familiar to anyone who has been to Greece or Italy for a summer holiday. In the growing warmth of spring, the cool of the shade was welcome. In winter, Kotor has a reputation for bitter coldness, sitting as it does in the grey stone shadow of the mountain that was my destination.

Each of the twenty-five hairpin bends on the way up had been numbered by hand in paint, and with every about-turn the view broadened again. At the top, I looked out over the bay and the tree-covered coast beyond to a deep blue sea dissolving into the marginally paler blue of the sky at the horizon. It might have been the end of the world. Behind me, a much bleaker landscape awaited. Limestone ridges unevenly patched with scrubby vegetation undulated as far as the eye could see. I understood now why the Ottomans would have struggled to subdue the country, and questioned why they had even bothered, other than for the sake of completism. Occasionally, a cluster of red roofs stood out. The road passed through the small settlement of Njeguši, the ancestral village of the Petrović dynasty who dominated Montenegrin history for so long. Boards by farmhouses and cottages advertised homemade smoked ham, cheese, wine and mead in a variety of unlikely spellings.

Cetinje

At last, cresting yet another ridge, appeared Cetinje, the old capital of Montenegro, lying in a shallow green bowl. Rebecca West described the solid stone architecture of the buildings as puritanical, but on a sunny day in May there was much greater variation. It is a curious mixture of the humdrum, the rustically picturesque and the grand. The town square and tree-lined streets were full of umbrellas from competing cafes, many of the old houses were painted in pastel shades, and at odd intervals architectural curiosities held my gaze. They were evidence of the age of Nikola I, father-in-law of Europe, who reigned here from 1860 until his forced departure to France during the First World War. Here, the great powers built embassies in their own national styles: the British red stucco cottage with white pilasters and windows that would look more at home in an Edwardian Channel resort; the Russian red baroque palace; the grand classical style of the Italian; the almost Art Deco French offering with mosaic-like bands of decorative tiles. The Turkish embassy was a long, low, acid-green bunkhouse with tightly boarded ground-floor windows, now the state school of drama. Grandest of all was the white Austro-Hungarian edifice with tiled roof, stone facings and chapel attached. All the key players in the late 19th century imperial waltz had a base in this small mountainous enclave.

Nikola was the last ruler from the line of prince-bishops (or vladikas) of Montenegro and the country’s only king. As Orthodox bishops were enjoined to celibacy, the title had moved down from uncle to nephew over the generations until Nikola’s uncle Danilo had renounced the episcopal role to facilitate his marriage and introduced a more traditional hereditary system for the secular aspect of his rule. Much of the early part of Nikola’s reign was spent fending off the Ottoman Empire with sporadic support from each of Austria-Hungary, France, Britain and especially Russia. In 1876, Montenegro and Serbia led simultaneous attacks on their much-weakened adversary, and the Montenegrin successes (which continued long after the Serbs had been forced to agree a settlement) led to a doubling of the size of their territory and the gain of the key towns of Nikšić and Podgorica. They also finally gained access to the Adriatic at Bar, although the great powers restricted its use for any martial purposes in order to allay their fears of Russian encroachment. The secret of their remarkable success was ascribed by Stillman of The Times thus: The generalship on both sides is bad, but on that of the Turks atrocious. Montenegrin troops were also notoriously bloodthirsty.

Montenegro was a cause célèbre in the great cities of Europe. We hear in casual Muscovite conversation in Anna Karenina that the Montenegrins are born fighters. It was the subject of a speech and article by Gladstone and a sonnet by Tennyson:

Great Tsernogora! never since thine own

Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm

Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.

Montenegro was also the model for Pontevedro in Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, which opened in Vienna in 1905 and quickly became popular, despite Montenegrin protests at being lampooned. The first Italian performance in Trieste in 1907, conducted by Lehár himself, had to be halted for a quarter of an hour while fifty-odd members of the audience were removed for protesting that Italians should not offend Montenegro when their royal families were related.

Even F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea. The Great Gatsby shows off his Orderi di Danilo, ostensibly bestowed on him by Nicolas Rex for gallantry in the First World War, although the obscure nature of the decoration was presumably designed to cast doubt on Gatsby’s professed life story.

Nikola was a remarkably skilful matchmaker. Four of his daughters were educated in Russia, two marrying grand dukes. These two, spiritually inclined, became close to the tsarina and are believed to have introduced Rasputin to her. Their husbands both had important military posts and were leading figures in the pro-war camp in the run-up to 1914. Another sister married Peter Karadjordjević, subsequently King Peter l of Serbia, although he was widowed by the time of his accession. Grandest of all was the marriage of Nikola’s fifth daughter, Elena, to Victor Emmanuel of Italy, over whom she towered; in pictures he would stand while she sat in an attempt to obscure the difference in height. In order to overcome the difficulty of conversion to Catholicism for a bride from a staunchly Orthodox country, she was welcomed into the Catholic Church in a ceremony on board the boat taking her from Bar to Bari.

Nikola’s sixth daughter, Anna, married Franz Joseph of Battenberg, a cousin of Queen Victoria twice over by marriage. The queen appears to have found Nikola engaging company on his two visits to Windsor Castle and admired his national dress. He was clearly shrewd and educated but inclined to hide it behind a buffoonish exterior. He needed all his guile to rule over a country riven by blood feuds. Tito’s Montenegrin commander, Milovan Djilas, told of the killings of his great-grandfather, both grandfathers, father, uncle and both brothers over the generations as though a dread curse lay upon them … The inherited fear and hatred of feuding clans was mightier than fear and hatred of the enemy, the Turks. It seems to me that I was born with blood on my eyes.

Nikola showed skill at using his countrymen’s naturally warlike nature to Montenegro’s – but especially his own – advantage. Relatively early in his reign, he was believed to have sold Russian wheat sent for famine relief to his starving people for personal gain. In the First Balkan War, he besieged the Albanian city of Scutari (now Shkodër), finally taking it with more difficulty than he had expected after a likely bribe to the Ottoman commander whose position had become hopeless. Nikola then withdrew his troops in the wake of protests from the great powers who felt that the balance of peace had been endangered, but only once he had secured a large foreign loan. He is also believed to have positioned aggressively on stock markets in order to profit from his imminent retreat. He had hoped to use his military successes to emerge as king of the south Slavs, but the First World War put a stop to that. He had already lost popularity given the inadequacy of his heir and his country’s strained finances after so many years of war. The contrast between Nikola’s unpopular surrender to Austria-Hungary in early 1916, nine days after the Austrians had attacked with Bosnian Muslim support, and the heroic withdrawal of his son-in-law, Peter of Serbia, over the mountains meant that there was only one realistic candidate in 1918 for the royal role. Recognising Nikola’s self-serving behaviour, West commented on the irony that he was nonetheless noble and romantic in appearance, and looked like the genial father of his people, postcards depicting him with his stately Queen on his arm, walking like Jupiter and Juno through the garlanded streets. He died in exile clutching a Montenegrin stone that he had carried with him as he fled the Austrians. His son, Danilo, a chip off the old block, busied himself in exile by selling off his Montenegrin real estate, as well as some state forests, to buyers from the invading power.

Nikola and his queen, Milena, were eventually reburied in the small Court Church on the ruins of the original monastery site in Cetinje when their remains returned from Italy in 1989. The ceremony was attended by a quarter of Montenegro’s population, now free to express nationalist feeling again in a more federally strained world, although not sufficiently enthused to sway elections the next year, when the Communist Party retained power with ease. A good array of regal postcards is still for sale at the Royal Mausoleum.

My quarters in Cetinje were not regal. The Hotel Grand was a Soviet-style reconstruction of an earlier hotel, badly damaged in the 1979 earthquake. The brutalist concrete exterior led to a gloomy reception area, from where I was indicated to the stairs. The stairwell was a vicious chemical yellow giving way to a series of long corridors of dark wood, down one of which I found my room. There was some compensation for the absence of hot water in the delicious Njeguški kebab that I found at a nearby restaurant, four enormous pieces of pork wrapped around smoked ham and cheese in a sensory overload of texture, smell and taste. I somehow finished it in a feeble attempt to establish my mountain credentials.

In the morning, I skirted the main town towards the monastery. It came into view across a meadow golden with buttercups and surrounded by trees full of early spring freshness. The imposing stone building ascended the base of the hill, with sturdy colonnades on each side flanking a central tower. An elaborately framed gold icon glinted from an archway high to the left. The monastery originally dates from the 15th century but was rebuilt several times as a result of the ravages of fire and war before the basis of the current building was erected in 1786.

The main gate, surmounted by a fresco of Christ and two angels, guarded a flight of stone stairs into a small sunlit courtyard. A stocky figure in a white T-shirt and jeans directed me to the chapel on one side and the shop on the other. The chapel walls were arrayed with a variety of icons and religious images of varying ages and charm. The gold-painted iconostasis, shielding the inner sanctum from the laity, soared above, displaying painted rows of saints and the blessed – examples to aspire to, carriers of one’s prayers to the Almighty and possibly witnesses to one’s conduct. High up, a painted crucifix of Christ was flanked by two sea serpents, representing both wisdom and evil (as personified by the snake in the Garden of Eden).

I looked around for the jewelled golden casket that contained the mummified right hand of St John the Baptist and a shard of the True Cross. I could see no sign of it, but my attention was piqued by a relatively modern wooden sarcophagus standing by the wall in the window. I resumed my study of the screen. A few minutes passed and a young monk walked in dressed in black robes, a ponytail emerging from his woollen monastic cap. He was followed by a small devout party. Walking straight to the sarcophagus, he opened it to reveal a glass cover beneath. Each of his group walked up to the box in turn, crossed themselves (right to left in the Orthodox way), gazed at the glass in deep reverence and kissed the surface at three different points. I joined the end of the line, and when my turn came, there in a jewelled container was a shrunken brown hand with the index and middle fingers extended. Beside it was a small, jewelled cross whose glass core revealed a sliver of wood. Both sat at the feet of a figure draped in gold cloth. Another mummified hand protruded from the sleeve of the left arm that lay across his chest. The monk informed me that this was St Petar of Cetinje. I looked reverently at each and kissed the glass accordingly. The idea that I might be looking at the hand of the Forerunner, the hand that had baptised Christ, and a piece of the cross on which Jesus had died struck a deep elemental note. I stood in contemplation for some time. It was only later that I reflected on the curious conjunction of the relics. St Petar, the most revered of the prince-bishops, had undoubtedly achieved much for his people; but he was also a fearsome leader of his troops in battle, who fell on their enemy like wolves on a white flock according to one contemporary traveller.

As I left the chapel, the monk described to me the travels of the hand of the Baptist over the years. It had been part of the treasures of the imperial court of Constantinople but was given to the Knights of Malta by Sultan Bayezid II when they were still based in Rhodes. It was moved to Russia in 1799 due to perceived threats to its safety from Napoleon, as Tsar Paul l was then Grand Master of the Order of Malta.