Serbia In The Early 1900s

BACK in August I highly praised Edith Durham's High Albania, a riveting account of her travels in Albania in 1908.

It prompted me to hunt down a copy of her earlier major work, Through The Lands Of The Serb, which has proved an equally entertaining read.

A reprint by Forgotten Books, which includes the author's revealing pencil sketches - the sort of illustration often omitted in reprints

Edith - she preferred her middle name over her first name, Mary - travelled through free Serbia and across the border into Turkish-occupied lands at a time when the Ottoman Empire was very much the sick man of Europe, albeit a sick man nursed by Britain and other powers opposed to Russian expansion.

She does not try to hide on which side of the fence her sympathies lie.

"I was brought up to consider the Turk a virtuous and much-injured individual," she writes, adding: "Now I never cross his frontier without hoping soon to be able to witness his departure from Europe."

Her adventures are not as life-threatening, perhaps, as her later journey through Albanian lands, but they still offer a fascinating first-hand and close-up account of a largely vanished world, albeit one whose heirs seem never all that far from strife today.