Edith Durham
The Struggle for Scutari
(Turk, Slav, and Albanian)
New Edition. Edited and introduced by Robert Elsie
Albanian Studies, Vol. 22
ISBN 978-1517209506
Centre for Albanian Studies, London 2015
249 pp.
“The Struggle for Scutari,” originally published in 1914, was the fourth book of the English
traveller and writer Edith Durham (1863-1944). She had already made a name for herself
with “Through the Lands of the Serb”
(1904), “The Burden of the Balkans” (1905)
and especially “High Albania” (1909).
This book is perhaps Durham’s most
ambitious piece of writing. It is the fruit
of her longest stay in the Balkans
(mostly in Montenegro and Albania) –
three and a half years from April 1910 to
September 1913. “The Struggle for
Scutari” deals with the border conflict,
and then with the bloody war waged by
the tiny Kingdom of Montenegro under
King Nikola upon a crumbling Ottoman
Empire, of which Albania was still a
part. Caught in the middle of the
conflict, between a rock and a hard
place, were the Albanian highland
tribes that Edith Durham knew and
loved.
“The Struggle for Scutari” is not only a
reliable source of history for the period
between 1910 and 1913, based as it is on first-hand experience, but also facilitates an
understanding of events in the Balkans up to this very day.
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