PICTURESQUE WOMEN OF ALBANIA

Hokitika Guardian, 13 June 1927, Page 1

PICTURESQUE WOMEN OF ALBANIA

(J. M. X. JEFFRIES, for the London “ Daily Mail ”.)

TIRANA (Albania), April 20,

I have said that material progress has laid its hand upon Albania tit last. This applies particularly to the towns : tlie country has so far been left much

as it wtts. More is being done in Tirana than anywhere else. Tirana is, or was, little more than a large Moslem village in the middle of the country, about 25 miles from the sea at Durazzo. At Durazzo itself preparations for progress is being made: it is a place of dust, ruts, novels, and melancholy. Tirana, where is the modest residence of the President of the Republic of Albania, is an open, rather straggling place, gathered round several painted mosques. Its few older roads are hut miry lanes, hut a number ol new ones are being pierced with a certain amount of despatch, broad and well-planned. They are made arteiPeter the Great's style. Where the required road passes through a standing house, half or a quarter or as much of the house as is mathematically necessary for the passage of the road is cut neatly away and the rest left standing. The newest of the new roads contains a fresh hotel named the “ Bar Palace,” and not far away are the offices of two avokale or lawyers, and a Patisserie Parisienne. Round the corner are the signs of dambthars, or dentists, and groceries arc making their appearance. Tirana has a reputedly powerful wireless station also, which communicates with Brindisi, and a small paper is being produced by Albania’s first journalist. M. f'hekrezi. So, after its long isolation. Albania is beginning to go the way of the world. The artist would do well to visit Albania now. before uniformity is achieved. Never in Europe have 1 known such an emblazoned scene as upon, say, the market-dav at Scutari. Indeed. it may compare with some of the most celebrated samples ol the picturesque outside our continent. 1( has not the dark, well-like mystery of the deep, declining streets ol Fez, nor can if show the blown robes and the .Eastern errantry of Damascus. But there is an open beauty about it without compare. It is as il a sower had come and scattered, and in the tree places the human grain had come to flower. Like flowers truly are the winding rows and clumps as irregularly as wild flowers break, vending the cloths and laces and tissues they and their mothers have spun and woven , and embroidered. As you pass them in the countryside you will see that they are never idle ; striding along erect or bout beneath some burden upon their shoulders, yet they are for ever spinning as they walk. A skem is in one hand or both, and they go endlessly winding or turning after the manner of their craft. And here below Scutari Castle they spread their goods, than which they themselves are perchance, more wonderful. Some of them arc in scarlet and some in yellow or snatches oi both, and many in white with variegated embroideries. Some are in black, the women of the Shoshi, unrelieved black, lint with their skirts standing out stiff and turning upwards, so that their rough wooden leg-coverings and sandals they look like so many Mongolians. Here and there a woman customer in full dress walks amid thorn, though they are generally so close tliaL you must push vour way. Necklaces of gold coins swing upon her breast and heavy earrings from her ears; she is perhaps a recent bride. Here and there, too. are Moslem women, closely veiled, with lint one long slit to see by, so narrow and so regularly horizontal that it. is like the slits in the conning-towers ot warships. Rut most arc Christian, and some near their black hair in wiki short tufts, thrust through either .side of the kerchief which they wear over their heads. Resides these are others, women and moil, inconceivably shaggy and tattered, with hits of sacking and fragments of old cord flopping about ilieni. 111 the garments of utter destitution, more pagodas of rags. All move and intermingle and jostle without thought, bending over the cloths or the squares of leather the tanners and leaves ot tobacco the carers alike spread upon the ground. The last remnants of old ruliher tyres are there, to he made into sandals, and provender in the folds of women’s skirts or in vivid rough hags. It is a sight without a parallel, and 1 think that the hand of a true paintei* who came to paint it might shake as ho saw it, shake with the fear that it might suddenly tremble and pass from his sight, and join nil the beauty nnci that squalor which ended in the Western lands when the clouded sunset of the Middle Ages waned away. There is still time for the painter, but 110 must hasten.