Peaks of Shala by Rose Wilder Lane - HTML preview

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Rexh—pronounced Redge.

[2] Gogoli—bewitched by a demon of the mountains; insane.

[3] Pronounced as Thaythee—th as in truth.

[4] Mountaineers.

[5] The great city.

[6] This story was told me in upper Thethis in the spring of 1921. In the summer of 1922 I visited the Mati, accompanied by Annette Marquis and Rrok Perolli. The Mati is a fertile high plateau defended by an unbroken ring of almost impassable mountains. It has never been conquered by foreign armies, though assailed by Romans, Turks, and Serbs; through 1920 and 1921 the men of Mati successfully defended their lands with their rifles against Serbian artillery. The present Prime Minister of the Albanian republic, Ahmet Bey Mati (or Ahmet Zogu, as he endeavors to persuade the people to call him, since the abolition of titles in Albania) is chief of the family which has ruled the Mati since Albania’s quarter century of freedom under Scanderbeg, in the fifteenth century.

We were the first foreigners who had ever entered the Mati. We found the country, the people, and the customs quite different from those of the Dukaghini tribes described in this book, excepting only the unvarying Albanian hospitality. We visited the Bulqis, very terribly devastated by the invading Serbs in 1920 and 1921, and partly circled the city of Dibra, taken from Albania by the 1913 frontier line as a knife takes out the eye of a potato. The Albanian frontier commission of the League of Nations was at that time sitting in Scutari, and I regret that commissions do not sometimes travel along the frontiers they have made.

As to the story of Lec i Madhe, we drank the delicious waters of the many strangely flavored springs of Bulqis, and we lunched in the “place where the great rocks are standing in rows.” These stones resemble those of Carnac and Stonehenge, though on a much smaller scale, and they may be relics of peoples who lived here prior to the arrival of the Albanians, or they may be a curious accident of geological formation.

On the site of the city Emadhija we found traces which seemed to us undeniably left by the work of human hands. They lie at the head of a valley in a flat triangular space formed by meeting mountain chains, one day’s journey from Kruja, the magnificent fifteenth-century fortress built by Scanderbeg. One side of this triangular space is the bed of a small stream, flowing against the base of the mountains; on the opposite side, a stone conduit brings water from a spring several miles distant to a fountain from which the village people still draw their drinking water. The present village is on the mountain side above the site of the city. The villagers say that the conduit was built by Filip the Second.

Of Emadhija itself nothing remains but a city pattern drawn on the sterile level land by lines of stones. These lines are fairly regular, four to six feet in width and two to three feet high; they form squares and oblongs, arranged in curving rows, like plans of houses and courtyards following winding streets. The stones, though much weathered and broken, are in general rough cubes, and they are black, while the stones of the river bed are white and gray limestone. Unfortunately, none of our party had any archæological knowledge, but our untrained observations convinced us that a city had undoubtedly existed there at some time long past, and we believed that we saw the tops of walls which had been buried by centuries of erosion from the adjacent mountains. The villagers of that part of the Mati speak of the place indifferently as “the ancient city Emadhija,” and “the birthplace of Lec i Madhe.”