Jan and Cora Gordon

  In their book about their 1925 journey, Two Vagabonds in Albania, Jan and Cora Gordon were a little dismissive of what was then known as Durazzo, today Durrës.  They wrote, 'Don’t stay in Durazzo. There's nothing to stop for in Durazzo unless you want to sketch the old walls that the Venetians made and which have been a bit tumbled about since by miscellaneous earthquakes.' They described how 'the mountaineers during the last revolution themselves expressed their opinion of their lowland compatriots. On marching into Durazzo one of their first actions was to go to the school and make an auto-da-fé of the lesson books. "If this is what education makes of the sons of the Eagle," they said, "down with Education." Durrës is actually an interesting place to visit these days. The Venetian walls and tower are still there, but there is also now a Roman amphitheatre discovered by chance in 1966 and a variety of monuments reflecting the communist period and ...

 Having just travelled through Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia, I revisited the article published by Jan Gordon in the magazine Land and Water, December 23, 1915. It helps greatly to have seen the terrain. Jan Gordon's map of the area discussed in the article. During the past week, I visited the Ochrida, to Elbasan to Tirana to Durazzo and the Pristina, to Prizrend to Tirana areas shown. My copy (shown above) is not good quality, so I have transcribed the text below. 'WE spent most of the night of the 30th of October on the roof of a Serbian train, the other half in a telegraph office at Kralievo, which lies to the north of Nish, lulled by the sonorous sleep of two French surgeon-majors who were using the large table as a four-poster bed. In the station trains were being shunted almost continuously, and in the few intervals of silence one could hear the faint boom of the distant cannon. With the dawn of the next day the Serbian Headquarter Staff left Kralievo for Rashka. Ni...