Jan and Cora Gordon

Pogradec and St Naum on the shores of Lake Ohrid, Albania at left and North Macedonia at right Pogradec in a view towards North Macedonia in the present Jan and Cora Gordon visited Pogradec on the shores of Lake Ohrid on their 1925 journey. Jan had this comment to make: 'P ogradec lies at the ultimate corner of Albania, where it abuts on to the fine mountain lake of Ochrida, and it has the sorry pleasure of being able to gnash its teeth at the sight of the shining monastery of St. Naum a few miles away across the water: a pretty pearl of an orthodox monastery torn from the weak Albanian clutch by the mightier power of the Serb. We do not wish to enter here into the rights and wrongs of the case, but it appeared to us that if only the poor old saint and his monastery had been in question he might have belonged to Albania and very little would have been disputed over him, but the rumour was current that a more modern saint, St. Petroleus, lay also probably buried in his vicinity, and...

In their book, Two Vagabonds in Albania, Jan and Cora Gordon described (from pg. 182) their 1925 visit to Berat. First appearances were not encouraging. 'THE hotel in Berat was the crudest we had yet encountered. The ground floor was compounded of a dark drinking den, heavily arched and unlit passages with earthen floors, and a reeking stable without windows. Upstairs we found it like the hahn at Elbasan, but dirtier - a huge barn with three or four little lath-and-plaster bedrooms huddled at one end. The rest was empty, echoing space, the floor of very uneven plank with holes worn through here and there. In it half a dozen soldiers had set up their beds and were always to be found asleep or half undressed; they never wholly undressed. As the only lavatory accommodation was at the extreme corner of this impromptu barrack-room, and was, moreover, a very semi-private kind of erection, this experience was one that Jo would rather have forgone.' 'In our bedroom also we lacked m...

In their book, Two Vagabonds in Albania, Jan and Cora Gordon described their progress from Tirana to Elbasan in 1925. 'UP, up, up the Krabe Pass we went slowly, labouringly, until midday, with the sun glowering into our eyes and the heat beating on our fore-heads, so that we were content to sink our heads and let the jogging hours pass by of themselves.' 'Well, you must be confirmed scenery-mongers if you want to stop and enjoy the beautiful in a bake-house oven. Yet once or twice we did halt and gasped out a few suspirations of desiccated appreciation. At sunset, very thirsty, we came down into Elbasan. Behind us old Mislim Haxji of Rodamir still plodded rhythmically along on his soft shoes as though the broiling march of eleven hours over the Krabe Pass had been little to his seventy odd years.' 'At first view Elbasan was one of those crouching towns. A low screen of trees was sufficient to hide quite from view all except the two white minarets which had survived ...

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 it...

 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...