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Updated: June 2, 2025
The Montenegrin loves money it is his curse, or rather the curse of every country on the brink of civilisation but he also loves to play the gentleman, who hates sordid money transactions. He will often make you a present and afterwards send in an extortionate bill. But, usually, you make him a monetary present at once, which he takes with thanks, at your own price.
There used to be a deep indentation in a stone of the bridge parapet during our stay in the country it has been plastered up which credulous Montenegrins relate to be the cut of a Turkish horseman pursuing a fleeing Montenegrin. The story goes that the Turk severed the Montenegrin's head from his body, and so violent was the stroke that he cut into the stone wall as well.
My disguised Montenegrin guide who was pledged to hand me over safe and sound to Voyvoda Lakitch at Andrijevitza signalled to me in great anxiety. Each day he remained on Turkish territory he risked detection and the loss of his life. I returned therefore to the Patriarchia, recovered my passport from the Pasha and was given by him a mounted gendarme to ride with me as far as Berani.
There the Romany was held in high regard, because of the help his own father had given to the Montenegrin people, fighting for their independence, by admirable weapons of Gipsy workmanship, setting all the Gipsies in that part of the Balkans at work to supply them. This was the song he sang
The Montenegrins rushed to the fray with wild enthusiasm and on the high ground between Rijeka and Podgoritza won the battle called "The Field of the Sultan's Felling," such was the number of Turks who, entangled in the thorn bushes, were slaughtered wholesale, as the Montenegrin driver recounts to this day when he passes the spot.
We had selected the island of Vranjina for our headquarters, known in history as the site of a famous treaty signed there between the Montenegrins and Venetians in the first half of the fifteenth century. It lies at the north or Montenegrin end of the lake.
No Montenegrin would venture into the Turkish territory with the certainty of incurring decapitation, if not in my company, at any rate on his return without me; so, on consultation with the sirdar in command at Danilograd, I sent back to Cettinje the horses we had come with, and hired those of a rayah of Podgoritza who had come to market at Danilograd, intending to go to Podgoritza, where we should hire other horses to Plamnitza, on the lake shore, whence we could proceed by water to Scutari.
My arrival was a thunderbolt, both for the Patriarchia and the Turkish authorities, who had forbidden the entry of strangers into the district and closed the main routes to it, but had never imagined any one would be so crazy as to drop in over the Montenegrin frontier by way of Rugova. The whole district was under military occupation.
The straggling fire of the early twilight stopped, and there was an unbroken silence and immobility which lasted perhaps twenty minutes, and until everything had become vague and indefinable in the deepening twilight, when we heard the signal, given by a trumpet call, and instantly the steep sides of the two ridges were crawling with gray shadows, and a terrific fire burst out from the redoubts at the top, lasting for hardly ten minutes, when it as suddenly ceased; and then, after a brief pause, the Montenegrin trumpet sounded from the summit of their ridge to tell that the work was done.
Lithe, active, and athletic men, none of whom fear death, and guarded by four warders in the loosest possible fashion, yet they never attempt a dash for freedom up the rocky slope which reaches down to their very promenade ground. Flight would entail their escaping from their country altogether, never to return, and that no Montenegrin has ever been known to do.
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