Back in the Balkans Again

We are all safely back in the Balkans; there is a traditional song about returning here;

"Oh we're back in the Balkans again,
Back to the joy and the pain–
What if it burns or it blows or it snows?
We're back to the Balkans again.
Back, where to-morrow the quick may be dead,
With a hole in his heart or a ball in his head–
Back, where the passions are rapid and red–
Oh, we're back to the Balkans again! "
SONG OF THE BALKAN PENINSULA.

This somehow says a lot about how I feel about this topsy-turvy part of the world. I always want to break out in song and sing it as we land at Prishtina airport...I imagine travellers of old in their horse-drawn carts singing this as they rattled and rolled up one of the many precarious, bandit ridden mountain passes going up ever deeper into High Albania and beyond, deeper into this troubled land.

This song is taken from the preface of a book written by an extraordinary woman who is famous in these parts but little known in her native England - Edith Durham - here she has streets named after her. Shortly after the start of the 20th century, already in her 50's and seeking adventure and escape from polite English society she set off to the Albanian lands. She stayed for some years and wrote "High Albania" - the whole book is fascinating and fully readable online at:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/durham/albania/albania.html

I recommend, if you have time, to at least read chapter one for a feel of where she travelled; a woman alone in a dangerous land. Eventually her knowledge on this part of the world came to be valued and she was called upon by the Foreign Office for advice when the Otterman empire disolved and the Balkan wars started. She was always a champion of the Albanian cause at a time when few others in western Europe understood the area; alas much of her advice seems to have been ignored, Albanian lands were divided and shared amongst the various neighbouring allies of the Great Powers and now we have the trouble we have today. The consequenses of these ill-advised foreign policy decisions still reverberate here one-hundred years later, a lesson today's politicians would do well to note.