BOSNIA AND THE HERZEGÓVINA.

As the train from Vienna descends into the valley of the Drave a change becomes perceptible in the scattered cottages and hamlets that fly past us. The dark wooden chalets of the Semmering valleys, that recall Salzburg and Tyrol and more distant Scandinavia, give place to meaner huts, less roomy, lower, paler, more rectangular. Rich maroon-brown beams that seem to have grown up with the pines around, dark projecting eaves that overhang the time-stained fronts as the shadowy fir-branches the primeval trunks—all these give place to wattle and daub and chilling whitewash. The eaves are now less prominent; but if the houses are comparatively browless, there is a pair of window eyelets under the trilateral gable, and their physiognomy is recognised at once. These are the huts you have seen far away on the Sclavonic outskirts of Hungary. You have seen them dotted about Bohemia and the sandy plains of Prussia; you have seen them magnified and embellished into the old palaces of Prague. As we approach Marburg we are entering in truth on another world—a Sclavonic tongue begins to be heard around. Those mountain-chalets were the high water mark of the Germanic sea.

For the tide has turned. Marburg, a few years ago reckoned a German town, is now almost entirely Slovenized. The tradesmen—nay, the well-to-do classes themselves—speak Slovene in preference to German. A fellow-traveller told me that since the Austro-Prussian war Slovene instead of German had become the language of the schools. Cut off from her German aspirations, the Austrian Government has seen the necessity of making friends with the Sclavonic Mammon; and, as she distrusts those members of the race who, like the Czechs and Croats, cherish memories of independent kingship, her statesmen have cast about them for a Sclavonic race free from any misguiding ‘Kronen-tradition,’ and have consequently been exalting the horn of the Slovenes, who inhabit Southern Styria and parts of Carinthia and Carniola, at the expense of the Germans of the towns, and partly even of the Carniolan Wends, whose language is akin to the Slovene. The painful impression produced by this turn of the tables on the Germans—who look on Austria as a mere warming-pan for themselves in Eastern Europe—is amusingly betrayed by a recent Prussian traveller, Maurer, who visited Marburg in 1870. ‘Another ten years,’ says he, ‘and Marburg will be as Slovenish as its immediate surroundings.... It was extremely painful to me (äusserst peinlich) to see the children at Steinbrück going to or coming from school with books in which the text and objects were Slovene; although these little ones, even the smallest of them, had our language at their fingers’-end so completely that they seemed never to have spoken any other.... We must not spare ourselves the realisation of the bitter truth that the greater part of Styria and Carinthia, and the whole of Carniola, Gorizia, Gradisca, and Istria, with the avenue to the Adriatic, are lost to us. Even supposing the whole of Southern Germany to have been fused with Northern, and the German element in Austria either under compulsion or of its free will to have followed the already torn away Bohemia and Moravia’—(the Berliner looks on the annexation of the Czech kingdom as a mere work of time)—‘even then we should have neither the might nor the right—though it matters less about the right (!)—to break forcibly through Illyria to the Adriatic. And yet our dreaminess and disregard of the facts before us made us look on Trieste and these former lands of the German Bund as our inheritance.’[145]—These poor Prussians!

But the Slovenes are left behind—as the train hurries along the willowed valley of the Save we find ourselves among a population less European in its dress, and soon arrive at Agram, the capital of Croatia, where we discover a fair hotel in the High Street. The aspect of the town at once strikes the stranger as other than German. What are these long, low, rectangular houses but slightly enlarged reproductions of the Sclavonic cottage? Here is the same pervading pallor, the twin eyelet windows, circular here, and pierced in the trilateral gables like owl-holes in an old barn. The gables themselves—more modest than the generality of those in Teutonic towns—seem to shrink from facing the street. Outside some of the older houses is to be seen a wooden gallery, festooned perhaps with flowers and creepers, on to which the room-doors open—it strikes one as an approach to the Turkish verandah, the Divanhané. The headings over the shops are almost entirely Sclavonic. Brilliant, quite Oriental, are the stores where the gay Croatian costumes are hung out to tempt the passing peasant. Picturesque are the windows, shut in by foliated bars and gratings of efflorescent ironwork; strange, too, the doors and shutters, crossed diagonally by iron bars of really artistic merit, decked at the point of intersection by a heraldic rose, and the limbs of the Maltese cross terminating in graceful fleurs-de-lys. Not that the object of all these is primarily ornament. These quadruple bolts and locks, these massive hinges and the holdfasts by them inside, which fit into sockets as in our safes, and so prevent the door from being burst open by hacking through the hinges from without—all these tell a different story. They speak of times when the streets of Agram were not so secure as at present.

On an eminence rises the cathedral and spacious palace of the bishop, enclosed, like so many churches of Sclavonic lands, in old walls with round, cone-peaked towers—a southern Kremlin. Just below it is the market-place, and in its centre the equestrian statue of the national hero, the Ban Jellachitj, the poet-warrior who in the days of the Magyar revolution led his Croats against their national enemy, and saved the Austrian police-state when its fortunes were at their lowest ebb. He is dressed in the picturesque hussar uniform of his country, with flowing mantle and high-plumed cap, riding northwards on his pedestal, and pointing his sword forwards towards the scenes of his triumphs over the Magyars.

The town is divided into three parts, the lower town in which is the market-place and main street, the height on which the cathedral stands, and the upper town on which rise many large houses inhabited by the resident bureaucracy, where is the Diet-hall, the Ban’s house and the Museum, and looking down from whose airy terraces you see the lower town stretched out like a straggling village below you, and are reminded of the view of Buda from its Acropolis. The cathedral, in spite of its bulwark of fortifications, has suffered much from the Turks, who destroyed it, they say, three times; and inside from its own bishops, who have defaced the gothic nave and aisles with whitewash and monstrous Jesuitic shrines. Its exterior is, however, still partly fretted with old stone panel-work, which recalls the Tudor ornamentation on the schools of Oxford. From the top of the square tower expands a beautiful panoramas—the silvery Save and its rich valley—the distant Bosnian mountains fading into the blue sky; and in the other direction the dark forest-covered heights of the Slema Vrh, which have given Agram her Sclavonic name Zagreb—‘beyond the rocks.’ Except the cathedral, and the finely-carved façade of the Marcus church, there are no buildings of beauty or interest. The Ban’s residence was so completely devoid of architectural pretensions, and so indistinguishable from the houses round, that we should not have noticed it, but for a large black flag thrust forth from one of its windows in honour of old Kaiser Ferdinand the ‘good-natured.’ As is too generally the case in Hungary, the people of Agram are far behind in æsthetic culture; the pictures in the Academy here are few and curiously bad, and the one good painting was not by a native, but a Czech artist. The Agramers, however, seem to have the good taste to appreciate this, and photographic copies are to be seen in the shop windows; rather, perhaps, owing to South Sclavonic patriotism, than to respect for high art. The picture represents the funeral of a Montenegrine Voivode or leader, whose body is being borne along a gloomy mountain gorge from the battle-field; and the grandeur of the lifeless hero, the dark, almost Italian look of the weeping clanspeople, are executed with great fidelity to Czernagoran nature.

But living pictures, more artistic than the bronze statue of the Ban, more graceful than the weeping Montenegrines, are around us here. The market-place is a spacious studio. The beauty of the Croatian peasant costume is almost unique in Europe—possibly only rivalled at Belgrade. Seen from above, when the market-place is thronged, it looks almost like a bed of red and white geraniums; it is these prevailing colours which give the peasant groups a lightness and brilliancy which I have seen nowhere else. What is remarkable is, that this brightness should be shared in such equal proportions by men and women alike. In Serbia—even in Turkey—the men are not so gay. The head-dress of the Serbian women is perhaps at times more elegant—the colours of their dress are often more varied; but what, after all, is a nosegay without a sufficiency of white flowers? In the Agram market-place, not only the colours, but the very materials, might have been chosen by an artist. What, indeed, is the tissue of these diaphanous chemises and undulating kerchiefs, but the mull muslin of our lay-figures? The women are, moreover, possessed of such a faculty for throwing themselves into picturesque attitudes that one would think they had a drop of Gipsy blood in their veins. In such drapery, with such instincts, such taste in colours, what need have they of novel modes?—they who have not yet improved away their form by cuirasses of millinery—they who have none of the heavy shrouds of colder climes to muffle them—whose simple fashions every breath of wind has an art to change! The faces, too, are rarely vulgar; these are not the coarse hoydens of a North-German market-place—on their features, in their demeanour, one would fancy that many of them have inherited the refinements of an older civilization; some soft Italian element, come perhaps by way of Venice, descended perhaps from the old Roman cities of these parts.

The head-dresses of these village ladies are varied, for every hamlet has its speciality of costume. On some, from St. Ivan, the transparent white kerchief falls about the bust and shoulders lightly as a bridal veil; on others it takes a rosier hue, and is known as the Rubac. On others, again, as those from Zagoria—who will have it that they are great grand-daughters of Avars—it is drawn backwards over a long silver pin, stuck horizontally across the hair, and depends over the back till its variegated border and long fringe sweep the girdle. Seen from the front this coiffure recalls that of the Contadine of the Romagna. In the summer months these peasants rarely put on their fur-fringed mantles, which resemble those of Serb and Slavonian; sometimes they wear a scarcely perceptible vest, but usually the sole covering of arms and torso is simply a light homespun tunic with loose flowing sleeves confined towards the wrist and then expanding again. In place of a skirt they generally wear two wide overlapping aprons, one before and one behind, which in a gale of wind may afford occasional studies for a Bacchante! and over the front one of these hangs a narrower apron starred with red asterisks, crossed by little zigzagging patterns, or by light transversal bands of rose and lilac. But enough of such pallid hues! The pride of their toilette is a brilliant crimson scarf, the Pojas, wound round the waist, some of the folds of which are at times loosened and hang down over the front apron in a graceful sling or outside pouch. Nor does a single kirtle content them, magnificent as this is. Amongst all the Illyrian Sclaves, south as well as north of the Save, I have noticed this peculiarity, that they wear the two kirtles of classic antiquity. Besides the zone round the waist, a bright scarlet fillet—the Strophion of ancient nymphs and goddesses—is wound just below the bosom, and is fastened with a bow in front as on the Thalia or Euterpè of the Vatican.

Round their necks hangs an array of what politeness would have me call coral necklaces. Occasionally they wear silver ear-rings, silver pendants on their breast, and rings on their fingers; but of gold and silver jewelry they possess less than their neighbours beyond the Save; the reason of this being the general absence of specie in the country, which prevents them from studding their hair and tunic with glittering coins—a habit which in Serbia alone withdraws some three-quarters of a million from the currency. Many of them, especially the girls, divide their hair into two long plaits, the ends of which they tie up with brilliant ribbons; for the twin pigtails of maidenhood are far more characteristically Sclave than German, and may be traced among the Russians far away to the White Sea—indeed, this may well be one of the tokens which betray the Sclavonic origin of so many soi-disant Germans. For boots the Croat ladies either wear a curious kind of sandal called Opanka, common to the men as well throughout the whole Illyrian triangle, and not unlike the ancient Egyptian, made of gay leather, red and yellow; or, must it be confessed?—they sometimes buskin themselves in high-heeled Wellingtons! and though their aprons—one cannot conscientiously speak of skirts—do not reach much below the knees, these martial casings can hardly be looked on as a concession to prudery, for after all they generally prefer to go about with feet and ankles in the most graceful costume of all—that of Eden!

To mention such very gorgeous gentlemen after the ladies really seems to require some apology. Imagine some exotic insect—how else can the subject be approached?—with forewings of dazzling gauzy white and underwings of scarlet. The white tunic expands like wings about the arms, and flutters from them in folds of gossamer; the bright scarlet vest—the Laibek—studded like some butterfly with silver stars, is lightly closed over the abdomen. These bright metallic knobs are generally arranged crozier-wise in front, and on one side of the vest is a small pocket just big enough to catch the corner of a rosy handkerchief—the same with which the women are coifed—which on highdays hangs down and floats like a sash about the flanks. A belt of varied leather-mosaic, called the Remen, quaintly patterned like the Wallack belts, but not so broad, grasps the tunic round the waist; and below this the tunic opens out again in flowing petticoats, which often reach below the knees, but hardly to the ankles, as those of some Syrmian peasants. A similar but narrower strip of leather round the shoulder serves to suspend a woollen wallet of the brightest scarlet tufted over with tassels; this supplies the want of pockets, and is the inseparable companion of the Croat, insomuch that every little boy is provided with a miniature Torba, as it is called. Below the tunic expand loose trousers of the same homespun muslin, flowing as those of the Phrygians of old or the Dacians of Trajan’s Column, and sometimes terminating in a handsome fringe. The feet are either shod with Opankas or with Wellingtons, as the women’s, but are more rarely bare.

When the weather is chilly, or when they are particularly desirous of showing themselves off, a superb mantle—the Surina—is cast over the shoulders, of a light yellowish ground-colour, decked with red, green, or orange embroidery, sometimes of the most artistic devices. Sometimes they are brown relieved with brilliant scarlet; but the real red mantles, ground and all, occur only in the western regiments or divisions of the Military Frontier, models of which are to be seen in the interesting collection of national costumes in the Agram Museum, so that the old German name for the Croats, Rothmäntel—‘Red-mantles’—is hardly applicable to the whole race. There is another word to which Croatian costume is said to have given birth with still less apparent foundation. You may search the market-places in vain for anything approaching a ‘cravat,’ which is usually derived from Krabaten or Kravaten, a broad-Dutch word for Croats. But the high collars of these Croat mantles may well have originated the word, though the signification from the first seems rather to have been a bandage round the collar, or in place of the collar, than the collar itself. For the fact that the word really was taken from the Croats we have the evidence of Ménage, who lived at the time of their first introduction into France. He says: ‘On appelle cravate ce linge blanc qu’on entortille à l’entour du cou, dont les deux bouts pendent par devant; lequel linge tient lieu de collet. Et on l’appelle de la sorte à cause que nous avions emprunté cette sorte d’ornement des Croates, qu’on appelle ordinairement Cravates. Et ce fut en 1636 que nous prismes cette sorte de collet des Cravates par le commerce que nous eusmes en ce tans-là en Allemagne au sujet de la guerre que nous avions avec l’Empereur.’ They are first mentioned in England by Skinner, who died in 1667, who speaks of them as a fashion lately introduced by travellers and soldiers. In Hudibras they are made to serve as halters.[146]

Certainly the most European part of the present Croatian costume is the black felt-hat, which oscillates between our broad-brim and what is vulgarly known as a ‘pork-pie;’ but then the brim is used as a receptacle for vasefuls of flowers, and is often surmounted by waving plumes, so any such work-a-day resemblances are soon forgotten. Then there is another variety of hat made of straw, with a conical peak, which recalls a more distant parallel. When a Croat wears one of these, and perchance, as he often does,[147] having doffed his belt, goes about in his long flowing tunic and broad petticoat-like breeks, an uncomfortable feeling comes over you that you have seen him before; and when you have searched the remotest crannies of Europe in vain for his like, it suddenly flashes upon you that it is no other than John Chinaman who stands before you! Yes; there are the very peaks to his boots; there is the beardless face, the long pendulous moustache, and in old days, when—as you may see by a picture in the Museum—the Croat wore a pigtail, as his Dalmatian brothers do still, a Celestial meeting him might have mistaken him for his double!

The patterns on these various articles of attire are striking in character; they are hieroglyphics, hard to decipher, but long household annals are written in them. I take it that pure ornament, as opposed to imitation of natural forms, has gone through two stages of development, which may be called the ‘Angular’ and the ‘Curved,’ of which the angular precedes the curved, and stands to it in much the same relation as Roman letters stand to current writing. During the Stone Age in Europe this angular ornamentation seems universally to have prevailed. It continued during the earlier Bronze Age, but towards its close the second phase of ornamentation began to develope itself in some countries, and we of the Iron Age have seen the old angular ornamentation almost supplanted by its offspring. At the present day, one European people—the Lapps of the extreme north—may still be said to remain almost in the first stage of ornament; the hardness of their materials, the bone and wood on which they mostly work, their little employment of metals and pottery, their seclusion from the current of European civilization, have conspired to keep them back. But it is more remarkable that a people of a more central European area, and a more prolific land, should still linger on in the transitionary stage between the old and new styles of decoration. Yet, as far as my observation goes, this is the case with the Croats, and generally with the Sclavonians of the south. They seem to be acquainted with the beauty of the new style, but to cling with a peculiar fondness to the angular ornamentation of their ruder forefathers. Thus, in the women’s clothes, at least, nearly the whole of the embroidery is of this prehistoric kind. The high collars of the Croat mantles, which resemble those of the Lapps in form, resemble them also in pattern. Many of the Croat women’s girdles are almost identical in pattern with those I have seen among the Lapps of Lake Enare. In the Museum is to be seen a large and curious collection of Croatian needlework, all of this angular pattern—crosses, and lines, and zigzags. Here are also to be seen carpets of rude character wrought by the homely looms of Slavonia, which are curious illustrations of the perfection of the old style—complex as the patterns are, they are all square or angled, and might any of them be models for a mosaic pavement; their colours are green, red, yellow, and white, less usually purple, and dark blue. But what is strange, is to find side by side with these rude shapes the secondary form of decoration in a highly developed state. The curved style of embroidery, as it appears on some of the men’s mantles—and it is noteworthy that it is confined almost exclusively to the men’s attire—is often a real work of art, and the elaborate pear-shaped forms which it frequently takes suggest the rich tendrillings of a Cashmere shawl. So abrupt is the leap from the ruder kind of ornament generally used, that these chefs-d’œuvre of curvature seem to be rather importations from without, than flowers of home growth. Nor does it seem difficult to trace their origin, for they are very often reproductions of the decorations which appear on the costly vests and jackets of the Turks. They are seedlings from Stamboul—less directly, from Byzantium.

As in ornament so in general character, the Croatian dress resembles that of all the Southern Sclaves, including the Roumans of Transylvania and Wallachia, who, for ethnological purposes, may be looked on as a Latinized branch of the family. In parts, indeed, it has been Orientalized by the Turks; and it is noteworthy that just as the men’s costume in Croatia shows the Oriental influence in ornament, so in Serbia, Dalmatia, and the lands beyond the Save and Danube, it is the men’s costume that makes the chief advances towards the Turkish. It is possibly a symptom of the almost Oriental seclusion of those who have to dread Oriental license. Often, when the husbands dress in completely Turkish fashion, the wives preserve almost unaltered the old national costumes; and it is owing to this, that throughout the whole South Sclavonic area, enough of the original dress has survived to show the common sisterhood of all. And of all, the Croat costume seems to be the best representative of the old Serb—of the Sclavonic costume as it existed in the days of the great Czar, Stephen Dūshan. Almost everywhere else the men’s costume, at least, has suffered from Turkish influences. Here, far better than in free Serbia, is the description applied to the Serb laity in the old laws—the ‘dressers in white,’ still applicable to the Croat men. At Belgrade it would be a meaningless epithet; at Agram it is still true. The Croats, too, with their fine mantles and flowing trouser and tunic, approach nearer to the primitive type of all—to the soldiers of Decebalus—to the sculptures on the Column of Trajan—if indeed we are to believe that the old Dacians were of Sarmatian stock.

The same South Sclavonic unity is apparent if we examine the pots and pans which these old-world peasants are selling in the market-place. There is hardly a form here which I do not remember in Wallachia, in Bulgaria, in Serbia. But it may reasonably be asked, whether the barbarous Serb races who settled in the Danubian basin in the fifth and succeeding centuries could have brought with them such an array of highly finished crockery as we see before us here? These narrow lofty necks and luxurious handles are surely not an inheritance from fifth-century savages. We do not find such among our Anglo-Saxon remains, nor even among the relics of the more polished Franks. We must search amongst Roman sepultures if we could find such in our own island, and indeed this gives the clue to their origin even here. They have come to the Sclaves of the South from a common source—the Eastern Roman Empire. Like the coinage, like the rich architecture of the old Serbian Empire, they betray Byzantine influences. The most conspicuous instance of this is the Stutza or Stutchka, as the Croats call it. This I have seen myself nationalized and adopted by Wallacks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosniacs, and Turks, over an area extending from the mouths of the Danube to the Adriatic, and from the mountains of Bosnia to the Carpathians, varying slightly at times in hue or form, but essentially the same. In parts, even the original Roman word seems to have been preserved. In the Bosnian mountains I found them still called Testja—doubtless the Roman Testa.[148] This survival of the Roman vessel is shared by the western part of the empire. The same shaped pot turns up in Spain and Portugal. It is common to South Italy, and to this day large quantities of these vessels are manufactured in Apulia and exported to the coast cities of Dalmatia. I have seen Roman pots of this type dug up near Bucharest, at Salona in Dalmatia, and at Siszek in Croatia, almost identical in shape with those sold every day in the market-places of the respective modern towns; and perhaps the best proof I can give of their likeness is, that on showing a picture of one from Roman Siscia to a Croatian countryman, he recognized it at once, and exclaimed ‘Stutza! Stutza!’ a name confined here to this peculiar kind of vessel. A kind of earthenware drinking-cup, which occurs in still ruder forms in Wallachia, is known here as Scafa, which is almost identical with the Greek word for a bowl, σκάφη. To call a scaphé a scaphé, was the Greek equivalent for calling a spade a spade; so the Croats at any rate can hardly be accused of not doing that. Scaphé is allied to another Greek word, Scyphos, signifying a cup, and common to the Latins, insomuch that one felt inclined to quote Horace’s lines to too bibulous Croats:—

The other name by which this cup is known to the Croats and Illyrian Sclaves, Scalica, is equally classical, and will recall at once the Latin Calicem and the Greek κύλικα. In form it has indeed degenerated from the goblets of Olympus! but one need not despair of tracing its pedigree from their graceless Roman corruptions. As to the Chalice of our own and the Romance languages, though it is more like the classic Calix in shape, it is not like these a living popular development, but, with its name, a mere church introduction, a fragment of antiquity mewed up for us in ecclesiastical reliquaries.

The other vessels to be found in the Croatian crockery-markets, if they do not both in shape and name so obviously betray Roman influences, at least in nearly every case bear witness to the common character of South Sclavonic civilization. There is hardly a shape in the Agram market which may not be found again at Belgrade or Bucharest.

If we pursue this science of the market-place and examine the rude jewelry which the Agram maidens are wearing, or the musical instruments which the countrymen have stuck into their belts or slung round their shoulders, we are again struck by this double evidence of South Sclavonic solidarity and the influence of Greco-Roman civilization. There are some ancient Croatian brooches in the Museum at Agram on which is to be seen the same filagree-work—the pyramids of grains, the spiral tendrillings, which turn up again on other gold and silver ornaments—Frankish, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon—and proclaim the common late-Roman origin of all. Like those of our old English barrows, these brooches are bossed with gems set in raised sockets. But here, unlike in England, this kind of work seems never to have died out; it is perpetuated still in the ear-rings, studs, and brooches of the modern Croats. The same Byzantine style reappears among Serbs and Roumans, and we shall find it again among the Bosnian mountains.

But how strangely classic are the musical instruments of the Croats! What visions of bucolic shepherds, of fauns and dancing satyrs; what memories of idyllic strains do they call up! Can it be merely that we are overlooking the same Arcadian kind of life that the Greek poet might have surveyed when he strolled forth beyond the walls of Syracuse? Is ‘the oaten stop and pastoral song’ the same, simply because the Croat shepherd of the Save-lands is in the same stage of civilization as was the rural Greek? Or are the pipes and lutes before us actually heirlooms from the very shepherds of whom Theocritus piped on the thymy pastures of Hybla?—the same with which Thyrsis and Corydon contended on the green banks of the Mincius? It really almost seemed so. I asked a countryman the name of his pipe, and to my amazement his reply was Fistjela. The man did not understand a word of Latin, but this seemed a very good attempt at Fistula, the pastoral pipe of the Romans, the very instrument which Thyrsis vowed to hang on the sacred pine. The old Pan’s pipe,[149] however, was a series of reeds waxed on to a stem in decreasing order, while this was a single reed, though more often a wooden pipe. It was also known as Fuškola.[150] Then there are the double pipes, the Roman Tibiæ. A slight development has indeed taken place. Instead of being held separate in the mouth, their ends are joined by a mouth-piece. The V has become a Y, that is all. They are also like the double pipes of classic times in being, as the ancients have it, ‘male and female,’ for the number of holes being uneven in the two branches—four in one and three in the other—one barrel is shriller than the other, and their blended notes may still be called, as they were by the Greeks, ‘married piping.’[151] Their name is Svirala, but in parts of Serbia Diplé, which is evidently Greek; and yet if their origin can be traced back to Hellenic times, it can be traced further back still to the double pipes of the Theban monument, on which the Egyptian ladies of Moses’ time are seen playing to their God Ptah.

Next, the Croats have a rude kind of flute possessed of the same Romance name Fluta, the Wallachian Flaute, the Italian Flauto; and lastly, the favourite instrument of all—the Tamburica, a simple form of lute with a straight neck and oval body, and four strings, or rather wires. Its name seems connected with the Persian drum or Tambûr; though in form, but for its extra chord, it is almost an exact reproduction of the three-stringed lute, the Nefer, which Thoth, their Mercury, is said to have given to the Egyptians, which dates back at least to the time when the Second Pyramid was built, which was handed on by the Egyptians to the Phœnicians and Greeks, who knew it as Nafra and Pandoura, under which name they gave it to the Romans.[152] Among the Latin peoples of the West, at least, it never died out, and though at times changing its form it has given the Italians their Pandora, the French their Mandore, the Spaniards their Bandurria and Bandole,[153] and even to us our Bandoline and—horresco referens!—the Banjo. Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s description of the Egyptian Nefer will almost answer to describe the Croatian Tamburitza of to-day. It had, he tells us, ‘a long flat neck and hollow oval body, either wholly of wood or covered with parchment, having the upper surface perforated with holes to allow the sound to escape. Over this body and the whole length of the handle were stretched three strings of cat-gut, secured at the upper extremity either by the same number of pegs or by passing through a hole in the handle.’

It would be easy to show that the conical-shaped baskets, the Corpa, which the Croat countryman on p. 4 has in his hand, is as like the Roman Corbis in form as it is in name, and may claim sisterhood with the Corbella of the Campanian peasant of to-day. Some even of the windows of Agram have a Roman air, for in several upper-storeys and outhouses, to save glass, they are provided with a heavy unglazed plate tracery of an angular kind, which is an exact reproduction of the Roman tracery, to be seen, for example, in the Amphitheatre of Pola in Istria.

It is hard to say how far these various reproductions of antique forms may be due to the earlier Roman or more Byzantine empire; how far they may be waifs from the wrecks of Siscia or Sirmium; how far filtered in from that later Constantinople which gave the old Serbs their religion and the model of their empire. We know that the traces of the more purely Roman empire, which embraced the old Dacia, Pannonia, and Illyricum, have not entirely perished, for its language lives still among the Roumans of the Carpathian and Danubian plains, among the Tzintzars of Mount Pindus, and never died out in the coast cities of Dalmatia. The Latin population, though reduced to the condition of shepherds, may yet have prevailed to introduce some of their arts among their Sclavonic conquerors. To this day the Tzintzars of the Macedonian mountains assert their technical superiority to the races round in the practice of the art of wood-carving. Considering the preservation of such Latin words as Testja, or Fistjela, or Korpa, we may perhaps be justified in assuming that many of the homely arts we see before us are rather the direct inheritance from Trajan than from Heraclius. Nor must the influence of the Venetians in Croatia be forgotten; for these kept open, in mediæval and later times, the old trade-route between the Adriatic and the Danube, opened out long before by their prototypes the Aquilejans.[154] To them probably is due the small wooden cask, the Croatian Baril, the Italian Barile; but one evident trace of Venice is to be found in the glass-works which exist at Samobor in Croatia, and in the heart of the deep oak forests of Slavonia. The name Flašica, of the glass bottles, may be formed from the Italian Fiasco, Flascon, and the forms of the rude beakers and the prettily rippled Croatian flasks are true Venetian—light, roughly blown, and of Roman bottle-green. In Dalmatia the importation of similar rude glass vessels still continues from the small Venetian island of Murano—the seat of the famed glass-works of old. But even these Venetian forms are, less directly, but another inheritance from Rome.

In modern times we must not forget the activity of the new Queen of the Adriatic, ‘la bella Trieste,’ the Austrian successor of the great republic, nor the Italian seaport of Hungary, Fiume, connected now with the interior by rail as well as by the magnificent Louisa-way; so that, with the old Venetian influences, we have plenty to account for the presence of a considerable Italian ingredient in the population of Agram and Croatia generally. For anyone here unacquainted with Croatian, Italian, not German, is the best means of communication. The Styrian mountains seem to form a shed between the areas of German and Italian influences, and besides, the Croats, like the Czechs, feel a certain jealousy of the German language which they do not experience of the Italian. Many of the high officials here show, by their names or features, an Italian descent. The military governor of Croatia is a Signor Mollinary; the director of telegraphs, whose acquaintance we were pleased to make, has an Italian, or rather a thoroughly Roman physiognomy, and speaks Tuscan by preference; the more civilized race seems to climb over the shoulders of the ruder Croats.

However, it must be remembered that German is still the language in use among the officers and bureaucracy of the monarchy, and that many of them reside here in Agram, so that the result is that nearly everybody in the town can speak three languages—Croatian, Italian, and German—and many of them speak French as well, which is more learnt here than formerly, as jealousy of the Germans becomes stronger with rising national aspirations. Even the military speak less German than they used to do; and here, as in Slovene Styria, the national tongue has now supplanted German as the school speech, and even to a certain extent as the official language. Among the Likaner and western regiments of the Granitza, as one approaches the Adriatic and Dalmatian frontier, Italian is known even by the peasants, and in the other parts of Croatia there is an itinerant Italian-speaking population, chiefly from Dalmatia, who gain their living as builders, and are esteemed better workers than the natives. It is natural that the Croats, lying between two more civilized nationalities, should be well practised in foreign tongues; but it must be allowed that they have a natural aptitude for learning them. They themselves are quite conscious of possessing this faculty, and there is nothing that a Croat prides himself on more than his gift of tongues.

A Croatian merchant with whom we were talking grew quite eloquent on this subject. ‘A Croat, sir,’ he said, ‘will learn any language under the sun in three months!—a German takes twice the time. Look at me! Besides my native tongue I know German, I know French, I know Serbian, I know Latin, I know Hungarian, and I picked up Italian in a month. To know a dozen languages is quite an ordinary accomplishment in Agram. Why, one of the members elected here to-day for the Diet, speaks fourteen. Just look at our philologists. Gaj was a Croat; Vuk Karadjić was a Croat;[155] Jagić, the greatest philologer living, was born at Agram. You English, you have your powers; you make railroads, you build bridges; but the faculty of learning languages is God’s gift to us!’ I do not know whose gift exaggeration may be; but, making every allowance for our friend’s patriotism, it must be acknowledged that the Sclavonic races have produced a large number of eminent philologers, and it may even be questioned how far the German superiority to us in this respect may not be due to their Sclavonic blood. In Agram this same faculty is shared in a humbler degree by the peasants of the market-place, who show quite an Italian aptitude for understanding a foreigner, and are remarkably quick in taking in the meaning of signs. This faculty does not stand alone; this power of attitudinising, the very dress of the peasants, all are symptoms of a common quality. It is a certain subtle adaptiveness, common to the whole Sclavonic race.

I had noticed in the market, sitting apart from the light Croat country people, a man selling vegetables of a different kind to the others, with vestments of a duller hue, and on his head a black conical sheepskin cap, which recalled to mind the head-gear of the Bulgars of the Lower Danube, and sure enough a Bulgar he turned out to be. On enquiring I found that a small Bulgarian colony had settled near the Archbishop’s Park of Maximir, to tracking out which I devoted my last afternoon at Agram. Passing through the park, I pursued a path which seemed to lie in the direction given me, and, after meandering awhile among maize fields, found myself presently alone in a beautiful oak forest. Through this I wandered on, now and then emerging on breathing glades which reminded me of the New Forest, enlivened too with the same brilliant fritillaries, and once a lightning glimpse of the purple emperor of butterflies himself, swooping down from his oaken eyrie. Only one thing appeared to be wanting, and that was a path; but I heard in the distance a tinkling of kine, and making my way towards the sound, espied some of the mild-eyed cows of the country grazing among the gnarled oak trunks, and under a tree beyond, a party of peasant women and maidens, towards whom I directed my footsteps. But hardly had I opened my lips, than, with a cry of alarm, they scampered off, and plunged into the thick of the forest like startled deer! The combined effect of an Indian helmet and Norfolk coattee is in these parts quite appalling. Only this morning as L— was strolling along a street of Agram, an old woman, mistaking him, as it would appear, for the devil, drew herself up, and having crossed herself and muttered sundry spells, felt greatly comforted. But the cows, though they took my appearance on the sylvan scene very coolly, maintained an impassible silence, and meanwhile

till happily a distant grunting fell on my ears, and groping my way through the trees I lighted this time on two swineherds and their charge; but the boys, though not so timid as the womankind, could not help me, and I must wander on till I found a woodman in a Croatian costume of darker hue—the bright red vest supplanted by one of funereal black, as befitting the sombreness of the woods—with whose help I found my way out of the forest, and finally to the Bulgarian settlement on the skirts of Maximir, which before I had overshot.

The colony consisted of two very rude straw-thatched sheds, which seemed all thatch and no wall, insomuch that on approaching them I at first mistook them for two long, irregular haystacks. One of the hovels was for dwelling-house and the other as a shelter for vegetable stores, filled with gherkins and onions, and overgrown by a vine-leaved pumpkin. The dwelling-house had a kind of porch or atrium; that is to say, the thatched eaves, supported by two poles, projected almost as far in front of the door as the one room extended behind it. Under this canopy were seated two Bulgars, hard at work tying up bundles of onions, clad in their dark national costume—the brown tight-sleeved jacket embroidered with black, the dull red sash, the brown trouser-leggings which are equally Turkish and Tartar, and on their head the black sheepskin cap which had at first attracted my attention; while on a peg behind hung one of their heavy mantles of the same black, shaggy sheepskin.