Spies ensure news spreads quickly in a dictatorship and they did not have to wait long for Ali Pasha’s delegation to arrive. Byron and Hobhouse dressed to meet them; Byron in his full regimentals and Hobhouse in his best red suit, the ones they had had tailored in Gibraltar. Ali Pasha was represented by his secretary, Spiridion Colovo, and Ioannina’s primate, its mayor. The guests were invited to join Ali Pasha in his provincial capital Tepelenë, several days ride to the wild and mountainous north; in the meantime they were to be the vizier’s most honoured guests here in Ioannina, forbidden from paying for anything, and with all of Ioannina at their disposal. Between them Byron and Hobhouse, Captain Leake, Signor Niccolo, Spiridion Colovo and the primate spoke an impressive array of languages: apart from all of their native tongues, they had between them Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, Turkish, French and Albanian - the latter being described by the fogeyish Hobhouse as a ‘mixture of Greek, Italian and a country language’, As everywhere Latin prevailed, the Esperanto of the times.
They were to spend the next five days in Ioannina preparing for the trip to Tepelenë and waiting for the weather to improve. In the meantime they had tailored Albanian costumes ‘as fine as pheasants’- quite likely Byron’s being the one in which he was painted by Thomas Philips in 1814, versions of which are now in the British Embassy in Athens, the National Portrait Gallery and the John Murray archive. They learned about local courtship practices - a subject never far from Byron’ heart. Husbands never saw their wives until the wedding ceremony, so an affair had to be either with a married woman, or one of easy virtue, or with a man - or better still a boy. Hobhouse reported that all ‘this is some excuse for pæderasty, which is practised underhandly by the Greeks, but openly carried on by the Turks.’ They saw a Greek wedding, with its raucous music and lights, its jewels and pistols, its chanting and praying, its bride ‘waddling from side to side like the Virgin’. They witnessed the start of Ramadan, when all concerned let off their pistols and guns firing live ammunition, two balls of which narrowly missed Hobhouse on the loo. We can be sure Byron - never slow to fire his pistols, real or metaphorical - joined in too, but not usually fired at Hobhouse on the loo. They went shooting themselves, wildfowling on the lake, without any great success. They tried out Ali Pasha’s horses, and were favourably impressed.
But the highlight of their stay in Ioannina was a visit to one of Ali Pasha’s sons’, Mouktar’s, palace. Ioannina is dominated by the bluff which juts out as a promontory into the restful and reflective Lake Pamvotis. It holds a perfect defensive position, the far lakeside end of which was originally built as a fortress in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Since then it has expanded and contracted with the ebb and flow of cultures and invasions. Ali Pasha saw its potential immediately and three hundred slaves died in his rush to re-enforce and expand the whole promontory from a castle into a citadel.
The promontory is now called Its Kale and it houses not just Ali Pasha’s and his sons’ - like Saddam Hussein he bred two (legitimate) sons who were just as ghastly as their father - palaces, his tomb, his mosque, and his treasury but the city’s Byzantine and Municipal Museums. Outside the inner citadel but still within Its Kale’s walls the area is called Kastro and is peacefully residential with one or two hotels and bars in converted houses. I stayed in, and can recommend, the Hotel Kastro. One can look over to the small island opposite where Ali Pasha met with a sticky end at the hands of the Ottoman army twelve years later at the age of 82. Fittingly, the Church of St. Nicolas nearby is adorned with graphically gruesome depictions of martyrdoms. His head was paraded through the streets of Constantinople on a pike - he would not have had it any other way.
At Mouktar’s palace they took coffee and were introduced to Mouktar’s handsome young son. Byron noted that he was ‘a little fellow ten years old with large black eyes as big as pigeon eggs, and all the gravity of sixty.’ They were shown around the palace and were impressed to see English carpets and a large painting of Constantinople. No mention was made of his harem, or of the story of how Mouktar had taken a shine to a married Christian woman and ordered her to attend his harem. Him being a Pasha, and his father being the Pasha, she had to take the offer seriously. The family convened and realised they had to obey, and so she submitted to his demands and her family fled the city. But Mouktar went further and fell in love with her; the other haremistas complained to Ali. Ali knew exactly how to put a stop to this; he rounded up the wives of the fifteen most prominent Christian families in Ioannina, tied them together and drowned them in the lake as a warning to other Christian wives to leave his poor sons alone.
There were always Ali family squabbles in the palaces. A year or so before Byron’s visit, when Ali Pasha’s other son Veli was away on another war, Ali raped one of his daughters-in-law, who subsequently had Ali’s baby. To keep it quiet before Veli returned Ali had some slaves strangle the wife, baby, doctor and midwife in return for their freedom. He then had the slaves beheaded by his black mutes, who knew, if nothing else, how to keep a secret. Inevitably Veli found out, and on hearing the news shot the hapless messenger.
By 11 October it was time to leave Mouktar and Ioannina and seek the real thing in Tepelenë. The rains had stopped, the horses were gathered, supplies were saddled, the escort assembled, the entourage in place. They left Signor Niccolo’s house, rode out past the main gate without noticing any fresh semi-torsos and headed north. Ahead of them were the gentle forested hills of Epirus, rising to the holy mountains of northern Greece and the badlands of Albania and the breeding land of Childe Harold‘s Pilgrimage.
Chapter Nine
FROM IOANNINA TO TEPELENË, AND BACK
11-26 OCTOBER 1809 | 12-24 FEBRUARY 2009
Lord Byron and the writer both left Ioannina, now in Greece, for Tepelenë, now in Albania, on diplomatic missions. Byron was to take Spiridion Foresti’s reassurances of His Majesty’s good intentions to His Excellency the Ali Pasha in the hope of pacifying him in the wake of previous, now broken, promises to give him the Ionian Islands in exchange for allying himself with Britain against France. If he could not be pacified, and a torrential rant if not bodily harm would be far from unexpected, Foresti hoped that Byron’s embassy could at least keep Ali Pasha from allying himself with the French.
The writer’s version of Spiridion Foresti was Professor Afrim Karagjozi, head of the Albanian Byron Society, whose university was organising a conference in the capital, Tirana, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Byron’s visit to the country. Via the professor’s powers of persuasion, and the good offices of the Albanian Ambassador in London, my mission was to request King Leka I of the Albanians to invite the Marquis of Lansdowne to lend Albania Lord Byron’s famous Albanian costume - as Byron is wearing in the National Portrait Gallery - to be the central display at the anniversary celebrations.
The Byron party left Ioannina on 11 October 1809. At its core were of course Hobhouse and Fletcher, with an outer ring of the dragoman Georgiou who had joined them in Preveza, and a new servant, courtesy of Ali Pasha, an Albanian warrior called Vassily who was to stay with Byron for the duration of the Grand Tour. Accompanying the group were Ali Pasha’s secretary’s priest and the priest’s servant, as well as eight of Ali Pasha’s janissaries as their escort and six horses for the baggage. With sixteen men and twenty-two horses the Byron entourage had grown into the Byron battalion. The writer left Ioannina alone in the worn and rented Smart car, but we live in straitened times.
What a wonderful sense of exhilaration, of freedom and adventure, the young Byron must have felt as he led the colourful and eclectic group that left Ioannina that autumn day. Beside him rode his best friend whom he knew was recording the great adventure day by day, behind him was his valet to keep him looking spruce, around him came a Greek guide and an Albanian guard to smooth the way in this strange and savage land, and all escorted by heavily armed, white kilted
soldiers of the
fiercest aspect with direct orders from a tyrant who ’requires and requests’ their safe passage ‘without let or hindrance’; all this, and on a secret mission for his king and country, and riding through wild and open autumnal landscapes that reminded him of his childhood Scotland. We know he was already spending more and more time writing, or scribbling, as he would have put it. Twenty days later, back in Ioannina, he would be inspired by what he had just seen and done and noted to unpack his sheaves, shuffle and shake them and start creating the first draft of his first epic Childe Harold‘s Pilgrimage. The Albanian adventure eventually stood out as the most vivid part of the more melancholy second canto.
Byron’s king, Ali Pasha, and the writer’s king, Leka I, are both prime examples of the art of power and survival. Ali Pasha and power understood each other perfectly, and he played the English off against the French, the Muslims off against the Christians, and the Turks off against the Greeks. He himself was a Bektashi, a most interesting branch of Islam which mixes local folklore and animism with the mystical aspects of Sufism. It was brought westwards to Albania by eastern dervishes in the sixteenth century, and settled in southern Albania by Ali Baba when Ali Pasha was in his twenties. When the Maoists made Albania the world’s first atheist state in their cultural revolution of 1967 they made a particular point of trying to wipe out Bektashism, partly by shooting the babas. (It’s fair to say they shot most of the imams and priests too.) The Bektashis disguised their religion by reverting to their folkloric tradition, and having weathered the ungodly storm Bektashism is now practised openly in teqes, these being more like retreats than mosques.
King Leka I of the Albanians is an interesting character too. He was two days old when the Italian fascists invaded Albania in 1939. By then his father, King Zog, who promoted himself from prime minister to president and then invented his own monarchy, upped with as much gold as his entourage could carry and fled to France.
It was a rare triumph for the Italian military. The Albanian army took one look at the Italian army and, using best Italian tactics,headed for the hills. Their leader King Zog, his Queen Geraldine and their new Crown Prince Leka arrived in Paris in the scarlet supercharged Mercedes cabriolet that Hitler had given them as a wedding present. When the self-same Hitler approached Paris Zog fired up the Merc again and spent the rest of the war in the London Ritz - not on the top floor, one imagines. The wartime Home Office rather unkindly called the royal family and their countless retainers’ King Zog’s Circus’.
But the king, clearly nobody’s fool, had the presence of mind to make King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and King Farouk of Egypt - the latter himself Albanian - the infant Leka’s godfathers, and then the further presence of mind to send him to the Sorbonne and Sandhurst. The young adult Leka then had his own presence of mind to put his family connections, multilingual education and military knowledge together and develop a thoroughly respectable career as a renowned arms dealer. Along the way he reminded Richard Nixon they were distant cousins and befriended Ronald Reagan, giving him the present of an elephant.
But for Crown Prince Leka, by now in the mid 1960s King Leka I,it wasn’t all plain sailing. Early in his career he was arrested in Thailand with an arms cache; then he had to leave Spain in a hurry when, in-spite of being a guest of the newly restored monarch Juan Carlos,the Spanish secret service found a small arsenal in his compound. He escaped to Rhodesia and when that became Zimbabwe to South Africa where he stayed until he was busted there too with an even larger arsenal after the apartheid regime fell. He returned to Albaniaon a passport issued by his own court-in-exile; at the border he filled in a form and under ‘occupation’ put down ‘King’. In the post-Hoxha chaos they let him in. His effects arrived soon afterward, and included eleven containers of arms ‘for my personal use’. Once back on the home soil he had known for only two days he narrowly lost areferendum to restore the monarchy. That was fifteen years ago. Since then, though not exactly content, he has become resigned to beingthe symbolic King of the Albanians rather than outright King of Albania. It’s a large diaspora, with Albanians all over the Balkans, in Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Italy and now in England too.
To reach Albania from Ioannina one needs to travel through to Zitsa. Zitsa, still being in Greece, is only thirty or so miles, and the track then, and the road now, winds slowly up to the mountains to the north-west of Ioannina. Yet it was on this comparatively easy stretch of the journey that the company managed to find itself scattered in a tremendous storm. When the heavens opened an advance guard of four of the janissaries went ahead to Zitsa to secure lodgings. This was simple enough; all villagers were obliged to house and feed any of Ali Pasha’s men whenever they passed through, so the guard would just have found the village primate and told him to arrange lodgings and food for sixteen men and twenty-two horses. At dusk and in a ferocious downpour with thunder and lightning exploding over their heads, Hobhouse, Vassily and the secretary arrived in the village. But of Byron and his group - Fletcher, the secretary’s valet and priest and the other four soldiers and the six pack horses - there was no sign. In the pitch dark, on the slippery track, with panicky horses in the fury of the storm they had become lost.
Byron had not been cowering from the storm; the sense of adventure, of being somewhere so different, so exotic, and right now so dangerous, simply inspired him. They found shelter in a hovel and lit some torches. Byron took some paper from his satchel and started composing what would later be polished into ‘Stanzas Composed During a Thunderstorm’, in which his thoughts turned back to Malta, and to Constance Spencer-Smith, his ‘Sweet Florence’:
While wandering through each broken path,
O’er brake and craggy brow;
While elements exhaust their wrath,
Sweet Florence, where art thou?
Not on the sea, not on the sea-
Thy bark hath long been gone:
Oh, may the storm that pours on me,
Bow down my head alone!
Full swiftly blew the swift Siroc,
When last I pressed thy lip;
And long ere now, with foaming shock,
Impelled thy gallant ship.
Hobhouse and the secretary sent out a search party, lit some fires and set off some guns in an effort to guide them in. Eventually at about 3 a.m. the Byron party arrived. Hobhouse was not amused: ‘The party had been for nine hours in total ignorance of their position, notwithstanding the three guides belonging to the horses, a priest and the secretary’s valet, who, I was informed, knew every step of the way.’ Fletcher was not amused either: at the height of their peril, just after two of the horses had slipped down the mountain, Byron started laughing and Georgiou panicked, ‘stamped, swore, cried and fired off his pistols’, which only made poor Fletcher think they were being ambushed by robbers.
No one in Zitsa today knows exactly where they slept, unusual itself in Greece as these Byron visitations are normally so well celebrated, even quite often with a Hotel Lordou Vironus on the supposed spot like so many splinters of the Cross. In fact the writer managed to cause quite a ruction in the Tourist Office by asking where they lodged, at which point in translation two Zitsanites fairly flew at each other before declaring by way of a truce that no one was sure. The only hotel is the Aganti, a new three star on the hill opposite Zitsa, with a fine view of the town and up to the mountains where they were, and the writer is, all heading, and from where some of these words are being written this evening.
The next morning they explored Zitsa and walked up the hill behind the village to the Monastery of Profitis Elias. Byron was moved that it lay ‘in the most beautiful situation I ever beheld.’ Hobhouse wrote that ‘This monastery of Zitza perhaps is the most romantic spot in the world.’ It’s hard to disagree now. Arriving at the peak of a sizeable hill, in the scent of a light forest of eucalyptus, surrounded below by a moat of valleys and then towered over by snowed mountains beyond, the
visitor is serenaded by goats’ bells and rushing water, and beyond that only silence, stillness and the constancy of patient time.
After a bit of banging on the iron gate Byron and Hobhouse persuaded a monk to let them in. The writer was more fortunate and pushed on an open door; inside the cleaner was sweeping the refectory. All of us found ‘panels covered with red pictures, particularly of Elijah.’ The monastery is now used only as an occasional retreat, but still kept in pristine condition. Above the entrance, carved in stone, is written:
12th-13th Ocktober 1809.
Monastic Zitza! from thy shady brow, thou small but favoured spot of holy ground!
Byron.
The lines are from the second canto of Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage.
They spent a second night at Zitsa and the next day headed north-west again but had to call a halt at Mazaraki because of more storms.From Zitsa to Mazaraki the road descends steeply into a valley, from goat country to sheep country, and now some vineyards and orchards. Mazaraki is still a small village, no more than a hamlet. There were only scattered hovels and so among the hovels they scattered themselves. All of them spent the night hunting fleas,but at least Byron, Hobhouse and Fletcher had the army travelling beds which the latter laid for them every night. The construction was ‘sapper simple’: the four sides of the frame and four legs slotted together in moments, and the slats of the base laid into a groove along the frame - typical examples can be seen in the Imperial War Museum.
The track continues to rise as it heads north-west up to the next stop, the village of Delvinaki, just shy of the Albanian border. On the way the track that was, and road that is, climbs steeply and there are still the ‘tremendous precipices beneath and grand prospect to the left of a thousand woody hills’. There is now a fence of sorts along the road, but it seems so flimsy that it would only prevent a bicyclist from taking the quick route down the ‘tremendous precipice’. This is a prosperous little town without it being immediately obvious why it should so be. There is a taxi rank, with taxis thereupon, a new three star hotel and whitewashed houses. The streets have just been swept. The flags are new. A taxi driver explains Delvinaki’s good fortune: there’s a famous spring in the mountains nearby, and the spring begat a health farm and the health farm begat the B&Bs and the B&Bs begat the taxi rank and his taxi thereupon. Does he take the waters himself ? He does not, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together: the water is expensive. More than the wine? More than the wine!
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