Edith Durham

The index to the UK Foreign Office archive includes the deathless entry: “Durham, Miss M. E., inadvisability of corresponding with.” Such was the irritation or terror that the early twentieth century Balkan traveller inspired among the officials she berated for their ignorance, incompetence and complacency. Such too was her fierce commitment to the needs of people a whole continent away, her belief in informed practical action rather than policies and conferences.

Edith Durham, born in London in 1863, is little remembered now in her own country, apart from labels on ethnographic artefacts in London and Yorkshire, and the affection and awe of enthusiasts.

She is better remembered in the Balkans, where she has streets named after her across Albania and Kosovo, and several schools. She was the first woman, the first Briton and the fourth individual to appear on a stamp in Kosovo. The 70th and 75th anniversaries of her death in 1944 were marked by conferences in Tirana revisiting her work, her distinctiveness and her impact. Generations here have venerated her as “the Queen of the Mountains”.

It’s a remarkable record for a previously unremarkable middle-class Englishwoman from Hampstead having a mid-life crisis. 1901 found Durham a spinster in her late 30s focused mainly on nursing her mother, with a sideline in natural-history watercolours. When she had what would now be recognised as a breakdown, her doctor prescribed – those were the days – travel. She steamed down the Adriatic and journeyed into Montenegro, then at its peak of Ruritanian charm and atavistic highland virtue. She fell in love with the region and the people, agreeing with her mother that ten months a year of nursing would get her two of Balkan travel.

Her expeditions produced seven books: an absorbing mix of finely-observed cultural detail, doughty-Englishwoman-meets-bewildered-villager anecdotes, and sociological generalisations. She wrote of harems and handcrafts, hospitality and feuds, monasteries and bedbugs with equal perceptiveness and wit. She travelled into genuinely challenging terrain, where communities were still essentially medieval, not just as the first woman but the first foreigner. The villagers wondered if she was the King of England’s sister, a man in disguise or a spy, and fretted over where a woman who was an honorary man but still wore a skirt should sleep. (With the priest, was one logical answer).

As she spent more time in the region, increasingly on Albanian lands, she became caught up in the plight of the people. The observer became the activist. During the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, she rode through the night to raise the alarm about the Greek occupation of the town of Korça, which is why it remains Albanian to this day. (She was accompanied by one of her romantic might-have-beens, the radical journalist Henry Nevinson. There was similar speculation about her guide, Marko Shantoja, although as she would relate: “One [of Marko’s companions] suggested that ‘a writing woman’ would be a good sort to marry, but Marko said that kind would not fetch wood and water, which damped the enthusiasm.”)

While some in Britain sneered at Edith’s enthusiasms, she was saving lives in the Balkans

On the ground during the devastation of war Durham distributed corn, clothes, quinine and roofing felt. Back in London she gathered donations and lobbied furiously for more decisive humanitarian intervention. During World War II, Albanians in America sent her food parcels, recalling her relief work for their people more than 30 years before.

As well as two generations of officials, she fell out with some of the more establishment Balkan specialists. While her ethnographic work and watercolours were respected by professionals, her passionate partisan lobbying and haranguing of official shortcomings ruffled the sober scholars and prudent diplomats engaged in the region. Rebecca West, who had a reputation-and-a-half herself as a pioneer, activist and fabulous prose stylist, skewered Durham as one of those travellers returning “with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.” (Reviewing the legendary Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is more insightful on 1930s British attitudes than it is on the Balkans, Durham riposted that “The novelist Miss West has written an immense book on the strength of one pleasure trip to Yugoslavia, but with no previous knowledge of land or people.”)

There’s a bigger question mark over her disproportionately high status as a foreigner in the Balkans. Those towns on whose maps she appears haven’t lacked for impressive women of their own, but in an enduringly patriarchal and socially conservative world, they’ve struggled to carve out autonomous roles, let alone have impact and drive change. Wars of ethnic identity have long relegated the struggles for social equality. In Durham’s time, women such as Staka Skenderova in Bosnia and Marija Jurić Zagorka in Croatia were fighting lonely and protracted campaigns for girls’ education and women’s rights (and indeed women’s writing). Kosovo’s extraordinary Shote Galica is celebrated as a warrior but requires excuses to be made for her lack of femininity. A Serbian or Albanian woman anthropologist would not have been able to visit and represent Serbian and Albanian villages as Durham did, benefiting from their legendary highland hospitality; her inappropriateness was excused as foreignness. And for all the precision of her ethnography, her generalisations are typical of someone of her time and background: there’s a touch of noble savagery about her Albanians, an arrogant thrill as she “stands awestruck… filled with vague memories of the cradle of [the] race, saying, ‘This did I do some thousands of years ago’”.

But Edith Durham cannot simply be relativised away. While some in Britain sneered at her enthusiasms, she was actively saving lives in the Balkans. Her assumptions may have been patronising, her writing philosophically colonialist, her increasingly one-eyed denunciations debatable, but while the sniffy letters and mocking quips were zinging around London, she was handing out food and medicine and shelter to civilians in a war zone. While the diplomats haggled over their imperial interests and drew lines on maps that continue to cause instability more than a century later, she lobbied to bring a whole people out of the chaos, whose lands and identities would otherwise have been carved up and lost. As a professional anthropologist, she has remained respected by other professionals.

It is surely no coincidence that British men doing manly things (diplomacy, espionage, soldiering, border-drawing) around the Balkans are mostly unremembered and uncommemorated, whereas the nursing, aid-doling, hospital-building, educating, researching women like Edith Durham and Margaret Hasluck in Albania, Paulina Irby in Bosnia, Emily Beaufort in Bulgaria and Flora Sandes in Serbia (admittedly she also became a decorated soldier of the Serbian Army) are still recalled with affection. The men’s manly writing – political, polemical, philosophical, frequently racist and usually redundant almost immediately – is forgotten. Marginalised by the publishing industry, the women’s womanly writing – about customs, culture, crafts, nature, people – is, though of its time, still worth reading.

A century later, there is a campaign to get Edith Durham a blue plaque in London led by Brian Ferris, who notes: “Durham deserves to be remembered as an artist, writer, anthropologist and tireless aid worker. She played a crucial role in the creation of a European state.” Sarah Walpole, archivist at the Royal Anthropological Institute (where Durham was the first woman to become a vice president), notes enduring demand for the material she collected: “She was such an interesting and influential woman, involving herself in places and situations far outside the realm of most women of her class.” An excellent online exhibition of her work, including watercolours and war photography, describes her simply as “one of the most prominent and influential female anthropologists in history.”

More generally, Edith Durham also speaks to something fundamental in the spirit: the instinct to escape Hampstead, ford a mountain river on a mule and stay with a Balkan bandit chieftain; the instinct to seek out new people, understand them on their own terms and offer help; the instinct to unrestraint, humanitarian passion and friendship.

“No Man’s Lands: Eight Remarkable Women in the Balkans” by Elizabeth Gowing and Robert Wilton is published in September. Writers, activists and co-founders of The Ideas Partnership charity for the education and empowerment of marginalized communities, they live in Kosovo. Robert Wilton’s latest Edwardian entertainment, “Bolsheviks at the Ballet” is also out soon. More at elizabethgowing.com, robertwilton.com and
theideaspartnership.org