FROM DEAD ILLYRIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3415, 29 August 1919, Page 60

FROM DEAD ILLYRIA.

By Jessie Mackay.

Illyria ! What an echo of " Augustan Rome, of Elizabethan England, of Pauline mission work, and of mediasval poetry is heard in the. very name of this ancient country ! The cradle of a Christian church of the first century, the people of Constantine the Great, the ancient barrier of Roman civilisation set between the heathen Slavs and the Adriatic Sea, the shrine of the very language of Alexander the Great, and what fragments of Macedonian and Epirote civilisation have survived the rude shocks of Avar, Slav, and Turkish invasion—all this is bound up in the longdespised names of Albania and the Albanians. The Albanians, indeed, were the poorest, the least regarded of all the peoples who made their plea to the League of Nations six months ago, and it is only bv way of America that we hear at all of that plea. Yet it would seem that, in incorporating Albania's storv and Albania's case in "its world-circling publications, the American Association for International Conciliation has rendered not the least of its many services to oppressed humanity. The document reprinted by the International Conciliation Association is- the statement drawn up by Mehmed Bey Konitza, and circulated in Great Britain, where its author represented the PanAlbanian Federation of America, otherwise called the Vatra. Mehmed Bey has yet another oredential to his claim of being one of Albania's foremost national leaders: during the brief reign of William of Wied, the Kaiser's last "made knight in Europe, he was 'the Albanian Minister to Greece—a post which required no little tact and fidelity. The Illyrians were not Greeks; the Hellenes in their wontedly superior fashion called them "barbarians," like their other neighbours; but these war-like clans had their revenge later, when Alexander, son of a Macedonian King and an Epirote princess, made Greece an appendage of the first world-empire. For Macedonia, Epirus, and Illyria so-called were inhabited, as Strabo tells us, by one people, speaking one language and living the same life. Macedonia is probably derived from two Albanian words, meaning " The Great," and Illyria itself is interpreted by Albanians as "land of the free." From Strabo's lists of placemames and their likeness to modern Albanian words, jt is inferred that Albanian is the daughter of the language spoken by Alexander the Great. And this older tongue was then spoken from a little south <jf Trieste to the Gulf of Arta, while this long strip of Adriatic coast, bordered a wide hinterland covering the modern Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and a large nart of Serbia. They were no inconsiderable opponents, these fierce mountaineers and sea-dwelling clans, even to Rome in the flush of her conquering strength; they had spirit to harry the' Roman ships in these land-locked waters, and, though the bold aggressors had finally to bow to the Imperial yoke, it took Rome two centuries to bring them under; nor did she then deem it well to place heavy burdens on her Ulyrian subjects. ' It was a species of autonomy the people enjoyed, under their own native chiefs, while they participated to the full in the advantages of roading, building, education, and settled institutions which softened Roman rule to the reconciled realms amid which her colonies were founded. This clemency, we may gather, was the easier extended since the Illyrians, before their first encounter with Roman arms, were no rude savages, but had attained some fair measure of indigenous civilisation. Albanian remains, as since discovered in the pre-Roman graves of Bosnia and Serbia, as well as. of Albania proper, include weapons and ornaments of distinction, and the Illyrians were among the first peoples to manufacture iron and trade in it. Thus it is seen that, while Rumania bases her somewhat flashy claims to greatness, her one professed descent from Roman colonists, Albania can formulate a claim more ancient in the attainments of her own people ages before the Romans came. Nor did the prestige of Ulyrian decrease at Rome when the Adriatic State gave such rulers to the Mother City as Diocletian, Justinian, and Constantino the Great. . One other bond united the higher minds of suzerain and vassal in these later days; Illyria was early a Christian country. " Round about Illvria have I fully preached the Gospel of Christ," and the Christian Albanians count the great Apostle of the Gentiles as their first missionary. To this day a number of the North Albanians or Ghegs still owe allegiance to Rome, as their ancestors did hi the days of Constantine. Scutari and Antivari have been bishoprics for at least 15 centuries. The Avars were the first of those rude Mongolian invaders who troubled the peace of the dying Roman Empire, and Illyria suffered heavily from their incursions. Still more disrupting were the succeeding hordes of Slavs, who bv the seventh century had established themselves well over the Balkan Peninsula. It was the rich plains of the interior that tempted these pastoral conquerors most, and Greater Illyria or Old Albania lost Serbia and Bosnia forever, as well as the highlands of Montenegro. Hyria, indeed, vanished

from the map: northward of the present - Albanian frontier the old clan-folk -were driven out or exterminated, though Roman civilisation lived on in patches further down the Adriatic coast, to make some showing in mediaeval art and literature, and Albania itself remained, a strangely isolated spot amid alien peoples and customs, holding a perilous security amid their mountain fastnesses. Like the Angles, Danes, and Saxons in Britain, the Slavs swept away a Christian civilisation, remaining heathen till the ninth century, when they joined the Eastern or Greek Church. The Northern Albanians remained faithful to Rome, while those in the South largely went over to the Greek faith. Many centuries later, when Albania fell under' the rule of the Turks, a large proportion of the isolated people voluntarily embraced Mohammedanism—Albania still preserved a kind of autonomy even under Islam, which, consequently, they hated perhaps a degree less than their old despoilers and oppressors, the Slavs. Then was shown forth to Eastern Europe that miracle which has made Albania a wonder in the church history of the unquiet Balkans. It is surely a miracle that a wild, untaught people should owe allegiance to three spiritual heads, and yet remain one in spirit and in aspiration. Lady Ulary Wortley Montague first told her British fellow countrymen of this triumph of national unity, holding Mohammedans, Catholics, and Greek Churchmen Albanians first and always. (To be Concluded.)