Chapter IX · RAGUSA AND EPIDAURUS. (continued 2)

The turbaned figure to the right of the illustration, and the elegant damsel with whom he is walking arm in arm, are not refugees, but peasants from the immediate neighbourhood of Ragusa. The man’s costume, so closely approaching the Turkish, is an interesting example of the influence wrought by the peculiar relations in which, of old, Ragusa stood to the Turks.[371] Nowhere else in Dalmatia does the costume of the peasant so nearly approach that of the true-believer. Here we have not only the same jacket and vest with their gorgeous gold embroidery, the same sash and schalvars, but even a turban on the head; and were it not for his white stockings and a certain preference for crimson jackets, the Ragusan peasant might easily be mistaken for a Moslem. This habit of dress is not confined to the peasants; it is still to be seen among the servants and lower classes in Ragusa itself, and was doubtless originally adopted by the Ragusan merchants to avoid raising the susceptibilities of the infidels with whom they traded, by appearing in the garb of a Giaour. In the seventeenth century, as may be gathered from the relation of an English traveller, the Ragusan merchant who travelled in Turkey in European costume did so at his peril. Blunt, who voyaged himself ‘clad in Turkish manner,’ tells us,[372] in his quaint style, how ‘foure Spahy-Timariots’ met his caravan, ‘where was a Ragusean, a Merchant of quality, who came in at Spalatra to goe for Constantinople, he being clothed in the Italian fashion and spruce, they justled him: He not yet considering how the place had changed his condition, stood upon his termes, till they with their Axes, and iron Maces (the weapon of that country) broke two of his ribs, in which case, we left him behinde, halfe dead, either to get backe as he could, or be devoured of beasts.’

‘If I appeared,’ says Blunt a little farther on, ‘in the least part clothed like a Christian, I was tufted like an Owle among other birds.’

Be pleased to observe the elegant pose of the Ragusan damsel who has condescended to visit these unfortunates arm in arm with our turbaned signior! There is a marked contrast between these refined peasant gentle-folk—these ‘Nostrani,’ as the Ragusans call all those who dwell within the limits of the old Republic—and yonder ‘Morlacchi’—the ruder sons and daughters of the Herzegovinian mountains. Ragusa, even in her days of mourning, has inherited something of her former civilization; a peculiar refinement, both in her peasants and citizens, not to be met with anywhere else throughout these lands, must strike the most unobservant traveller. Not here the rude stare, the pestering beggary, the meanness and mendacity—the painful relics of that barbarous Venetian policy which condemned Dalmatia to perpetual poverty and ignorance. The lion of St. Mark has never weighed like an incubus on Ragusa. It needs to have visited Spalato and other Dalmatian cities to appreciate the extraordinary exception in favour of cleanliness and good manners that presents itself here.

The language here, not counting the German spoken by the Austrian soldiery, is partly Italian and partly Sclavonic, but the bulk of the population speak only Sclavonic. Here you hear the Serbian language at its best; it, too, seems to have felt the influence of the literary Italian which was once the official and scholastic language of the Republic, and falls from the lips of Ragusan citizens with Tuscan elegance and softness. The two elements of which Dubrovnik-Ragusa was originally composed, the Serbian and the Roman, blend to form the typical Ragusan features—now and again separating themselves in all their individuality. In the streets of Ragusa the turquoise eyes of the true Sclave peep out often enough from beneath the raven locks and lashes of the Italian.

Is the time, one asks oneself, to arrive once more when Ragusa shall take up anew the work for which by her very birth she is so eminently fitted—will she once more take her place as the pioneer of South-Sclavonic literature and civilisation? Her ‘gift of tongues,’ her sober industry, her position, still remain. Though the old haven of the Argosies has become too small for the leviathans of modern days, she has at hand in Gravosa the finest harbour on the Dalmatian coast—the nearest port to the point where the Narenta debouches on the sea after cleaving a path through the Dinaric Alps towards the Drina and the commercial basin of the Danube. The old trade route of Ragusan merchants only waits for the demolition of artificial barriers to be opened out anew. Already we hear of the improvement of the navigation of the lower Narenta, and a new steam service is planned between Stagno and Ragusa.

Ragusa is the natural port of the Illyrian interior—the born interpreter between the Italian and Sclave. Those only who have traversed the barbarous lands between the Adriatic and the Save can adequately realise how intimately the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina is bound up with the future of Ragusa. The plodding genius of the Serbs needs to be fanned into energy by these fresh sea-breezes—their imagination languishes for want of this southern sunshine!

Here at last, after groping among the primeval shadows of the mighty beech and pinewoods of the Bosnian midlands, we take our ease in one of the gorgeous rock-girt coves which beautify the environs of Ragusa. Overhead are hanging groves and gardens of rosy oleander, ferny palms, myrtles, and creepers with flame-coloured trumpets. On the steep, a spiry aloe leans forward, stretching towards the south; beneath us the cliffs sink precipitously into the blue-emerald waters—intensified in the deeper pools into a vinous purple—stretching away to the horizon in marvellous ultramarine—on either side of the cove, fretting in a silvery line of foam against walls of orange rock whose natural brilliance is glorified now into refined gold by the setting sun. This is not the light of common day!—it stands to it as some gorgeous mediæval blazoning to a modern chromo-lithograph. It dazzles our dull northern eyes. We are on the borders of another world. We catch an inspiration of the South. The waters of the next sea-bosom lap the ruins of Hellenic Epidaurus.

But the gold on the rocks melts into more sombre browns and greys; the western steeps of the cove lose their outlines in vague shadow; the intense azure of sea and sky dies into a dark sapphire; the plashing of the waves below asserts itself in tones more solemn with the gathering twilight, and the darkness deepens into night.