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Comparative Critical Studies 4, 1, pp. 5165

BCLA 2007

Childe Harolds Pilgrimage in the Balkans

tatiana kuzmic

On 19 September 1809, having been away from England for a few months,
during which he travelled to Portugal, Spain, and Malta, the twenty-one
year-old George Gordon Byron sailed for Greece. His tour of the famous
classical sites included a short excursion into Tepelene, Albania, where
he was excellently treated by the Chief Ali Pasha1 and where he found
the inspiration for the central section (stanzas 3672) of the second canto
of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage. The beginning and the end of the canto,
mirroring Byrons own travelling schedule, focus on Greece. While the
poets premature death at Missolonghi secured him a place among the
champions of philhellenism, his fascination with Turkey, the ruling force
in the Balkan peninsula of the time, has brought this traditional conception of Byron as a ghter for Greek freedom into question.2 At the same
time, Byrons Eastern poetry has earned him a place in Edward Saids
compilation of authors who made a signicant contribution to building
the Orientalist discourse,3 a view that has also come under criticism and
one which requires further scrutiny. Harolds adventure in Albania can be
read as orientalising in as far as it functions to perpetuate such conventional binary opposites as West and East, progress and stasis, experience
and innocence, and so forth, but the stanzas on neighbouring Greece,
which frame the experience at Ali Pashas court in the second canto,
muddle the simple East/West opposition. Relying on theoretical models
that emerged in response to Saids seminal study Orientalism, such as
Maria Todorovas concept of Balkanism and David Cannadines Ornamentalism, this essay seeks to offer a more nuanced reading of Byrons
encounter with the Ottoman-ruled Balkans. The Self/Other distinction, typical of travel narratives and foundational to the idea of Orientalism, will be re-examined and complicated in light of the contrast that
is employed in Byrons works between Greece as the cradle of Western
civilization in decline and Albania as a novel site of discovery.
While Saids groundbreaking work has been criticized for portraying
the West too monolithically and for dening it too exclusively in terms
51

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of France and England,4 thereby to turn his own argument against him
engaging in his own brand of Occidentalism, Childe Harolds travels
in the second canto of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage offer an opportunity
to revisit the phenomenon in a more geographically circumscribed area
and one that belongs neither to the Occident nor to the Orient as dened
by Said. Such is the case with the Balkan peninsula, whose proximity to
the Orient and its ve centuries-long occupation by the Ottoman empire
have placed it in the ambiguous position of being viewed as insufficiently
Western or European as well as insufficiently Eastern or exotic. Although
this term geographically designates a part of Europe, the name Balkan
itself, a local Turkish word for bare cliffs,5 testies to the long-standing
centre of inuence. Furthermore, before Western travellers learned the
indigenous name, their common designations for the region bore the
stamp of its conicted identity: European Turkey, Turkey-in-Europe,
European Levant, and Oriental Peninsula.6
The name Balkan for the area of Europe that today encompasses
the European part of Turkey, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and
the republics of what is now the former Yugoslavia was rst coined by
the German geographer August Zeune in 1808.7 His description of the
boundaries of the Balkans reveals much of the political attitude towards
the region: In the north this Balkan Peninsula is divided from the rest of
Europe by the long mountain chain of the Balkans [] and to the east it
fades away into the Black Sea (emphasis mine).8 It is peculiar how Zeune
portrays the region as clearly separated from the more civilized north and
as virtually disappearing into the more backward east, making as much an
ideological as a geographical distinction between Europe and the other
uncomfortably contained within it. It should be no surprise, therefore,
that setting off on a journey only a year later, from the most western part
of Europe towards its most eastern ends, Byron would impart to his reader
the feeling that he was visiting the very edges of the civilized world. The
meaning of the phrase the very edges of the civilized world may be taken
as twofold: it certainly applies to the Albania of Byrons time, since he was
one of the rst Englishmen ever to visit the country, as he points out in
the notes to the second canto, where he asserts that with the exception
of Major Leake, then officially resident at Joannina, no other Englishmen
have ever advanced beyond the capital into the interior, as that gentleman
very lately assured me.9 It also offers an interesting perspective on
Greece, the birthplace of the civilized world, as far as Western Europeans of the time were concerned, yet one whose geographical location
and political situation belied the classical expectations associated with

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53

it. As such a mixture of the beginning and end of (Western) civilization,

the Balkans constitute an ambiguous geographical space. Where exactly
the West ends and the East begins within the peninsula that bridges the
two is what Childe Harold comes to explore in the second canto of the
Pilgrimage.
The theme of crossroads or in-betweenness has been associated with
the Balkans as far back as the twelfth century, when St. Sava Nemanjic,
the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church, wrote about his sense of
being doomed by fate to be the East in the West, and the West in the
East.10 While the West and the Orient are usually presented as binary
opposites, the Balkans, as Todorova has documented, have been characterized by the prex semi: semideveloped, semicolonial, semicivilized,
semioriental, etc.11 She concludes that, unlike orientalism, which is a
discourse about an imputed opposition, balkanism is a discourse about
an imputed ambiguity.12 Vesna Goldsworthy has shown how this ambiguity has contributed to the pejorative connotations of the very name
Balkan, especially in contrast to what has traditionally been considered
European:
Even the most broad-minded Western journalists and authors write about European
values with the same swaggering assurance that enabled their forebears to assume so
condently that white, Christian civilisation was superior to the cultures it destroyed.
It is hardly surprising therefore that each Balkan nation chooses to see itself as a
guardian of European values rather than the barbarian at Europes gate. (Goldsworthy, p. ix)

This was, and still is, especially the case with Greece, whose ancient
history has held the claim to birthing European civilization. The Western
travellers who began ooding the country during the high time of philhellenism in the nineteenth century experienced this discord at rst hand
when they encountered its broken arch, its ruind wall/its chambers
desolate, and portals foul (CHP II, ll. 4647). What Todorova calls their
unimaginative concreteness and almost total lack of wealth,13 gave the
Balkans an earthy quality not so easily identiable with the more ethereal
term Oriental. Incidentally, Todorovas description of the historical
and geographic concreteness of the Balkans as opposed to the intangible nature of the Orient14 gives the Balkans a physically circumscribed
diverseness and actuality that unhinges Saids construction of a monolithic divide.
The tradition of the so-called Grand Tour, commonly undertaken
by upper-class young British men such as Byron, was interrupted by the
Napoleonic wars and the French occupation of Italy, which was previously

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the destination of those seeking an exotic European experience. Around

the same time, Greece the other and since Winckelmann, arguably,
even more authentic, classical location became open to Western visitors
when Britain, in 1799, signed a treaty with the Ottoman empire, under
whose jurisdiction the country lay at the time.15 English access to Greece
spawned a philhellenic wave of interest in and travel to the area.16 Its
magnitude was only bolstered by the progress made in education, which
besides enlarging the English reading public and accelerating the output
of literary material, also ensured that this expanding readership at home
received reports on Greece (and the Balkans in general) written by those
few who, like Byron, had experienced it at rst hand.
As Said suggested in Orientalism, the indirect experience of
reading about geographically distant locations was prone to affect perceptions even before the direct encounter took place. This caused many a
travellers disappointment when experiencing what was expected to be
the grandeur and sublimity of Greece of Plato, Sophocles, and Herodotus. Entering British consciousness during Byrons time, Greece and
the surrounding Balkan nations were, much as Said claims for the Orient,
less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text,
or a citation from someones work on [it].17 Since the English travellers
of Byrons time saw themselves as heirs of the Classical tradition, they
expected the Ottoman-ruled Greece to be a reection, to some extent,
of their own identity, and the disappointment was all the greater when
Greece did not measure up to their expectations. Childe Harold begins
to convey this sentiment from the moment he rst glimpses Greece from
the sea, at the beginning of Canto II:
Ancient of days! august Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone glimmering through the dream of things that were:
First in the race that led to Glorys goal,
They won and passed away is this the whole?
(CHP II, ll. 1014)

The connotations of impressiveness such as ancient, august, might,

and grand in combination with questions to which the reply lies exclusively in the past tense give the lines a tone of mourning and resignation
that permeates Harolds perception of Greece throughout the canto. It
also encapsulates the prevailing English philosophy regarding Greece at
the time: the belief in its Classical greatness and the disbelief that it could
have, in Byrons words, passed away, as if history had just leapt over

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55

more than twenty centuries from the Golden Age of Athens to the last
stages of the Ottoman power. This attitude reveals the personal attachment to the Greece known from, as the next line says, a school-boys
tale (CHP II, l.15), which mediated the expectations with which Byron,
a classically educated Cambridge student, encountered a very different
Greece of the early nineteenth century.
Harold seems to explain away the change by portraying Greece as
merely the inevitable victim of the cyclical nature of history and resigns
himself to meeting its men of might and grand in soul (CHP II, l.10)
in the other world:
Even gods must yield religions take their turn:
Twas Joves tis Mahomets and other creeds
Will rise with other years, till man shall learn
Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds;
Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds.
(CHP II, ll. 2327)
Yet if, as holiest men have deemd, there be
A land of souls beyond that sable shore,
To shame the doctrine of the Sadducee
And sophists, madly vain of dubious lore;
How sweet it were in concert to adore
With those who made our mortal labours light!
To hear each voice we feard to hear no more!
Behold each mighty shade reveald to sight,
The Bactrian, Samian sage, and all who taught the right!
(CHP II, ll. 6472)

Harold entertains no possibility here, as Don Juans sad trimmer poet

(DJ III, l. 649) will several years later, that Greece might still be free (DJ
III, l. 704). Nigel Leask points out the degree to which this famous line
is ironised by the fact that the verses are sung by the trimmer poet,18
who plays both sides in politics. Accordingly, the adverb still in the line
connotes more a longing for the past than a hope for a future improvement, and this desire stands in quite the contrast to the eschatological
projections of Harold, who fantasizes about meeting Zoroaster and
Pythagoras (The Bactrian and Samian) in heaven. The inevitability of
a creeds demise, even if it is ones own, reinforces the disillusioned and
melancholy tone for which Childe Harold and its author became famous
while, at the same time, it prepares the way for a fresh encounter with
Albania, whose creed Mahomets, the ruling one in the area at the time
provides a fresh experience for the otherwise disenchanted Harold.

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The connection is made when Harold addresses Albania for the rst
time and alludes again, by his use of religious symbols, to the cyclical
nature of time:
Land of Albania, let me bend mine eyes
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!
The cross descends, thy minarets arise,
And the pale crescent sparkles in the glen,
Through many a cypress grove within each ken.
(CHP II, ll. 338342)

The crescent here is not only used as a symbol of Islam, but is also
endowed with romantic symbolism generally associated with the moon, as
it sparkles in the glen and shines through cypress groves. This coincides
with Harolds disenchantment with Greece, since he felt, or deemd he
felt, no common glow (CHP II, l. 364) upon passing Leucadia, but in
contrast, found Albania much more exciting in its novelty: The scene
was savage, but the scene was new (CHP II, l. 385). Byron expresses the
same sentiment in one of his letters sent home from the journey, where
his lengthy description of the Albanians in their dresses ends with his
recognition of them as a new & delightful spectacle to a stranger (BLJ
1:227).
The novelty is brought into contrast with Greeces agedness in lines
that constitute the transition from one creed to another:
Now Harold felt himself at length alone,
And bade to Christian tongues a long adieu;
Now he adventurd on a shore unknown,
Which all admire, but many dread to view
(CHP II, ll. 379382)
From the dark barriers of that rugged clime,
Evn to the centre of Illyrias vales,
Childe Harold passd oer many a mount sublime
Through lands scarce noticed in historic tales
(CHP II, ll. 406409)

Lines 379382 indicate an ideological turning point from what is Balkan

the last frontier of Christian tongues to what is Oriental the
dreadful, yet enticing shore unknown and the difference between the
two is only underscored by Harolds feeling of being alone. Harold has
something in common with the Christian tongues, as well as with Greek
antiquity, so it is his clear difference from those he encounters in Albania
that allows him to feel truly other, while the feelings expressed in his

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57

encounter with Greece are much more ambivalent and waver between
nostalgic longing for its glorious past and disappointment in its present
state. While in line 409 he identies Albania as one of the lands scarce
noticed in historic tales, as an upper-class educated European Byron was
schooled in the historic tales of Greece. He demonstrates this abundantly when he has Harold recall both historical and mythical Greek
characters in his stanzas devoted to Greece. Albania, by contrast, has
no history yet and is, as Byron describes, quoting Gibbon in a note to
the poetry, less known than the interior of America (CPW 2:192). The
comparison of Greeces next-door neighbour to a former English colony
at the other end of the world makes the contrast between the old and the
new, located in such geographical proximity, all the greater.
Byron was one of few Western Europeans to visit Albania, especially
some of its more remote regions, such as Tepelene. Paul SimpsonHousley explains that part of this is due to its geographical isolation for
even today a journey from Tirana [the capital] to Tepelene demands six
hours as the road traverses mountain passes.19 Byron himself was aware
of the magnitude of his feat and demonstrated this in both the lines of and
the notes to Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, as indicated above. While Childe
Harold pities Greece for its subjection to Turkey and, in consequence,
its savageness, he seems to admire Ali Pashas domain precisely because
of its military splendour and wild behaviour. Ten stanzas (5665) are
devoted to describing the opulence and merriment of Ali Pashas court.
From the chief s surroundings
Amidst no common pomp the despot sate,
While busy preparation shook the court,
Slaves, eunuchs, soldiers, guests, and santons wait;
Within, a palace, and without, a fort:
Here men of every clime appear to make resort.
(CHP II, ll. 500504)

to the military supplies

Richly caparisond, a ready row
Of armed horse, and many a warlike store
Circled the wide extending court below
(CHP II, ll. 505507)

to the dress at court

The wild Albanian kirtled to his knee,
With shawl-girt head and ornamental gun,
And gold-embroiderd garments, fair to see;
The crimson-scarfed men of Macedon
(CHP II, ll. 514517)

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Byrons Harold misses no detail and, in contrast to his anguished queries

regarding Greeces destiny, he now pours forth enchanting depictions
of its master. It is important to note here that Ali Pasha himself was not
Turkish but rather, as Byron explains in his letters, one of the most
powerful men in the Ottoman empire (BLJ 1:226). He paid nominal
taxes to the Sultan, but was more powerful than the Sultan in his own
sphere, which, beside Albania, included Greece as far south as the Gulf
of Corinth. Because of his political clout as well as his Muslim religion, he
had more in common with the Turks than with the subjected peoples of
the Ottoman empire. Byron certainly perceived him as such and declared
so in his poetry as well as in his letters, one of which states that the Pasha
possesses that dignity which I nd universal amongst the Turks (BLJ
1:228). The contrast between the subject nation and the one in charge is
brought out most sharply in two adjacent verses whose word choice makes
it difficult to sustain the despondent mood concerning fallen Greece that
imbued the beginning of the canto:
Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground;
Half whispering there the Greek is heard to prate
(CHP II, ll. 527528)

The contrasting adverbs proudly/half whispering and verbs

treads/prate suggest no record of the former Greek greatness nor
any reprimand for Muslim reign, while the contrast between here and
there reinforces the cyclical inevitability formerly used to account for
the change of regime.
Harolds impressions are solidied when he experiences a warm
welcome and merry entertainment at Ali Pashas:
Childe Harold at a little distance stood
And viewd, but not displeasd, the reverie,
Nor hated harmless mirth, however rude:
In sooth, it was no vulgar sight to see
Their barbarous, yet their not indecent glee
(CHP II, ll. 640644)

His description cannot be termed unambiguously positive as he seems to

take care not to extol the barbarous festivities too unequivocally. Thus,
instead of portraying them as directly positive, he opts for presenting
a scene that is not negative: Harold was not wholly pleased, but not
displeasd; he did not completely enjoy the mirth, but neither did
he hate it; it could not be termed decorous or cultured, but it was no
vulgar sight to see either; hardly decent, but not indecent. As soon as

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he characterizes the activities at the rulers as harmless, he makes sure

to correct this by qualifying them as however rude. Finally, as if fearing
to be too closely associated with all this, the rst line lets it be known
that Harold watched, but did not participate, since he at a little distance
stood. To put it in more familiar terms, he looked, but did not touch.
The description is not unlike one that might be made of children, who
are also savage and new; they have not yet been initiated, nor are they
ready to be, into all the ne shades of proper behaviour, but they are
innocent and pleasing to watch in that state. The portrayal of primitive
nations in keeping with the connotations of the term as not yet fully
formed and as a reection of what a superior nation the observers
might have been once in the past was a common phenomenon in colonial
explorations of ethnic and racial difference. Time as a tool of power and
a perpetrator of inequality has been analysed by the Africanist anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who notes that as a result of the Enlightenment
idea of progress and the subsequent taxonomizing of cultures, travel took
place from the centres of learning and power to places where man was to
nd nothing but himself ,20 himself as a child, that is. Just as Harold stood
at a little distance from the Albanian festivities, so must the anthropologist employ certain distancing devices21 in order to achieve an objective view of the other. Consequently, relations between the West and its
Other [] were conceived not only as a difference, but as a distance in
Space and Time.22 Byrons portrayal of Albanians thus denies them what
Fabian calls coevalness, that is, a contemporaneous existence of them/
the observed with Byron/the observer. Albanias youthfulness, however,
comes as a refreshment and counterpoint to the very aged Greece. As one
who belongs to this aged cultural lineage, Harold comes to embody experience and disillusion while he witnesses displays of innocence and mirth.
The contrasts created in this scene between what is new and old or innocent and experienced contribute to the romantic thrust of the encounter.
They also place Harold on the side-lines, allow him to withhold from
praising the festivities too highly since he knows that other creeds will
rise with other years (CHP II, ll. 2425) and determine his overall
cautious attitude that brings out the role of the romantic outsider for
which Byrons characters, as well as the author himself, became famous.
Another, perhaps more compelling, reason for Byrons fascination
with Ali Pashas court is that, as a visitor from the super-power of the
western end of Europe passing time with the ruler of its eastern end,
despite their differences in ethnicity and religion, he could have easily
found that in terms of socio-economic circumstances they had much in

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common. The British travellers of the time, in fact, generally preferred

Turks to Greeks, not only because the unambiguous ethnicity of the
Turks induced no anxiety, but also because, as Todorova explains, for
the vast majority of the ruling elites in Europe [] it was easier to identify (and they, in fact, did) with the Ottoman rulers, rather than with the
Balkan upstarts.23 Thus, while Byron mentions some daring mountain
band that showed disdain for Ali Pashas power (CHP II, ll. 421422),
and while in his note to those verses he explains how ve thousand Suliots
performed several acts [] not unworthy of the better days of Greece
(CPW 2:195), he nevertheless contrasts his welcome by Ali Pasha with
less friendly receptions by those of whom he thought he could expect
more:
But these did shelter him beneath their roof,
When less barbarians would have cheered him less,
And fellow-countrymen have stood aloof
(CHP II, ll. 591593)

The progression of closeness imparted to the persons described in each

line is of particular signicance: these clearly a pronoun of distance
refers to the Albanians; the less barbarians to other Europeans he
encountered on his journey (described briey in stanza 67); and fellowcountrymen, obviously, to the British. The ambiguous designation of
less barbarians, as well as their positioning between complete barbarians and the civilized from home, neatly sums up the quality of inbetweenness discussed earlier that characterizes the Balkans.
A warm reception by a Turkish ruler was not uncommon during
these early days of British travels to the Balkans. Todorova notes several
instances: in 1796, while in Lesbos, tired of their poor Greek quarters,
[John] Morritts party managed to invite themselves to the local aga, who
treated them handsomely24 and, in 1806, Nicholas Biddle was evidently
pleased with his visit to the aga of Mistra.25 Both visitors were pleasantly surprised, enough so as to graciously impute qualities of civilization to their hosts: Morritt commented that he began to think there
were gentlemen in all nations26 and Biddle described the aga of Mistra
as an old gentlemen [who] is in general very civil.27 The reason for the
deplorable condition of the Greeks was that they were slaves,28 Todorova
reminds us, whereas the encounter between the English and the Turks
was one of a master nation in the making [] recognizing an established
one.29 Byron alludes to this feeling in one of his letters when he describes
the Greeks as plausible rascals, with all the Turkish vices without their
courage (BLJ 1:238). An Ottoman rulers unambiguous identity and the

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61

condence that comes with belonging to the ruling class provide a more
authentic, more clearly-delineated, other for Childe Harold than the
subjugated Greek who is supposed to be culturally related to him, yet
neither looks nor acts anything like what one would come to expect based
on historic tales. The political circumstances governing the relationship between England and the provinces under Ali Pashas jurisdiction
created the opportunity for just such an encounter for the poet, whose
visit was to secure Englands routes to Egypt and India, which were
endangered by Napoleons expansion at the time.30 Ali Pasha, in turn,
recognized Byron as a representative of an equal political power, a fact
that, judging by Byrons attention to it in his letters, greatly impressed
the poet. In a long letter to his mother, written about a month after his
visit, he relates how Ali Pasha received me standing, a wonderful compliment from a Mussulman, & made me sit down on his right hand (BLJ
1:227, emphasis Byrons). Ali Pashas comment that he was certain I
[Byron] was a man of birth because I had small ears, curling hair, & little
white hands, related in the same letter, is repeated three times elsewhere,
in a letter to Henry Drury, sent in May 1810 (BLJ 1:238), in a later letter
to Mrs. Byron (BLJ 1:249), and in one sent to Byrons friend Francis
Hodgson in July of the same year (BLJ 1:254).
In his work entitled Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire
a response to Saids Orientalism David Cannadine calls for paying more
attention to matters of class in examining colonial politics in conjunction
with the already heavily developed analyses of race. He argues, accordingly, that the binary opposites underlying the Self/Other distinction
employed by post-colonial critics are appealingly simplistic31 and that
the British Empire was about the familiar and domestic, as well as the
different and exotic, that it was, in fact, about the domestication of the
exotic the comprehending and the reordering of the foreign in parallel,
analogous, equivalent, resemblant terms.32 A social hierarchy ranging
from rich to poor, educated to uneducated, ruling to ruled, was a familiar
scene at home that could be quite easily applied to any foreign order,
with the social distinction often taking precedence over any difference of
culture, race or ethnicity. Thus, Byron must have felt that he had more
in common with the comfortably situated Ali Pasha in his surroundings
than with the defenceless urn (CHP II, l. 20) and scatterd heaps (l.
43) he encountered in Greece. He suggests as much himself when he
writes, in a letter to Henry Drury: I see not much difference between
ourselves & the Turks, save that we have foreskins and they none, that
they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they

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little (BLJ 1:238). The reduction of differences to custom and dress, that
is, to outward appearances, indicates that Byron recognizes an essential
quality that is common to both nations and, in Cannadines terms, reorders Albania vis--vis England in parallel, analogous, equivalent, resemblant terms. This may explain why, in spite of the poets reputation as a
champion of Greek freedom, one of the best known images of Byron is
his portrait in Albanian dress by Thomas Phillips.33 In describing British
travellers disappointment in Greece, Todorova singles out the lack of
striking physical resemblance and the absence of classical manners.34
It is to be expected, then, that Byron would prefer to commemorate his
journey to the Balkans by dressing as one of the ruling class of the region
at the time. He bragged to his mother about some very magnique
Albanian dresses (BLJ 1:231) that he purchased in a post scriptum to
the same long letter in which he described the grand welcome extended
to him by Ali Pasha.
In spite of his laudatory and exotically charged description of Albania,
Byrons journey to the Balkans, when discussed today, is almost exclusively focused on Greece; proof that European expectations have not
changed, even after the disappointing encounters between world and
text of the nineteenth century. In contrast to Missolonghi, writes Paul
Simpson-Housley, Tepelene, Albania, is almost peripheral to Byrons
world, and in recent years has seldom been visited by adherents of
Byrons works.35 The impact Byrons verses left on Albania, by contrast,
is equal to his own fascination with the country expressed through Childe
Harold: the children, for instance, study the Second Canto of Childe
Harolds Pilgrimage at the age of sixteen as they do elsewhere in Albania
and virtually the entire population is aware of the plaque in the wall of
Ali Pashas castle in honour of the poet.36 The highest inscription on
the plaque bears testimony to the respect bequeathed even by the late
Stalinist Albanian president, Enver Hoxha, whose words are recorded
on it: I like Byron, not that I am a Romantic, but for the fact that he
sincerely loved my people.37
This oversight and downplaying of Byrons unique visit may be in part
the poets own fault, however, as he himself positioned his experiences
in Albania between his verses on Greece. After all, Albania was, as most
other Balkan nations at the time were, merely a stop on the way to the land
of Classical Antiquity. The rest of the Balkans had indeed only become
known to the West by dint of their proximity to Greece once Europe
entered its stage of philhellenism in the late eighteenth century. As if
mirroring Byrons own writing design, The British Librarys Writers

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63

Lives volume on Byron narrates his trip to Albania in the section subtitled Greece, though it too admits that at rst Byron was less interested
in the Greeks than in their overlords as it begins to supply the details of
his visit with the ogreish Ali Pasha.38 The page preceding the conclusion to the chapter on Byrons Grand Tour, however, carries a full-page
picture of Thomas Phillipss painting.
Byrons less enthusiastic treatment of the Greeks as opposed to their
overlords is traceable to the fact that the Albanian Muslims were perceived
as more authentically other by the English Christian visitor, as illustrated by their depiction in Childe Harolds Pilgrimage. Christian Greece,
by contrast, the supposed cradle of Western European civilization that
had the misfortune of being corrupted by Turkish rule, could not be
so easily classied as either other or as self, and that is precisely what
made the visitor so uncomfortable. A location situated somewhere indenably between the cultural heritage of Rome and Byzantium, between
the political jurisdiction of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburgs and the
Turkish Ottomans, between the religions of Christianity and Islam (especially since Orthodoxy, the Greek national religion, must have appeared
to any Westerner as a more eastern variant of Catholicism) does not allow
for simple classication. Vesna Goldsworthy develops this theme as she
shows that while the Balkan peninsula has often been seen as insufficiently
different to play the role of an exoticised Oriental Other, it has nevertheless continued to be seen as too polluted by this Otherness to be (properly) European.39 And, since pollution muddles the clean separation
between Self and Other that is enabled by such concepts as Orientalism,
it is easy to understand how what Todorova calls the mongrel nature
and racial ambiguity of the Balkans would cause much more discomfort
than an encounter with the clearly separate Ottoman rulers.40 Although
reading Childe Harolds Pilgrimage today, from a post-colonial perspective, seems to require awareness of the framework of Saids Orientalism, the problematization of this all-encompassing concept in terms
of its geographically and ideologically more specic manifestations, such
as Balkanism, disrupts the classic Self/Other distinction, yet precisely
because of that it allows for a closer examination of the so-called in-between places that equate with neither and yet are both.

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tatiana kuzmic

NOTES
1 Byrons Letters and Journals: The complete and unexpurgated text of all the letters
available in manuscript and the full printed version of all others, edited by Leslie A.
Marchand, 11 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 19731981), vol. 1, p. 237. Further references to this collection are
given as BLJ, followed by volume and page number.
2 Two fairly recent articles that question Byrons philhellenism are Byron and the
Eastern Mediterranean: Childe Harold II and the polemic of Ottoman Greece
by Nigel Leask in The Cambridge Companion to Bryon, edited by Drummond Bone
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 99117, and Byron, Turkey
and the Orient by Massimiliano Demata in The Reception of Byron in Europe, vol.
2: Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Richard Cardwell (London:
Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), pp. 439452, which also challenges the Saidian
reading of Byrons Eastern poetry.
3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 99.
4 Ahmad Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), pp.
166, 183.
5 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 24.
6 Ibid., p. 27. Byrons travel companion, John Cam Hobhouse, used one of these terms
in the title of his book, A journey through Albania and other provinces of Turkey in
Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the years 1809 and 1810 (London: James
Cawthorn, 1813).
7 Todorova, p. 25.
8 Ibid., p. 26.
9 Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, edited by Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19801993), vol. 2, p. 192. Further references to this
collection are given as CPW, followed by volume and page number. To distinguish
between different works within the collection, CHP is used for Childe Harolds
Pilgrimage and DJ for Don Juan.
10 Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 8.
11 Todorova, p. 16.
12 Ibid., p. 17.
13 Ibid., p. 14.
14 Ibid., p. 11.
15 Leask, Byron and the Eastern Mediterranean, p. 104.
16 For a detailed account of British Philhellenism and Byrons role in it, see David
Roessel, In Byrons Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
17 Said, p. 177.
18 Leask, pp. 99100.
19 Paul Simpson-Housley, Tepelene, Land of Albania, The Byron Journal 20 (1992),
9295, p. 92.
20 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 6.
21 Ibid., p. 52.

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22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30

31
32
33
34
35
36
37

38
39
40

65

Ibid., p. 147.
Todorova, p. 109.
Ibid., p. 93.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 93.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 91.
For a detailed account of the political implications of Byrons journey, see Peter
Cochran, Natures Gentler Errors: Byron, the Ionian Islands, and Ali Pacha
[sic], in The Byron Journal 23 (1995), 2235.
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 4.
Cannadine, p. xix.
Martin Garrett, George Gordon, Lord Byron, British Library Writers Lives (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 3233.
Todorova, p. 94.
Simpson-Housley, p. 92.
Ibid., p. 93.
Ibid., p. 93. It bears pointing out that Simpson-Housleys article was written in 1992
and it is questionable whether a Stalinist presidents quote is still standing in the
same place a decade and a half after the fall of Communism. Hoxhas somewhat
hesitant acknowledgement of Byron nevertheless attests to the magnitude of the
poets inuence.
Garret, p. 25.
Goldsworthy, p. 6.
Todorova, p. 19.

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