Edith Durham: a celebration of her life

On 14 March 2025, the AAA held a major event about Edith Durham. The evening was introduced by our Chairman Stephen Nash and hosted by the Embassy of Kosovo in London. In this edition of the Gazette we have a number of contributions that will give readers who were not able to attend a good sense of what happened. Our coverage begins with an overview of the evening by Adam Yamey. Adam’s summary is followed by contributions from John Hodgson and Elizabeth Gowing. Joanna Hanson looks in more detail at the texts read by Dame Joanna Lumley. We then hear from Dame Joanna about why she is such an admirer of Edith Durham.

Dame Joanna Lumley reading from High Albania

The woman from England who saved a nation

Adam Yamey

Mary Edith Durham (1863-1944), usually known as Edith Durham, is well-known to many Albanians but little-known amongst British people. She was a remarkable woman. Trained at Bedford College and the Royal College of Art, she was an accomplished artist, a prolific writer, a skilled anthropologist and a formidable political lobbyist. The event hosted by the Embassy of Kosovo celebrated Edith’s life and achievements, whose work was of great importance in the Balkans, especially in what is now Albania and Kosovo. Several speakers gave interesting talks about different aspects of Edith’s life. Between the speakers, the actress and presenter Joanna Lumley read short excerpts from some of the books written by Edith Durham.

In 1900, Edith’s medical advisor suggested that for the good of her health, she should take a break from her busy life in England. She travelled to Montenegro, and thus began her many years of arduous travelling around the Western Balkans, learning about the people who lived there, their traditions and ways of life, their problems and the complex political situation in the region.

The Oxford historian Noel Malcolm was the first speaker. Briefly and succinctly, he gave a comprehensive outline of the political situation in the Balkans when Edith was working there. In a nutshell, the region was the epicentre of the struggle to determine how Balkan territory was to be divided up as the Ottoman Empire was suffering its death throes.

John Hodgson, the translator of many Albanian novels including those of Ismail Kadare, gave a fascinating talk about his first visits to Kosovo in the early 1980s when many country people were still living in the way they were when Edith Durham visited them in the years before the First World War.

James Hickson, Edith Durham’s grand-nephew, then spoke about Edith’s family: her parents and her eight siblings, many of whom, like Edith, went on to do remarkable things. Edith was the oldest child, and after her father died, she was left to care for some of the family as well as continuing her work as a successful artist. It was the stress of this overworking that caused her to become so unwell that her doctor recommended she took the holiday, which led to her involvement with the Balkans and the Albanian people in particular.

Wherever she travelled, Edith was welcomed by local people. While staying with them, she observed their customs and all aspects of their daily lives. She was given and purchased many items - clothing, domestic tools, fabrics and much more - which she brought back to England. Many of these precious mementoes are housed in two museums: the Bankfield Museum in Halifax (Yorkshire), and the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill (London). Rachel Terry of the Bankfield Museum and Peronel Craddock of the Horniman Museum both spoke, and explained how their museums had obtained the exhibits collected by Edith Durham, and what items their collections house. Hearing them made me want to revisit the Horniman, and to pay a first visit to the Bankfield.

Elizabeth Gowing, who published her book, Edith and I, in 2013, joined the event via Zoom from Prishtina. Elizabeth first visited Kosovo in 2006 and she described how she first came across this extraordinary woman.

Another speaker was David Oakley-Hill, whose father Dayrell R. Oakley-Hill (1898-1985) played a leading role in running the Gendarmerie of Albania during the reign of King Zog. Oakley-Hill lived and worked in Albania between 1929 and 1938. His son David told the meeting that his father and Edith Durham had communicated with each other. David is currently completing a book about another formidable English woman, who worked in Albania: Margaret Hasluck (1885-1948). Edith and Margaret wrote letters to each other, and David will be including some of them in his forthcoming book.

I wrote earlier that Edith is far from well-known in Britain. Brian Ferris, another speaker, is valiantly trying to remedy this situation by getting a commemorative plaque attached to a house where Edith lived in London, 36 Glenloch Road in Belsize Park. Brian spoke about the frustrations he is facing in trying to achieve this. I have discovered that Edith also lived, albeit briefly, at three other addresses around Belsize Park.

In between the speakers’ presentations, Dame Joanna Lumley read extracts from some of Edith’s books. Most of them came from High Albania (first published in 1909), which is still one of the best books that has been written about Albania in English. Before reading the first extract, Joanna explained that after her first brief visit to Albania, she fell in love with the country. The event was hosted by His Excellency the Ambassador of Kosovo, Ilir Kapiti. Joanna’s readings and the excellent presentations by the guest speakers were all introduced by AAA Chairman Stephen Nash. This was an enjoyable and highly informative evening, a fine appreciation of the woman whose empathy with the Albanians, observations and political lobbying saved what is now the country of Albania from being carved up by the countries around it.

Edith Durham in Kosovo

John Hodgson

I first came across Edith Durham in Prishtina in 1980, when I arrived to teach for the British Council at the university. My colleague Shaqir Shaqiri, seeing that I was interested in the unfamiliar country in which I found myself, said to me, “If you really want to understand us, you should read this book”. He presented me with a photocopy of the first edition of High Albania.

At that time, many of the customs and traditions that Durham experienced on her journeys through the Albanian mountains were still intact in the rural society of Kosovo. My hospitable students invited me to their homes in the villages, where guests were seated in a place of honour cross legged by the stove in a room full of men if bare of furniture, but still with infinite gradations of status in the seating plan, from the elders of the family close by me, to a cluster of children by the door on a sheet of tin known as the trapazan. Conversation was intense and formal, for television had not yet destroyed it. Supper was served on low round portable tables that were brought by younger sons. We dismembered delicious roast chickens with our fingers, and at the end of the meal an elder of status might foretell the future by examining marks on the breastbone of the fowl. I once asked if I could be taught how to do this, I was told that I had studied enough.

But there was still plenty I could learn. From conversation in these hospitable houses, I was taught an oral history that differed entirely from the official version put out by Tito’s Yugoslavia. I was taught about the tribal structure of Albanian society, about Isa Boletini’s visit to London in 1913, when he was obliged to hand over his weapon before entering the Houses of Parliament but cannily kept a pistol in reserve, and about the Serbian colonisation of Kosovo in pre-war “old Yugoslavia”. I learned the traditional wisdom enshrined in the allegorical anecdotes and parables that eventually found their way into print in the collections of Anton Çetta. We drank endless glasses of very strong black tea, and threw cigarettes across the room to each other. Like Edith Durham seventy years previously, I found this a fascinating and heady experience. Like her, I reflected “how dull in comparison were London dinner parties”.

This way of life has now been swept aside by the fierce tide of modernity, and of course, many of its features are unlamented. But in Durham the society of northern Albania found its supreme chronicler.

My colleague Shaqir was writing a doctoral dissertation on Edith Durham. Very soon after my arrival in 1981, Kosovo was racked by demonstrations that were brutally suppressed by the Yugoslav Army. Shaqir lost his job at the university, and was given a two-year prison sentence. Although a dissertation on Durham was not in itself considered a crime, such a subject was held against him, and Durham’s fierce support for the Albanian cause made her a politically sensitive writer. Not like the respected Rebecca West, who earned Durham’s withering contempt for her retelling of the Serbian myth of the Battle of Kosovo in the sumptuous prose of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “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”.

Durham responded to Albanian hospitality with steadfast love. She described the customs of the country with vivid wit, and went on to devote all her energies to the relief of the Albanian people in time of war, and support for their fragile political cause in time of peace. Durham, and no doubt my colleague Shaqir, would be delighted and probably very surprised to find an evening held in her honour in the Embassy of the independent Republic of Kosovo in London. But we do well to remember her.

Rruga Edith Durham:

Paving the way for a strong relationship between Britain and the Balkans

Elizabeth Gowing

You can walk across the wide lawn of Golders Green crematorium and try to summon the memory of one or many of the Londoners whose ashes have been scattered here. You need a good imagination though, or a powerful sense of connection - the space is carefully maintained to offer a soothingly neutral backdrop for complicated emotions. When I came here in search of something remaining of Edith Durham, I struggled to find it.

Perhaps it is appropriate for a woman who was defined by her travel, that all that was left of her sifted and shifted in air and never settled in any one place. Edith Durham did not leave a gravestone or even a plaque marking the place that an urn had been stowed. More than eighty years ago, her scattered ashes became - at some molecular level - a part of this greensward in North London, but the place had no particular significance for her. To find her memorial, we need to leave London for the countries of the Balkans.

In her beloved Albania, for example, she is commemorated in streetscapes, mountainscapes and the educational landscape. A huge building project is currently transforming the Edith Durham school in the middle of Tirana, not far from the capital’s Rruga Edit Durham. And whether you travel from there west to Durrës or north to Shkodra or south-east to Korça, you will find more roads proudly bearing Edith’s name. In Shkodra, the road named after her is the address of the idiosyncratic and wonderful Tradita hotel, a sanctuary for many elements of heritage - from its collection of painted wedding chests, to the dishes and drinks served according to traditional recipes. The hotel owner, Gjon Dukgilaj, is naturally an Edith Durham fan, and it was he who put up the stone monument to Edith on the pass above Theth. Here, around a bas relief based on one of the surviving photographs of her, her name is given in short as “E Durham” while a lot more of the mason’s time has been taken to set out the elaborate name by which she was known affectionately to the Albanians, “Kralica e Malësorëve” - the Queen of the Highlanders.

In Montenegro, which was Edith’s first taste of the Balkans - the gateway drug for what became full intoxication with the region - she is also memorialised. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Montenegrin street which carries her name is in the majority-Albanian town of Ulqin, the cultural centre of the country’s Albanians. The sign announcing this as “Ulica/Rruga Edit Durham” is at the exact spot where she must have stood to make the 1905 sketch she titled using the Italian name for the town, “A Corner of Dulcigno”.

But most of all, it is in Kosovo that Edith Durham is memorialised. Here, too, there is a school (in the municipality of Suhareka). But the Republic of Kosovo also chose her as the first woman to appear on one of its postage stamps. And there are at least six Kosovan roads named after her - one, a central square in the capital, just off the main pedestrian boulevard named for Mother Teresa. Others are in Fushë Kosovë, Gjilan, Gjakova, Istog and Prizren.

“Kralica e Malësorëve” - the Queen of the Highlanders

(photo courtesy Elizabeth Gowing)

Impressive though this roll call is, it possibly undersells or misses the point about the extent to which Edith Durham is a part of the national consciousness in Kosovo. It is that affection for her which is the reason these road names were chosen. She had proof of the nature of this two-way street even within her lifetime. In 1944, a few months before her death, and at a time of rationing in the austerity of war-time Britain, she noted how her legacy was starting to take shape. A letter to a friend proudly noted how “my services in relief work have not been forgotten by the Albanians. The Albanian colony in USA sent me 132 pounds for my birthday saying I had fed them and they must feed me, so sent half a dozen large food parcels as well. I was deeply touched”.

At the event at the Kosovan Embassy showcasing Edith Durham’s writing, I read an extract from my book, Edith and I: on the trail of an Edwardian traveller in Kosovo, describing how the response to any of my questions on anthropological issues in Kosovo - whether those related to old men’s headwear, to the etymology of traditional carbohydrates, or the custom of putting a tea-towel under the windscreen wipers of cars in a wedding procession - was the comment, “You’re quite an Edith Durham, aren’t you!” Her name has become not just a landmark on city maps, but a reference point for relationships between interested Brits and the people of Kosovo. For the benign precedent she set of honesty and openness, every member of the AAA must be grateful - for not only giving her name to these roads, but paving the way for relationships of trust between two peoples.

A Blue Plaque in celebration of Edith Durham

Joanna Hanson

Joanna Lumley has a personal love of Albania. She has done travel programmes there tracing the Roman Via Egnatia route. She came to a special celebration to read from the works of the great Edwardian female traveller, Edith Durham, to galvanise support for a Blue Plaque to be placed on a London residence where this Balkan trailblazer and early anthropologist had lived.

In between the remarks made by the speakers, Joanna read excerpts from two of Edith Durham’s books: Through the Lands of the Serb (1904) and High Albania (1909). These texts are witness to Durham’s graphic writing and observations which form a revealing record of her early twentieth century travels to the Balkan lands. Her political support for an independent Albania was discussed, mentioning her interventions as well as the Foreign Office thinking about this lady. Durham developed unambiguous views about the negative role of the Serbs, Russians and Austro-Hungarians in these Albanian territories. She not only journeyed through them but was active there during the Balkan Wars and First World War when she provided relief and care for the refugees and wounded soldiers.

Joanna Lumley first read two excerpts from Through the Lands of the Serb. Both were about Scutari, modern-day Shkodër. In the second reading, Joanna read Edith’s description of “bazaar day”, when men and women from the surrounding villages flocked into the town:

I have no space to describe the dresses of the various tribes; the women with stiff, straight, narrow skirts boldly striped with black that recall forcibly the dresses upon the earliest Greek vases; the great leathern iron-studded belts; the women with cowries in their hair; the wild men from the mountains in huge sheepskin coats with the wool outside; town Christian women blazing in scarlet and white, masses of gilt coins, silver buttons and embroidery; Mohammedan ladies shapeless in garments which may be correctly termed "bags," or to be still more accurate, "undivided trousers," of brilliant flowered material, not only thickly veiled but with blue and gold cloth cloaks clasped over the head as well, shrouding the figure and allowing only a tiny peephole through which to see; poor women, veiled down to the knees in white, looking like ghosts in the dark entrances; Turks in turbans, long frock-coats and coloured sashes; little girls their hair dyed a fierce red and their eyebrows blackened. They all unite in one dazzling and confused mass which one only disentangles by degrees, and when I plunged for the first time into that 10 unforgettable picture, saw the blaze of sunlight, the dark rich shadows, the gorgeousness, the squalor, the glitter, the filth, the colour, the new-flayed hides sizzling in the sun and blackened with flies, the thousand and one tawdry twopenny articles for sale on all hands, I thought with a pang of the poor Albanian "female" who was passing weary, colourless hours in a grey London suburb, and understood the sickness of her soul.

Joanna also read excerpts from High Albania, including Edith’s description of meeting “one of the Albanian virgins who wear male attire”:

While we halted to water the horses she came up—a lean, wiry, active woman of forty seven, clad in very ragged garments, breeches and coat. She was highly amused at being photographed, and the men chaffed her about her “beauty”. Had dressed as a boy, she said, ever since she was quite a child because she had wanted to, and her father had let her. Of matrimony she was very derisive—all her sisters were married, but she had known better. Her brother, with whom she lived—a delicate-looking fellow, much younger than she—came up to see what was happening. She treated me with the contempt she appeared to think all petticoats deserved—turned her back on me, and exchanged cigarettes with the men, with whom she was hail-fellow-well-met. In a land where each man wears a moustache, her little, hairless, wizened face looked very odd above masculine garb, as did also the fact that she was unarmed.

Edith Durham brought Albania into British thinking and was the first person really to do so. She started her travels in 1900 on the advice of her doctor who felt she required recuperation from the travails of nursing her sick mother. She set out as a quiet, reserved lady but quickly developed into a more assertive and bold persona. She became an adviser to the British Government which grew increasingly sceptical of her evolving views as she developed a more intensive knowledge of the people of these lands. Her turn of the century writings were both socio-political as well as descriptive.

Joanna’s final reading was a description of a St John’s Day Edith spent in the back and beyond of the Albanian Highlands:

After mass there was a rush for the shooting ground—the mark was a white stone, and the range short. The Primaeval hit often, and a man with a Mauser every time he tried. Those that missed were very close. But it was not difficult, for I hit it myself, with the Primaeval's beloved Martini, which he pressed upon me, adorned as it was with silver coins, to reward it for the lives it had taken. Drunk with noise, excitement, and the smell of burnt powder, he drew out the hot empty cartridge-cases and breathed in their odour with ecstasy, gasping, '' By God, it is good!”… The afternoon passed in paying visits—sitting on heaps of fern in dark dwellings, drinking healths in rakia, chewing sheep-cheese, and firing rifles and revolvers indoors; a noisy joy that peppers oneself and the refreshments with burnt powder and wads. In one yard two girls were slowly turning a whole sheep that, spitted lengthwise, was roasting over a large wood fire. It was stuffed with herbs and sewn up the belly, and of all ways of cooking mutton, this is the most excellent. By night-time we were all too sleepy to do much sing-song. The Primaeval had emptied all his cartridges, and was again busy refilling them. We had passed a true Albanian day, said the Padre of Toplana: duhan, rakia, puslike, dashtnia (tobacco, brandy, guns, love). I suggested that dashtnia should come first, because maxima est caritas. But they said, not in Albania. And so ended St. John's Day.

As did the evening dedicated to this Edwardian and her many Balkan revelations.

Dame Joanna Lumley

When she had finished her readings, Dame Joanna Lumley spoke to the Anglo-Albanian Gazette about her admiration for “the beautiful and extraordinary” Edith Durham.

Joanna Lumley: I adore travelling and people who explore when they travel and she was one the great travellers. She travelled with an open mind, an artistic eye for recording things and she wrote things down, in her words and her drawings. She was brave, quite tough. I love her boyish attitude, her tom-boyish way of doing things… She showed such respect and interest in the way people lived. I think she would have been a welcome guest and it’s not surprising that she’s revered in Kosovo and Albania today – and her own country know nothing of her – yet!

AAG: A traveller, a woman, a collector, an anthropologist - is there one of those characteristics that speaks to you more than another?

Joanna Lumley: I think that an intrepid, single traveller – she had Marco her dragoman with her – she endured tremendous hardships. This was a time when there were women explorers, she was part of a British curiosity I like to think of it as - a time when women got out of their bustles and skirts, they could wear divided trousers and ride horses and be like a chap! I loved her travelling, as well as the artefacts she brought back… My grandmother and my great aunt were also great travellers in Tibet, Bhutan, Sikim. They also brought back artefacts. So all of Edith Durham I applaud and love.

AAG: When you read her books, do you feel a connection with Edith Durham?

Joanna Lumley: Yes, I try to make scribblings when I’m travelling and filming. I keep notebooks and jot down things. I love the way she writes. You don’t write with lots of sentiment, you don’t say “a lovely sunset”, you say “a sunset slashed with blue and green”. You don’t have lots of sloppy adjectives. Edith writes in a clear way and describes things in a way that jump out. I like that no-nonsense approach. She was an extraordinary, many-sided woman. She was a Florence Nightingale with her nursing. But I like the traveller in her best.