Struggle for Scutari : Turk, Slav, and Albanian

“The Struggle for Scutari,” originally published in 1914, was the fourth book of the English traveller and writer Edith Durham (1863-1944). She had already made a name for herself with “Through the Lands of the Serb” (1904), “The Burden of the Balkans” (1905) and especially “High Albania” (1909). This book is perhaps Durham’s most ambitious piece of writing. It is the fruit of her longest stay in the Balkans (mostly in Montenegro and Albania) – three and a half years from April 1910 to September 1913. “The Struggle for Scutari” deals with the border conflict, and then with the bloody war waged by the tiny Kingdom of Montenegro under King Nikola upon a crumbling Ottoman Empire, of which Albania was still a part. Caught in the middle of the conflict, between a rock and a hard place, were the Albanian highland tribes that Edith Durham knew and loved. “The Struggle for Scutari” is not only a reliable source of history for the period between 1910 and 1913, based as it is on first-hand experience, but also facilitates an understanding of events in the Balkans up to this very day.