The Land Of The Black Mountain The Adventures Of Two Englishmen In Montenegro By Reginald Wyon And Gerald Prance

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Early in the autumn of 1826 the Abbe Birotteau, the principal personage of this history, was overtaken by a shower of rain as he returned home from a friend's house, where he had been passing the evening. He therefore crossed, as quickly as his corpulence would allow, the deserted little square called "The Cloister," which lies directly behind the chancel of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien at Tours. The Abbe Birotteau, a short little man, apoplectic in constitution and about sixty years old, had already gone through several attacks of gout. Now, among the petty miseries of human life the one for which the worthy priest felt the deepest aversion was the sudden sprinkling of his shoes, adorned with silver buckles, and the wetting of their soles. Notwithstanding the woollen socks in which at all seasons he enveloped his feet with the extreme care that ecclesiastics take of themselves, he was apt at such times to get them a little damp, and the next day gout was sure to give him certain infallible proofs of constancy. Nevertheless, as the pavement of the Cloister was likely to be dry, and as the abbe had won three francs ten sous in his rubber with Madame de Listomere, he bore the rain resignedly from the middle of the place de l'Archeveche, where it began to come down in earnest.

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This book observes images of Montenegro in Anglo-American creative writing and films from the late eighteenth century until 2016. Like the Balkans as a whole, Montenegro usually reappeared in the West’s consciousness with the outbreak of wars, but remained marginalized on the larger Balkan map because of its peripheral political influence and, therefore, remained little known. In the past, Montenegro was experienced as almost unapproachable, barren, and wild. Its people, like their mountains, were seen as massive and fierce, while their primitivism equally delighted and repulsed visitors. Even today, when one searches the Internet for “Montenegro,” one finds titles mostly containing modifiers circling around “undiscovered,” “magical,” and “mysterious.” The book follows these vignettes chronologically to point out how the rhetoric they share dangerously builds a caricature of the country. However, they also provide a very lively mosaic of landscapes, history, people, their costumes, houses, and everyday life, which are sometimes distorted. No one can claim that these descriptions were not influenced by the ideologies the travellers inherited at home and were not filtered through their own cultural grids, but, significantly, they evoke places that are now forever lost – destroyed in wars, by earthquakes, faulty development planning, or, simply, by time.