Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in the Balkans

Abstract

51 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 Pasha’1 and where he found the inspiration for the central section (stanzas 36–72) of the second canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The beginning and the end of the canto, mirroring Byron’s own travelling schedule, focus on Greece. While the poet’s 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 fi ghter for Greek freedom into question.2 At the same time, Byron’s ‘Eastern’ poetry has earned him a place in Edward Said’s compilation of authors who made ‘a signifi cant contribution to building the Orientalist discourse’,3 a view that has also come under criticism and one which requires further scrutiny. Harold’s 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 Pasha’s court in the second canto, muddle the simple East/West opposition. Relying on theoretical models that emerged in response to Said’s seminal study Orientalism, such as Maria Todorova’s concept of ‘Balkanism’ and David Cannadine’s ‘Ornamentalism’, this essay seeks to off er a more nuanced reading of Byron’s 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 Byron’s works between Greece as the cradle of Western civilization in decline and Albania as a novel site of discovery. While Said’s groundbreaking work has been criticized for portraying the West too monolithically and for defi ning it too exclusively in terms