Edmund Spencer - Travels in European Turkey 1850

Captain Edmund Spencer was a prolific British travel writer of the mid-nineteenth century. He seems to have lived in Prussia for a time. His first travel book was entitled "Sketches of Germany and the Germans, with a glance at Poland, Hungary, & Switzerland in 1834, 1835, and 1836, by an English resident of Germany” (London 1836). He was in contact with German travel writer, Count Hermann Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871), whose book "Tutti Frutti” he translated into English (London 1836). Spencer’s second great tour took him down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople and the Black Sea where he visited the Caucasus. He hereafter published his "Travels in the Western Caucasus” (London 1838) and other volumes on the region. Finally, in 1850, Spencer undertook an extensive voyage through the southern Balkans, which he described in his two-volume "Travels in European Turkey, in 1850, through Bosnia, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thrace, Albania, and Epirus, with a visit to Greece and the Ionian Isles” (London 1851). The Albanian portion of this epic journey took him on horseback and on foot from Ohrid to Mirdita, Elbasan, Kruja, Shkodra and up to Kotor, and then back to Elbasan from where he continued on to Berat, Përmet, and Janina. This description of mid-nineteenth century Albania, with much rare insight, is given as follows.