Edith Durham’s Bold Edwardian Collection of Beautiful Balkan Things

Wednesday 4 February 2026 at 2.00 pm at the Lowther Pavilion. Guests may attend the lecture – £10 pp (pay on door)

Lecturer: Elizabeth Gowing

Studied at Magdalen College Oxford before training as a teacher and working in Lambeth, Hackney and Islington. Moved to Kosovo in 2006 and there worked with the Ethnological Museum in Prishtina and co-founded ‘The Ideas Partnership’, a charity working on education and cultural heritage projects. Speaks fluent Albanian and has translated two books (the unauthorised biography of Yugoslavia’s longest-held political prisoner, Adem Demaci, and the memoirs of one of the leaders of the 1912 uprising). Also the author of four books about Kosovo – Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo (2011), Edith and I; on the trail of an Edwardian traveller in Kosovo (2013); The Rubbish-Picker’s Wife; an unlikely friendship in Kosovo (2015) and The Silver Thread; a journey through Balkan craftmanship (2017). Her latest book (2022 – with Robert Wilton) is No Man’s Lands: 8 extraordinary women in Balkan history. Regular contributor to Radio 4 (Saturday Live, Excess Baggage, From Our Own Correspondent) and the BBC World Service. She has also worked as a member of the advisory board of GuideKS, the NGO for Kosovan tour guides, and of the board of Faktoje, the Albanian fact-checking organisation.

The Lecture:

Subtitled (in Edith’s own words) ‘Such costumes as I have never seen before and never shall again perhaps’, the lecture is illustrated with rich fabrics and great stories. Edith Durham’s travels in the first decades of the twentieth century took her across the unexplored Accursed Mountains between Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania, to what are now UNESCO World Heritage Site monasteries, and through bazaars she describes as ‘glowing with goods’. In watercolours and in seven published books she recorded the objects she collected, the landscapes she visited and the people she met. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and was the first woman to become its Vice President. The lively lecture draws on the lecturer’s book, Edith and I; on the trail of an Edwardian traveller in Kosovo (2013). The book was the first biographical work on Edith Durham in English and was described by The Times as ‘the most delicious and delightful read of the summer’.

Caption:A  portrait of Edit Durham by Kel Marubi – Drejtoria e Përgjithshme e Arkivave. Public domain