15 - Illyris, Epirus and Macedonia in the Early Iron Age

Summary

GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTION

The mountainous terrain of the South-west Balkans is divided into sections by two watersheds. One separates the waters of the Danube basin from those flowing into the Adriatic–Sicilian sea and the Aegean, and the other the waters entering the Adriatic from those entering the Aegean. These two watersheds meet at a gigantic bastion, the Šar Planina, with peaks of 2,764 m and 2,702 m. To early geographers it was a part of the Haemus range, and in later writers it had its own name, Mount Scardus. To the west of the Šar Planina the mountainous masses of Montenegro and northern Albania extend towards the Adriatic coast. Here, if you travel from north to south (or vice versa), there is one possible but difficult route running above the valley of the White Drin from Peć to Kukës, and there is one easy route via the Zeta valley from Titograd to Shkodër (Scodra). Because of its great strategic value, the Zeta valley was the centre of the Ardiaean kingdom in the Hellenistic period and of the Serb kingdom of Stefan Dušan in the Middle Ages. To the east of the Šar Planina and to the north of the headwaters of the Vardar (Axius) and its tributaries, there are in the watershed range two low cols, separated from one another by the Crna Gora (1651 m), and it is over these cols that the easy routes run from the headwaters of the Ibar and the Morava to those of the Vardar.