Sky Arts - An Exile

In 1848 Edward Lear, writer and illustrator of nonsense verse, set out on an epic journey through Greece and Albania. But Lear was more than just a humorist - he was an excellent landscape artist, traveller and writer of travel books.

With Lear’s writings and drawings as a guide, Robert Horne follows Lear’s journey through the awe-inspiring scenery of the southern Balkans, where he has encountered fascinating reminders of a turbulent past and the warmth of the modern inhabitants: the inspiration for all travellers.

But who was Edward Lear? Many of us have enjoyed the popular nonsense verse The Owl and the Pussycat and it is for comic rhymes that Edward Lear became famous. But it is his life as a serious landscape painter and great Victorian traveller that is inspiring. He was one of the first Westerners to explore and illustrate some of the remote Balkan mountain regions of the Ottoman Empire.

Lear’s original intention when he set out on a journey to the ‘East’ was to visit the famous monasteries of Mt. Athos. An outbreak of the plague in Thessaloniki altered his plans. In typical intrepid fashion he continued on a meandering epic adventure that took him across the Balkan mountains from coast to coast, drawing and writing his journal on the way.

Lear was an attractive and convivial companion and had many friends, but his humorous exterior hid a lonely and troubled character wracked with doubts and troubled by short-sight, epilepsy and asthma.

This three part documentary explores Lear’s character through his arduous and dangerous exploits in a still little known pocket of Europe - through northern Greece, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Albania. It is a region often as little understood today as it was then, whose wild and spectacular landscapes are some of the most magnificent, unspoiled and still barely visited in Europe.

Episode 1: Into Ottoman Lands
In the attractive setting of Corfu, Robert Horne outlines Lear’s background and some surprising connections with Greece and Athens before embarking on the journey proper from Thessaloniki to the Albanian border, taking in the breathtaking beauty of the mountain lakes, Prespa and Ochrid.

Episode 2 Albania: The Devil Draws
As an artist Lear was attacked as Satan throughout Muslim lands, something that would not happen in modern Albania. Whilst exploring the remains of Albania’s rich heritage and the Ottoman past Robert Horne is intrigued by Albania’s recent history and how the eccentric rule of the communist dictator Enver Hoxha casts its shadow over the present.

Episode 3 Greece: Coast to Coast
Lear was impressed by the legacy of the struggle of the local people against Ottoman oppression. Nowhere was this more exemplified than in the mountains of northern Greece. Robert finds that stories of those times are still celebrated, and Lear himself remembered, but the traditional way of life is fighting to survive against encroaching modernity into a breathtaking landscape.


Robert Horne – presenter
Mike Dyer - The Voice of Edward Lear
Derek Smith – director
Quentin Russell – writer
Nicolas Parsons - The Own and the Pussycat (extract)
 

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