Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume VIII Part 12

In the morning, the horses were brought to us at an early hour, in charge of a jolly old officer of gendarmes, who was to accompany us. As far as the village of Kalepa, there is a carriage road; afterward, only a stony path. From the spinal ridge of the promontory, which we crossed, we overlooked all the plain of Khania, and beyond the Dictynnaean peninsula, to the western extremity of Crete. The White Mountains, tho less than seven thousand, feet in height, deceive the eye by the contrast between their spotless snows and the summer at their base, and seem to rival the Alps. The day was cloudless and balmy; birds sang on every tree, and the gra.s.sy hollows were starred with anemones, white, pink, violet and crimson. It was the first breath of the southern spring, after a winter which had been as terrible for Crete as for Greece.

After a ride of three hours, we reached a broad valley, at the foot of that barren mountain ma.s.s in which the promontory terminates. To the eastward we saw the large monastery of Agia Triada (the Holy Trinity), overlooking its fat sweep of vine and olive land.... In the deep, dry mountain glen which we entered, I found numbers of carob-trees. Rocks of dark-blue limestone, stained with bright orange oxydations, overhung us as we followed the track of a torrent upward into the heart of this bleak region, where, surrounded by the hot, arid peaks, is the Monastery of Governato.

We descended on foot to the Monastery of Katholiko, which we reached in half an hour. Its situation is like that of San Saba in Palestine, at the bottom of a split in the stony hills, and the sun rarely shines upon it. Steps cut in the rock lead down the face of the precipice to the deserted monastery, near which is a cavern 500 feet long, leading into the rock. The ravine is spanned by an arch, nearly fifty feet high.

At Agia Triada, as we rode up the stately avenue of cypresses, between vineyards and almond trees in blossom, servants advanced to take our horses, and the abbot shouted, "Welcome," from the top of the steps. We were ushered into a clean room, furnished with a tolerable library of orthodox volumes. A boy of fifteen, with a face like the young Raphael, brought us gla.s.ses of a rich, dark wine, something like port, some jelly and coffee. The size and substantial character of this monastery attests its wealth, no less than the flourishing appearance of the lands belonging to it. Its large courtyard is shaded with vine-bowers and orange trees, and the chapel in the center has a facade supported by Doric columns.

THE COLOSSAL RUINS OF CNOSSOS[62]

BY PHILIP S. MARDEN

The ruins [of the Cnossos palace] lie at the east of the high road, in a deep valley. Their excavation has been very complete and satisfactory, and while some restorations have been attempted here and there, chiefly because of absolute necessity to preserve portions of the structure, they are not such restorations as to jar on one, but exhibit a fidelity to tradition that saves them from the common fate of such efforts.

Little or no retouching was necessary in the case of the stupendous flights of steps that were found leading up to the door of this prehistoric royal residence, and which are the first of the many sights the visitor of to-day may see.

It is in the so-called "throne room of Minos" that the restoring hand is first met. Here it has been found necessary to provide a roof, that damage by weather be avoided; and to-day the throne room is a dusky spot, rather below the general level of the place. Its chief treasure is the throne itself, a stone chair, carved in rather rudimentary ornamentation, and about the size of an ordinary chair. The roof is supported by the curious, top-heavy-looking stone pillars, that are known to have prevailed not only in the Minoan but in Mycenaean period; monoliths noticeably larger at the top than at the bottom, reversing the usual form of stone pillar with which later ages have made us more familiar. This quite illogical inversion of what we now regard as the proper form has been accounted for in theory, by a.s.suming that it was the natural successor of the sharpened wooden stake. When the ancients adopted stone supports for their roofs, they simply took over the forms they had been familiar with in the former use of wood, and the result was a stone pillar that copied the earlier wooden one in shape. Time, of course, served to show that the natural way of building demanded the reversal of this custom; but in the Mycenaean age it had not been discovered, for there are evidences that similar pillars existed in buildings of that period, and the representation of a pillar that stands between the two lions on Mycenae's famous gate has this inverted form.

Many hours may be spent in detailed examination of this colossal ruin, testifying to what must have been in its day an enormous and impressive palace. One can not go far in traversing it without noticing the traces still evident enough of the fire that obviously destroyed it many hundred, if not several thousand, years before Christ. Along the western side have been discovered long corridors, from which scores of long and narrow rooms were to be entered. These, in the published plans, serve to give to the ruin a large share of its labyrinthine character. It seems to be agreed now that these were the storerooms of the palace, and in them may still be seen the huge earthen jars which once served to contain the palace supplies. Long rows of them stand in the ancient hallways and in the narrow cells that lead off them, each jar large enough to hold a fair-sized man, and in number sufficient to have accommodated Ali Baba and the immortal forty thieves. In the center of the palace little remains; but in the southeastern corner, where the land begins to slope abruptly to the valley below, there are to be seen several stories of the ancient building. Here one comes upon the rooms marked with the so-called "distaff" pattern, supposed to indicate that they were the women's quarters.

The restorer has been busy here, but not offensively so. Much of the ancient wall is intact, and in one place is a bathroom with a very diminutive bathtub still in place. Along the eastern side is also shown the oil press, where olives were once made to yield their coveted juices, and from the press proper a stone gutter conducted the fluid down to the point where jars were placed to receive it. This discovery of oil presses in ancient buildings, by the way, has served in more than one case to arouse speculation as to the antiquity of oil lamps such as were once supposed to belong only to a much later epoch. Whether in the Minoan days they had such lamps or not, it is known that they had at least an oil press and a good one. In the side of the hill below the main palace of Minos has been unearthed a smaller structure, which they now call the "villa," and in which several terraces, have been uncovered rather similar to the larger building above. Here is another throne room, cunningly contrived to be lighted by a long shaft of light from above falling on the seat of justice itself, while the rest of the room is in obscurity.

It may be that it requires a stretch of the imagination to compare the palace of Cnossos with Troy, but nevertheless there are one or two features that seem not unlike the discoveries made by Dr. Schliemann on that famous site. Notably so, it seems to me, are the traces of the final fire, which are to be seen at Cnossos as at Troy, and the huge jars, which may be compared with the receptacles the Trojan excavators unearthed, and found still to contain dried peas and other things that the Trojans left behind when they fled from their sacked and burning city. Few are privileged to visit the site of Priam's city, which is hard, indeed, to reach; but it is easy enough to make the excursion to Candia and visit the palace of old King Minos, which is amply worth the trouble, besides giving a glimpse of a civilization that is possibly vastly older than even that of Troy and Mycenae. For those who reverence the great antiquities, Candia and its pre-cla.s.sic suburb are distinctly worth visiting, and are unique among the sights of the ancient h.e.l.lenic and pre-h.e.l.lenic world.

CORFU[63]

BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN

From whichever side our traveler draws near to Corfu, he comes from lands where Greek influence and Greek colonization spread in ancient times, but from which the Greek elements have been gradually driven out, partly by the barbarism of the East, partly by the rival civilization of the West. The land which we see is h.e.l.lenic in a sense in which not even Sicily, not even the Great h.e.l.las of Southern Italy, much less than the Dalmatian archipelago, ever became h.e.l.lenic. Prom the first historic glimpse which we get of Korkyra,[64] it is not merely a land fringed by h.e.l.lenic colonies; it is a h.e.l.lenic island, the dominion of a single h.e.l.lenic city, a territory the whole of whose inhabitants were, at the beginning of recorded history, either actually h.e.l.lenic or so thoroughly h.e.l.lenized that no one thought of calling their h.e.l.lenic position in question. Modern policy has restored it to its old position by making it an integral portion of the modern Greek kingdom.

To the south of the present town, connected with it by a favorite walk of the inhabitants of Corfu, a long and broad peninsula stretches boldly into the sea. Both from land and from sea, it chiefly strikes the eye as a wooded ma.s.s, thickly covered with the aged olive trees which form so marked a feature in the scenery of the island. A few houses skirt the base, growing on the land side into the suburb of Kastrades, which may pa.s.s for a kind of connecting link between the old and the new city. And from the midst of the wood, on the side nearest to the modern town, stands out the villa of the King of the Greeks, the chief modern dwelling on the site of ancient Korkyra. This peninsular hill, still known as Palaiopolis, was the site of the old Corinthian city whose name is so familiar to every reader of Thucydides. On either side of it lies one of its two forsaken harbors. Between the old and the new city lies the so-called harbor of Alkinoos; beyond the peninsula, stretching far inland, lies the old Hyllaic harbor, bearing the name of one of the three tribes which seem to have been essential to the being of a Dorian commonwealth....

This last is the Corfu whose fate seems to have been to become the possession of every power which has ruled in that quarter of the world, with one exception. For fourteen hundred years the history of the island is the history of endless changes of masters. We see it first a nominal ally, then a direct possession, of Rome and of Constantinople; we then see it formed into a separate Byzantine princ.i.p.ality, conquered by the Norman lord of Sicily, again a possession of the Empire, then a momentary possession of Venice, again a possession of the Sicilian kingdom under its Angevin kings, till at last it came back to Venetian rule, and abode for four hundred years under the Lion of Saint Mark.

Then it became part of that first strange Septinsular Republic of which the Czar was to be the protector and the Sultan the overlord. Then it was a possession of France; then a member of the second Septinsular Republic under the hardly disguised sovereignty of England; now at last it is the most distant, but one of the most valuable, of the provinces of the modern Greek kingdom.

Of the modern city there is but little to say. As becomes a city which was so long a Venetian possession, the older part of it has much of the character of an Italian town. It is rich in street arcades; but they present but few architectural features; and we find none of those various forms of ornamental window so common, not only in Venice and Verona, but in Spalato, Cattaro, and Trau. The churches in the modern city are architecturally worthless. They are interesting so far as they will give to many their first impression of orthodox arrangement and orthodox ritual. The few ecclesiastical antiquities of the place belong to the elder city. The suburb of the lower slope of the hill contains three churches, all of them small, but each of which has an interest of its own.

RHODES[65]

BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

Coming on deck the next morning at the fresh hour of sunrise, I found we were at Rhodes. We lay just off the semicircular harbor, which is clasped by walls--partly shaken down by earthquakes--which have n.o.ble, round towers at each embracing end. Rhodes is, from the sea, one of the most picturesque cities in the Mediterranean, altho it has little remains of that ancient splendor which caused Strabo to prefer it to Rome or Alexandria. The harbor wall, which is flanked on each side by stout and round, stone windmills, extends up the hill, and becoming double, surrounds the old town; these ma.s.sive fortifications of the Knights of St. John have withstood the onsets of enemies and the tremors of the earth, and, with the ancient moat, excite the curiosity of this so-called peaceful age of iron-clads and monster cannon. The city ascends the slope of the hill and pa.s.ses beyond the wall. Outside and on the right toward the sea are a picturesque group of a couple of dozen stone windmills, and some minarets and a church-tower or two. Higher up the hill is sprinkled a little foliage, a few mulberry trees, and an isolated palm or two; and, beyond, the island is only a ma.s.s of broken, bold, rocky mountains. Of its forty-five miles of length, running southwesterly from the little point on which the city stands, we can see but little.

Whether or not Rhodes emerged from the sea at the command of Apollo, the Greeks exprest by this tradition of its origin their appreciation of its gracious climate, fertile soil, and exquisite scenery. From remote antiquity it had fame as a seat of arts and letters, and of a vigorous maritime power, and the romance of its early centuries was equaled if not surpa.s.sed when it became the residence of the Knights of St. John. I believe that the first impress of its civilization was given by the Phoenicians; it was the home of the Dorian race before the time of the Trojan War, and its three cities were members of the Dorian Hexapolis; it was, in fact, a flourishing maritime confederacy strong enough to send colonies to the distant Italian coast, and Sybaris and Parthenope (modern Naples) perpetuated the luxurious refinement of their founders.

The city of Rhodes itself was founded about four hundred years before Christ, and the splendor of its palaces, its statues and paintings gave it a pre-eminence among the most magnificent cities of the ancient world. If the earth of this island could be made to yield its buried treasures as Cyprus has, we should doubtless have new proofs of the influence of Asiatic civilization upon the Greeks, and be able to trace in the early Doric arts and customs the superior civilization of the Phoenicians, and of the masters of the latter in science and art, the Egyptians.

Naturally, every traveler who enters the harbor of Rhodes hopes to see the site of one of the seven wonders of the world, the Colossus. He is free to place it on either mole at the entrance of the harbor, but he comprehends at once that a statue which was only one hundred and five feet high could never have extended its legs across the port. The fame of this colossal bronze statue of the sun is disproportioned to the period of its existence; it stood only fifty-six years after its erection, being shaken down by an earthquake in the year 224 B.C., and enc.u.mbering the ground with its fragments till the advent of the Moslem conquerors.

Pa.s.sing from the quay through a highly ornamented Gothic gateway, we ascended the famous historic street, still called the Street of the Knights, the ma.s.sive houses of which have withstood the shocks of earthquakes and the devastation of Saracenic and Turkish occupation.

This street, of whose palaces we have heard so much, is not imposing; it is not wide, its solid stone houses are only two stories high, and their fronts are now disfigured by cheap Arab balconies; but the facades are gray with age. All along are remains of carved windows. Gothic sculptured doorways and shields and coats of arms, crosses and armorial legends, are set in the walls, partially defaced by time and the respect of Suleiman for the Knights, have spared the mementos of their faith and prowess. I saw no inscriptions that are intact, but made out upon one shield the words "voluntas mei est." The carving is all beautiful.

We went through the silent streets, waking only echoes of the past, out to the ruins of the once elegant church of St. John, which was shaken down by a powder-explosion some thirty years ago, and utterly flattened by an earthquake some years afterward. Outside the ramparts we met, and saluted, with the freedom of travelers, a gorgeous Turk who was taking the morning air, and whom our guide in bated breath said was the governor. In this part of the town is the Mosque of Suleiman; in the portal are two lovely marble columns, rich with age; the lintels are exquisitely carved with flowers, arms, casques, musical instruments, the crossed sword and the torch, and the mandolin, perhaps the emblem of some troubadour knight. Wherever we went we found bits of old carving, remains of columns, sections of battlemented roofs. The town is saturated with the old Knights. Near the mosque is a foundation of charity, a public kitchen, at which the poor were fed or were free to come and cook their food; it is in decay now, and the rooks were sailing about its old, round-topped chimneys.

There are no h.e.l.lenic remains in the city, and the only remembrance of that past which we searched for was the antique coin, which has upon one side the head of Medusa and upon the other the rose (rhoda) which gave the town its name. The town was quiet; but in pursuit of this coin in the Jews' quarter we started up swarms of traders, were sent from Isaac to Jacob, and invaded dark shops and private houses where Jewish women and children were just beginning to complain of the morning light.

Our guide was a jolly Greek, who was willing to awaken the whole town in search of a silver coin. The traders, when we had routed them out, had little to show in the way of antiquities. Perhaps the best representative of the modern manufactures of Rhodes is the wooden shoe, which is in form like the Damascus clog, but is inlaid with more taste.

The people whom we encountered in our morning walk were Greeks or Jews.

The morning atmosphere was delicious, and we could well believe that the climate of Rhodes is the finest in the Mediterranean, and also that it is the least exciting of cities.

MT. ATHOS[66]

BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

Beyond Thasos is the Thracian coast and Mt. Pangaus, and at the foot of it Philippi, the Macedonian town where republican Rome fought its last battle, where Ca.s.sius leaned upon his sword-point, believing everything lost. Brutus transported the body of his comrade to Thasos and raised for him a funeral pyre; and twenty days later, on the same field, met again that specter of death which had summoned him to Philippi. It was not many years after this victory of the Imperial power that a greater triumph was won at Philippi, when Paul and Silas, cast into prison, sang praises unto G.o.d at midnight, and an earthquake shook the house and opened the prison doors.

In the afternoon we came in sight of snowy Mt. Athos, an almost perpendicular limestone rock, rising nearly six thousand four hundred feet out of the sea. The slender promontory which this magnificent mountain terminates is forty miles long and has only an average breadth of four miles. The ancient ca.n.a.l of Xerxes quite severed it from the mainland. The peninsula, level at the ca.n.a.l, is a jagged stretch of mountains (seamed by chasms), which rise a thousand, two thousand, four thousand feet, and at last front the sea with the sublime peak of Athos, the site of the most conspicuous beacon-fire of Agamemnon. The entire promontory is, and has been since the time of Constantine, ecclesiastic ground; every mountain and valley has its convent; besides the twenty great monasteries are many pious retreats. All the sects of the Greek church are here represented; the communities pay a tribute to the Sultan, but the government is in the hands of four presidents, chosen by the synod, which holds weekly sessions and takes the presidents, yearly, from the monasteries in rotation. Since their foundation these religious houses have maintained against Christians and Saracens an almost complete independence, and preserved in their primitive simplicity the manners and usages of the earliest foundations.

Here, as nowhere else in Europe or Asia, can one behold the architecture, the dress, the habits of the Middle Ages. The good devotees have been able to keep themselves thus in the darkness and simplicity of the past by a rigorous exclusion of the s.e.x always impatient of monotony, to which all the changes of the world are due. No woman, from the beginning till now, has ever been permitted to set foot on the peninsula. Nor is this all; no female animal is suffered on the holy mountain, not even a hen. I suppose, tho I do not know, that the monks have an inspector of eggs, whose inherited instincts of aversion to the feminine gender enable him to detect and reject all those in which lurk the dangerous s.e.x. Few of the monks eat meat, half the days of the year are fast days, they practise occasionally abstinence from food for two or three days, reducing their pulses to the feeblest beating, and subduing their bodies to a point that destroys their value even as spiritual tabernacles. The united community is permitted to keep a guard of fifty Christian soldiers, and the only Moslem on the island is the solitary Turkish officer who represents the Sultan; his position can not be one generally coveted by the Turks, since the society of women is absolutely denied him. The libraries of Mt. Athos are full of unarranged ma.n.u.scripts, which are probably mainly filled with the theologic rubbish of the controversial ages, and can scarcely be expected to yield again anything so valuable as the Tishendorf Scriptures.

At sunset we were close under Mt. Athos, and could distinguish the buildings of the Laura Convent, amid the woods beneath the frowning cliff. And now was produced the apparition of a sunset, with this towering mountain cone for a centerpiece, that surpa.s.sed all our experience and imagination. The sea was like satin for smoothness, absolutely waveless, and shone with the colors of changeable silk, blue, green, pink, and amethyst. Heavy clouds gathered about the sun, and from behind them he exhibited burning spectacles, magnificent fireworks, vast shadow-pictures, scarlet cities, and gigantic figures stalking across the sky. From one crater of embers he shot up a fan-like flame that spread to the zenith and was reflected on the water. His rays lay along the sea in pink, and the water had the sheen of iridescent gla.s.s. The whole sea for leagues was like this; even Lemnos and Samothrace lay in a dim pink and purple light in the east. There were vast clouds in huge walls, with towers and battlements, and in all fantastic shapes--one a gigantic cat with a preternatural tail, a cat of doom four degrees long.

All this was piled about Mt. Athos, with its sharp summit of snow, its dark sides of rock.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] From "Pictures from Italy." d.i.c.kens made his trip to Italy in 1844.

[2] From "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers. Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869.

Translated by John Durand.

[3] Begun in 1386. Its architects were Germans and Frenchmen.

[4] From "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869.

Translated by John Durand.