Part 31

In modern Salonica there is not much respect for pagan antiquities, and one sees only the usual fragments of columns and sculptures worked into walls or incorporated in Christian churches. But those curious in early Byzantine architecture will find more to interest them here than in any place in the world except Constantinople. We spent the day wandering about the city, under the guidance of a young Jew, who was without either prejudices or information. On our way to the Mosque of St. Sophia, we passed through the quarter of the Jews, which is much cleaner than is usual with them. These are the descendants of Spanish Jews, who were expelled by Isabella, and they still retain, in a corrupt form, the language of Spain. In the doors and windows were many pretty Jewesses; banishment and vicissitude appear to agree with this elastic race, for in all the countries of Europe Jewish women develop more beauty in form and feature than in Palestine. We saw here and in other parts of the city a novel head-dress, which may commend itself to America in the revolutions of fashion. A great mass of hair, real or assumed, was gathered into a long slender green bag, which hung down the back and was terminated by a heavy fringe of silver. Otherwise, the dress of the Jewish women does not differ much from that of the men; the latter wear a fez or turban, and a tunic which reaches to the ankles, and is bound about the waist by a gay sash or shawl.

The Mosque of St. Sophia, once a church, and copied in its proportions and style from its namesake in Constantinople, is retired, in a delightful court, shaded by gigantic trees and cheered by a fountain. So peaceful a spot we had not seen in many a day; birds sang in the trees without disturbing the calm of the meditative pilgrim. In the portico and also in the interior are noble columns of marble and verd-antique, and in the dome is a wonderfully quaint mosaic of the Transfiguration. We were shown also a magnificent pulpit of the latter beautiful stone cut from a solid block, in which it is said St. Paul preached. As the Apostle, according to his custom, reasoned with the people out of the Scriptures in a synagogue, and this church was not built for centuries after his visit, the statement needs confirmation; but pious ingenuity suggests that the pulpit stood in a subterranean church underneath this. I should like to believe that Paul sanctified this very spot with his presence; but there is little in its quiet seclusion to remind one of him who had the reputation when he was in Thessalonica of one of those who turn the world upside down. Paul had a great affection for the brethren of this city, in spite of his rough usage here, for he mingles few reproaches in his fervent commendations of their faith, and comforts them with the assurance of a speedy release from the troubles of this world, and the certainty that while they are yet alive they will be caught up into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Happily the Apostle could not pierce the future and see the dissensions, the schisms, the corruptions and calamities of the Church in the succeeding centuries, nor know that near this spot, in the Imperial Hippodrome, the sedition of the citizens would one day be punished by the massacre of ninety thousand,—one of the few acts of inhumanity which stains the clemency and the great name of Theodosius. And it would have passed even the belief of the Apostle to the Gentiles could he have foreseen that, in eighteen centuries, this pulpit would be exhibited to curious strangers from a distant part of the globe, of which he never heard, where the doctrines of Paul are the bulwark of the Church and the stamina of the government, by a descendant of Abraham who confessed that he did not know who Paul was.

The oldest church in the city is now the Mosque of St. George, built about the year 400, if indeed it was not transformed from a heathen temple; its form is that of the Roman Pantheon. The dome was once covered with splendid mosaics; enough remains of the architectural designs, the brilliant peacocks and bright blue birds, to show what the ancient beauty was, but the walls of the mosque are white and barn-like. Religions inherit each other's edifices in the East without shame, and we found in the Mosque of Eske Djuma the remains of a temple of Venus, and columns of ancient Grecian work worthy of the best days of Athens. The most perfect basilica is now the Mosque of St. Demetrius (a name sacred to the Greeks), which contains his tomb. It is a five-aisled basilica; about the gallery, over the pillars of the centre aisle, are some fine mosaics of marble, beautiful in design and color. The Moslems have spoiled the exquisite capitals of the pillars by painting them, and have destroyed the effect of the aisles by twisting the pulpit and prayer-niche away from the apse, in the direction of Mecca. We noticed, however, a relaxation of bigotry at all these mosques: we were permitted to enter without taking off our shoes; and, besides the figures of Christian art left in the mosaics, we saw some Moslem pictures, among them rude paintings of the holy city Mecca.

On our way to the citadel we stopped to look at the Arch of Constantine before the Gate of Cassander,—a shabby ruin, with four courses of defaced figures, carved in marble, and representing the battles and triumphs of a Roman general. Fortunately for the reader we did not visit all the thirty-seven churches of the city; but we made the acquaintance in a Greek church, which is adorned with quaint Byzantine paintings, of St. Palema, who lies in public repose, in a coffin of exquisite silver filigree-work, while his skull is enclosed in solid silver and set with rubies and emeralds. This may please St. Palema, but death is never so ghastly as when it is adorned with jewelry that becomes cheap in its presence.

The view from the citadel, which embraces the Gulf of Salonica and Mt. Olympus, the veritable heaven of the Grecian pantheon, and Mt. Ossa and Mt. Pelion, piercing the blue with their snow-summits, is grand enough to repay the ascent; and there is a noble walk along the wall above the town. In making my roundabout way through modern streets, back to the bazaars, I encountered a number of negro women, pure Africans, who had the air and carriage of the aristocracy of the place; they rejoiced in the gay attire which the natives of the South love, and their fine figures and independent bearing did not speak of servitude.

This Thessalonica was doubtless a healthful and attractive place at the time Cicero chose to pass a portion of his exile here, but it has now a bad reputation for malaria, which extends to all the gulf,—the malaria seems everywhere to have been one of the consequences of the fall of the Roman Empire. The handbook recommends the locality for its good “shooting”; but if there is any part of the Old World that needs rest from arms, I think it is this highway of ancient and modern conquerors and invaders.

In the evening, when the lights of the town and the shore were reflected in the water, and a full moon hung in the sky, we did not regret our delay. The gay Thessalonians, ignorant of the Epistles, were rowing about the harbor, circling round and round the steamer, beating the darabouka drum, and singing in that nasal whine which passes for music all over the East. And, indeed, on such a night it is not without its effect upon a sentimental mind.

At early light of a cloudless morning we were going easily down the Gulf of Therma or Salonica, having upon our right the Pierian plain; and I tried to distinguish the two mounds which mark the place of the great battle near Pydna, one hundred and sixty-eight years before Christ, between Æmilius Paulus and King Perseus, which gave Macedonia to the Roman Empire. Beyond, almost ten thousand feet in the air, towered Olympus, upon whose “broad” summit Homer displays the ethereal palaces and inaccessible abode of the Grecian gods. Shaggy forests still clothe its sides, but snow now, and for the greater part of the year, covers the wide surface of the height, which is a sterile, light-colored rock. The gods did not want snow to cool the nectar at their banquets. This is the very centre of the mythologie world; there between Olympus and Ossa is the Yale of Tempe, where the Peneus, breaking through a narrow gorge fringed with the sacred laurel, reaches the gulf, south of ancient Heracleum. Into this charming but secluded retreat the gods and goddesses, weary of the icy air, or the Pumblechookian deportment of the court of Olympian Jove, descended to pass the sunny hours with the youths and maidens of mortal mould; through this defile marks of chariot-wheels still attest the passages of armies which flowed either way, in invasion or retreat; and here Pompey, after a ride of forty miles from the fatal field of Pharsalia, quenched his thirst. Did the Greeks really believe that the gods dwelt on this mountain in clouds and snow? Did Baldwin II. believe that he sold, and Louis IX. of France that he bought, for ten thousand marks of silver, at Constantinople, in the thirteenth century, the veritable crown of thorns that the Saviour wore in the judgment-hall of Pilate?

At six o'clock the Cape of Posilio was on our left, we were sinking Olympus in the white haze of morning, Ossa, in its huge silver bulk, was near us, and Pelion stretched its long white back below. The sharp cone of Ossa might well ride upon the extended back of Pelion, and it seems a pity that the Titans did not succeed in their attempt. We were leaving, and looking our last on the Thracian coasts, once rimmed from Mt. Athos to the Bosphorus with a wreath of prosperous cities. What must once have been the splendor of the Ægean Sea and its islands, when every island was the seat of a vigorous state, and every harbor the site of a commercial town which sent forth adventurous galleys upon any errand of trade or conquest! Since the fall of Constantinople, these coasts and islands have been stripped and neglected by Turkish avarice and improvidence, and perhaps their naked aspect is attributable more to the last owners than to all the preceding possessors; it remained for the Turk to exhaust Nature herself, and to accomplish that ruin, that destruction of peoples, which certainly not the Athenian, the Roman, or the Macedonian accomplished, to destroy that which survived the contemptible Byzantines and escaped the net of the pillaging Christian crusaders. Yet it needs only repose, the confidence of the protection of industry, and a spirit of toleration, which the Greeks must learn as well as the Turks, that the traveller in the beginning of the next century may behold in the Archipelago the paradise of the world.

We sailed along by the peninsula of Magnesia, which separates the Ægean from the Bay of Pagasæus, and hinders us from seeing the plains of Thessaly, where were trained the famous cavalry, the perfect union of horse and man that gave rise to the fable of centaurs; the same conception of double prowess which our own early settlers exaggerated in the notion that the Kentuckian was half horse and half alligator. Just before we entered the group of lovely Sporades, we looked down the long narrow inlet to the Bay of Maliacus and saw the sharp snow-peaks of Mt. OEta, at the foot of which are the marsh and hot springs of Thermopylae. We passed between Skiathos and Skopelos,—steep, rocky islands, well wooded and enlivened with villages perched on the hillsides, and both draped in lovely color. In the strait between Skiathos and Magnesia the Greek vessels made a stand against the Persians until the defeat at Thermopylae compelled a retreat to Salamis. The monks of the Middle Ages, who had an eye for a fertile land, covered the little island with monasteries, of which one only now remains. Its few inhabitants are chiefly sailors, and to-day it would be wholly without fame were it not for the beauty of its women. Skopelos, which is larger, has a population of over six thousand,—industrious people who cultivate the olive and produce a good red wine, that they export in their own vessels.

Nearly all day we sailed outside and along Euboea; and the snow dusting its high peaks and lonely ravines was a not unwelcome sight, for the day was warm, oppressively so even at sea. All the elements lay in a languid truce. Before it was hidden by Skopelos, Mt. Athos again asserted its lordship over these seas, more gigantic than when we were close to it, the sun striking the snow on its face (it might be the Whiteface of the Adirondacks, except that it is piled up more like the Matterhorn), while the base, bathed in a silver light, was indistinguishable from the silver water out of which it rose. The islands were all purple, the shores silver, and the sea around us deeply azure. What delicious color!

Perhaps it was better to coast along the Euboean land and among the Sporades, clothed in our minds with the historic hues which the atmosphere reproduced to our senses, than to break the dream by landing, to find only broken fragments where cities once were, and a handful of fishermen or shepherds the only inheritors of the homes of heroes. We should find nothing on Ikos, except rabbits and a hundred or two of fishers, perhaps not even the grave of Peleus, the father of Achilles; and the dozen little rocky islets near, which some giant in sportive mood may have tossed into the waves, would altogether scarcely keep from famine a small flock of industrious sheep. Skyros, however, has not forgotten its ancient fertility; the well-watered valleys, overlooked by bold mountains and rocky peaks (upon one of which stood “the lofty Skyros” of Homer's song) still bear corn and wine, the fig and the olive, the orange and the lemon, as in the days when Achilles, in woman's apparel, was hidden among the maidens in the gardens of King Lycomedes. The mountains are clothed with oaks, beeches, firs, and plane-trees. Athens had a peculiar affection for Skyros, for it was there that Cymon found the bones of Theseus, and transported them thence to the temple of the hero, where they were deposited with splendid obsequies, Æschylus and Sophocles adding to the festivities the friendly rivalry of a dramatic contest. In those days everything was for the state and nothing for the man; and naturally—such is the fruit of self-abnegation—the state was made immortal by the genius of its men.

Of the three proud flagstaffs erected in front of St. Mark's, one, for a long time, bore the banner of Euboea, or Negropont, symbol of the Venetian sovereignty for nearly three centuries over this island, which for four centuries thereafter was to be cursed by the ascendency of the crescent. From the outer shore one can form little notion of the extraordinary fertility of this land, and we almost regretted that a rough sea had not driven us to take the inner passage, by Rootia and through the narrow Euripus, where the Venetian-built town and the Lion of St. Mark occupy and guard the site of ancient Chalkis. The Turks made the name of Negropont odious to the world, but with the restoration of the Grecian nationality the ancient name is restored, and slowly, Euboea, spoiled by the Persians, trampled by Macedonians and Romans, neglected by Justinian (the depopulator of the Eastern Empire), drained by the Venetians, blighted by the Osmanlis, is beginning to attract the attention of capital and travel, by its unequalled fertility and its almost unequalled scenery.

Romance, mythology, and history start out of the waves on' either hand; at twilight we were entering the Cyclades, and beginning to feel the yet enduring influence of a superstition which so mingled itself with the supremest art and culture, that after two thousand years its unreal creations are nearly as mighty as ever in the realms of poetry and imagination. These islands are still under the spell of genius, and we cannot, if we would, view them except through the medium of poetic history. I suppose that the island of Andros, which is cultivated largely by Albanians, an Illyrian race, having nothing in common with the ancient Ionians, would little interest us; if we cared to taste its wine, it would be because it was once famous throughout Greece, and if we visited the ruins of its chief city, it would be to recall an anecdote of Herodotus: when Themistocles besieged the town and demanded tribute, because the Andrians had been compelled to join the fleet of Xerxes at Salamis, and threatened them with the two mighty deities of Athens, Persuasion and Necessity, the spirited islanders replied that they were protected by two churlish gods, Poverty and Inability.

It was eleven o'clock at night when we sailed between Keos and Helena, the latter a long barren strip that never seems to have been inhabited at all, except from the tradition that Helen once landed there; but Keos and its old town of Iulis was the home of legends and poets, and famous for its code of laws, one of which tended to banish sickness and old age from its precincts, by a provision that every man above sixty should end his life by poison. Its ancient people had a reputation for purity and sobriety, which was probably due to the hegira of the nymphs, who were frightened away to the mainland by a roaring lion. The colossal image of the lion is still to be seen in marble near the ruins of the old city. The island of the Cyclades, which we should have liked most to tread, but did not see, is Delos, the holy, the religious and political centre of the Greek confederation, the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, the seat of the oracle, second only to that of Delphi, the diminutive and now almost deserted rock, shaken and sunken by repeated earthquakes, once crowned with one of the most magnificent temples of antiquity, the spot of pilgrimage, the arena of games and mystic dances and poetic contests, and of the joyous and solemn festivities of the Delian Apollo.

We were too late to see, though we sat long on deck and watched for it by the aid of a full moon, the white Doric columns of the temple of Minerva on Sunium, which are visible by daylight a long distance at sea. The ancient mariners, who came from Delos or from a more adventurous voyage into the Ægean, beheld here, at the portals of Attica, the temple of its tutelary deity, a welcome and a beacon; and as they shifted their sails to round the cape, they might have seen the shining helmet of the goddess herself,—the lofty statue of Minerva Promachus on the Acropolis.

XXVIII.—ATHENS.

IN the thought of the least classical reader, Attica occupies a space almost as large as the rest of the world. He hopes that it will broaden on his sight as it does in his imagination, although he knows that it is only two thirds as large as the little State of Rhode Island. But however reason may modify enthusiasm, the diminutive scale on which everything is drawn is certain to disappoint the first view of the reality. Who, he asks, has made this little copy of the great Athenian picture?

When we came upon deck early in the morning, the steamer lay in the land-locked harbor of the peninsula of Piræus. It is a round, deep, pretty harbor; several merchant and small vessels lay there, a Greek and an Austrian steamer, and a war-vessel, and the scene did not lack a look of prosperous animation. About the port clusters a well-to-do village of some ten thousand inhabitants, many of whom dwell in handsome houses. It might be an American town; it is too new to be European. There, at the entrance of the harbor, on a low projecting rock, are some ruins of columns, said to mark the tomb of Themistocles; sometimes the water nearly covers the rock. There could be no more fitting resting-place for the great commander than this, in sight of the strait of Salamis, and washed by the waves that tossed the broken and flying fleet of Xerxes. Beyond is the Bay of Phalerum, the more ancient seaport of the little state. And there—how small it seems!—is the plain of Athens, enclosed by Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes. This rocky peninsula of Piræus, which embraced three small harbors, was fortified by Themistocles with strong walls that extended, in parallel lines, five miles to Athens. Between them ran the great carriage-road, and I suppose the whole distance was a street of gardens and houses.

A grave commissionnaire,—I do not know but he would call himself an embassy,—from one of the hotels of Athens, came off and quietly took charge of us. On our way to the shore with our luggage, a customs officer joined us and took a seat in the boat. For this polite attention on the part of the government our plenipotentiary sent by the officer (who did not open the trunks) three francs to the treasury; but I do not know if it ever reached its destination. We shunned the ignoble opportunity of entering the classic city by rail, and were soon whirling along the level and dusty road which follows the course of the ancient Long Wall. Even at this early hour the day had become very warm, and the shade of the poplar-trees, which line the road nearly all the way, was grateful. The fertile fields had yet the freshness of spring, and were gay with scarlet poppies; the vines were thrifty. The near landscape was Italian in character: there was little peculiar in the costumes of the people whom we met walking beside their market-wagons or saw laboring in the gardens; turbans, fezes, flowing garments of white and blue and yellow, all had vanished, and we felt that we were out of the Orient and about to enter a modern city. At a half-way inn, where we stopped to water the horses, there was an hostler in the Albanian, or as it is called, the Grecian national, costume, wearing the fustanella and the short jacket; but the stiff white petticoat was rumpled and soiled, and I fancied he was somewhat ashamed of the half-womanly attire, and shrank from inspection, like an actor in harlequin dress, surprised by daylight outside the theatre.

This sheepish remnant of the picturesque could not preserve for us any illusions; the roses blooming by the wayside we knew; the birds singing in the fields we had heard before; the commissionnaire persisted in pointing out the evidences of improvement. But we burned with a secret fever; we were impatient even of the grateful avenue of trees that hid what we at every moment expected to see. I do not envy him who without agitation approaches for the first time, and feels that he is about to look upon the Acropolis! There are three supreme sensations, not twice to be experienced, for the traveller: when he is about to behold the ancient seats of art, of discipline, of religion,—Athens, Rome, Jerusalem. But it is not possible for the reality to equal the expectation. “There!” cried the commissionnaire, “is the Acropolis!” A small oblong hill lifting itself some three hundred and fifty feet above the city, its sides upheld by walls, its top shining with marble, an isolated fortress in appearance! The bulk of the city lies to the north of the Acropolis, and grows round to the east of it along the valley of the Ilissus.