Part 1
Transcriber's Note
This version of the text is unable to reproduce certain typographic features. Italics are delimited with the '_' character as _italic_.
The position of photographs and maps are indicated as
where a descriptive caption exists. Each as been repositioned, where necessary, to fall at a paragraph or chapter break. Where no caption exists, a brief description has been added, using '<>' as delimiters.
The 'oe' ligature is rendered as separate characters. Any text printed using "small capitals" was shifted to all upper-case.
Please see the transcriber's notes at the end of this text for a more complete account of any other textual issues and their resolution.
VACATION DAYS IN GREECE
BY RUFUS B. RICHARDSON
FORMERLY DIRECTOR OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF ARCHÆOLOGY, ATHENS
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published, September, 1903
TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK
To
MY SON
THE COMPANION OF MY TRAVELS
PREFACE
During a residence of eleven years in Greece I have formed the habit of writing to certain periodicals descriptions of my journeys. The occasion for making a book out of these articles was the suggestion on the part of many members of the American School of Classical Studies, at Athens, who had shared these journeys with me, that I should do so, and so make the descriptions accessible to them. I yielded to this suggestion all the more readily from the consideration that my wanderings have taken me into many nooks and corners not usually visited by those whose stay in the country is short.
Having seen the sunrise from most of the mountain-tops of the country, having forded many of its rivers, and having caught the indescribable color at early dawn and at evening twilight, from the deck of coasting steamers, all along these fascinating shores, I felt it only right that I should try to convey to others, less fortunate than myself, some picture, however inadequate, of all this experience and enjoyment. All that is here set down is, however, but a part of a larger picture that is ever present in my memory.
For the most part I have avoided what has been most frequently described. Athens, Olympia, and the much-visited Argive plain, I have not touched upon, because I did not wish to swell the book by telling thrice-told tales. I tell of what I have most enjoyed, in the hope that readers may feel with me the charm of this poet's land, which has, more than any other, "infinite riches in a little room."
The slight alterations that I have made in the original form of the descriptions was made with the design of bringing them, in a measure, up to the present time. I have also arranged them on a geographical thread, running from the Ionian Islands, through Northern Greece to the Peloponnesus. The two larger articles, on Sicily and Dalmatia, are not simply tacked on. They belong to the subject, inasmuch as Sicily was an important part of Hellas, as the Greeks called their country, and inasmuch as Greek colonies once skirted the greater part of the coast of Dalmatia.
In regard to the spelling of proper names, I have tried to shun unusual appearances. But I have great objection to changing all the Greek endings in _os_ into _us_, just because the Romans did so. I also object to changing the Greek _k_ into _c_ where it will surely be pronounced as an _s_. In the case of names that have become a part of our English speech, I have, however, admitted these changes. The result may not seem satisfactory, on account of the lack of a rigid system; but I trust that it will be pardoned.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CORFU 3
A DAY IN ITHACA 13
DELPHI, THE SANCTUARY OF GREECE 24
DODONA 34
THE BICYCLE IN GREECE 47
ACARNANIA 54
ÆTOLIA 65
THERMOPYLÆ 79
THESSALY 90
AN ASCENT OF THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN IN GREECE 104
A JOURNEY FROM ATHENS TO ERETRIA 111
TAYGETOS AND KITHÆRON 119
STYX AND STYMPHALUS 128
AN UNUSUAL APPROACH TO EPIDAUROS 140
MESSENE AND SANDY PYLOS 151
A TOUR IN SICILY 173
DALMATIA 208
ILLUSTRATIONS
Bronze Charioteer Found at Delphi Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
Corfu. Mouth of the Old Harbor with "Ship of Ulysses" 10
Ithaca. Polis Bay from the North 20
Temple at Stratos 56
Thermon. Temple of Apollo in the Foreground 72
Thermopylæ. From the West 86
Meteora Monasteries 100
Sparta, with Taygetos in the Background 120
The Stygian Pool 130
Theatre at Epidauros 146
Bay of Navarino, with Old Pylos to the Right and Sphakteria to the Left 158
Stone Quarry at Syracuse Called Latomia dei Cappucini 186
So-called Concordia Temple at Girgenti 194
Cattaro 214
Spalato. Palace of Diocletian. South Front 222
Clissa 234
MAP OF SICILY AND DALMATIA 173
MAP OF GREECE _at end of volume_
VACATION DAYS IN GREECE
CORFU
It is great good fortune to spend a week in Corfu on the way to Greece. Seeing it from one end to the other, wandering through its olive forests and vineyards, brings on a mild, or, in some cases, a wild, intoxication without wine. What words fit the surrounding beauty but "Islands of the Blessed," "Elysium," "Garden of Eden," "Paradise"? It is not Heaven, after all, for one sees here the poor, lame, blind, begging for small alms; but, as long as earth holds such corners as Corfu, it is not all cursed.
To the traveller who has felt the intoxication of such a region, and is impelled to report something of it, the impotence of words comes home with special force. Naught but the painter's art seems adequate to report Corfu. And, furthermore, painter as well as poet might here well feel the weakness of his art. It is a great boon to have had this realm of beauty brought upon the retina of the eye, and so communicated to the soul.
One may, perhaps, be allowed to group the impressions that Corfu makes, and report them with a plainness that aspires only to the office of a photograph, resigning the attempt at coloring.
Before the eye lies one Corfu--the Corfu of to-day; but before the mind are brought two others--the Kerkyra of Greek history and the Scheria of Homer. The two latter compete with the former, and refuse the present beautiful scene a monopoly of attention.
But, first, to be just to the present Corfu. The traveller who has never been east of Italy, which was my case at the time of my first visit in 1890, feels that he is here passing for the first time the bounds between Europe and the Orient. The streets and squares of the city, which contains a population of about 30,000--about one-third of the population of the whole island--swarm with figures clad in the most wonderful costumes, men and women vying with one another in display of colors. The Corfiotes themselves contribute largely to this display of costumes. From across the narrow strait come from Epirus many Albanians, with their big white skirts and their kingly air, some for trade and a quick return, and some for a longer stay. From the same quarter come the no less picturesque people, partly Greek and partly Wallachian--but who can give the component parts of the blood of these people of Epirus?--who, having attempted to secure the consummation of what the Congress of Berlin decreed, incorporation with Greece, were treated as Turks usually treat insurgents, and were then living as refugees in Corfu, awaiting the hour when Moslem rule shall recede from the shores of Europe. Some of these men's costumes are ragged and dirty, but with what an air the men walk in them. It is not a swagger, but a king's gait. A well-dressed European gentleman can as little compete with these men for attention as the Berlin palace can compete with the picturesque ruins of Heidelberg. The clergy, who seem numerous enough here to preach the Gospel to every creature, with their long black gowns and high stiff caps, make quite a feature in the throng. The military officers are also numerous and brilliantly dressed, but are too much like ordinary Europeans to attract particular notice.
The vegetation here is also Oriental--oranges, lemons, figs, forests of cactus and giant aloes abound. The four or five million olive-trees, many sixty feet high, are the characteristic features of the island. They form a beautiful background for the tall, dark-green cypresses. But the vine presses hard upon the olive. It is great good fortune to be here in the time of the grape harvest, even if one must miss the oranges and the olives. One day in September I walked to Palæokastritza, an old cloister on a rock looking out on the Ionian Sea, sixteen miles from the city. The way was through a continuous vineyard full of laborers. At this season of the year there is hardly a drop of running water in the island. There are places where springs and brooks and even rivers have been and will be again, but there are none there now. The water in the wells and cisterns looks suspicious. But one has a substitute for water that is just about as cheap. For copper coin of the value of two cents a woman gave me a pile of grape clusters, enough for four men. On my return I managed to signify with my poor Greek to a man riding on a load of grapes that I would like to change places with him. For three miles I rode stretched out on the top of crates full of grapes, resting my tired feet, eating, by the permission of the driver, from the top of the crates, while from the bottom the precious juice oozed out and trickled into the dusty road. I felt that I was playing Dionysos. Then it was that the vintagers, many women and few men, came trooping picturesquely from the fields. They looked so happy that it seemed as if the contagion of joy rested in the vine. It seemed as if a touch of music would have converted them into a Dionysiac chorus.
If Corfu had no classical history, it would still be historically interesting. It has been spared that curse which rested so long on the rest of Greece--Turkish occupation. The Turks dashed their forces in vain in two memorable sieges against its rock forts. The high degree of culture here, as compared with the rest of Greece, outside of Athens, is partly due to this exemption. But there have been stimulating influences from without. Rome, Byzantium, Naples, Venice, and England have held sway here. The rule of Venice, to which the Corfiotes gave themselves voluntarily, as they had formerly done to Rome, lasted nearly six hundred years, with the interruption of the Anjou episode. This rule was mild and beneficent. It was the Venetians who built the fortifications which kept off the Turks, and which still form, though to a less degree than twenty-five years ago, the characteristic feature in the aspect of the city.
From Waterloo to 1864 England exercised a protectorate over this and the six other Ionian Islands. Ten successive Lord High Commissioners, of whom Gladstone was one, and whose monuments profusely deck the esplanade, represented here the majesty of England. The English built the present fine system of roads--paid for, of course, in Ionian money. A kindly feeling prevails toward England because she yielded to the strong desire of the inhabitants for union with the kingdom of Greece. But the fact that the English, on their departure, blew up the principal fortification of the harbor on the island Vido, and carried away all the guns from the other forts, left a sting. The dismantled fort was paid for in Ionian money, but the exigencies of European politics demanded the dismantling. Austria had as much to say about that as England.
But, sweeping away the name of Corfu, which arose in the Middle Ages, and transferring ourselves back of all this foreign occupation and centuries of semi-barbarism, let us introduce ourselves to the Greek Kerkyra of Thucydides. Passing southward, a half a mile or so from the esplanade of the present city, one comes along an isthmus between two old harbors to an elevated peninsula, on which now stands the King's villa in a beautiful garden. Here one is overpowered by historic associations. Here lay the proud Greek colony established by Corinth in 734 B.C. , a colony that first set the example of filial ingratitude, and, feeling itself stronger than the mother city, joined battle with her and defeated her in the first great naval battle of Greeks against Greeks, in 665 B.C. From this rising ground the eye dimly discerns in the distance, near the mainland opposite the southern end of the island, the Sybota Islands, where the later great naval battle between mother city and colony in the presence of an Athenian fleet gave the occasion for the dreadful Peloponnesian war. From this inner harbor, now abandoned and still, nearly silted up and yearly submitting to the encroachment of vines upon its borders, the proud fleet of Alcibiades and Nicias sailed for Syracuse. It was the alliance with Kerkyra, the key to the voyage to Sicily, that lured the Athenians to that ruin.
Little of this Kerkyra remains above ground. Perhaps much may yet be found below. About twelve years ago excavations by Carapanos laid bare a great quantity of terra-cottas. Perhaps it was a terra-cotta manufactory that he discovered. The ruins of an old Doric temple lie on the surface of the ground near a spring in an olive grove on the side of the peninsula looking toward the mainland. The situation, 100 feet above the strait, among the olives and near an ancient fountain, makes one feel that he could have joined in doing honor to the dryads and naiads with the throng that used to meet here. One of the antiquarians of Corfu has lately advanced the view that these remains are those not of a temple but of a bath. Blessed bathers!
It was not bad taste for the King of Greece to put his gardens on the spot of the Gardens of Alkinoos. If I were King of Greece I would try to compound with my subjects to take the business of ruling off my hands and let me keep my Corfu home. It is no wonder that Elizabeth, the Empress of Austria, sought relief from her troubles in her villa on the other side of the inner harbor.
When a part of the Venetian works was being removed in 1843, where the isthmus between the two old harbors joins the present city, there was found a circular monument about twenty feet in diameter, ending in a flat cone, and containing an inscription running almost around the layer of stones just below the coping. It reads thus: "This is the monument of Menekrates, son of Tlasias, of Œantheia by birth. The people erected it in his memory, "for he served them well as _proxenos_" (consul) "and he perished in the sea." This with more, making six hexameters, now much more obscured than when first discovered and copied, I made out by the help of a manual of epigraphy in the rays of the sun just rising over the mountains of Epirus. The archaic forms of the letters make it a remarkable inscription, which may be dated as far back as 600 B. C. As I read this inscription, a century older than the Persian war, and two centuries before Thucydides, I thought, here surely one is in contact with Greek antiquity.
The next day, in an upper room of the building used for both library and high school, in company with the director, Professor Romanos, and Professor Papageorgios, a gentleman who deserves the title _philoxenos_, I read the other inscriptions of Corfu which have not been lost in the labyrinths of the British Museum or elsewhere. Some of these are of about the same age as that on the Menekrates monument, but very clear as well as exceedingly interesting on account of the old forms of the letters. They are mostly tomb inscriptions, telling of the grief which all the world has felt over the loss of the brave and the good.
One need not linger too long over Kerkyra. It is a state which we cannot love. We cannot forget that before Salamis it held its fleet off the southern point of the Peloponnesus, waiting to see which way the great struggle was going to incline. When Athens concluded the alliance with her at the opening of the Peloponnesian war, many at Athens felt it to be an unholy alliance, and that the burden of hatred thus shouldered was almost a counterbalance to the winning of the second navy in Greece. Thucydides draws an awful picture of the decimating feuds, which seemed tinged with barbaric fury, between aristocracy and commons. In his pages the island vanishes from view bathed in blood.
Long before the time of Thucydides the natives of this island stoutly maintained their descent from the oar-loving Phæacians of Homer. Their land was Scheria, the home of Alkinoos. This belief, in which they took so much pride, really made them great as a naval power; and he who would to-day take away the charm of Homeric tradition from this land, which has been made by it into holy ground, would work it a greater injury than one who should despoil it of its olive-trees. Of course, our enjoyment of Homer does not depend on localizing his story:
"_Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben Das allein veraltet nie._"
And yet the story of the Odyssey, localized here from gray antiquity, one likes, while here, to believe; to read as if there had been nobody to bring up any objections to its geography, or to reason about its geography at all--to read it, in short, with Corfiote eyes and Corfiote fancy.
Does not the very ship which Poseidon turned into stone, because it conveyed Ulysses home, still stand at the mouth of the old inner harbor? Yesterday I passed the bridge over the Potamo, where, according to Gregorovius, Ulysses was cast ashore, and tumbled out of the stream that had received him to sink exhausted in his long sleep under the double tree. I can almost go farther here than I am asked to go. Methinks that under yonder tree, which looks as if it might count almost any number of centuries, the sturdy swimmer fell asleep and awoke so sweetly. It does not matter that another place near the entrance of the old harbor has come to honor in the mouths of the natives as the spot of the meeting between Ulysses and Nausikaa. Our mood adapts itself kindly to either locality. Somewhere hereabouts we will let the sweet story have a local habitation. Let fancy for the hour hold sway. Thus we are perchance brought nearer to the clever voyager, the beautiful maid, the garrulous old king guided by his wife in the midst of his sailor people. Ah! the fiction of Homer holds the mind in more abiding thrall than the facts of Thucydides.
A DAY IN ITHACA
Ithaca was the first of the great Homeric places of renown to "swim into my ken," if it can be said to have swum into my ken when I saw it by the light of the full moon in sailing from Corfu to Patras. But I became acquainted with Troy and Mycenæ long before I really appropriated Ithaca. This I got by the method of gradual approach, a method which has a certain charm only granted to one who is privileged to reside a series of years near his goal.
On a journey to Dodona, the year after this moonlight view, our steamer, in passing from Patras to Prevesa, put in at Bathy, officially called Ithaca, on the east side of the island; and I had just one hour ashore which was more tantalizing than satisfactory as far as studying the topography of Ithaca was concerned; and yet one may believe that he sees in the beautiful bay and harbor the very harbor of Phorkys, where Ulysses landed after his twenty years' absence. The cave of the Nymphs, where the jolly Phæacians laid him asleep with his treasures about him was not visible; but we were told that this is now farther up the hill.
After an interval of several years, in which I had passed Ithaca several times in the night, I set foot on it again in a more satisfactory fashion. Taking refuge from the August heat of Athens in the Ionian Islands, I was spending a few days in Argostoli, the chief town of Kephallenia, and seized this opportunity to approach Ithaca from the back side, so to speak. A drive of four hours brought us clear across from the west side of Kephallenia to Samos on the east side, over the high backbone of the island. During the last hour of the journey, the descent, as "the sun was setting, and all the ways were growing shady," our eyes were fastened upon Ithaca lying peacefully in the bosom of Kephallenia--a beautiful sight.
As we had planned for only one day in Ithaca, we determined to make it a long one, and started from Samos in a sail-boat at half-past two in the morning; but, although the sail was filled most of the time, so gentle was the breeze that, even supplemented by the work of the oars, it did not bring us to Ithaca until half-past five. My boy of twelve years, companion of many of my wanderings in Greece, was asleep most of the way, but broke the parallel with Ulysses by waking up when the keel touched the shore.