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Title: The Near East - Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople
Author: Hichens, Robert (Robert Smythe), 1864-1950
Language: English
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THE NEAR EAST
[Illustration: THE MOSQUE OF SULEIMAN AT CONSTANTINOPLE]
THE
NEAR EAST
DALMATIA, GREECE
AND CONSTANTINOPLE
BY
ROBERT HICHENS
ILLUSTRATED BY
JULES GUÉRIN
AND WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
LONDON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
1913
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES BY THE DE VINNE PRESS
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 1
CHAPTER II
IN AND NEAR ATHENS 49
CHAPTER III
THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 95
CHAPTER IV
DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 137
CHAPTER V
IN CONSTANTINOPLE 181
CHAPTER VI
STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 225
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Mosque of Suleiman at Constantinople _Frontispiece_
From a painting by Jules Guérin
PAGE
The Roman Amphitheater at Pola 4
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Market-Place at Spalato 9
From a painting by Jules Guérin
Zara--Piazza delle Erbe 14
The Harbor of Mezzo 17
Spalato--Peristilio 24
Trau--Vestibule of the Cathedral 27
Ragusa 32
The Rector's Palace and the Public Square at Ragusa 37
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Jesuits' Church and the Military Hospital, Ragusa 45
The Parthenon at Athens 52
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Acropolis, with a View of the Areopagus and Mount
Hymettus, from the West 55
The Theater of Dionysus on the southern slope of the
Acropolis 62
The Temple of the Olympian Zeus at Athens 65
From a painting by Jules Guérin
In the Portico of the Parthenon 70
The Temple of Athene Nike at Athens 75
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Stadium, Athens 82
The Academy, Mount Lycabettus in the background 87
The Acropolis at Athens, early morning 92
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Temple of Poseidon and Athene at Sunium 98
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Temple of Athene, Island of Ægina 103
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Theater of Dionysus, Athens 108
The Plain of Marathon 113
A Monastery at the foot of Hymettus 120
Ruins of the Great Temple of the Mysteries at Eleusis 125
The Odeum of Herodes Atticus in Athens 133
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Site of Ancient Delphi 140
From a painting by Jules Guérin
Delphi--Gulf of Corinth in the distance 143
The Lion of Chæronea, the Acropolis and Mount Parnassus 150
Place of the famous Oracle, Delphi 154
View of Mount Parnassus 159
Ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi 165
The Temple of Hera at Olympia 170
Olympia--Entrance to the Athletic Field 175
The Grand Bazaar in Constantinople 184
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Bosphorous--Constantinople in the distance 190
Galata Bridge, which connects Galata and Pera 193
The Water-front of Stamboul, with Pera in the distance 200
Looking down Step Street, Constantinople 203
Public Letter-writers in a Constantinople Street 208
The Courtyard of the "Pigeon's Mosque" 213
From a painting by Jules Guérin
Street Scene in Constantinople 221
The Mosque of the Yeni-Validé-Jamissi, Constantinople 228
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Royal Gate leading to the old Seraglio 231
From a painting by Jules Guérin
The Mosque of Santa Sophia 238
From a painting by Jules Guérin
In the Cemetery of Eyub, on the Golden Horn 241
From a painting by Jules Guérin
Interior of Santa Sophia 246
St. George's Greek Church, now a mosque, Constantinople 251
Street vista in Galata from end of bridge,
Constantinople 258
A view over Constantinople showing the Mosque of Santa
Sophia 263
PICTURESQUE DALMATIA
[Illustration: THE ROMAN AMPHITHEATER AT POLA]
THE NEAR EAST
CHAPTER I
PICTURESQUE DALMATIA
Miramar faded across the pale waters of the Adriatic, which lay like a
dream at the foot of the hills where Triest seemed sleeping, all its
activities stilled at the summons of peace. Beneath its tower the
orange-colored sail of a fishing-boat caught the sunlight, and gleamed
like some precious fabric, then faded, too, as the ship moved onward to
the forgotten region of rocks and islands, of long, gray mountains, of
little cities and ancient fortresses, of dim old churches, from whose
campanile the medieval voices of bells ring out the angelus to a people
still happily primitive, still unashamed to be picturesque. By the way
of the sea we journeyed to a capital where no carriages roll through the
narrow streets, where there is not a railway-station, where the citizens
are content to go on foot about their business, and where three quarters
of the blessings of civilization are blessedly unknown. We had still to
touch at Pola, in whose great harbor the dull-green war-ships of Austria
lay almost in the shadow of the vast Roman amphitheater, which has
lifted its white walls, touched here and there with gold, above the sea
for some sixteen hundred years, curiously graceful despite its gigantic
bulk, the home now of grasses and thistles, where twenty thousand
spectators used to assemble to take their pleasure.
But when Pola was left behind, the ship soon entered the watery
paradise. Miramar, Triest, were forgotten. Dalmatia is a land of
forgetting, seems happily far away, cut off by the sea from many
banalities, many active annoyances of modern life.
Places that are, or that seem to be, remote often hold a certain
melancholy, a tristesse of "old, unhappy, far-off things." But Dalmatia
has a serene atmosphere, a cheerful purity, a clean and a cozy gaiety
which reach out hands to the traveler, and take him at once into
intimacy and the breast of a home. Before entering it the ship coasts
along a naked region, in which pale, almost flesh-colored hills are
backed by mountains of a ghastly grayness. Flesh-color and steel are
almost cruelly blended. No habitations were visible. The sea, protected
on our right by lines of islands, was waveless. No birds flew above it;
no boats moved on it. We seemed to be creeping down into the ultimate
desolation.
But presently the waters widened out. At the foot of the hills appeared
here and there white groups of houses. A greater warmth, like a breath
of hope, stole into the air. White and yellow sails showed on the breast
of the sea. Two sturdy men, wearing red caps, and standing to ply their
oars, hailed us in the Slav dialect as they passed on their way to the
islands. The huge, gray Velebit Mountains still bore us company on our
voyage to the South, but they were losing their almost wicked look of
dreariness. In the golden light of afternoon romance was descending upon
them. And now a long spur of green land thrust itself far out, as if to
bar our way onward. The islands closed in upon us again. A white town
smiled on us far off at the edge of the happy, green land. It looked
full of promises, a little city not to be passed without regretting. It
was Zara, the capital without a railway-station of the forgotten
country.
Zara, Trau, Spalato, Ragusa, Castelnuovo, Cattaro, Sebenico--these, with
two or three other places, represent Dalmatia to the average traveler.
Ragusa is, perhaps, the most popular and interesting; Spalato the most
populous and energetic; Cattaro the most remarkable scenically. Trau
leaves a haunting memory in the mind of him who sees it. Castelnuovo is
a little paradise marred in some degree by the soldiers who infest it,
and who seem strangely out of place in its tiny ways and its
tree-shaded piazza on the hilltop. But Zara has a peculiar charm, half
gay, half brightly tender. And nowhere else in all Dalmatia are such
exquisite effects of light wedded to water to be seen as on Zara's
Canale.
Zara, like other sirens, is deceptive. The city has a face which gives
little indication of its soul. Along the shore lie tall and cheerful
houses,--almost palaces they are,--solid and big, modern, with windows
opening to the sea, and separated from it only by a broad walk, edged by
a strip of pavement, from which might be taken a dive into the limpid
water. And here, when the ship tied up, a well-dressed throng of joyous
citizens was taking the air. Children were playing and laughing. Two or
three row-boats slipped through the gold and silver which the sun, just
setting behind the island of Ugljan opposite, showered toward the city.
Music came from some place of entertainment. A simple liveliness
suggested prosperous homes, the well-being of a community apart, which
chose to live "out of the world," away from railroads, motor-cars, and
carriage traffic, but which knew how to be modern in its own quiet and
decorous way.
Yet Zara had a great soaring campanile--it had been visible far off at
sea--and tiny streets and old buildings, San Donato, the duomo, San
Simeone; and five fountains,--the _cinque pozzi_,--and a Venetian
tower,--the Torre di Buovo d'Antona,--and fortification gardens, and
lion gateways. Where were all these? A sound of bells came from behind
the palaces. And these bells seemed to be proclaiming the truth of Zara.
[Illustration: THE MARKET-PLACE AT SPALATO]
Bells ringing in hidden places behind the palaces; bells calling across
strange gardens lifted high on mighty walls; bells whispering among
pines and murmuring across green depths of glass-like water; bells
chiming above the yellowing vines on tiny islands! Who that remembers
Zara remembers not Zara's bells?
Walk a few steps from the sea, passing between the big houses which
front it into the Piazza delle Erbe, and you come at once into a busy
strangeness of Croatia girdled about by Italy. Dalmatia has been
possessed wholly or in part by Romans, Goths, Slavs, Hungarians, Turks,
Venetians. Now smart Austrian soldiers make themselves at home in Zara,
but Italy seems still to rule there, stretching hands out of the past.
Italian may be heard on all sides, but the peasants who throng the
_calle_ and the market-place and the harbor speak a Slavonic dialect,
and in the piazza on any morning, almost in the shadow of the Romanesque
cathedral, and watched over by a griffin perched on a high Corinthian
column hung with chains, which announce its old service as a pillory,
you may hear their chatter, and see the gay colors of costumes which to
the untraveled might perhaps suggest comic opera.
There is a wildness of the near East in this medieval Italian town, a
wildness which blooms and fades between tall houses of stone, facing
each other so closely that friend might almost clasp hand with friend
leaning from window to opposite window. Against the somber grays and
browns of façades, set in the deep shadows of the paved alleys which are
Zara's streets, move brilliant colors, scarlet and silver, blue and
crimson and silver. Multitudes of coins and curious heavy ornaments
glitter on the caps and the dresses of women. Enormous boys and great,
striding men, brave in embroidered jackets, with bright-red caps too
small for the head, silver buttons, red sashes stuck full of weapons and
other impedimenta, gaiters, and pointed shoes, march hither and thither,
calmly intent on some business which has brought them in from the
outlying districts. It varies, of course, with the changing seasons. In
the latter part of October and beginning of November most of the male
peasants were selling very large hares. Live cocks and hens were being
disposed of by many of the women, and it is a common thing in Zara to
see well-dressed people bearing about with them bunches of puffed-out
and drearily blinking poultry, which they have bought casually at some
corner; by the great Venetian tower; or near the round, two-storied
church of San Donato, founded on the spot where once stood a Roman
forum, whose pavement still remains; or perhaps by San Simeone, close to
the palace of the governor, where under the black eagles of Austria the
sentry, in blue and bright yellow, stands drowsily in the sunshine
before his black and yellow box.
[Illustration: ZARA--PIAZZA DELLE ERBE]
Sometimes the peasants bring live stock to church. One morning, on a
week day, I went into San Simeone, to which Queen Elizabeth of Hungary
gave the superb arca of silver gilt which contains, it is said, the
remains of the saint. I found there a number of peasants, men and women,
all in characteristic costumes. Only peasants were there. Some were
quietly sitting, some kneeling, some standing, with their market-baskets
set down on the pavement beside them. In a hidden place behind the high
altar, above which is raised the great, carved sarcophagus, priests were
droning the office. A peasant in red, with a gesture, invited me to sit
beside him. I did so, and he whispered in my ear some words I could not
understand; but I gathered that something very important was about to
take place. Every face was expectant. All eyes were earnestly fixed upon
the sarcophagus. A woman came in, carrying in her arms a turkey, which
looked anxious-minded, crossed herself, and waited with us, gazing. The
droning voices ceased. A sort of carillon sounded brightly. We all
knelt, the woman with the turkey, too, as a priest in scarlet and white
mounted the steps which divide the altar from the area. There was a
moment of deep silence. Then the great, glittering, and sloping lid,
with its recumbent figure of the saint, slowly rose between the bronze
supporting figures. My peasant friend touched me, stood up, and led the
way toward the altar. I followed him with the rest of the congregation,
and we filed slowly up the steps, and one by one gazed down into the dim
coffin. There I saw a skull, and the vague brown remains of what had
once been a human being, lying in the midst of votive offerings. On the
fingers of one hand, which looked as if made of tobacco leaf, were
clusters of rings. The fat, bronze faces on each side seemed smiling.
But the peasants stood in awe. And presently the great lid sank down.
All made the sign of the cross. The market-baskets were picked up, and
the turkey was restored to the sunlight.
[Illustration: THE HARBOR OF MEZZO]
Close to San Simeone are the cinque pozzi--five fountains in a row, with
iron wheels above them. They are between four and five hundred years
old, and lie almost at the foot of the Venetian tower, near a Corinthian
column and the fragments of a Roman arch. Just behind them some steps
lead up to one of the delicious shady places of Zara. Mount them, and
you will have a happy surprise such as the little Dalmatian cities
are always ready to give you.
You have been walking away from the sea, with your back to the harbor,
and here is another, but minute, harbor nestling under a great fortress
wall above which, in a garden, some young soldiers are idly leaning and
laughing under trees with leaves of gold and red-brown. Brightly painted
vessels, closely packed together, lie on the blue-green water. Beyond
them are the trees of Blažeković Park. And just beneath you, on
your right, is the great, yellow stone Porta di Terra Ferma, with its
winged lion of St. Mark. Beyond, over the narrow exit from the harbor,
the landlocked Canale di Zara, which sometimes, especially at evening,
reminded me of the Venice lagoons, lies glittering in the sun. And a
Venetian fort on the peak of Ugljan shows like a strange and determined
shadow against the blue of the sky.
The great white campanile which dominates Zara, and which from the sea
looks light and graceful, is the campanile of the duomo, Sant'
Anastasia, and was partly built by the Venetians, and completed not many
years ago. From the narrow street which skirts the duomo this campanile,
though majestic, looks heavy and almost overwhelming, too huge, too
tremendously solid, for the little town in which it is set. And, its
blanched hue, beautiful from the sea, has a rather unpleasant effect
against the deep, time-worn color of the church, the façade of which,
with its two rose windows, one large, one small, its three beautiful,
mellow-toned doorways, and its curious and somehow touching, though
stolid, statues, is very fine. The interior, not specially interesting,
contains some glorious Gothic stalls dating from the fifteenth century.
They are of black wood, relieved with bosses and tiny statuettes of
bright gold, and above each one is the half-length of a gilded and
painted man, wearing a beard and holding a scroll. The Porta Marina,
through which the chief harbor is gained, is remarkable for its carved,
dark-gray lion, companioned by two white cherubs of stone brilliantly
full of life despite their almost terrifying obesity. One of the most
beautiful things in Zara is the delicate and lovely campanile of Santa
Maria, over six hundred years old. St. Grisogono, the church of the
city's patron saint, was in the hands of workmen and could not be
visited when I was in Dalmatia.
Almost the whole of Zara is surrounded by water. On the great walls of
the ancient fortifications are gardens, and from these gardens you look
down on quiet inlets of the sea. Old buildings, old walls and gardens,
tiny, medieval streets through which no carriage ever passes, fountains,
lion gateways, painted boats lying on clear and apparently motionless
waters shut in from the open sea by long lines of mountainous islands,
pine-trees and olives and golden vineyards, and over all an ancient
music of bells. It is difficult to say good-by to Zara, even though
Spalato sends out a summons from the _riviera_ of red and of gold, even
though Ragusa calls from its leafy groves under the Fort Imperiale.
Bora, the wind of the dead, blew when our ship rounded the lighthouse of
Spalato long after darkness had fallen. And the following day was the
"_giorno dei morti_." The strange cathedral, octagonal without, circular
within, once the mausoleum of the Emperor Diocletian, was crowded with
citizens and peasants devoutly praying. Incense rose between the dark,
hoary walls, the columns of granite and porphyry, to the dome of brick.
Outside in the wind the black hornblende sphinx kept watch on those who
came and went, mourning for their departed. The sky was a heavy gray,
and the temple was dark, and looked wrinkled and seared with age, and
sad despite its pagan frieze showing the wild joys of the chase, despite
the loveliness of its thirteenth-century pulpit of limestone and marble,
raised high on wonderfully graceful columns with elaborately carved
capitals.
Spalato is the biggest, most bustling town of Dalmatia. Much of it is
built into the great palace of Diocletian, which lies over against the
sea, huge, massive, powerful, once probably noble, but now disfigured
by the paltry windows and the green shutters of modern dwellings, by a
triviality of common commercial life, sparrows where eagles should be.
When nature takes a ruin, she usually glorifies it, or touches it with a
tenderness of romance. But when people in the wine trade lay hold upon
it, hang out their washing in it, and establish their cafés and their
bakeries and their butchers' shops in the midst of its rugged walls, its
arches, and its columns, the ruin suffers, and the people in the wine
trade seem to lose in value instead of gaining in importance.
[Illustration: SPALATO--PERISTILIO]
Spalato is a strange confusion of old and new. It lacks the delicacy of
Zara, the harmonious beauty of Ragusa. One era seems to fight with
another within it. Here is a noble twelfth-century campanile, nearly a
hundred and eighty feet high, there a common row of little shops full of
cheap and uninviting articles. Turning a corner, one comes unexpectedly
upon a Corinthian temple. It is the Battistero di San Giovanni, once
perhaps the private temple of Diocletian. For the moment no one is near
it, and despite the icy breath of Bora raging through the city and
crying, "This is the day of the dead!" a calm of dead years infolds you
as you enter the massive doorway and pass into the shadow beneath the
stone wagon-roof. A few steps, and the smell of fish assails you,
hundreds of strings of onions greet your eyes, and the heavy rolling
of enormous barrels of wine over stone pavements breaks through the
noise of the wind. You have come unexpectedly out through a gateway of
the palace on to the quay to the south, and are in the midst of
commercial activities. The contrasts are picturesque, but they are
rough, and, when complicated by Bora, are confusing, almost distressing.
Nevertheless, Spalato is well worth a visit. It contains a small, but
remarkable, museum, specially interesting for its sarcophagi found at
Salona and its collection of inscriptions. The sarcophagus showing the
passage of the Red Sea is very curious. Apart from the now disfigured
palace, the Battistero, the very interesting and peculiar cathedral,
with its vestibule, its rotunda, and its Piazza of the Sphinx, like
nothing else I have seen, the town is full of picturesque nooks and
corners; and its fruit market at the foot of the massive octagonal
Hrvoja Tower, which dates from 1481, is perhaps even more animated, more
full of strangeness and color, than Zara's Piazza delle Erbe. Here may
be seen turbans of crimson on the handsome heads of men, elaborately
embroidered crimson jackets covering immense shoulders and chests, women
dressed in blue and red, white and silver, or with heads and busts
draped in the most brilliant shade of orange color. When Bora blows, the
men look like monks or Mephistopheles; for some--the greater
number--wrap themselves from head to foot in long cloaks and hoods of
brown, while others of a more lively temperament shroud themselves in
red. They are a handsome people, rustic-looking, yet often noble, with
kind yet bold faces, steady eyes, and a magnificent physique. Their gait
is large and loose. There are giants in Dalmatia in our days. And many
of the women are not only pretty, but have delightful expressions, open,
pure, and gay. There seems to be nothing to fear in Dalmatia. I have
driven through the wilds, and over the flanks of the mountains, both in
Dalmatia and Herzegovina, in the dead of the night, and had no
unpleasant experience. The peasants have a high reputation for honesty
and general probity as well as for courage. And beggars are scarce, if
they exist at all, in Dalmatia.
Trau has a unique charm. The riviera of the Sette Castelli stretches
between it and Spalato, along the shore of an inlet of the sea which is
exactly like a blue lake. And what a marvelous blue it is on a cloudless
autumn day! Every one knows what is meant by a rapture of spring. Those
who traverse that riviera at the end of October, or even in the opening
days of November, will know what a rapture of autumn can be.
[Illustration: TRAU--VESTIBULE OF THE CATHEDRAL]
Miles upon miles of bright-golden and rose-red vineyards edge the
startling blue of the sea. And the vines are not stunted and ugly,
but large, leafy, growing with a rank luxuriance. Among them, with
trunks caught as it were in the warm embraces of these troops of
bacchantes, are thousands of silver-green olive-trees. And peasants in
red, peasants in orange-color, move waist-deep, sometimes shoulder-deep,
through the glory, under the glory of the sun. Here and there in a
grass-grown clearing, like a small islet in the ocean of vines, appears
a hut of brushwood and woven grasses, and under the trees before it sit
peasants eating the grapes they have just picked warm from the plants.
Now and then a sportsman may be seen, in peasant costume, smoking a
cigarette, his gun over his shoulder, passing slowly with his red-brown
dog among the red-gold vines. Now and then a distant report rings out
among the olives. Then the warm silence falls again over this rapture of
autumn. And so, you come to Trau.
Trau is a tiny town set on a tiny island approached by bridges,
medieval, sleepy, yet happy, almost drowsily joyous, in appearance, with
that air of half-gentle, half-blithe satisfaction with self which makes
so many Dalmatian places characteristic and almost touching. How odd to
live in Trau! Yet might it not be a delicious experience to live in dear
little Trau with the right person, separated from the world by the
shining water,--for who comes over the bridges, when all is
said?--guarded by the lion and the statue which crown the gateway,
cradled in peace and mellow fruitfulness?
The gateway passed, a narrow alley or two threaded, a corner turned,
and, lo! a piazza, a loggia with fine old columns, a tiled roof and a
clock-tower, a campanile and a cathedral with a great porch, and
underneath the porch a marvel of a doorway! Can tiny Trau on its tiny
island really possess all this?
The lion doorway of the duomo at Trau is certainly one of the finest
things in Dalmatia. The duomo dates from the thirteenth century, but has
been twice enlarged. It is not large now, but small and high, dim, full
of the smell of stale incense, blackened by age, almost strangely
silent, almost strangely secluded. In the choir is a deep well with an
old well-head. There are many tombs in the pavement. The finely carved
pulpit, with its little lion, and the fifteenth-century choir-stalls are
well worth seeing, and the roof of the chapel of St. Giovanni Orsini,
which contains a great marble tomb, has been made wonderful by age, like
an old face made wonderful by wrinkles. But Radovan's doorway is
certainly the marvel of Trau. In color it is a rich, deep, dusty brown,
and it is elaborately and splendidly carved with two big lions, with
Adam on a lion and with Eve on a lioness. The lioness is grasping a
lamb. There is a multiplicity of other detail. The two big lions,
which stick out on each side of the round-arched doorway, as if about to
step forth into the alleys of Trau, have a fine air of life, though they
both look tame. Their mouths are open, but almost smiling.
[Illustration: RAGUSA]
When you leave the duomo, wander through the Venetian streets of this
wonderful little island city, where Gothic windows and beautifully
carved balconies look out to, lean forth to, the calm, blue waters,
edged by the red and the gold of the vines. For this place is unique and
has an unique charm. Peace dwells here, and beauty has found a quiet
abiding-place, where it lingers, and will linger, I hope, for many
centuries yet, girdled by olive-groves, by vineyards, by sun-kissed
waters, guarded by the lions of Venice.
From Spalato I visited the white ruins of Salona, where the Emperor
Diocletian was born, and near which, in his palace at Spalato, he spent
the last eight years of his life, cultivating his garden, seeking after
philosophy, and, let us hope, repenting of his bitter persecution of the
Christians. From the hill, on the site of the Basilica Urbana, I saw one
of those frigid and almost terrible lemon sunsets which come with the
wind of the dead. I stayed till night despite the intense cold, till the
fragments of the city, scattered far over the sloping ground above the
riviera of the Sette Castelli, and creeping up to the solitary
dwelling-house built by Professor Bulic of old Roman stones, took on sad
and unnatural pallors in the darkness, till lonely columns stood up like
watching specters, and fragments of wall were like specters crouching.
For a long while the lemon hue persisted in the western sky, and the
voice of the wind rose with the night, crying among the burial-places.
A few hours' voyage on a splendid ship, and you step ashore at Gravosa,
the port for Ragusa, the most popular place in Dalmatia, and in many
ways the most attractive. For it is embowered in woods and gardens;
contains remarkable old buildings; is girdled about by tremendous
fortress walls, and by forts perched on bastions of rock overlooking the
sea and the isle of Lacroma, where Richard Cœur de Lion touched land
and founded a monastery; is thoroughly and deliciously medieval, yet
full of Slav and Austrian life; possesses a railway-station, many
well-built villas, and a good hotel, and is surrounded by delightful
country. Perhaps in all Dalmatia Ragusa is the best center from which to
take long walks and make expeditions. It is cheery, cozy, and wonderful
at the same time. The terrific walls of the fortresses do not appal or
overwhelm, for all about them cluster the gardens. Ivy climbs over the
archways. In what was once a moat the grass grows thickly, the flowers
bloom, and many trees give shade. This is a medieval paradise, and its
inhabitants have reason to rejoice in it and to say there is no place
like it.
Though small, it is intricate. At every moment one is surprised by some
unexpected view, by some marvel of masonry, militant or ecclesiastical;
by a fountain or a statue, an old doorway, a courtyard, a campanile, an
exquisite façade, with arches and lovely columns, balconies and carved
window-frames; by cloisters, a strange alley ending in flights of steps,
which lead to a mountain from which a fort looks down; by a secret
harbor, or a secret garden, or a little magical grove nestling beneath a
protecting wall which dates from the Middle Ages, when Ragusa was a
proud republic.
Was Burne-Jones ever in Ragusa? It is like one of the little enchanted
towns he loved to paint in the backgrounds of his pictures. Was William
Morris ever there? It is like a city in one of his poems. It is full of
churches, and their towers are full of bells. Monks and priests pass
perpetually through the narrow streets with smartly dressed Austrian
soldiers. And military music, the triumph of bugles and trumpets, the
beat and rattle of drums, joins with the drowsy sound of church organs,
and the old voices of clocks chiming the hours, to make the symphony of
Ragusa. Men and women from the Breno Valley, from Canali the golden,
where oaks grow among the rocks, and the autumn vineyards are a wonder
forever to haunt the memory, from Melada and the Stag Islands, from the
Ombla and Herzegovina, pass all day down "the Stradone," stroll in the
Brsalje, a piazza with mulberry-trees overlooking the sea, talk by the
Amerling fountain, or sit on the wall by Porta Pille under the statue of
San Biagio, the patron saint of the town. And each one is in a
picturesque, perhaps even a brilliant, costume. The men often wear long
chains, and carry handsomely chased weapons and long, elaborate pipes.
Some have sheepskins flung jauntily over their shoulders, and bright-red
caps. The women wear golden ornaments, embroidered jackets, and
marvelous aprons almost like prayer-rugs, handsome pins, pleated
head-dresses, bright-colored handkerchiefs or tiny caps, coins hanging
on chains over their thickly growing hair.
The chief hotels, the villas, and the railway-station, where a row of
victorias is drawn up,--for this is no Zara, but a city which believes
that it "moves with the times,"--lie among roses, oleanders, single
rhododendrons, trees, and masses of luxuriant vegetation outside Porta
Pille. As soon as you have passed beneath San Biagio and descended the
hill, you are in a bright, medieval world, in the heart of one of the
most original and fascinating little cities that exists in Europe.
[Illustration: THE RECTOR'S PALACE AND THE PUBLIC SQUARE AT RAGUSA]
On the left of the Stradone, the chief street and the newest, between
two and three hundred years old, at right angles to it, shadowed by tall
and ancient houses, tiny alleys, ending in steep flights of steps, lead
up toward the mountain. On the flat to its right is a happy maze of
alleys, clean, strange, old, yet never sad. A delicious cheerfulness
reigns in Ragusa. From the dimness of venerable doorways smiling faces
look forth. They lean down from carved stone balconies. Gay voices
chatter at the foot of frowning walls, huge bastions, mighty
watch-towers; before the statue of Roland, near the Dogana which has a
loggia and Gothic windows; by the fine and massive Onofrio fountain,
which for over four hundred and seventy years has given water to the
inhabitants; among the doves by Porta Place, which leads to the harbor.
The wide, but intimate, Stradone toward noon and evening is thronged
with cheerful and neatly dressed citizens, strolling to and fro in the
soft air between the delicious little shops full of fine rugs, weapons,
chains, and filigree ornaments.
Opposite the fountain of Onofrio are the church, monastery, and
cloisters of the Franciscans, with a courtyard and an old pharmacy
containing some wonderful vases. At the east end of the Stradone, away
to the right, are the church of San Biagio, the cathedral, and the
Palazzo dei Rettori. On the other side of the street are the military
hospital and the church of the Jesuits. Not far away is the Dominican
monastery.
Of these the most remarkable is the rector's palace. But the cloisters
of the Franciscans are beautiful and hold an extraordinary charm and
peace. The rector's palace is a noble Renaissance building, with a
courtyard containing a very handsome staircase, and with a really
splendid fifteenth-century colonnade fronting the piazza. The carving of
the capitals of the columns is wonderfully effective. Three are said to
be inferior to the remaining four, which were the work of an architect
of Naples, Onofrio. But all are remarkable. The little winged boys have
a tenderness and liveliness, a softness and activity, which are quite
exquisite. The windows of Venetian Gothic are beautiful; and the whole
effect of this façade, with its carved doorway, the round arches, richly
dark, with notes of white, the two tiers of stone seats raised one above
the other, and the double rows of windows, square and arched, in the
shadow of the colonnade, is absolutely noble.
The cathedral is not very interesting, and the "Assumption" over the
high altar, though attributed to Titian, cannot be by him. Much more
attractive is a copy of the Madonna della Sedia of Raphael. The treasury
contains some remarkable jewels and silver and many relics.
In the Dominican church there is a genuine Titian, and there are some
very curious and interesting pictures by Nicolo Ragusano, a painter of
Ragusa who lived in the fifteenth century. The cloisters contain a white
well-head, guarded by graceful columns, orange-trees, and flowers, above
which peer the small windows of the monks. But if one had to be a monk
in Ragusa, surely it would be wise to cast in your lot with the
Franciscans at the other end of the street, whose Romanesque
fourteenth-century cloisters with octagonal columns are quite beautiful
and in excellent preservation. The capitals of the columns are carved
with animals. Palms flourish there, and roses. Above, a terrace, with a
wonderful balustrade--a series of tiny arches resting on tiny columns, a
sort of stone echo of the arches and columns below,--runs all round the
court. The peace is profound, but not sad. As one lingers there one can
understand, indeed one can scarcely help understanding, the very
peculiar charm which must often attach to the monkish life.
Ragusa contains some nine thousand inhabitants. One of them remarked
that eight hundred of these were ecclesiastics. And he was unsympathetic
enough to add, "E molto troppo!" Perhaps his statement was untrue. But
certainly the ways of Ragusa swarm with religious. Nevertheless,--one
thinks of Rome, with its crowds of priests and its crowds of
free-thinkers,--the inhabitants of Ragusa seem to be very devout. In
almost all of the many churches, at all times of the day, people may be
found praying, meditating, telling their beads, worshiping at shrines of
the saints.
Around Ragusa there are many beautiful walks, on Lacroma, on Lapad by
Gravosa, on Monte Sergio, on Monte Petka. A really superb drive is the
expedition to Castelnuovo in the Bocche di Cattaro, along the Dalmatian
riviera, which is as fine as almost any part of the French riviera, and
which is still wild and natural, not yet turned into a vanity-box. Those
who take this glorious drive will cross the frontier into Herzegovina,
and, best of all, they will pass by the wonderful vineyards of Canali,
which roll in waves of gold to the very feet of a chain of naked and
savage mountains.
The voyage from Ragusa to Cattaro is one of the finest in Europe. The
entrance into the bocche, the journey through them, and the arrival at
Cattaro, hidden away like some precious thing that must not be revealed
to the dull gaze of the ordinary world, almost, but mercifully not
quite, under the giant shadow of the Black Mountain, make for the
voyager what comes to seem at length a deliberately planned, and
triumphantly carried out, scenic crescendo, which closes in sheer magic.
The coast of Dalmatia is guarded by chains of islands and is pierced by
many long and narrow inlets. During the voyage from Triest or Fiume to
the extreme south of the country, the ship, often for many hours, seems
to be traveling over a series of lakes. Rarely does she emerge into open
water. But between Gravosa and the bocche there is open sea. Nature has
not neglected to make her preparations. She gives you the stretch of
open sea as a contrast to what is coming. And just when you are
beginning to feel its monotony, the prow of the vessel veers to the
left, seems to be sensitively searching for some unseen opening in the
rugged coast. She finds that opening between Punta d'Ostro and Punta
d'Arza, leaving the little isle of Rondoni, with its round, yellow fort,
on the right and the open sea behind.
The mountains which guard the bocche are nearly six thousand feet high,
bare, cruelly precipitous, in color a peculiar, almost ashy, gray. When
you are at a long distance from them they seem to descend sheer into the
water; but as you draw nearer over the waveless sea, you find that along
their bases runs a strip of beautiful fertile country, green, thickly
wooded in many places, with gay little villages set among radiant
gardens, with a white highroad, along which peasants are passing. There
is Castelnuovo on its hill among leafy groves, with its old, narrow
fortress on the rock fought for by Turks and Venetians; near by is
Zelenika; and there another large fortress, with the Austrian flag
above it. The sensitive prow of the ship veers again, this time to the
southeast, where the ash-gray precipices surely hold the sea forever in
check. But the ship knows better. The Canale di Kumbur shows itself,
leading to the splendid Bay of Teodo surreptitiously observed from afar
by the mountains of Montenegro. If you held your breath and listened,
might you not hear the boom of guns by the lake of Scutari? All sense of
being at sea fades from you as the ship penetrates ever more deeply into
the secret recesses of the mountains. This is like superb lake scenery,
austere, grand, almost terrible, and yet radiant. Nature is even
coquettish on this perfect morning of autumn, for in these remoter
regions she has cast a swathe of the lightest and whitest possible mist,
like one of those scarfs of Tunis, over the cultivated land which edges
the precipices. As the ship draws near, the mist seems to disperse in a
sparkle of gold, revealing intimate beauties, full of charming detail: a
little Byzantine church with a pale-green cupola, a priest in a sunny
garden leaning over a creeper-covered wall, white horses trotting
briskly along a curly, white road, soldiers marching through a village
with a faint beat of drums, children perhaps going to school through a
riot of green. But the mist is ever there in the distance, part of the
spirit of autumn.
[Illustration: THE JESUITS' CHURCH AND THE MILITARY HOSPITAL, RAGUSA]
Do not miss the tiny twin islands with their two little churches. One of
them, Santa Maria dello Scalpello, is a place of pilgrimage. Old, gray,
minute yet dignified, with its few tall cypresses about it, it so
completely covers the island that you see only a church with cypresses
apparently floating upon the water. Now there is a scatter of
ivory-white birds on the steel-colored surface, a glint of powder-blue
on the ridges made by the ship. Marvelous harmonies of pearl color,
gray, and blue, with here and there faint dashes of primrose-yellow,
make magic in the distance before you. This is really an enchanted
place, home of a peace that seems touched with eternity. And the ship
creeps on, as if fearing perhaps to disturb it, farther and farther into
places more secret still, and of a peace even more profound, till the
pearl color and the gray, with their hints of yellow and blue, begin to
give way to another dominion. The last bay has been gained. The secret
of Cattaro is to be at length revealed. Through the wondrous delicacies
of the now rather suggested than actually seen mist, and above them,
dawns a marvelous pageant of autumn, which bears a curiously exact
resemblance to one of Turner's superb visions.
It is like a dream, but a dream of ardor and power, in which browns,
reds, russets, greens, and many shades of gold and of yellow march
together from the circle of the waters through climbing valleys to the
mountains, which here at last give pause to the sea. And bells are
ringing in this great, this triumphant dream. And now surely faint
outlines are becoming visible, as of turrets and cupolas striving to
break in glory through the mist. The fires of autumn glow more fiercely,
like a furnace fanned. Trails of smoke show here and there. Mist, smoke,
and fire--it is like a grand conflagration. The turrets reveal
themselves as great groups of trees. But the smoke rises from household
fires; the cupolas are cupolas of churches; and the bells are the bells
of Cattaro, calling from this vale of enchantment to the cannon which
are thundering before Scutari beyond the mountains of Montenegro.
IN AND NEAR ATHENS
[Illustration: THE PARTHENON AT ATHENS]
CHAPTER II
IN AND NEAR ATHENS
What Greece is like in spring, I do not know, when rains have fallen,
and round Athens the country is green, when the white dust perhaps does
not whirl through Constitution Square and over the garden about the
Zappeion, when the intensity of the sun is not fierce on the road to the
bare Acropolis, and the guardians of the Parthenon, in their long coats
the color of a dervish's hat, do not fall asleep in the patches of shade
cast on the hot ground by Doric columns. I was there at the end of the
summer, and many said to me, "You should come in spring, when it is
green."
Greece must be very different then, but can it be much more beautiful?
Disembark at the Piræus at dawn, take a carriage, and drive by Phalerum,
the bathing-place of the Athenians, to Athens at the end of the summer,
and though for just six months no rain has fallen, you will enter a bath
of dew. The road is dry and dusty, but there is no wind, and the dust
lies still. The atmosphere is marvelously clear, as it is, say, at
Ismailia in the early morning. The Hellenes, when they are talking quite
naturally, if they speak of Europe, always speak of it as a continent in
which Greece is not included. They talk of "going to Europe." They say
to the English stranger, "You come to us fresh from Europe." And as you
drive toward Athens you understand.
This country is part of the East, although the Greeks were the people
who saved Europe from being dominated by the races of Asia. All about
you--you have not yet reached Phalerum--you see country that looks like
the beginning of a desert, that holds a fascination of the desert. The
few trees stand up like carved things. The small, Eastern-looking
houses, many of them with flat roofs, earth-colored, white, or tinted
with mauve and pale colors, scattered casually and apparently without
any plan over the absolutely bare and tawny ground, look from a distance
as if they, too, were carved, as if they were actually a part of the
substance of their environment, not imposed upon it by an outside force.
The moving figure of a man, wearing the white fustanella, has the
strange beauty of an Arab moving alone in the vast sands. And yet there
is something here that is certainly not of Europe, but that is not
wholly of the East--something very delicate, very pure, very sensitive,
very individual, free from the Eastern drowsiness, from the heavy
Eastern perfume which disposes the soul of man to inertia.
[Illustration: THE ACROPOLIS, WITH A VIEW OF THE AREOPAGUS AND MOUNT
HYMETTUS, FROM THE WEST]
It is the exquisite, vital, one might almost say intellectual, freshness
of Greece which, between Europe and Asia, preserves its eternal
dewdrops--those dewdrops which still make it the land of the early
morning.
Your carriage turns to the right, and in a moment you are driving along
the shore of a sea without wave or even ripple. In the distance, across
the purple water, is the calm mountain of the island of Ægina. Over
there, along the curve of the sandy bay, are the clustering houses of
old Phalerum. This is new Phalerum, with its wooden bath-houses, its one
great hotel, its kiosks and cafés, its shadeless plage, deserted now
except for one old gentleman who, like almost every Greek all over the
country, is at this moment reading a newspaper in the sun.
Is there any special charm in new Phalerum, bare of trees, a little
cockney of aspect, any exceptional beauty in this bay? When you have
bathed there a few times, when you have walked along the shore in the
quiet evening, breathing the exquisite air, when you have dined in a
café of old Phalerum built out into the sea, and come back by boat
through the silver of a moon to the little tram station whence you
return to Athens, you will probably find that there is. And from what
other bay can you see the temple of the Parthenon as you see it from the
bay of Phalerum?
You have your first vision of it now, as you look away from the sea,
lifted very high on its great rock of the Acropolis as on a throne.
Though far off, nevertheless its majesty is essentially the same, casts
the same tremendous influence upon you here as it does when you stand at
the very feet of its mighty columns. At once you know, not because of
the legend of greatness attaching to it, or because of the historical
associations clinging about it, but simply because of the feeling in
your own soul roused by its white silhouette in this morning hour, that
the soul of Greece--eternal majesty, supreme greatness, divine calm, and
that remoteness from which, perhaps, no perfect thing, either God-made
or, because of God's breath in him, man-made, is wholly exempt--is
lifted high before you under the cloudless heaven of dawn.
You may even realize at once and forever, as you send on your carriage
and stand for a while quite alone on the sands, gazing, that to you the
soul of Greece must always seem to be Doric. From afar the Doric
conquers.
The ancient Hellenes, divided, at enmity, incessantly warring among
themselves, were united in one sentiment: they called all the rest of
the nations "barbarians." The Parthenon gives them reason.
"Unintelligible folk" to this day must acknowledge it, using the word
"barbarian" strictly in our modern sense.
But the sun is higher, the morning draws on; you must be gone to Athens.
Down the long, straight, new road, between rows of pepper-trees, passing
a little church which marks the spot where a miscreant tried to
assassinate King George, and always through beautiful, bare country like
the desert, you drive. And presently you see a few houses, like the
houses of a quiet village; a few great Corinthian columns rising up in a
lonely place beyond an arch tawny with old gold; a public garden looking
new but pleasant,--not unlike a desert garden at the edge of the Suez
Canal,--with a white statue (it is the statue of Byron) before it; then
a long, thick tangle of trees stretching far, and separated from the
road and a line of large apartment-houses only by an old and slight
wooden paling; a big square with a garden sunken below the level you are
on, and on your right a huge, bare white building rather like a
barracks. You are in Athens, and you have seen already the Olympieion,
the Arch of Hadrian, the Zappeion garden, Constitution Square, and the
garden and the palace of the king.
Coming to Athens for the first time by this route, it is difficult to
believe one is in the famous capital, even though one has seen the
Acropolis. And I never quite lost the feeling there that I was in a
delightful village, containing a cheery, bustling life, some fine modern
buildings, and many wonders of the past. Yet Athens is large and is
continually growing. One of the best and most complete views of it is
obtained from the terrace near the Acropolis Museum, behind the
Parthenon. Other fine views can be had from Lycabettus, the solitary and
fierce-looking hill against whose rocks the town seems almost to surge,
like a wave striving to overwhelm it, and from that other hill,
immediately facing the Acropolis, on which stands the monument of
Philopappos.
It is easy to ascend to the summit of the Acropolis, even in the fierce
heat of a summer day. A stroll up a curving road, the mounting of some
steps, and you are there, five hundred and ten feet only above the level
of the sea. But on account of the solitary situation of the plateau of
rock on which the temples are grouped and of its precipitous sides, it
seems very much higher than it is. Whenever I stood on the summit of the
Acropolis I felt as if I were on the peak of a mountain, as if from
there one must be able to see all the kingdoms of the world and the
glory of them.
[Illustration: THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS ON THE SOUTHERN SLOPE OF THE
ACROPOLIS]
What one does see is marvelously, almost ineffably beautiful. Herodotus
called this land, with its stony soil and its multitudes of bare
mountains, the "rugged nurse of liberty." Though rugged, and often
naked, nevertheless its loveliness--and that soft word must be used--is
so great and so pure that, as we give to Greek art the crown of wild
olive, so we must give it surely also to the scenery of Greece. It is a
loveliness of outline, of color, and above all of light.
Almost everywhere in Greece you see mountains, range upon range, closing
about you or, more often, melting away into far distances, into outlines
of shadows and dreams. Almost everywhere, or so it seemed to me, you
look upon the sea. And as the outlines of the mountains of Greece are
nearly always divinely calm, so the colors of the seas of Greece are
magically deep and radiant and varied. And over mountains and seas fall
changing wonders of light, giving to outline eternal meanings, to color
the depth of a soul.
When you stand upon the Acropolis you see not only ruins which, taking
everything into consideration, are perhaps the most wonderful in the
world, but also one of the most beautiful views of the world. It is
asserted as a fact by authorities that the ancient Greeks had little or
no feeling for beauty of landscape. One famous writer on things Greek
states that "a fine view as such had little attraction for them," that
is, the Greeks. It is very difficult for those who are familiar with
the sites the Greeks selected for their great temples and theaters, such
as the rock of the Acropolis, the heights at Sunium and at Argos, the
hill at Taormina in Sicily, etc., to feel assured of this, however
lacking in allusion to the beauty of nature, unless in connection with
supposed animating intelligences, Greek literature may be. It is almost
impossible to believe it as you stand on the Acropolis.
All Athens lies beneath you, pale, almost white, with hints of mauve and
yellow, gray and brown, with its dominating palace, its tiny Byzantine
churches, its tiled and flat roofs, its solitary cypress-trees and
gardens. Lycabettus stands out, small, but bold, almost defiant. Beyond,
and on every side, stretches the calm plain of Attica. That winding
river of dust marks the Via Sacra, along which the great processions
used to pass to Eleusis by the water. There are the dark groves of
Academe, a place of rest in a bare land. The marble quarries gleam white
on the long flanks of Mount Pentelicus, and the great range of Parnes
leads on to Ægaleos. Near you are the Hill of the Nymphs, with its
observatory; the rocky plateau from which the apostle Paul spoke of
Christ to the doubting Athenians; the new plantation at the foot of
Philopappos which surrounds the so-called "Prison of Socrates."
Honey-famed Hymettus, gray and patient, stretches toward the
sea--toward the shining Saronic Gulf and the bay of Phalerum. And there,
beyond Phalerum, are the Piræus and Salamis. Mount Elias rules over the
midmost isle of Ægina. Beneath the height of Sunium, where the Temple of
Poseidon still lifts blanched columns above the passing mariners who
have no care for the sea-god's glory, lies the islet of Gaidaronisi, and
the mountains of Megara and of Argolis lie like dreaming shadows in the
sunlight. Very pure, very perfect, is this great view. Nature here seems
purged of all excesses, and even nature in certain places can look
almost theatrical, though never in Greece. The sea shines with gold, is
decked with marvelous purple, glimmers afar with silver, fades into the
color of shadow. The shapes of the mountains are as serene as the shapes
of Greek statues. Though bare, these mountains are not savage, are not
desolate or sad. Nor is there here any suggestion of that "oppressive
beauty" against which the American painter-poet Frederic Crowninshield
cries out in a recent poem--of that beauty which weighs upon, rather
than releases, the heart of man.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF THE OLYMPIAN ZEUS AT ATHENS]
From this view you turn to behold the Parthenon. A writer who loved
Greece more than all other countries, who was steeped in Greek
knowledge, and who was deeply learned in archæology, has left it on
record that on his first visit to the Acropolis he was aware of a
feeling of disappointment. His heart bled over the ravages wrought by
man in this sacred place--that Turkish powder-magazine in the Parthenon
which a shell from Venetians blew up, the stolen lions which saw Italy,
the marbles carried to an English museum, the statues by Phidias which
clumsy workmen destroyed.
But so incomparably noble, so majestically grand is this sublime ruin,
that the first near view of it must surely fill many hearts with an awe
which can leave no room for any other feeling. It is incomplete, but not
the impression it creates.
The Parthenon, as it exists to-day, shattered, almost entirely roofless,
deprived of its gilding and color, its glorious statues, its elaborate
and wonderful friezes, its lions, its golden oil-jars, its Athene
Parthenos of gold and ivory, the mere naked shell of what it once was,
is stupendous. No memory of the gigantic ruins of Egypt, however
familiarly known, can live in the mind, can make even the puniest fight
for existence, before this Doric front of Pentelic marble, simple, even
plain, but still in its devastation supreme. The size is great, but one
has seen far greater ruins. The fluted columns, lifted up on the marble
stylobate which has been trodden by the feet of Pericles and Phidias,
are huge in girth, and rise to a height of between thirty and forty
feet. The architrave above their plain capitals, with its projecting
molding, is tremendously massive. The walls of the cella, or sanctuary
of the temple, where they still remain, are immense. But now, where
dimness reigned,--for in the days when the temple was complete no light
could enter it except through the doorway,--the sunlight has full
possession. And from what was once a hidden place the passing traveler
can look out over land and sea.
[Illustration: IN THE PORTICO OF THE PARTHENON]
Some learned men have called the Parthenon severe. It is wonderfully
simple, so simple that it is not easy to say exactly why it produces
such an overpowering impression of sublimity and grandeur. But it is not
severe, for in severity there is something repellent, something that
frowns. It seems to me that the impression created by the Parthenon as a
building is akin to that created by the Sphinx as a statue. It
suggests--seems actually to send out like an atmosphere--a tremendous
calm, far beyond the limits of any severity.
The whole of the Parthenon, except the foundations, is of Pentelic
marble. And this marble is so beautiful a substance now after centuries
of exposure on a bare height to the fires of the sun, to the sea-winds
and the rains of winter, that it is impossible to wish it gilded, and
painted with blue and crimson. From below in the plain, and from a long
distance, the temple looks very pale in color, often indeed white. But
when you stand on the Acropolis, you find that the marble holds many
hues, among others pale yellow, cocoa color, honey color, and old gold.
I have seen the columns at noonday, when they were bathed by the rays of
the sun, glow with something of the luster of amber, and look almost
transparent. I have seen them, when evening was falling, look almost
black.
The temple, which is approached through the colossal marble Propylæa, or
state entrance, with Doric colonnades and steps of marble and black and
deep-blue Eleusinian stone, is placed on the very summit of the
Acropolis, at the top of a slope, now covered with fragments of ruin,
scattered blocks of stone and marble, sections of columns, slabs which
once formed parts of altars, and broken bits of painted ceiling, but
which was once a place of shrines and of splendid statues, among them
the great statue of Athena Promachos, in armor, and holding the lance
whose glittering point was visible from the sea. The columns are all
fluted, and all taper gradually as they rise to the architrave. And the
flutes narrow as they draw nearer and nearer to the capitals of the
columns. The architrave was once hung with wreaths and decorated with
shields. The famous frieze of the cella, which represented in marble a
great procession, and which ran round the external wall of the
sanctuary, is now in pieces, some of which are in the British Museum,
and some in Athens. A portion of this frieze may still be seen on the
west front of the temple. The cella had a ceiling of painted wood. On
one of its inner walls I saw traces of red Byzantine figures, one
apparently a figure of the Virgin. These date from the period when the
Parthenon was used as a Christian church, and was dedicated to Mary the
mother of God, before it became a mosque, and, later, a Turkish
powder-magazine. The white marble floor, which is composed of great
blocks perfectly fitted together, and without any joining substance,
contrasts strongly with the warm hues of the inner flutes of the Doric
columns. Here and there in the marble walls may be seen fragments of red
and of yellow brick. From within the Parthenon, looking out between the
columns, you can see magnificent views of country and sea.
Two other temples form part of the Acropolis, with the Propylæa and the
Parthenon, the Temple of Athene Nike and the Erechtheum. They are
absolutely different from the profoundly masculine Parthenon, and almost
resemble two beautiful female attendants upon it, accentuating by their
delicate grace its majesty.
The Temple of Nike is very small. It stands on a jutting bastion just
outside the Propylæa, and has been rebuilt from the original materials,
which were dug up out of masses of accumulated rubbish. It is Ionic,
has a colonnade, is made of Pentelic marble, and was once adorned with a
series of winged victories in bas-relief.
Ionic like the Temple of Nike, but much larger, the Erechtheum stands
beyond the Propylæa, and not far from the Parthenon, at the edge of the
precipice beneath which lies the greater part of Athens. A marvelously
personal element attaches to it and makes it unique, giving it a charm
which sets it apart from all other buildings. To find this you must go
to the southwest, to the beautiful Porch of the Caryatids, which looks
toward the Parthenon.
There are six of these caryatids, or maidens, standing upon a high
parapet of marble and supporting a marble roof. Five of them are white,
and one is a sort of yellowish black in color, as if she had once been
black, but, having been singled out from her fellows, had been kissed
for so many years by the rays of the sun that her original hue had
become changed, brightened by his fires. Four of the maidens stand in a
line. Two stand behind, on each side of the portico. They wear flowing
draperies, their hair flows down over their shoulders, and they support
their burden of marble with a sort of exquisite submissiveness, like
maidens choosing to perform a grateful and an easy task that brings with
it no loss of self-respect.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE NIKE AT ATHENS]
I once saw a great English actress play the part of a slave girl. By
her imaginative genius she succeeded in being more than a slave: she
became a poem of slavery. Everything ugly in slavery was eliminated from
her performance. Only the beauty of devoted service, the willing service
of love,--and slaves have been devoted to their masters,--was shown in
her face, her gestures, her attitudes. Much of what she imagined and
reproduced is suggested by these matchlessly tender and touching
figures; so soft that it is almost incredible that they are made of
marble, so strong that no burden, surely, would be too great for their
simple, yet almost divine, courage. They are watchers, these maidens,
not alertly, but calmly watchful of something far beyond our seeing.
They are alive, but with a restrained life such as we are not worthy to
know, neither fully human nor completely divine. They have something of
our wistfulness and something also of that attainment toward which we
strive. They are full of that strange and eternal beauty that is in all
the greatest things of Greece, from which the momentary is banished, in
which the perpetual is enshrined. Contemplation of them only seems to
make more deep their simplicity, more patient their strength, and more
touching their endurance. Retirement from them does not lessen, but
almost increases, the enchantment of their very quiet, very delicate
spell. Even when their faces can no longer be distinguished and only
their outlines can be seen, they do not lose one ray of their soft and
tender vitality. They are among the eternal things in art, lifting up
more than marble, setting free from bondage, if only for a moment, many
that are slaves by their submission.
About two years ago this temple was carefully cleaned, and it is very
white, and looks almost like a lovely new building not yet completed.
Here and there the white surface is stained with the glorious golden hue
which beautifies the Parthenon, the Propylæa, the Odeum of Herodes, the
Temple of Theseus, the Arch of Hadrian, and the Olympieion. The interior
of the temple is full of scattered blocks of marble. In the midst of
them, and as it were faithfully protected by them, I found a tiny tree
carefully and solemnly growing, with an air of self-respect. Above the
doorway of the north front is some very beautiful and delicate carving.
This temple was once adorned with a frieze of Eleusinian stone and with
white marble sculpture. Its Ionic columns are finely carved, and look
almost strangely slender, if you come to them immediately after you have
been among the columns of the Parthenon. Majesty and charm are supremely
expressed in these two temples, the Parthenon and the Erechtheum, the
smaller of which is on a lower level than the greater. One thinks again
of the happy slave who loves her lord.
The group of magnificent, gold-colored Greco-Roman columns which is
called the Olympieion stands in splendid isolation on a bare terrace at
the edge of the charming Zappeion garden. In this garden, full of firs
and pepper-trees, acacias, palms, convolvulus, and pink oleanders, I saw
many Greek soldiers, wearied out with preparations for the Balkan war
against Turkey, which was declared while I was in Athens, sleeping on
the wooden seats, or even stretched out at full length on the light,
yellow soil. For there is no grass there. Beyond the Olympieion there is
a stone trough in which I never saw one drop of water. This trough is
the river-bed of the famous Ilissus!
The columns are very splendid, immense in height, singularly beautiful
in color,--they are made of Pentelic marble,--and with Corinthian
capitals, nobly carved. Those which are grouped closely together are
raised on a platform of stone. But there are two isolated columns which
look even grander and more colossal than those which are united by a
heavy architrave. The temple of which they are the remnant was erected
in the reign of Hadrian to the glory of Zeus, and was one of the most
gigantic buildings in the world.
From the Zappeion garden you can see in the distance the snow-white
marble Stadium where the modern Olympic and Pan-Hellenic games take
place. It is gigantic. When full, it can hold over fifty thousand
people. The seats, the staircases, the pavements are all of
dazzling-white marble, and as there is of course no roof, the effect of
this vastness of white, under a bright-blue sky, and bathed in golden
fires, is almost blinding. All round the Stadium cypress-trees have been
planted, and their dark-green heads rise above the outer walls, like
long lines of spear-heads guarding a sacred inclosure. Two comfortable
arm-chairs for the king and queen face two stelæ of marble and the
far-off entrance. The earthen track where the sports take place is
divided from the spectators by a marble barrier about five feet high,
and till you descend into it, it looks small, though it is really very
large. The entrance is a propylæum. It is a great pity that immediately
outside this splendid building the hideous panorama should be allowed to
remain, cheap, vulgar, dusty, and despicable. I could not help saying
this to a Greek acquaintance. He thoroughly agreed with me, but told me
that the Athenians were very fond of their panorama.
[Illustration: THE STADIUM, ATHENS]
In a straight line with the beautiful Arch of Hadrian, and not far off,
is the small and terribly defaced, but very graceful, Monument of
Lysicrates, a circular chamber of marble, with small Corinthian columns,
an architrave, and a frieze. It is surrounded by a railing, and
stands rather forlornly in the midst of modern houses.
The Temple of Theseus, or more properly of Hercules, on the other side
of the town, is a beautifully preserved building, lovely in color, very
simple, very complete. It is small, and is strictly Doric and very
massive. Many people have called it tremendously impressive, and have
even compared it with the Parthenon. It seems to me that to do this is
to exaggerate, to compare the very much less with the very much greater.
There really is something severe in great massiveness combined with
small proportions, and I find this temple, noble though it is, severe.
Athens contains several very handsome modern buildings, and one that I
think really beautiful, especially on a day of fierce sunshine or by
moonlight. This is the Academy, which stands in the broad and airy
University Street, at whose mouth are the two cafés which Athenians call
"the Dardanelles." It is in a line with the university and the national
library, is made of pure white marble from Pentelicus, and is very
delicately and discreetly adorned with a little bright gold, the
brilliance of which seems to add to the virginal luster of the marble.
The central section is flanked by two tall and slender detached columns
crowned with statues. Ionic colonnades relieve the classical simplicity
of the façade, with some marble and terra-cotta groups of statuary. The
general effect is very calm, pure, and dignified, and very satisfying.
The Athenians are proud, and with reason, of this beautiful building,
which they owe to the generosity of one of their countrymen.
Modern Athens, despite its dust, is a delightful city to dwell in.
Nobody in it looks rich,--that dreadful look!--and scarcely anybody
looks poor. The king and the princes stroll casually about the streets,
or may be met on the Acropolis or walking by the sea at Phalerum. I was
allowed to wander all over the palace gardens, which are full of palms
and great trees, and which resemble a laid-out wood. A Rumanian friend
of mine told me that one day when he was in the garden, on turning a
corner, he came upon the king and queen, with the crown-princess, who
had just come down from the terrace in front of the royal apartments.
All the center of the palace was burned out more than a year ago, and is
now being slowly rebuilt. Greece is the home of genuine democrats, but
democracy is delightful in Greece. Nobody thinks about rank, and
everybody behaves like a gentleman. The note of Athens is a perfectly
decorous liveliness, which is never marred by vulgarity. The stranger is
welcomed and treated with the greatest possible courtesy, and he is
never bothered by objectionable people such as haunt many of the cities
of Italy, and of other lands where travelers are numerous. Athens indeed
is one of the most simpatica of cities, wonderfully cheerful, simply
gay, of a perfect behavior, yet unceremonious.
I have said that the Greeks are democrats. Nevertheless, like certain
other democrats of whom one has heard, there are Greeks who love to
think that they are not quite as all other Greeks. America, I am
informed, has her "four hundred." Greece has her "fifty-two." In New
York the "four hundred" consider themselves the advance-guard of
fashion, if not of civilization. In Athens the "fifty-two" rejoice in a
similar conviction. They do daring things sometimes. There is a
card-game beloved of the Greeks called "Mouse." The fifty-two have
introduced bridge and despise "Mouse." In Athens they frequent one
another's houses. In the summer they "remove" to Kephisia in the
pine-woods, where there are many pleasant, and some very fantastic,
villas, and where picnics, tennis, and card-parties, theatrical
performances and dances, fleet the hours, which are always golden, away.
They are sometimes criticized by the "outsiders," for even gods are
subject to criticism. People say now and then, "What will the fifty-two
do next?" or, "Really there is no end to the folly of the fifty-two!"
But have not similar remarks been heard even at Newport or upon Fifth
Avenue pavements? Nevertheless, despite the fifty-two, you have only to
look at the thin and decrepit palings of King George's garden to
realize that at last you have found the true democracy, and a democracy
sensible enough to understand the advantage of possessing a royal
family. Every society needs a leader, and royalty leads far more
effectively than any one else, however self-assured, however glittering.
The Greeks are not without wisdom.
Their manners are charming and excellent. I had an unusual opportunity
of putting them to the test. I was in Athens just before and just after
the declaration of war against Turkey, when spies were everywhere, when
a Turkish spy was discovered in Athens disguised as a Greek priest, and
a woman was caught near Lycabettus in the act of poisoning the
water-supply of the city. One morning early, when I was on the sea near
Salamis in a small boat with a Greek fisherman, I was arrested on
suspicion of being a spy, and was brought before the admiral in supreme
command of the fleet. My passport was in Athens at my hotel, the admiral
evidently disbelieved my explanations, and I was handed over to the
police at the Piræus, accompanied by a report from the admiral in which,
as was afterward made known to me, he stated that I was "a very
suspicious character." And now to the test of Hellenic good manners.
[Illustration: THE ACADEMY, MOUNT LYCABETTUS IN THE BACKGROUND]
Eventually a guard of police carrying rifles was sent to convey me from
the Piræus to Athens, and in the middle of the afternoon I was obliged
to walk as a prisoner through the streets of the Piræus, to take the
tram to Phalerum, to get out there and wait for half an hour at a
railway-station, and to travel in the train to Athens. In Athens I was
made to walk three times, always guarded closely, through the principal
streets and squares of the city, and twice past my hotel in the
Constitution Square during the most busy hour of the day. Eventually, at
night, I was released. Now, the Hellenes are considered by many people
to be very inquisitive. During my public exposure as a prisoner I met
with no really disagreeable curiosity from the crowd. Many people
discreetly inquired of my guards who I was and what I had done, and
naturally a great many more stared at me. But nobody followed me and my
attendants as we marched on our way from one police station to another,
to the War Office, etc. There was no pushing or jostling, such as there
would certainly have been in an English town if a prisoner with guards
was exposed to the public gaze. Curiosity was, as a rule, almost
carefully dissembled, and inquiries were made with a charming
discretion. I confess I felt grateful to the Greeks that day, though not
to the admiral who had me arrested, or to the police who put me to so
much inconvenience. And I was grateful for one thing more, that I was
released just in time to see King George's arrival in Athens on the eve
of the war.
The Hellenes are not an enthusiastic people, as a rule. They are
critical, intellectual, sometimes rather cynical. But that night they
gave way to emotion. Great crowds were lined up in Constitution Square,
and were massed on the brow of the hill before the palace, when at
length the police let me go. Darkness had long since fallen, but the
square was illuminated brightly. All the balconies were packed with
people. The terrace before the Grande Bretagne was black with
sight-seers. And everywhere in the forefront were rows of eager,
vivacious Greek children, many of them the soldiers of the future.
We had to wait for a very long time. But at last the king came in an
open carriage, driving with "the Diádochos," as the crown-prince is
always called in Greece. Both were in uniform. There was no ceremonial
escort, so the people formed an unceremonial one. They ran with the
carriage, shouting, waving their hats and handkerchiefs, cheering till
they were hoarse, and crying, "War! War!" The great square rang with the
clapping of thousands of hands. "Never before," said a Greek to me, "has
the king had such a reception." When the carriages containing the rest
of the royal family and the ministers had gone by, we ran in our
thousands to the palace. Above the great entrance porch there is a
balcony, and after a short time slim King George stepped out, rather
cautiously, I thought, upon it, followed by all the princes and
princesses. It was very dark, but a footman accompanied his Majesty,
holding an electric light, and we had our speech.
[Illustration: THE ACROPOLIS AT ATHENS, EARLY MORNING]
The king read the first part of it in a loud, unemotional voice, bending
sometimes to the light. But at the close he spoke a few words extempore,
commending the Hellenic cause, if war should come, to the mercy of God.
And then, again with precaution, he retired into the palace amid a storm
of cheers.
I was afterward told that, with the whole of the royal family, his
Majesty had been standing upon some loose planks which spanned an abyss.
The royal palace, owing to the disastrous fire, is not yet what it
seems. Fortunately, the Greek army has proved more solid, and the God of
battles, so solemnly invoked by their king, has been favorable to the
arms of the Greeks. No one, I think, who was in Greece during that time
of acute tension, who saw the feverish preparations, the devotion of the
toiling soldiers, the ardor of the volunteers; no one who witnessed, as
I did, the return to Athens of the "American Greeks," who gave up
everything and crossed the ocean to fight for their little, splendid
country, could wish it otherwise.
The descendants of those who made the Parthenon have shown something of
that Doric soul which is surely the soul of Greece.
THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF POSEIDON AND ATHENE AT SUNIUM]
CHAPTER III
THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS
Upon the southern slope of the Acropolis, beneath the limestone
precipices and the great golden-brown walls above which the Parthenon
shows its white summit, are many ruins; among them the Theater of
Dionysus and the Odeum of Herodes Atticus, the rich Marathonian who
spent much of his money in the beautification of Athens, and who taught
rhetoric to two men who eventually became Roman emperors. The Theater of
Dionysus, in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their
dramas, is of stone and silver-white marble. Many of the seats are
arm-chairs, and are so comfortable that it is no uncommon thing to see
weary travelers, who have just come down from the Acropolis, resting in
them with almost unsuitable airs of unbridled satisfaction.
It is evident to any one who examines this great theater carefully that
the Greeks considered it important for the body to be at ease while the
mind was at work; for not only are the seats perfectly adapted to their
purpose, but ample room is given for the feet of the spectators, the
distance between each tier and the tier above it being wide enough to do
away with all fear of crowding and inconvenience. The marble arm-chairs
were assigned to priests, whose names are carved upon them. In the
theater I saw one high arm-chair, like a throne, with lion's feet. This
is Roman, and was the seat of a Roman general. The fronts of the seats
are pierced with small holes, which allow the rain-water to escape.
Below the stage there are some sculptured figures, most of them
headless. One which is not is a very striking and powerful, though
almost sinister, old man, in a crouching posture. His rather round
forehead resembles the very characteristic foreheads of the
Montenegrins.
Herodes Atticus restored this theater. Before his time it had been
embellished by Lycurgus of Athens, the orator, and disciple of Plato. It
is not one of the gloriously placed theaters of the Greeks, but from the
upper tiers of seats there is a view across part of the Attic plain to
the isolated grove of cypresses where the famous Schliemann is buried,
and beyond to gray Hymettus.
Standing near by is another theater, Roman-Greek, not Greek, the Odeum
of Herodes Atticus, said to have been built by him in memory of his
wife. This is not certain, and there are some authorities who think
that, like the beautiful arch near the Olympieion, this peculiar, very
picturesque structure was raised by the Emperor Hadrian, who was much
fonder of Athens than of Rome.
The contrast between the exterior, the immensely massive, three-storied
façade with Roman arches, and the interior, or, rather, what was once
the interior, of this formerly roofed-in building, is very strange. They
do not seem to belong to each other, to have any artistic connection the
one with the other.
The outer walls are barbarically huge and heavy, and superb in color.
They gleam with a fierce red-gold, and are conspicuous from afar. The
almost monstrous, but impressive, solidity of Rome, heavy and bold,
indeed almost crudely imperious, is shown forth by them--a solidity
absolutely different from the Greek massiveness, which you can study in
the Doric temples, and far less beautiful. When you pass beyond this
towering façade, which might well be a section of the Colosseum
transferred from gladiatorial Rome to intellectual Athens, you find
yourself in a theater which looks oddly, indeed, almost meanly, small
and pale and graceful. With a sort of fragile timidity it seems to be
cowering behind the flamboyant walls. When all its blanched marble seats
were crowded with spectators it contained five thousand persons. As you
approach the outer walls, you expect to find a building that might
accommodate perhaps twenty-five thousand. There is something bizarre in
the two colors, fierce and pale, in the two sizes, huge and
comparatively small, that are united in the odeum. Though very
remarkable, it seems to me to be one of the most inharmonious ruins in
Greece.
The modern Athenians are not very fond of hard exercise, and except in
the height of summer, when many of them go to Kephisia and Phalerum, and
others to the islands, or to the baths near Corinth for a "cure," they
seem well content to remain within their city. They are governed, it
seems, by fashion, like those who dwell in less-favored lands. When I
was in Athens the weather was usually magnificent and often very hot.
Yet Phalerum, perhaps half an hour by train from Constitution Square,
was deserted. In the vast hotel there I found only two or three
children, in the baths half a dozen swimmers. The pleasure-boats lay
idle by the pier. I asked the reason of this--why at evening dusty
Athens was crammed with strollers, and the pavements were black with
people taking coffee and ices, while delightful Phalerum, with its
cooler air and its limpid waters, held no one but an English traveler?
"The season is over," was the only reply I received, delivered with a
grave air of finality. I tried to argue the matter, and suggested that
anxiety about the war had something to do with it. But I was informed
that the "season" closed on a certain day, and that after that day the
Athenians gave up going to Phalerum.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE, ISLAND OF ÆGINA]
The season for many things seemed "over" when I was in Athens. Round
about the city, and within easy reach of it, there is fascinating
country--country that seems to call you with a smiling decision to enjoy
all Arcadian delights; country, too, that has great associations
connected with it. From Athens you can go to picnic at Marathon or at
Salamis, or you can carry a tea-basket to the pine-woods which slope
down to the Convent of Daphni, and come back to it after paying a visit
to Eleusis. Or, if you are not afraid of a "long day," you can motor out
and lunch in the lonely home of the sea-god under the columns at Sunium.
If you wish to go where a king goes, you can spend the day in the thick
woods at Tatoï. If you are full of social ambition, and aim at
"climbing," a train in not many minutes will set you down at Kephisia,
the summer home of "the fifty-two" on the slope of a spur of Mount
Pentelicus.
Thither I went one bright day. But, as at Phalerum, I found a deserted
paradise. The charming gardens and arbors were empty. The villas,
Russian, Egyptian, Swiss, English, French, and even now and then Greek
in style, were shuttered and closed. All in vain the waterfalls sang,
all in vain the silver poplars and the yellow-green pines gave their
shade. No one was there. I went at length to a restaurant to get
something to eat. Its door was unlocked, and I entered a large, deserted
room, with many tables, a piano, and a terrace. No one came. I called,
knocked, stamped, and at length evoked a thin elderly lady in a gray
shawl, who seemed alarmed at the sight of me, and in a frail voice
begged to know what I wanted. When I told her, she said there was
nothing to eat except what they were going to have themselves. The
season was over. Eventually she brought me _mastika_ and part of her own
dinner to the terrace, which overlooked a luxuriant and deserted garden.
And there I spent two happy, golden hours. I had sought the heart of
fashion, and found the exquisite peace that comes to places when fashion
has left them. Henceforth I shall always associate beautiful Kephisia
with silence, flowers, and one thin old woman in a gray shawl.
[Illustration: THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS, ATHENS]
Greece, though sparsely inhabited, is in the main a very
cheerful-looking country. The loneliness of much of it is not
depressing, the bareness of much of it is not sad. I began to understand
this on the day when I went to the plain of Marathon, which,
fortunately, lies away from railroads. One must go there by carriage or
motor or on horseback. The road is bad both for beasts and machinery,
but it passes through country which is typical of Greece, and through
which it would be foolish to go in haste. Go quietly to Marathon, spend
two hours there, or more, and when you return in the evening to Athens
you will have tasted a new joy. You will have lived for a little while
in an exquisite pastoral--a pastoral through which, it is true, no pipes
of Pan have fluted to you,--I heard little music in Greece,--but which
has been full of that lightness, brightness, simplicity, and delicacy
peculiar to Greece. The soil of the land is light, and I believe, though
Hellenes have told me that in this belief I am wrong, that the heart of
the people is light. Certainly the heart of one traveler was as he made
his way to Marathon along a white road thickly powdered with dust.
Has not each land its representative tree? America has its maple.
England its oak, France its poplar, Italy its olive, Turkey its cypress,
Egypt its palm, and so on. The representative tree of Greece is the
pine. I do not forget the wild olive, from which in past days the crowns
were made, nor the fact that the guide-books say that in a Greek
landscape the masses of color are usually formed by the silver-green
olive-trees. It seemed to me, and it seems to me still in remembrance,
that the lovely little pine is the most precious ornament of the Grecian
scene.
Marathon that day was a pastoral of yellow and blue, of pines and sea.
On the way I passed through great olive-groves, in one of which long
since some countrymen of mine were taken by brigands and carried away to
be done to death. And there were mighty fig-trees, and mulberry-trees,
and acres and acres of vines, with here and there an almost black
cypress among them. But the pines, more yellow than green, and the
bright blue sea made the picture that lives in my memory.
Not very long after we were clear of the town we passed not far from the
village of "Louis," who won the first Marathon race that was run under
King George's scepter, Marousi, where the delicious water is found that
Athens loves to drink. And then away we went through the groves and the
little villages, where dusty soldiers were buying up mules for the
coming war; and Greek priests were reading newspapers; and olive-skinned
children, with bright, yet not ungentle, eyes, were coming from school;
and outside of ramshackle cafés, a huddle of wood, a vine, a couple of
tables, and a few bottles, old gentlemen, some of them in native dress,
with the white fustanella, a sort of short skirt not reaching to the
knees, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black tassels,
were busily talking politics. Carts, not covered with absurd but lively
pictures, as they are in Sicily, lumbered by in the dust. Peasants,
sitting sidewise with dangling feet, met us on trotting donkeys. Now
and then a white dog dashed out, or a flock of thin turkeys gobbled and
stretched their necks nervously as they gave us passage. Women, with
rather dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads, were working in the
vineyards or washing clothes here and there beside thin runlets of
water. Two German beggars, with matted hair uncovered to the sun, red
faces, and fingers with nails like the claws of birds, tramped by, going
to Athens. And farther on we met a few Turkish Gipsies, swarthy and full
of a lively malice, whose tents were visible on a hillside at a little
distance, in the midst of a grove of pines. All the country smiled at us
in the sunshine. One jovial man in a fustanella leaned down from a cart
as we passed, and shouted in Greek: "Enjoy yourselves! Enjoy
yourselves!" And the gentle hills, the olive- and pine-groves, the
stretching vineyards, seemed to echo his cry.
What is the magic of pastoral Greece? What is it that gives to you a
sensation of being gently released from the cares of life and the
boredom of modern civilization, with its often unmeaning complications,
its unnecessary luxuries, its noisy self-satisfactions? This is not the
tremendous, the spectacular release of the desert, an almost savage
tearing away of bonds. Nothing in the Greece I saw is savage; scarcely
anything is spectacular. But, oh, the bright simplicity of the life and
the country along the way to Marathon! It was like an early world. One
looked, and longed to live in those happy woods like the Turkish
Gipsies. Could life offer anything better? The pines are small,
exquisitely shaped, with foliage that looks almost as if it had been
deftly arranged by a consummate artist. They curl over the slopes with a
lightness almost of foam cresting a wave. Their color is quite lovely.
The ancient Egyptians had a love color: well, the little pine-trees of
Greece are the color of happiness. You smile involuntarily when you see
them. And when, descending among them, you are greeted by the shining of
the brilliant-blue sea, which stretches along the edge of the plain of
Marathon, you know radiance purged of fierceness.
The road winds down among the pines till, at right angles to it, appears
another road, or rough track just wide enough for a carriage. This leads
to a large mound which bars the way. Upon this mound a habitation was
perched. It was raised high above the ground upon a sort of tripod of
poles. It had yellow walls of wheat, and a roof and floor of brushwood
and maize. A ladder gave access to it, and from it there was a wide
outlook over the whole crescent-shaped plain of Marathon. This dwelling
belonged to a guardian of the vineyards, and the mound is the tomb of
those who died in the great battle.
[Illustration: THE PLAIN OF MARATHON]
I sat for a long time on this strange tomb, in the shadow of the rustic
watch-house, and looked out over the plain. It is quite flat, and is now
cultivated, though there are some bare tracts of unfruitful ground. In
all directions I saw straggling vines. Not far away was one low,
red-tiled house belonging to a peasant, whose three small, dirty, and
unhealthy-looking children presently approached, and gazed at me from
below. In the distance a man on a white horse rode slowly toward the
pine-woods, and to my left I saw a group of women bending mysteriously
to accomplish some task unknown to me. No other figures could I see
between me and the bright-blue waters that once bore up the fleet of
Persia. Behind me were stony and not very high hills, ending in the
slopes down which Miltiades made his soldiers advance "at a running
pace." One hundred and ninety-two brave men gone to dust beneath me;
instead of the commemorative lion, the little watch-house of brushwood
and wheat and maize; silence the only epitaph. The mound, of hard,
sun-baked earth, was yellow and bare. On one side a few rusty-looking
thorn-bushes decorated it harshly. But about it grew aloes, and the wild
oleander, with its bright-pink flowers, and near by were many great
fig-trees. A river intersects the plain, and its course is marked by
sedges and tall reeds. Where the land is bare, it takes a tawny-yellow
hue. Some clustering low houses far off under the hills form the
Albanian village of Marathon. Just twenty-two miles from Athens, this
place of an ancient glory, this tomb of men who, I suppose, will not be
forgotten so long as the Hellenic kingdom lasts, seems very far away,
hidden from the world between woods and waters, solitary, but not sad.
Beyond the plain and the sea are ranges of mountains and the island of
Eubœa.
A figure slowly approaches. It is the guardian of the vineyards, coming
back to his watch-house above the grave of his countrymen, smiling, with
a cigarette between his white teeth. As I go, he calls out "Addio!" Then
he mounts his ladder carefully and withdraws to his easy work. How
strange to be a watcher of vineyards upon the tumulus of Marathon!
If you care at all for life in the open, if you have the love of camping
in your blood, Greece will call to you at every moment to throw off the
dullness of houses, to come and stay under blue heaven and be happy. Yet
I suppose the season for all such joys was over when I was in Greece,
for I never met any citizens of Athens taking their pleasure in the
surrounding country. In Turkey and Asia Minor, near any large town, when
the weather is hot and fine, one may see cheerful parties of friends
making merry in the open air, under trees and in arbors; or men
dreaming idly in nooks that might have made old Omar's delight, shaded,
and sung to by a stream. In Greece it is not so. Once you are out in the
country, you come upon no one but peasants, shepherds, goatherds,
Gipsies, turkey-drivers, and, speaking generally, "sons of the soil."
In the very height of summer, I am told, the Athenians do condescend to
go to the pine-woods. They sleep during part of the day, and stay out of
doors at night, often driving into the country, and eating under the
trees or by the sea. But even in the heat of a rainless September, if I
may judge by my own experience, they prefer Constitution Square and "the
Dardanelles" to any more pastoral pleasures.
I did not imitate them, but followed the Via Sacra one morning, past the
oldest olive-tree in Greece, a small and corrugated veteran said to have
been planted in the time of Pericles, to the Convent of Daphni, now
fallen into a sort of poetic decay.
Once more I was among pine-trees. They thronged the almost park-like
slopes under Ægaleos. They crowded toward the little Byzantine church,
which stands on the left of the road on the site of a vanished temple of
Apollo, with remains of its once strongly fortified walls about it.
Lonely, but smiling, as though with a radiant satisfaction at its own
shining peace, is the country in whose bosom the church lies. A few
sheep, small, with shaggy coats of brown and white, were grazing near
it; a dog lay stretched out in the sun; and some lean, long-tailed
horses were standing with bowed heads, as if drowsing. An ancient and
very deep well was close by. In the marble well-head the friction of
many drawn cords has cut grooves, some of them nearly an inch in depth.
The court of the convent is roughly paved and is inclosed within rough
walls. In it are a few trees, an acacia or two, a wild pepper-tree, and
one gigantic cypress. From a branch near the entrance a big bell hung by
a chain. But the only sound of bells came to me from without the walls,
where some hidden goats were moving to a pasture. Fragments of broken
columns and two or three sarcophagi lay on the hot ground at my feet. To
my right, close to the church, a flight of very old marble steps led to
a rustic loggia with wooden supports, full of red geraniums and the
flowers of a plant like a very small convolvulus. From the loggia, which
fronted her abiding-place, a cheerful, kindly-faced woman came down and
let me into the church and left me with two companions, a black kitten
playing with a bee under the gilded cupola.
[Illustration: A MONASTERY AT THE FOOT OF HYMETTUS]
The church, like almost all the Byzantine churches I saw in Greece, is
very small, but it is tremendously solid and has a tall belfry. The
exterior, stained by weather, is now a sort of earthy yellow; the
cupola is covered with red tiles. The interior walls look very
ancient, and are blackened in many places by the fingers of Time. Made
more than eight hundred years ago, the remains of the Byzantine mosaics
are very curious and interesting. In the cupola, on a gold ground, is a
very large head of a Christ ("Christos Pantokrator"), which looks as if
it were just finished. The face is sinister and repellent, but
expressive. There are several other mosaics, of the apostles, of
episodes in the life of the Virgin, and of angels. None of them seemed
to me beautiful, though perhaps not one looks so wicked as the Christos,
which dominates the whole church. Until comparatively recent times there
were monks attached to this convent, but now they are gone.
I passed through a doorway and came into a sort of tiny cloister, shaded
by a huge and evidently very ancient fig-tree with enormous leaves. Here
I found the remains of an old staircase of stone. As I returned to the
dim and massive little church, glimmering with gold where the sunlight
fell upon the mosaics, the eyes of the Christos seemed to rebuke me from
the lofty cupola. The good-natured woman locked the door behind me with
a large key, handed to me a bunch of the flowers I had noticed growing
in the loggia, and bade me "Addio!" And soon the sound of the goat-bells
died away from my ears as I went on my way back to Eleusis.
There is nothing mysterious about this road which leads to the site of
the Temple of the Mysteries. It winds down through the pine-woods and
rocks of the Pass of Daphni into the cheerful and well-cultivated
Thriasian plain, whence across a brilliant-blue stretch of water, which
looks like a lake, but which is the bay of Eleusis, you can see houses
and, alas! several tall chimneys pouring forth smoke. The group of
houses is Eleusis, now an Albanian settlement, and the chimneys belong
to a factory where olive-oil soap is made. The road passes between the
sea and a little salt lake, which latter seems to be prevented from
submerging it only by a raised coping of stone. The color of this lake
is a brilliant purple. In the distance is the mountainous and rocky
island of Salamis.
When I reached the village, I found it a cheery little place of small
white, yellow, and rose-colored houses, among which a few cypress-trees
grow. Although one of the most ancient places in Greece, it now looks
very modern. And it is difficult to believe, as one glances at the
chimneys of the soap factory, and at two or three black and dingy
steamers lying just off the works to take in cargo, that here Demeter
was worshiped with mysterious rites at the great festival of the
Eleusinia. Yet, according to the legend, it was here that she came,
disguised as an old hag, in search of her lost Persephone; here that
she taught Triptolemus how to sow the plain, and to reap the first
harvest of yellow wheat, as a reward for the hospitable welcome given to
her by his father Celeus.
The ruins at Eleusis are disappointing to the ordinary traveler, though
interesting to the archæologist. They have none of the pathetic romance
which, notwithstanding the scoldings of many vulgar persons set forth in
a certain visitors' book, broods gently over poetic Olympia. Above the
village is a vast confusion of broken columns, defaced capitals, bits of
wall, bits of pavement, marble steps, fallen medallions, vaults,
propylæa, substructures, scraps of architraves carved with inscriptions,
and subterranean store-rooms. In the pavement of the processional way,
by which the chariots came up to the Temple of Demeter, the chief glory
and shrine of Eleusis, are the deep ruts made by the chariot-wheels. The
remnants of the hall of the initiated bears witness to the long desire
of poor human beings in all ages to find that peace which passeth our
understanding. Of beauty there is little or none. Nevertheless, even
now, it is not possible in the midst of this tragic _débâcle_ to remain
wholly unmoved. Indeed, the very completeness of the disaster that time
and humanity have wrought here creates emotion, when one remembers that
here great men came, such men as Cicero, Sophocles, and Plato; that
here they worshiped and adored under cover of the darkness of night;
that here, seeking, they found, as has been recorded, peace and hope to
sustain them when, the august festival over, they took their way back
into the ordinary world along the shores of sea and lake. Eleusis is no
longer beautiful. It is a home of devastation. It is no longer
mysterious. A successful man is making a fortune out of soap there. But
it is a place one cannot easily forget. And just above the ruins there
is a small museum which contains several very interesting things, and
one thing that is superb.
This last is the enormous and noble upper part of the statue of a woman
wearing ear-rings. I do not know its history, though some one assured me
that it was a caryatid. It was dug up among the ruins, and the color of
it is akin to that of the earth. The roughly undulating hair is parted
in the middle of a majestic, goddess-like head. The features are pure
and grand; but the two things that most struck me, as I looked at this
great work of art, were the expression of the face, and the deep bosom,
as of the earth-mother and all her fruitfulness. In few Greek statues
have I seen such majesty and power, combined with such intensity, as
this nameless woman shows forth. There is indeed almost a suggestion of
underlying fierceness in the face, but it is the fierceness that may
sometimes leap up in an imperial nature. Are there not royal angers
which flame out of the pure furnaces of love? This noble woman seems to
me to be the present glory of Eleusis.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF THE MYSTERIES AT ELEUSIS]
The mountainous island of Salamis, long and calm, with gray and orange
rocks, lies like a sentinel keeping guard over the harbor of the Piræus.
It is so near to the mainland that the sea between the two shores looks
like a lake, lonely and brilliant, with the two-horned peak called "the
throne of Xerxes" standing out characteristically behind the low-lying
bit of coast where the Greeks have set up an arsenal. Whether Xerxes did
really watch the famous battle from a throne placed on the hill with
which his name is associated is very doubtful. But many travelers like
to believe it, and the kind guides of Athens are quite ready to stiffen
their credulity.
The shores of this beautiful inclosed bit of sea are wild. The water is
wonderfully clear, and is shot with all sorts of exquisite colors. The
strip of mainland, against which the liquid maze of greens and blues and
purples seems to lie motionless, like a painted marvel, is a tangle of
wild myrtle and dwarf shrubs growing in a sandy soil interspersed with
rocks. Gently the land curves, forming a series of little shallow bays
and inlets, each one of which seems more delicious than the last as you
coast along in a fisherman's boat. But, unfortunately, the war-ships of
Greece often lie snug in harbor in the shadow of Salamis not far from
the arsenal, and, as I have hinted already, their commander-in-chief has
little sympathy with the inquiring traveler. I shall not easily forget
the expression that came into his face when, in reply to his question,
"What did you come here for?" I said, "To visit the scene of the
celebrated battle." A weary incredulity made him suddenly look very old;
and I believe it was then that, taking a pen, he wrote on the margin of
his report about me that I was "a very suspicious person."
It is safer, especially in war-time, to keep away from Salamis; but if
you care for smiling wild places where the sea is, where its breath
gives a vivid sense of life to the wilderness, you may easily forget her
myrtle-covered shores and the bays of violet and turquoise.
Of the many wonderful haunts of the sea which I visited in Greece, Cape
Sunium is perhaps the most memorable, though I never shall forget the
glories of the magnificent drive along the mountains between Athens and
Corinth. But Sunium has its ruined temple, standing on a great height.
And in some of us a poet has wakened a wondering consciousness of its
romance, perhaps when we sat in a Northern land beside the winter fire.
And in some of us, too, an immortal painter has roused a longing to see
it, when we never thought to be carried by our happy fate to Greece.
In going to Sunium I passed through the famous mining district of
Laurium, where now many convicts work out their sentences. In ancient
times slaves toiled there for the benefit of those citizens who had
hereditary leases granted by the state. They worked the mines for
silver, but now lead is the principal product. It happened that just as
we were in the middle of the dingy town, or village, where the miners
and their families dwell,--for only some of them are convicts,--a tire
of the motor burst. This of course delayed us, and I was able to see
something of the inhabitants. In Athens I had heard that they were a
fierce and ill-mannered population. I found them, on the contrary, as I
found almost all those whom I met in Greece, cheerful, smiling, and
polite. Happy, if rather dirty, children gathered round us, delighted to
have something to look at and wonder about. Men, going to or coming from
the works, paused to see what was the matter and to inquire where I came
from. From the windows of the low, solid-looking houses women leaned
eagerly out with delighted faces. Several of the latter talked to me. I
could not understand what they said, and all they could understand was
that I came from London, a circumstance which seemed greatly to impress
them, for they called it out from one to another up the street. We
carried on intercourse mainly by facial expression and elaborate
gesture, assisted genially by the grubby little boys. And when I got
into the car to go we were all the best of friends. The machine made the
usual irritable noises, but from the good people of Laurium came only
cries of good-will, among them that pleasant admonition which one hears
often in Greece: "Enjoy yourself! Enjoy yourself!"
When Laurium was left behind we were soon in wild and deserted country.
Now and then we passed an Albanian on horseback, with a gun over his
shoulder, a knife stuck in his belt, or we came upon a shepherd watching
his goats as they browsed on the low scrub which covered the hills. All
the people in this region are Albanians, I was told. They appeared to be
very few. As we drew near to the ancient shrine of Poseidon we left far
behind us the habitations of men. At length the car stopped in the
wilderness, and on a height to my left I saw the dazzling white marble
columns of the Temple of Sunium.
Almost all the ruins I saw in Greece were weather-stained. Their
original color was mottled with browns and grays, with saffron, with
gold and red-gold. But the columns of Sunium have kept their brilliant
whiteness, although they stand on a great, bare cliff above the sea,
exposed to the glare of the sun and to the buffeting of every wind of
heaven. They are raised not merely on this natural height, but also on
a great platform of the famous Poros-stone. In the time of Byron there
were sixteen columns standing. There are now eleven, with a good deal of
architrave. These columns are Doric, and are about twenty feet in
height. They have not the majesty of the Parthenon columns, but, on the
contrary, have a peculiar delicacy and even grace, which is lacking both
in the Parthenon and in the Theseum. They do not move you to awe or
overwhelm you; they charm and delight you. In their ivory-white
simplicity, standing out against the brilliant blue of sea and sky on
the white and gray platform, there is something that allures.
Upon one of the columns I found the name of Byron carved in bold
letters. But I looked in vain for the name of Turner. Byron loved the
Cape of Sunium. Fortunately, nothing has been done to make it less
wonderful since his time. It is true that fewer columns are standing to
bear witness to the old worship of the sea-god; but such places as
Sunium are not injured when some blocks of marble fall, but when men
begin to build. Still the noble promontory thrusts itself boldly forward
into the sea from the heart of an undesecrated wilderness. Still the
columns stand quite alone. All the sea-winds can come to you there, and
all the winds of the hills--winds from the Ægean and Mediterranean, from
crested Eubœa, from Melos, from Hydra, from Ægina, with its
beautiful Doric temple, from Argolis and from the mountains of Arcadia.
And it seems as if all the sunshine of heaven were there to bathe you in
golden fire, as if there could be none left over for the rest of the
world. The coasts of Greece stretch away beneath you into far distances,
curving in bays, thrusting out in promontories, here tawny and volcanic,
there gray and quietly sober in color, but never cold or dreary. White
sails, but only two or three, are dreaming on the vast purple of
Poseidon's kingdom--white sails of mariners who are bound for the isles
of Greece. Poets have sung of those isles. Who has not thought of them
with emotion? Now, between the white marble columns, you can see their
mountain ranges, you can see their rocky shores.
Behind and below me I heard a slight movement. I got up and looked. And
there on a slab of white marble lay a snow-white goat warming itself in
the sun. White, gold, and blue, and far off the notes of white were
echoed not only by the mariner's sails, but by tiny Albanian villages
inland, seen over miles of bare country, over flushes of yellow, where
the pines would not be denied.
[Illustration: THE ODEUM OF HERODES ATTICUS IN ATHENS]
There is an ineffable charm in the landscape, in the atmosphere, of
Greece. No other land that I know possesses an exactly similar spell.
Wildness and calm seem woven together, a warm and almost caressing
wildness with a calm that is full of romance. There the wilderness is
indeed a haven to long after, and there the solitudes call you as if
with the voices of friends.
As I turned at last to go away from Poseidon's white marble ruin, a
one-armed man came up to me, and in English told me that he was the
guardian of the temple.
"But where do you live?" I asked him, looking over the vast solitude.
Smiling, he led the way down to a low whitewashed bungalow at a little
distance. There, in a rough but delicious loggia, paved and fronting the
sea, I found two brown women sitting with a baby among some small pots
of flowers. Remote from the world, with only the marble columns for
neighbors, with no voice but the sea's to speak to them, dwell these
four persons. The man lived and worked for many years in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, where he lost his arm in some whirring machinery. Now he
has come home and entered the sea-god's service. Pittsburgh and the
Hellenic wilderness--what a contrast! But my one-armed friend takes it
philosophically. He shrugs his shoulder, points to his stump, and says,
"I guess I couldn't go on there like this, so I had to quit, and they
put me here."
They put him "here," on Cape Sunium, and on Cape Sunium he has built
himself a house and made for himself a loggia, white, cool, brightened
with flowers, face to face with the purple sea, and the isles and the
mountains of Greece. And at Sunium he intends to remain because,
unfortunately, having lost an arm, he is no longer wanted in Pittsburgh.
I gave him some money, accepted the baby's wavering but insistent hand,
and left him to his good or ill fortune in the exquisite wilderness.
DELPHI AND OLYMPIA
[Illustration: THE SITE OF ANCIENT DELPHI]
CHAPTER IV
DELPHI AND OLYMPIA
There are two ways of going from Athens to Delphi: by sea from the
Piræus to Itea and thence by carriage; or by motor. Despite the rough
surfaces of the roads and the terrors of dust, I chose the latter; and I
was well rewarded. For the drive is a glorious one, though very long and
fatiguing, and it enabled me to see a grand monument which many
travelers miss--the Lion of Chæronea, which gazes across a vast plain in
a solitary place between Thebes and Delphi.
Leaving Athens early one morning, I followed the Via Sacra, left Eleusis
behind me, traversed the Thriasian plain, the heights of Mount Geraneia,
and the rich cultivated plain of Bœotia, passed through the village
of Kriekouki, and arrived at Thebes. There I halted for an hour. After
leaving Thebes, the journey became continually more and more interesting
as I drew near to Parnassus: over the plain of Livadia, through the
village and khan of Gravia, where one hundred and eighty Greeks fought
heroically against three thousand Turks in 1821, over the magnificent
Pass of Amblema, across the delightful olive-covered plain of Krissa,
and up the mountain to Delphi.
Throughout this wonderful journey, during which I saw country
alternately intimate and wild, genial and majestic, and at one point
almost savage, I had only one deception: that was on the Pass of
Amblema, which rises to more than eight thousand feet above the level of
the sea. Delphi, I felt, ought to be there. Delphi, I believed, must be
there, hidden somewhere among the rocks and the fir-woods, where wolves
lurk, and where the eagle circles and swoops above peaks which are cold
and austere. Only when we began to descend in serpentine curves, when I
saw far below me great masses of olive-trees, and the distant shining of
the sea, did I realize that I was mistaken, and that Delphi lay beyond,
in a region less tragically wild, more rustic, even more tender.
During this journey of, I believe, about three hundred kilometers or
more, I realized fully the loneliness that happily shadows a great part
of Greece. We seemed to be almost perpetually in the midst of a
delightful desolation, gloriously alone with nature, now far up on bare
flanks of the hills, now traveling through deserted pine-woods or
olive-groves, now upon plains which extended to shadowy ranges of
mountains, and which here and there reminded me of the plains of
Palestine. Strange it seemed to come upon an occasional village of
Greeks or Albanians, strayed, surely, and lost and forgotten in the
wilderness; stranger still to see now and then some tiny Byzantine
church, perhaps with a few cypresses about it, perched on a mountain
height that looked as if it never had been trodden by foot of man. The
breezes that met us were alive with a tingling purity of hilltop and
sea, or sweet and wholesome with the resinous odor of pine. And the
light that lay over the face of the land made nearly all things magical.
[Illustration: DELPHI--GULF OF CORINTH IN THE DISTANCE]
Again we met Turkish Gipsies. In Greece they have made the wild life
their own. No longer one hears of brigands, though only a few years ago
these highways were dangerous, and men traversed them armed and at their
own peril. Now the Gipsies are in happy possession, and travel from
place to place in small caravans, with their mules, donkeys, and dogs,
and their tiny peaked tents, telling the _bonne aventure_ to the
superstitious, and, so the Greeks declare, stealing whatever they can
lay their dark hands on. They look wild and smiling, crafty rather than
ferocious; and they greet you with loud cries in an unknown tongue, and
with gestures expressive of the perpetual desire to receive which seems
inherent in all true vagabonds. They pitch their tents usually on the
outskirts of the villages, staying for days or weeks, as the luck serves
them. And, so far as I could judge, people receive them with good
nature, perhaps grateful for the excitement they bring into lives that
know little variation as season follows season and year glides into
year. Just outside Thebes I found eleven of their tents set upon some
rough ground, the beasts tethered, the dogs on guard, the babies
toddling and sprawling, while their mothers were cooking some mysterious
compound, and the men were away perhaps on some nefarious errand among
the excited Thebans. For that day Greek officers were visiting the town,
and in front of the café, among the trees, and above the waterside,
where we stopped to lunch, there was a parade of horses, mules, and
donkeys from all the neighborhood. War was taking its toll of the
live-stock, and the whole population was abroad to see the fun.
As soon as I had descended from the car and begun to unpack my
provisions, an elderly man came up, asked whether we were from Athens,
and then put the question that is forever on the lips of the Greek,
"What is the news?" Every Greek has a passion for the latest news.
Often, when I was traveling through the country, people I passed on the
way called out to me, "What is the news?" or, "Can you give us a
newspaper?"
Thebes, where, according to legend, Hercules was born; where the stones
gathered themselves together when Amphion struck his lyre; where blind
Tiresias prophesied; and, seated upon a block of stone, the Sphinx asked
her riddle of the passers-by and slew them; where Œdipus ruled and
suffered his hideous fate; where the Epigoni took their vengeance; and
Epaminondas showed how one man can lift a city and set it on a throne
above all the cities of its fatherland--Thebes, where letters were first
brought into use among the Greeks, and where weak-voiced Demosthenes by
his eloquence persuaded the people to march to their glorious death
against Philip of Macedon, is now just a busy village on the flank of a
hill. Frequently devastated by earthquakes, which are the scourge of
this region, it looks newly built, fairly clean and neat. It dominates
the plain in which Plutarch was born, and the murmur of its waters is
pleasant to the ear in a dry and thirsty land. But though Thebes is not
specially interesting, below it, in that plain once celebrated for its
flowers,--iris and lily, narcissus and rose,--beyond all sound of the
voices of chattering peasants or determined soldiers, solitary in its
noble rage and grief, is that most moving of monuments, the Lion of
Chæronea.
I came upon it unexpectedly. If I had not happened to be looking toward
the left my chauffeur would have driven me on without pause to
Parnassus, the mighty flanks of which were already visible in the
distance. When he pulled up we were already almost out of sight of the
lion. And I was glad as I walked back alone, still more glad when I
stood before it in solitude, surrounded by the great silence of the
plain.
There where the lion sits, raised now on a high pedestal and with
cypresses planted about him, was fought the great battle of Chæronea
between the Greeks and Philip of Macedon; and there the Greeks lost
much, but not their honor. Had it been otherwise, would the lion be
there now after so many centuries, testifying to the grief of men long
since dead, to their anger, even to their despair, but not to their
cowardice or shame? I have heard people say that the face of the lion
does express shame. It seems to me nobly passionate, loftily angry and
sad, but not ashamed. The Thebans raised it to commemorate those of
their comrades in arms who died on the battle-field. What shame can
attach to such men? For long years the lion lay broken in pieces and
buried in the earth. Only in 1902 were the fragments fitted together,
though long before that they had lain above ground, where many noted
travelers had seen them. The restoration has been splendidly successful,
and has given to Greece one of the most memorable manifestations in
marble of a state of soul that exists not merely in Greece, but in
the world. Lion-hearted men are superbly commemorated by this lion.
[Illustration: THE LION OF CHÆRONEA, THE ACROPOLIS AND MOUNT PARNASSUS]
The height of the statue from the top of the pedestal is about twenty
feet. The material of which it is made, marble of Bœotia, was once, I
believe, blue-gray. It is now gray and yellow. The lion is sitting, but
in an attitude that suggests fierce vitality. Both the huge front paws
seem to grasp the pedestal almost as if the claws were extended in an
impulse of irresistible anger. The head is raised. The expression on the
face is wonderful. There is in it a savage intensity of feeling that is
rarely to be found in anything Greek. But the savagery is ennobled in
some mysterious way by the sublime art of the sculptor, is lifted up and
made ideal, eternal. It is as if the splendid rage in the souls of all
men who ever have died fighting on a losing side had been gathered up by
the soul of the sculptor, and conveyed by him whole into his work. The
mysterious human spirit, breathed upon from eternal regions, glows in
this divine lion of Greece.
Various writers on the scenery of Greece have described it as "alpine"
in character. One has even used the word in connection with some of the
mountain-ranges that may be seen from the plain of Attica. Such
distracting visions of Switzerland did not beset my spirit as I traveled
through a more beautiful and far more romantic land, absolutely
different from the contented republic which has been chosen by Europe as
its playground. But there were moments, as we slowly ascended the Pass
of Amblema, when I thought of the North. For the delicate and romantic
serenity of the Greek landscape did here give way to something that was
almost savage, almost spectacular. The climbing forests of dark and
hardy firs made me think of snow, which lies among them deep in winter.
The naked peaks, the severe uplands, the precipices, the dim ravines,
bred gloom in the soul. There was sadness combined with wildness in the
scene, which a premature darkness was seizing, and the cold wind seemed
to go shivering among the rocks.
It was then that I thought of Delphi, and believed that we must be
nearing the home of the oracle. As we climbed and climbed, and the cold
increased, and the world seemed closing brutally about us, I felt no
longer in doubt. We must be close to Delphi, old region of mysteries and
terror, where the god of the dead was thought to be hidden, where Apollo
fought with Python, where men came with fear in their hearts to search
out the future.
[Illustration: PLACE OF THE FAMOUS ORACLE, DELPHI]
But presently we began to descend, and I learned that we were still a
long way from Delphi. The sun set, and evening was falling when we were
once more down on the sea-level, traversing one of the most delightful
and fertile regions of Greece, the lovely plain of Krissa, which
extends to the sea. The great olive-gardens stretch away for miles on
every hand, interspersed here and there with plane-trees,
mulberry-trees, medlars, cypresses, and the wild oleander. Many battles
have been fought in that sylvan paradise, which now looks the home of
peace, a veritable Garden of Eden lying between mountains and sea.
Pilgrims traveling to Delphi were forced to pay toll there, and
eventually the extortion became so intolerable that it led to war. That
evening, as we drove along a road cut straight through the heart of the
olive-woods, the whole region seemed sunk in a dream. We met no one; we
heard no traffic, no voices, no barking of dogs. The thousands of
splendid trees, planted symmetrically, were moved by no breeze. Warmth
and an odorous calm pervaded the shadowy alleys between them. Here and
there a soft beam of light shone among the trees from the window of a
guardian's dwelling. And once we stopped to take Turkish coffee under a
vine-trimmed arbor, solitary and lost in the sweet silence, in the
silver dusk of the forest. A lodge in the wilderness! As I looked at the
dark, bright-eyed man who served us, I, perhaps foolishly, envied him
his life, his strange little home, remote, protected by his only
companions, the trees.
In this plain camels are used for transport, and, I believe, for plowing
and other work. They are to be found nowhere else in Greece. I saw none
that night; but one morning, after leaving Delphi, I met a train of them
pacing softly and disdainfully along the dusty road, laden with bales
and with mysterious bundles wrapped round with sacking.
In the dark we began to climb up once more. At last we were actually on
Parnassus, were approaching the "navel of the earth." But I was not
aware of any wildness, such as that of Amblema, about us. The little I
could see of the landscape did not look savage. I heard goat-bells
tinkling now and then not far off. Presently some lights beamed out
above us, as if in welcome. We passed through a friendly village street,
came out on the mountain-side, and drew up before a long house, which
stood facing what was evidently a wide view, now almost entirely hidden,
though a little horned moon hung in the sky, attended by the evening
star. The village was Kastri; the long house was the "Hôtel d'Apollon
Pythien."
Delphi is memorable, but not because of wildness or terror. In
retrospect it rises in my mind as a lonely place of light, gleaming on
volcanic rocks and on higher rocks that are gray; of a few mighty
plane-trees, pouring a libation of green toward olive-trees on the
slopes beneath them; of a perpetual sweet sound of water. And beside the
water travelers from the plain of Krissa, and travelers from Arachova,
that wonderfully placed Parnassian village, renowned for its beautiful
women, are pausing. They get down from their horses and mules to lave
their hands and to drink. They cross themselves before the little
Christian shrine under the trees by the roadside. They sit down in the
shadows to rest.
It is very sweet to rest for long hours by the Castalian fountain of
Delphi, remote from all habitations upon the great southern slope of
Parnassus, under the tree of Agamemnon; to listen to the voice of the
lustral wave. There, in the dead years, the pilgrims piously sprinkled
themselves before consulting the oracle; there, now, the brown women of
the mountains chatter gaily as they wash their clothes. The mountain is
bare behind the shrine, where perhaps is a figure of Mary with Christ in
her arms, or some saint with outspread wings. Its great precipices of
rock are tawny. They bloom with strong reds and yellows, they shine with
scars of gold. Among the rocks the stream is only a thread of silver,
though under the bridge it flows down through the olive-gardens, a broad
band of singing happiness.
Delphi has a mountain charm of remoteness, of lofty silence; it has also
a seduction of pastoral warmth and gentleness and peace. Far up on the
slope of gigantic Parnassus, it faces a narrow valley, or ravine, and a
bare, calm mountain, scarred by zigzag paths, which look almost like
lines sharply cut in the volcanic soil with an instrument. In the
distance, away to the right, the defile opens out into the plain of
Krissa, at the edge of which lies a section of sea, like a huge uncut
turquoise lying in a cup of the land. Beyond are ranges of beautiful,
delicate mountains.
The ruins of Delphi lie above the highroad to the left of it, between
Kastri and the Castalian fountain, unshaded, in a naked confusion, but
free from modern houses and in a fine loneliness. Once, and not very
long ago, the village of Kastri stood close to the ruins, and some of it
actually above them. But when excavations were undertaken seriously, all
the houses were pulled down, and set up again where they stand to-day.
Like the ruins at Eleusis and Olympia, the remains at Delphi are
fragmentary. The ancient Hellenes believed that the center of the earth
was at a certain spot within the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the
eagles of Zeus, flying from the two ends of the earth, had met. The
foundations, and some portions of the walls of this celebrated shrine,
in which two golden eagles stood, may be visited, but very little of it
remains. On the foundation has been set up a large Roman column, upon
which once stood a statue. The fallen blocks of Doric columns are
gigantic, and from them it is possible to gain some faint idea of the
temple's immense size and massiveness. In the midst of a pit of
stone, not far from the columns, I found a solitary fig-tree growing. It
is interesting to notice that the huge outer wall of the temple was
constructed of quantities of blocks, each one differing in shape from
its neighbors. These were ingeniously fitted close together without the
aid of any joining material. Although it is impossible not to wonder at
and admire the cleverness shown in this wall, it produced on my mind an
impression of confusion that was almost painful. The multitudes of
irregular lines distressed my eyes. There is little repose in a puzzle,
and this wall is like a mighty puzzle in stone.
[Illustration: VIEW OF MOUNT PARNASSUS]
Among the masses of broken fragments which cover much of the hillside
stands out a small, solid building of Parian marble, very pure, very
clean, almost shining under the rays of the sun. It resembles a great
marble casket in which something very precious might be placed and
sealed up. This is the treasury of the Athenians, which has been
reconstructed since Kastri was moved from the fragments of the original
temple. It is, in fact, a tiny Doric temple. The marble, of a beautiful
yellow-white color, is mingled here and there with limestone. This
little temple stands on a platform, with the clearly defined Sacred Way
winding up the hill beside it. The front of it is approached by two
steps, and it has two Doric columns, containing, however, only two
blocks of the original marble, brown, with touches of old gold. The
remaining blocks of these columns are of white Poros marble, brought
from a distance, and they look rough and almost glaring. Poros marble
may always be recognized by the minute shining grains, like specks of
gold, that are scattered through it. Although a fine substance, it looks
vulgar when placed beside Parian marble.
The semicircular places in which the priests of Delphi used to sit may
still be seen, facing a fine view. The sea is hidden by a shoulder of
the mountain, but the rolling slopes beyond the road are covered thickly
with olive-trees, among which the goat-bells chime almost perpetually;
and on the far side of the narrow valley the bare slopes, with their
tiny, red paths, lead calmly toward rocky summits. To the left the
highroad turns sharply round a rock in the direction of the Castalian
fountain.
In the fairly well-preserved theater to the northwest, quantities of
yellow flowers were growing, with some daisies. Among the gray limestone
blocks of the orchestra I found a quantity of excellent blackberries.
Where once was the stage, there are now brown grasses dried up by the
sun. This theater is very steep, and above it towers a precipice. Near
by, between the theater and the stadium, Parnassus gives back to your
cry a swift and sharp echo. The gold, red-gold, and gray stadium, which
lies farther up the mountain than the theater, is partly ruined, but in
parts is well preserved. As I stood in it, thinking of the intellectual
competitions that used to take place there, of the poems recited in it,
of the music the lyre gave forth, and of the famous Pythian games,
which, later, used to be celebrated in this strange mountain fastness, I
saw eagles wheeling over me far up in the blue, above the wild gray and
orange peaks.
In the museum, which stands in a splendid position on the mountain-side,
with a terrace before it, there are many fine things. Delphi in the time
of its greatness contained thousands of statues, great numbers of which
were in bronze. Nero, Constantine, and others carried hundreds of them
away. One which they left, a bronze charioteer in a long robe, faces you
as you enter the museum. It is marvelously alive, almost seems to glow
with vitality. The feet should be specially noticed. They are bare, and
are miracles of sensitiveness. Farther on there is a splendid Antinous,
robust, sensual, egoistic, a type of muscular beauty and crude
determination, without heart or any sparkle of intellect. Two other
statues which I thought exceptionally interesting are of a sturdy,
smiling child and of a headless and armless woman. The latter, numbered
1817 in the catalogue, is very gracious and lovely. The back of the
figure and the drapery, especially that part of it which flows from
under the left arm to the heel of the right foot, are exceptionally
beautiful.
There is a very fine view from the terrace. Toward evening it becomes
wonderfully romantic. Far off, the village of Arachova, perched on its
high ridge, bounds the horizon. It is a view closed in by mountains yet
not oppressive; for there is width between the two ranges, and the large
volcanic slopes are splendidly spacious. Here and there on these slopes
are large wine-colored splashes such as you see often on the mountains
of Syria, and these splashes give warmth to the scene. Above the
Castalian fountain the two peaks of the Phædriadæ, a thousand feet high,
stand up magnificently. Between them is the famous cleft from which the
cold stream issues, to flow down through the olive-groves.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT DELPHI]
When evening falls, follow the winding white road a little way toward
Arachova. From the soft dusk of the defile that spreads out into the
plain of Krissa the goat-bells still chime melodiously. I have heard
them even very late in the night. The section of sea that was turquoise
now looks like solid silver. Behind it the mountains, velvety and black,
flow away in delicate shapes. They are dreamlike, but beyond them rise
other ethereal ranges which seem to you, as you gaze on them,
impalpable, fluid almost, like a lovely imagination of mountains
summoned up in your mind. Black-green is the plain. Under the tree of
Agamemnon glows a tiny light, like an earth-bound star. Where once the
pilgrims gathered who knew only the gods, Christian hands have tended
the lamp before the holy picture. And a little farther on, among the
foliage of the olive-trees, shines another of these Christian stars,
which, in the darkness of Delphi's solitudes, shed their light, faintly
perhaps, but faithfully, upon a way once often trodden by pagans who now
sleep the last long sleep. To what changes in the human soul do these
earth-bound stars bear witness! I sat beneath Agamemnon's tree,
listening to the cry of the fountain, watching the little lights, till
the night was black about me.
I must always think of Olympia as the poetic shrine of one of the most
poetic statues in the world. As the Parthenon seems to be the soul of
Athens, so the Hermes of Praxiteles seems to be the soul of Olympia,
gathering up and expressing its aloofness from all ugly things, its
almost reflective tenderness, its profound calm, and its far-off freedom
from any sadness. When I stayed there I was the only traveler. Never did
I see any human being among the beautiful ruins, or hear any voice to
break their silence. Only the peasants of that region passed now and
then on the winding track below the hill of Cronus, to lose themselves
among the pine-trees. And I heard at a distance the wonderful sound,
eternity's murmur withdrawn, that the breeze makes among their branches,
as I sat by the palace of Nero.
Nature has taken Olympia into her loving arms. She has shed her
pine-needles and her leaves of the golden autumn upon the seats where
the wrestlers reposed. She has set her grasses and flowers among the
stones of the Temple of Zeus. Her vines creep down to the edge of that
cup of her earth which holds gently, as a nurse holds a sleeping child,
palaces, temples, altars, shrines of the gods and ways for the chariots.
All the glory of men has departed, but something remains which is better
than glory--peace, loveliness, a pervading promise of lasting things
beyond.
Among the ruins of Nero's palace I watched white butterflies flitting
among feathery, silver grasses and red and white daisies. Lizards basked
on the altar of Zeus. At the foot of the Heræum, the most ancient temple
that may be seen in Greece at this time, a jackal whined in its
dwelling. Sheep-bells were sounding plaintively down the valley beyond
the arch leading to the walled way by which the great stadium, where the
games took place, was entered. When I got up presently to stroll among
the ruins, I set my foot on the tiny ruts of an uneven pavement,
specially constructed so that the feet of contending athletes should not
slip upon it.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF HERA AT OLYMPIA]
The ruins lie in a sheltered and remote valley far away from the sea,
and surrounded by gentle hills, woods, and delightful pastoral country.
At some distance is the last railway station of the Peloponnesian
railway line, which connects with the main line at Pyrgos. Between the
station and the low hill on which stand the hotel and the museum is
strung out a small, straggling hamlet of peasants' houses. It is very
difficult to realize that this remote sanctuary, hidden away in the
green glades and amid the pastures of Elis, where the waters of Cladeus
and Alpheus glide among reeds and rushes, was ever crowded with people
from all parts of Greece; that emperors dwelled there; that there the
passions of the mob were roused to intense expression; that there men
gained the desire of their hearts or were exposed to the sneers and
opprobrium of their fellows. For Olympia to-day looks like an ideal home
for the great god Pan.
I have called the ruins beautiful, and I think them so, partly because
of their situation, with which they seem to me to combine harmoniously,
and partly because of nature's collaboration with them, which is lacking
from the ruins at Eleusis and even at Delphi. At Olympia many trees grow
among the remains of the temples. A river runs by them. Excavations,
though usually interesting, are often both dusty and ugly. At Olympia
they are pastoral. Dryads might love them. Pan might sit happily on
almost any bit of the walls and play his pipe. They form a unique sylvan
paradise, full of wonderful associations, in which one is tempted to
rest for hours, whereas from many ruins one wishes only to get away once
they have been examined. And yet Olympia is so fragmentary that many
persons are bitterly disappointed with what they find there, as the
visitors' book in the little hotel bears witness.
In all the mass of remains, and they cover a very large extent of
ground, I think I saw only four complete columns standing. Two of these
were columns of the Heræum, in which the Hermes of Praxiteles was found
lying among the remnants. They are golden-brown in color, and are of
course Doric, very massive and rather squat. The temple, the base of
which is very clearly marked, must have looked very powerful, but, I
should think, heavy rather than really majestic. I cannot imagine the
wonderfully delicate Hermes standing within it. It is believed that the
original columns of the Heræum were of wood, and that when they began to
rot away the stone columns were put up in their places. Much of the
temple was made of brick. The Hermes stood between two of the columns.
It will be evident to any one who examines carefully all that is left of
the Temple of Zeus that it must have been very grand. Fragments of the
shafts of its columns, which are heaped in confusion on the ground, are
enormous. One block, which I found poised upright on its rounded edge,
was quite six feet high. This temple was made of limestone, which is now
of a rather dreary, almost sinister, gray color. Exposure to the weather
has evidently darkened it. The foundations are terrific. They suggest
titanic preparations for the bearing up of a universe of stone. It seems
to me that from what is left of this celebrated building, which stands
in the middle of the sacred precinct, and which once contained Phidias's
statue of Zeus, about forty feet high, one can gather something of what
was the builders' conception of the chief of all the gods of Olympus. To
them he must surely have been simply the Thunderer, a deity terrific and
forbidding, to whose worship must be raised a temple grand but probably
almost repellent. Legend relates that when Phidias had completed his
great statue of Zeus, and it had been placed in position, Zeus sent down
a thunderbolt which struck the ground close to the statue. The Greeks
considered the thunderbolt to be the god's characteristic expression of
content. Instead of the eagles of Zeus, I saw hovering over, and
perching upon, this ruin black and white birds, with long tails, not
unlike magpies. The statue of Zeus has disappeared. It is known to have
been taken to Constantinople, and in that tempestuous city it vanished,
like so much else. In the time of Olympia's glory the temple was
elaborately decorated, with stucco, painting, gilding, marble tiles,
shields, and vases, as well as with many statues. But despite this, I
think it must have been far less satisfying than the calm and glorious
Parthenon, in which seems to dwell rather the spirit of a goddess than
the spirit of any human builders.
Earthquakes are frequent at Olympia, and have been so since the most
ancient times. One destroyed the greater part of Zeus's temple about
four hundred years after Christ. By that time the Olympic games had
ceased to be held, and no doubt the place was beginning to fall into the
neglect which, with the lapse of the centuries, has become so romantic.
After it was forgotten by men, nature began to remember and love it.
Very little of the famous stadium has been excavated. I found flocks of
sheep and goats feeding peacefully above it, and near by a small,
barefooted boy, with a little gun, out after quail.
On the first day of my visit to Olympia, after spending a few hours
alone among the ruins I crossed the river, where I saw some half-naked
men dragging for fish with hand-nets, and mounted the hill to the
museum, which looks out over the delicious valley, and is attended by
some umbrella-pines. It was closed, but the keeper came smiling from
his dwelling close by to let me in. He did not follow me far, but sat
down in the vestibule among the Roman emperors.
[Illustration: OLYMPIA--ENTRANCE TO THE ATHLETIC FIELD]
On my right I saw the entrance to what seemed a small gallery, or
perhaps a series of small rooms. In front of me was a large, calm,
well-lighted hall, with a wooden roof and walls of a deep, dull red,
round which were ranged various objects. My eyes were attracted
immediately to one figure, a woman apparently almost in flight,
radiantly advancing, with thin draperies floating back from an
exquisitely vital form--the celebrated "Victory" of Pæonius, now more
than two thousand years old. Beyond this marvel of suggested motion I
saw part of another room very much smaller than the hall and apparently
empty. It drew me on, as in certain Egyptian temples the dim holy of
holies draws the wanderer onward with an influence that may not be
resisted. I took no more heed of the "Victory," of Hercules winning the
apples of the Hesperides, or of anything else, but walked forward, came
into the last room, and found myself alone with the Hermes of Olympia.
The room in which the Hermes stands--alone save for the little child on
his arm--is exactly opposite the distant entrance of the museum. The
keeper, when letting me in, had left the big door wide open. In my heart
I thanked him, but not at that moment, for just then I did not notice
it. I was looking at the Hermes.
A great deal of sad nonsense is talked in our day by critics of art,
music, and literature about "restraint." With them the word has become a
mere parrot cry, a most blessed word, like Mesopotamia. They preach
restraint very often to those who have little or nothing to restrain.
The result is nullity. In striving to become "Greek," too many unhappy
ones become nothing at all. Standing before the Hermes of Olympia, one
realizes as never before the meaning, the loveliness, of restraint, of
the restraint of a great genius, one who could be what he chose to be,
and who has chosen to be serene. This it is to be Greek. Desire of
anything else fails and lies dead. In the small and silent room, hidden
away from the world in the green wilderness of Elis, one has found that
rare sensation, a perfect satisfaction.
Naked the Hermes stands, with his thin robe put off, and flowing down
over the trunk of a tree upon which he lightly leans. He is resting on
his way to the nymphs, but not from any fatigue. Rather, perhaps,
because he is in no haste to resign his little brother Dionysus to their
hands for education. Semele, the mother, is dead, and surely this
gracious and lovely child, touching because of his innocent happiness,
his innocent eagerness in pleasure, looks to Hermes as his protector. He
stretches out one soft arm in an adorable gesture of desire. The other
clings to the shoulder of Hermes. And Hermes watches him with an
expression of divine, half-smiling gentleness, untouched by sadness, by
any misgiving, such as we often feel about the future of a little child
we love; Hermes watches him, contemplative, benign, celestial.
There is a pause in the hurry, in the sorrow, of this travailing world;
there is a hush. No more do the human cries sound in the midst of that
darkness which is created by our misunderstanding. No longer do the
frantic footfalls go by. The golden age has returned, with its knowledge
of what is not needed--a knowledge that we have lost.
I looked up from Hermes and the little brother, and, in the distance,
through the doorway of the museum, I saw a tiny picture of Elis bathed
in soft, golden light; a calm hillside, some green and poetic country,
and, in the foreground, like a message, a branch of wild olive.
That is what we need, what secretly we desire, our branch, perhaps our
crown, of wild olive. And all the rest is as nothing.
IN CONSTANTINOPLE
[Illustration: THE GRAND BAZAAR IN CONSTANTINOPLE]
CHAPTER V
IN CONSTANTINOPLE
Constantinople is beautiful and hateful. It fascinates and it repels.
And it bewilders--how it bewilders! No other city that I have seen has
so confused and distressed me. For days I could not release myself from
the obsession of its angry tumult. Much of it seems to be in a perpetual
rage, pushing, struggling, fighting, full of ugly determination to
do--what? One does not know, one cannot even surmise what it desires,
what is its aim, if, indeed, it has any aim. These masses of dark-eyed,
suspicious, glittering people thronging its streets, rushing down its
alleys, darting out of its houses, calling from its windows, muttering
in its dark and noisome corners, gathering in compact, astonishing
crowds in its great squares before its mosques, blackening even its
waters, amid fierce noises of sirens from its innumerable steamers and
yells from its violent boatmen, what is it that they want? Whither are
they going in this brutal haste, these Greeks, Corsicans, Corfiotes,
Montenegrins, Armenians, Jews, Albanians, Syrians, Egyptians, Arabs,
Turks? They have no time or desire to be courteous, to heed any one but
themselves. They push you from the pavement. They elbow you in the road.
Upon the two bridges they crush past you, careless if they tread upon
you or force you into the mud. If you are in a caique, traveling over
the waters of the Golden Horn, they run into you. Caique bangs into
caique. The boatmen howl at one another, and somehow pull their craft
free. If you are in a carriage, the horses slither round the sharp
corners, and you come abruptly face to face with another carriage,
dashing on as yours is dashing, carelessly, scornfully, reckless
apparently of traffic and of human lives. There seems to be no plan in
the tumult, no conception of anything wanted quietly, toward which any
one is moving with a definite, simple purpose. The noise is beyond all
description. London, even New York, seems to me almost peaceful in
comparison with Constantinople. There is no sound of dogs. They are all
dead. But even their sickly howling, of which one has heard much, must
surely have been overpowered by the uproar one hears to-day, except
perhaps in the dead of night.
Soldiers seem to be everywhere. To live in Constantinople is like living
in some vast camp. When I was there, Turkey was preparing feverishly for
war. The streets were blocked with trains of artillery. The steamers in
the harbor were vomiting forth regiments of infantry. Patrols of
horsemen paraded the city. On my first night in Pera, when, weary with
my efforts to obtain some general conception of what the spectacular
monster really was, what it wanted, what it meant, what it was about to
do, I had at length fallen asleep toward dawn, I was wakened by a
prolonged, clattering roar beneath my windows. I got up, opened the
shutters, and looked out. And below me, in the semi-darkness, I saw
interminable lines of soldiers passing: officers on horseback, men
tramping with knapsacks on their backs and rifles over their shoulders;
then artillery, gun-carriages, with soldiers sitting loosely on them
holding one another's hands; guns, horses, more horses, with officers
riding them; then trains of loaded mules. On and on they went, and
always more were coming behind. I watched them till I was tired,
descending to the darkness of Galata, to the blackness of old Stamboul.
Gradually, as the days passed by, I began to understand something of the
city, to realize never what it wanted or what it really meant, but
something of what it was. It seemed to me then like a person with two
natures uneasily housed in one perturbed body. These two natures were
startlingly different the one from the other. One was to me
hateful--Pera, with Galata touching it. The other was not to be
understood by me, but it held me with an indifferent grasp, and from it
to me there flowed a strange and almost rustic melancholy that I cared
for--Stamboul. And between these two natures a gulf was fixed--the gulf
of the Golden Horn.
Pera is a mongrel city, set on a height and streaming blatantly to
Galata; a city of tall, discolored houses not unlike the houses of
Naples; of embassies and churches; of glaring shops and cafés glittering
with plate-glass, through which crafty, impudent eyes are forever
staring out upon the passers-by; of noisy, unattractive hotels and wizen
gardens, where bands play at stated hours, and pretentious, painted
women from second-rate European music-halls posture and squall under the
light of electric lamps. There is no rest, no peace in Pera. There seems
to be no discipline. Motor-cars make noises there even in the dead of
night, and when standing still, such as I never before heard or
imagined. They have a special breed of cars in Pera. Bicyclists are
allowed to use motor sirens to clear the way before them. One Sunday
when, owing to a merciful strike of the coachmen, there was comparative
calm, I saw a boy on horseback going at full gallop over the pavement of
the Grande Rue. He passed and repassed me five times, lashing his horse
till it was all in a lather. Nobody stopped him. You may do anything, it
seems, in Pera, if it is noisy, brutal, objectionable. Pera has all
that is odious of the Levant: impudence, ostentation, slyness,
indelicacy, uproar, a glittering commonness. It is like a blazing ring
of imitation diamonds squeezing a fat and dirty finger. But it is
wonderfully interesting simply because of the variety of human types one
sees there. The strange thing is that this multitude of types from all
over the East and from all the nations of Europe is reduced, as it were,
by Pera to a common, a very common, denominator. The influence of place
seems fatal there.
[Illustration: THE BOSPHOROUS--CONSTANTINOPLE IN THE DISTANCE]
Stamboul is a city of wood and of marble, of dusty, frail houses that
look as if they had been run up in a night and might tumble to pieces at
any moment, and of magnificent mosques, centuries old, solid, huge,
superb, great monuments of the sultans. The fire-tower of Galata looks
toward the fire-tower of Stamboul across a forest of masts; but no
watchfulness, no swiftness of action, can prevent flames from
continually sweeping through Stamboul, leaving waste places behind them,
but dying at the feet of the mosques. As one looks at Stamboul from the
heights of Pera, it rises on its hills across the water, beyond the sea
of the Golden Horn, like a wonderful garden city, warm, almost ruddy,
full of autumnal beauty, with its red-brown roofs and its trees. And out
of its rich-toned rusticity the mosques heave themselves up like
leviathans that have nothing in common with it; the Mosque of Santa
Sophia, of the Sultan Achmet, with its six exquisite minarets, of
Mohammed the Conqueror, of Suleiman the Magnificent, and how many
others!
There is no harmony between the mosques of Stamboul and the houses of
Stamboul. The former are enduring and grand; the latter, almost like
houses of cards. And yet Stamboul is harmonious, is very beautiful.
Romance seems brooding over it, trailing lights and shadows to clothe it
with flame and with darkness. It holds you, it entices you. It sheds
upon you a sense of mystery. What it has seen, Stamboul! What it has
known! What a core of red violence that heart has and always has had!
When the sunset dies away among the autumnal houses and between the
minarets that rise above the city like prayers; when the many cypresses
that echo the minarets in notes of dark green become black, and the
thousands of houses seem to be subtly run together into a huge streak of
umber above the lights at the waterside; when Seraglio Point stretches
like a shadowy spear toward the Bosporus and the Black Sea, and the
coasts of Asia fade away in the night, old Stamboul murmurs to you with
a voice that seems to hold all secrets, to call you away from the world
of Pera to the world of Aladdin's lamp. Pera glitters in the night and
cries out to heaven. Old Stamboul wraps itself in a black veil and
withdraws where you may not follow.
[Illustration: GALATA BRIDGE, WHICH CONNECTS GALATA AND PERA]
When I think of Constantinople as a whole, as seen, say, from the top of
the Galata tower, set up by the Genoese, I think of it as the most
wonderful, the most beautiful, and the most superbly situated city I
ever have seen.
It is an Eastern city of the sea, pierced by water at its heart, giving
itself to the winds from Marmora, from the Golden Horn, from the
Bosporus, from the Black Sea. The snows of Asia look upon it across the
blue waters of Marmora, where the Iles des Princes sleep in a flickering
haze of gold. Stamboul climbs, like Rome, to the summits of seven hills,
and gazes over the great harbor, crowded with a forest of masts, echoing
with sounds of the sea, to Galata, and to Pera on the height. And the
Golden Horn narrows to the sweet waters of Europe, but broadens toward
Seraglio Point into the Bosporus, that glorious highway of water between
Europe and Asia, lined with the palaces and the villas of sultans and
pashas, of Eastern potentates and of the European Powers: Yildiz, and
Dolma bagtché, Beylerbey, and Cheragan, the great palace of the Khedive
of Egypt's mother, with its quay upon the water, facing the villa of her
son, which stands on the Asian shore, lifted high amid its woods, the
palace of the "sweet waters of Asia," the gigantic red-roofed palace
where Ismail died in exile. Farther on toward Therapia, where stand the
summer embassies of the Powers, Robert College, dignified, looking from
afar almost like a great gray castle, rises on its height above its
sloping gardens. Gaze from any summit upon Constantinople, and you are
amazed by the wonder of it, by the wonder of its setting. There is a
vastness, a glory of men, of ships, of seas, of mountains, in this grand
view which sets it apart from all other views of the world. Two seas
send it their message. Two continents give of their beauty to make it
beautiful. Two religions have striven to sanctify it with glorious
buildings. In the midst of its hidden squalor and crime rises what many
consider the most beautiful church--now a mosque--in the world. Perhaps
no harbor in Europe can compare with its harbor. For human and
historical interest it can scarcely be equaled. In the shadow of its
marvelous walls, guarded by innumerable towers and girdled by forests of
cypresses, it lies like some great magician, glittering, mysterious,
crafty, praying, singing, intriguing, assassinating, looking to East and
West, watchful, and full of fanaticism.
I crossed the new bridge. The famous old timber bridge, which rocks
under your feet, has been moved up the Golden Horn, and now spans the
sea by the marine barracks. Evening was falling; a wind had brought
clouds from the Black Sea. The waters were colorless, and were licked
into fretful wavelets, on which the delicate pointed caiques swayed like
leaves on a tide. Opposite to me, at the edge of Stamboul, the huge
Mosque of Yeni-Validé-Jamissi rose, with its crowd of cupolas large and
small and its prodigious minarets. Although built by two women, it
looked stern and male, seemed to be guarding the bridge, to be
proclaiming to all the mongrels from Galata and Pera, who hurried from
shore to shore, that Stamboul will make no compromise with the infidel,
that in the great space before this mosque the true East in Europe
begins.
Russia was in the wind, I thought. The breath of the steppes was
wandering afar to seek--what? The breath of the desert? The great mosque
confronted it, Islam erect, and now dark, forbidding under the darkening
sky. Even the minarets had lost their delicate purity, had become
fierce, prayers calling down destruction on unbelievers. And all the
cries of Stamboul seemed to gather themselves together in my ears,
keening over the sea above which I stood--voices of many nations; of
Turks, Arabs, Circassians, Persians, of men from the wilds of Asia and
the plains of India; voices of bashi-bazouks and of slaves; even, thin
high voices of eunuchs. From the quays to right and left of the bridge
crowds of people rose to my sight and hurried away; to them crowds of
people descended, sinking out of my sight. Soldiers and hamals passed,
upright and armed, bending beneath the weight of incredible loads. Calls
of Albanian boatmen came up from the sea. From the city of closely
packed fishermen's vessels rose here and there little trails of smoke.
On their decks dim figures crouched about wavering fires. A gnarled
beggar pushed me, muttering, then whining uncouth words. Along the
curving shore, toward the cypress-crowned height of Eyub, lights were
strung out, marking the waterside. Behind me tall Pera began to glitter
meretriciously. The Greek barbers, I knew, were standing impudently
before the doors of their little saloons, watching the evening pageant
as it surged slowly through the Grande Rue and toward the Taxim Garden.
Diplomats were driving home from the Sublime Porte in victorias. The
"cinemas" were gathering in their mobs. Tokatlian's was thronged with
Levantines whispering from mouth to mouth the current lies of the day.
Below, near the ships, the business men of Galata were rushing out of
their banks, past the large round-browed Montenegrins who stand on the
steps, out of their offices and shops, like a mighty swarm of disturbed
bees. The long shriek of a siren from a steamer near Seraglio Point tore
the gloom. I went on, despite menacing Validé Sultan, I lost myself in
the wonderful maze of Stamboul.
[Illustration: THE WATER-FRONT OF STAMBOUL WITH PERA IN THE DISTANCE]
Stamboul near the waterside is full of contrasts so sharp, so strange
that they bewilder and charm, and sometimes render uneasy even one who
has wandered alone through many towns of the East. Sordid and filthy,
there is yet something grandiose in it, something hostile and
threatening in the watchful crowds that are forever passing by. Between
the houses the sea-wind blows up, and you catch glimpses of water, of
masts, of the funnels of steamers. Above the cries of the nations rise
the long-drawn wails and the hootings of sirens. The traffic of the
streets is made more confusing by your constant consciousness of the
traffic of the sea, embraced by it, almost mingling with it. Water and
wind, mud and dust, cries of coachmen and seamen, of motor-cars and
steamers, and soldiers, soldiers, soldiers passing, always passing.
Through a window-pane you catch a glitter of jewels and a glitter of
Armenian eyes gazing stealthily out. You pass by some marble tombs
sheltered by weary trees, under the giant shadow of a mosque, and a few
steps farther on you look through an arched doorway and see on the
marble floor of a dimly lighted hall half-naked men, with tufts of black
hair drooping from partly shaved heads and striped towels girt round
their loins, going softly to and fro, or bending about a fountain from
which water gushes with a silvery noise. This is a Turkish bath.
Throughout Stamboul there are bath-houses with little cupolas on their
roofs, and throughout Stamboul there are tombs; but the uneasy and
watchful crowds throng the quarters near the waterside and the great
bazaars and the spaces before the principal mosques. They are not spread
throughout the city. Many parts of Stamboul are as the waste places of
the earth, abandoned by men.
By night they are silent and black; by day they look like the ways of a
great wooden village from which the inhabitants have fled. In their open
spaces, patches of waste ground, perhaps a few goats are trying to
browse among rubbish and stones, a few little children are loitering,
two or three silent men may be sitting under a vine by a shed, which is
a Turkish café. There is no sound of steps or of voices. One has no
feeling of being in a great city, of being in a city at all. Little
there is of romance, little of that mysterious and exquisite melancholy
which imaginative writers have described. Dullness and shabbiness brood
over everything. Yet an enormous population lives in the apparently
empty houses. Women are watching from the windows behind the grilles.
Life is fermenting in the midst of the dust, the discomfort, the almost
ghastly silence.
[Illustration: LOOKING DOWN STEP STREET, CONSTANTINOPLE]
The great bazaar of Stamboul is a city within a city. As you stand
before its entrance you think of a fortress full of immured treasures.
And there are treasures of price under the heavy arches, in the long
roofed-over lanes. The bazaars of Tunis seem minute, of Damascus
ephemeral, of Cairo dressed up, of Jerusalem crushed together and
stifling, when compared with the vast bazaars of Stamboul, which have a
solidity, a massiveness, unshared by their rivals. I saw there many
cheap goods such as I have seen on certain booths in the East End of
London, but they were surrounded with a certain pomp and dignity, with a
curious atmosphere of age. Some parts of the bazaars are narrow. Others
are broad and huge, with great cupolas above them, and, far up, wooden
galleries running round them. Now and then you come upon an old fountain
of stained marble and dim faience about which men are squatting on their
haunches to wash their faces and hands and their carefully bared arms.
The lanes are paved and are often slippery. Just under the lofty roof
there are windows of white glass, and about them, and on arches and
walls, there are crude decorations in strong blues and purples, yellows
and greens. The serious merchants from many lands do not beset you with
importunities as you pass; but sometimes a lustrous pair of eyes invites
you to pause, or a dark and long-fingered hand gently beckons you toward
a jewel, a prayer-carpet, a weapon, or something strange in silver or
gold or ivory.
One day a man from Bagdad invited me to buy a picture as I drew near to
him. It was the portrait of a dervish's cap worked in silk. The cap,
orange-colored and silver, was perched upon a small table (in the
picture) above which hung curtains in two shades of green. A heavy gilt
frame surrounded this "old master" of the East. We bargained. The
merchant's languages were broken, but at length I understood him to say
that the cap was a perfect likeness. I retorted that all the dervishes'
caps I had seen upon living heads were the color of earth. The merchant,
I believe, pitied my ignorance. His eyes, hands, arms, and even his
shoulders were eloquent of compassion. He lowered the price of the
picture by about half a farthing in Turkish money, but I resisted the
blandishment and escaped into the jewel bazaar, half regretting a lost
opportunity.
Many Turkish women come to the bazaars only to meet their lovers. They
cover a secret desire by a pretense of making purchases. From the upper
floor of the yellow-blue-and-red kiosk, in which Turkish sweets are
sold, and you can eat the breasts of chickens cooked deliciously in
cream and served with milk and starch, I have watched these subtle
truants passing in their pretty disguises suggestive of a masked ball.
They look delicate and graceful in their thin and shining robes, like
dominoes, of black or sometimes of prune-color, with crape dropping
over their faces and letting you see not enough; for many Turkish women
are pretty.
[Illustration: PUBLIC LETTER-WRITERS IN A CONSTANTINOPLE STREET]
One day I was in the upper room of a photographer's shop when two
Turkish women came in and removed their veils, standing with their backs
to the English infidel. One was obviously much younger than the other,
and seemed to have a beautiful figure. I was gazing at it, perhaps
rather steadily, when, evidently aware of my glance, she turned slowly
and deliberately round. For two or three minutes she faced me, looking
to right and left of me, above me, even on the floor near my feet, with
her large and beautiful blue-gray eyes. She was lovely. Young, perhaps
eighteen, she was slightly painted, and her eyebrows and long curling
lashes were blackened. Her features were perfect, her complexion was
smooth and brilliant, and her expression was really adorable. It seemed
to say to me quietly:
"Yes, you are right. It is foolish ever to conceal such a face as this
with a veil when really there is not too much beauty in the world. Mais
que voulez-vous? Les Turcs!" And the little hanum surely moved her thin
shoulders contemptuously. But her elderly companion pulled at her robe,
and slowly she moved away. As the two women left the room, the
photographer, a Greek, looked after them, smiling. Then he turned to me,
spread out his thin hands, and said, with a shrug, "Encore des
désenchantées!"
I thought of the disenchanted one day as I sat among the letter-writers
in the large and roughly paved court of the "Pigeon's Mosque," or Mosque
of Bajazet II. For hours I had been wandering on foot through the upper
quarters of old Stamboul, and I could not release my mind from the dull
pressure of its influence. All those wooden houses, silent, apparently
abandoned, shuttered--streets and streets of them, myriads of them! Now
and then above the carved wood of a lattice I had seen a striped
curtain, cheap, dusty, hanging, I guessed, above a cheap and dusty
divan. The doors of the houses were large and solid, like prison doors.
Before one, as I slowly passed by, I had seen an old Turk in a long
quilted coat of green, with a huge key in his hand, about to enter. He
glanced to right and left, then thrust the key into the door. I had felt
inclined to stop and say to him:
"That house has been abandoned for years. Every one has migrated long
ago from this quarter of Stamboul. If you stay here, you will be quite
alone." But the old Turk knew very well that all the houses were full of
people, of imprisoned women. What a fate to be one of the prisoners!
That was my thought as I looked at the sacred pigeons, circling in happy
freedom over the garden where Bajazet slumbers under his catafalque,
fluttering round the cupolas of their mosque, and beneath the
gray-pink-and-white arcade, with its dull-green and plum-colored
columns, or crowding together upon the thin branches of their
plane-tree. A pure wind blew through the court and about the marble
fountain. The music made by the iridescent wings of the birds never
ceased, and their perpetual cooing was like the sweet voice of content.
The sunshine streamed over the pavement and penetrated under the arches,
making the coral beads of a rosary glow and its gold beads glitter,
giving to the amber liquid carried on a tray by a boy to a barber
beneath his awning a vivacity almost of flame. Beside me a lover was
dictating a letter to a scribe, who squatted before his table, on which
were arranged a bright-blue inkstand and cup, a pile of white paper, and
a stand with red pens and blue pencils. Farther on, men were being
shaved, and were drinking coffee as they lounged upon bright-yellow
sofas. Near me a very old Turk, with fanatical, half-shut eyes, was
sitting on the ground and gazing at the pink feet of the pigeons as they
tripped over the pavement, upon which a pilgrim to the mosque had just
flung some grain. As he gazed, he mechanically fingered his rosary,
swiftly shifting the beads on and on, beads after beads, always two at a
time. Some incense smoldered in a three-legged brazier, giving out its
peculiar and drowsy smell. On the other side of the court a fruit-seller
slept by a pile of yellow melons. The grain thrown by the pilgrim was
all eaten now, and for a moment the sunshine was dimmed by the cloud of
rising and dispersing birds, gray and green, with soft gleams like
jewels entangled in their plumage. Some flew far to the tall
white-and-gray minaret of their mosque, others settled on the cupola
above the fountain. A few, venturous truants, disappeared in the
direction of the seraskierat wall, not far off. The greater number
returned to their plane-tree on the right of the lover and the scribe.
And as the lover suggested, and the scribe wrote from right to left, the
pigeons puffed out their breasts and cooed, calling other pilgrims to
remember that even the sacred have their carnal appetites, and to honor
the poor widow's memory before going up to the mosque to pray.
One day I went up the hill toward Yildiz to see the Selamlik. That
morning the sultan was going to pray in the mosque of wood which Abdul
Hamid built close to the mysterious, walled-in quarter of palaces,
harems, kiosks, gardens, barracks, and parks which he made his prison.
From the Bosporus you can see it extending from the hilltop almost to
the sea, a great property, outside the city, yet dominating it, with
dense groves of trees in which wild animals were kept, with open spaces,
with solitary buildings and lines of roofs, and the cupola of the
mosque of the soldiers. All about it are the high walls which a coward
raised up to protect him and his fear. The mosque is below the great
entrance-gates on a steep hillside beyond the walls. A large modern
house, white, with green shutters, in which Abdul Hamid used to grant
audiences and, I believe, to give banquets, looks down on it. From the
upper windows of this dwelling the Turks say the ex-sultan often stared
at his city through powerful glasses.
[Illustration: THE COURTYARD OF THE "PIGEON'S MOSQUE"]
The mosque is not large. It is yellow and white, with a minaret of
plaster on the side next the sea, and a graveled courtyard surrounded by
green iron railings and planted with a few trees. On the side next to
Yildiz is a steep bank. A road runs up the hill to the left of the
mosque as you face Yildiz, and another hidden road descends from the
gates and gives access to the courtyard behind the mosque. The sultan
has therefore a choice of two routes, and nobody seems to know
beforehand which way he will come. There were very few tourists in
Constantinople when I was there. People were afraid of war, and before I
left the Orient express had ceased to run. But I found awaiting the
padishah many Indian pilgrims, a large troop of pilgrims from Trebizond
who were on their way to Mecca, several Persians wearing black toques,
and a good many Turks. These were in the courtyard close to the mosque,
where I was allowed to stand by the aristocratic young chief of police,
who wore a woolly, gray, fez-shaped cap. Outside the railings stood a
dense crowd of veiled women.
Soon after I arrived a squadron of the body-guard rode up from the city,
carrying red-and-green pennons on long staffs, and halted before the
gates of the palace. And almost at the same moment the palace musicians,
in dark-blue, red, and gold, wearing short swords, and carrying shining
brass instruments, marched into the inclosure. They stood still, then
dropped their instruments on the ground, moved away, and sat down on the
bank, lolling in easy attitudes. Time slipped by, and important people
strolled in, officers, court officials, attendants. Eunuchs shambled
loosely past in wonderfully fitting, long frock-coats, wearing turquoise
rings on their large weak hands, and looking half-piteously impudent.
Men hurried into the mosque carrying brown Gladstone bags. Nazim Pasha,
weary and grave, the weight of war already on his shoulders, talked with
the master of the ceremonies beside some steps before which lay a
bright-yellow carpet.
This is the sultan's entrance to the mosque. It is not imposing. The two
flights of steps curve on right and left to a trivial glass porch which
reminded me of that bulbous addition to certain pretentious houses which
is dignified by the name "winter garden." Some smart, very strong
Turkish sailors lined up opposite me. Not far from the porch stood a
group of military doctors in somber uniforms. A second yellow carpet was
unrolled to cover the flight of steps on the left of the porch, more
eunuchs went by, more Gladstone bags were carried past me. Then came
soldiers in yellowish brown, and palace officials in white and blue,
with red collars. Two riding-horses were led by two grooms toward the
back of the mosque. The musicians rose languidly from the bank, took up
their instruments, turned round, and faced toward Yildiz. Through the
crowd, like a wind, went that curious stir which always precedes an
important event for which many people are waiting. Nazim Pasha spoke to
the chief of police, slowly moving his white-gloved hands, and then from
the hilltop came a rhythmical, booming noise of men's voices, very deep,
very male: the soldiers before the gates were acclaiming their
sovereign. I saw a fluttering movement of pennons; the sultan had
emerged from the palace and was descending by the hidden road to perform
his devotions.
In perhaps five minutes an outrider appeared from behind the mosque,
advancing slowly parallel with the bank, followed by a magnificent
victoria, covered with gold and lined, I think, with satin, drawn by two
enormous brown horses the harness of which was plated with gold. They
were driven from the box by a gorgeous coachman, who was standing. The
musicians, turning once more, struck up the "Sultan's Hymn," the
soldiers presented arms; the brown horses wheeled slowly round, and I
saw within a few paces of me, sitting alone in the victoria in a
curious, spread-out attitude, a bulky and weary old man in a blue
uniform, wearing white kid gloves and the fez. He was staring straight
before him, and on his unusually large fair face there was no more
expression than there is on a white envelop. Women twittered. Men
saluted. The victoria stopped beside the bright-yellow carpet. After a
moment's pause, as if emerging from a sort of trance, the Calif of Islam
got up and stepped slowly and heavily out, raising one hand to his fez.
Then, as if with an abrupt effort to show alertness, he walked almost
quickly up the steps to the glass porch, turned just before entering it,
stood for an instant looking absolutely blank, again saluted, swung
round awkwardly, and disappeared. Almost immediately afterward one of
his sons, a rather short and fair young man with a flushed face,
attended by an officer, hurried past me and into the mosque by another
entrance.
A few persons went away while his Majesty was praying; but all the
pilgrims stayed, and I stayed with them. Several of the officials walked
about on the gravel, talked, smoked, and drank orangeade, which a
servant brought to them on a silver tray. Now and then from within the
mosque came to us the loud murmur of praying voices. The soldiers of the
body-guard descended the hill from the gates of Yildiz on foot, leading
their horses, and assembled outside the courtyard. They were followed by
a brilliant squadron of cavalry in dark-blue-and-red uniforms, with
green-and-red saddle-cloths; their blood-red flag was borne before them,
and their own music accompanied them. The soldiers in yellowish brown
had piled arms and were standing at ease, smoking and talking. Twenty
minutes perhaps went by, then a Gladstone bag was carried out of the
mosque. We all gazed at it with reverence. What was in it? Or, if there
was nothing, what had been recently taken out of it? I never shall know.
As the bag vanished, a loud sound of singing came from within, and a
troop of palace guards in vivid-red uniforms, with white-and-red toques
trimmed with black astrakhan, marched into the court led by an officer.
Some gendarmes followed them. Then the chief of police tripped forward
with nervous agility, and made us all cross over and stand with our
backs to the bank in a long line. An outrider, dressed in green and
gold, and holding a big whip, rode in on a huge strawberry-roan horse.
Behind him came a green-and-red brougham with satin cushions, drawn by
a pair of strawberry roans. A smart coachman and footman sat on the box,
and on each side rode two officers on white horses.
Now the singing ceased in the mosque. People began to come out. The
sultan's son, less flushed, passed by on foot, answering swiftly the
salutes of the people. The brougham was drawn up before the
bright-yellow carpet. Nazim Pasha once more stood there talking with
several officials. The soldiers had picked up their arms, the sailors
were standing at attention.
Then there was a very long wait.
"The sultan is taking coffee."
Another five minutes passed.
"The sultan is sleeping."
On this announcement being made to me, I thought seriously of departing
in peace; but a Greek friend, who had spoken to an official, murmured in
my ear:
"The sultan is awake and is changing his clothes."
This sounded promising, and I decided to wait.
[Illustration: STREET SCENE IN CONSTANTINOPLE]
It seemed to me that his Majesty was a very long time at his toilet; but
at last we were rewarded. Abruptly from the glass porch he appeared in
European dress, with very baggy trousers much too long in the leg and a
voluminous black frock-coat. He stood for a moment holding the
frock-coat with both hands, as if wishing to wrap himself up in it.
Then, still grasping it, he walked quickly down the steps, his legs
seeming almost to ripple beneath the weight of his body, and stepped
heavily into the brougham, which swung upon its springs. The horses
moved, the carriage passed close to me, and again I gazed at this mighty
sovereign, while the Eastern pilgrims salaamed to the ground.
Mechanically he saluted. His large face was still unnaturally blank, and
yet somehow it looked kind. And I felt that this old man was weary and
sad, that his long years of imprisonment had robbed him of all vitality,
of all power to enjoy; that he was unable to appreciate the pageant of
life in which now, by the irony of fate, he was called to play the
central part. All alone he sat in the bright-colored brougham, carrying
a flaccid hand to his fez and gazing blankly before him. The carriage
passed out of the courtyard, but it did not go up the hill to the
palace.
"The sultan," said a voice, "is going out into the country to rest and
to divert himself."
To rest, perhaps; but to divert himself!
After that day I often saw before me a large white envelop, and the most
expressive people in the world were salaaming before it.
STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES
[Illustration: THE MOSQUE OF THE YENI-VALIDÉ-JAMISSI, CONSTANTINOPLE]
CHAPTER VI
STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES
Stamboul is wonderfully various. Compressed between two seas, it
contains sharp, even brutal contrasts: of beauty and ugliness, grandeur
and squalor, purity and filth, silence and uproar, the most delicate
fascination and a fierceness that is barbaric. It can give you peace or
a sword. The sword is sharp and cruel; the peace is profound and
exquisite.
Every day early I escaped from the uproar of Pera and sought in Stamboul
a place of forgetfulness. There are many such places in the city and on
its outskirts: the mosques, the little courts and gardens of historic
tombs; the strange and forgotten Byzantine churches, lost in the maze of
wooden houses; the cemeteries vast and melancholy, where the dead sleep
in the midst of dust and confusion, guarded by giant cypresses; the
lonely and shadowed ways by the walls and the towers; the poetic glades
and the sun-kissed terraces of Seraglio Point.
Santa Sophia stands apart from all other buildings, unique in beauty,
with the faint face of the Christ still visible on its wall; Christian
in soul though now for so long dedicated to the glory of Allah and of
his prophet. I shall not easily forget my disappointment when I stood
for the first time in its shadow. I had been on Seraglio Point, and,
strolling by the famous Royal Gate to look at the lovely fountain of
Sultan Ahmed, I saw an enormous and ugly building decorated with huge
stripes of red paint, towering above me as if fain to obscure the sun.
The immensity of it was startling. I asked its name.
"Santa Sophia."
I looked away to the fountain, letting my eyes dwell on its projecting
roof and its fretwork of gold, its lustrous blue and green tiles,
splendid ironwork, and plaques of gray and brown marble.
It was delicate and enticing. Its mighty neighbor was almost repellent.
But at length--not without reluctance, for I feared perhaps a deeper
disappointment--I went into the mosque by the Porta Basilica, and found
myself in the midst of a vast harmony, so wonderful, so penetrating, so
calm, that I was conscious at once of a perfect satisfaction.
At first this happy sense of being completely satisfied seemed shed upon
me by shaped space. In no other building have I had this exact feeling,
that space had surely taken an inevitable form and was announcing
itself to me. I stood beneath the great dome, one hundred and
seventy-nine feet in height, and as I gazed upward I felt both possessed
and released.
[Illustration: THE ROYAL GATE LEADING TO THE OLD SERAGLIO]
For a long time I was fully aware of nothing but the vast harmony of
Santa Sophia, descending upon me, wrapping me round. I saw moving
figures, tiny, yet full of meaning, passing in luminous distances,
pausing, bending, kneeling; a ray of light falling upon a white turban;
an Arab in a long pink robe leaning against a column of dusky red
porphyry; a dove circling under the dome as if under the sky. But I
could not be strongly conscious of any detail, or be enchanted by any
separate beauty. I was in the grasp of the perfect whole.
The voice of a child disturbed me.
Somewhere far off in the mosque a child began to sing a great tune,
powerfully, fervently, but boyishly. The voice was not a treble voice;
it was deeper, yet unmistakably the voice of a boy. And the melody sung
was bold, indeed almost angry, and yet definitely religious. It echoed
along the walls of marble, which seemed to multiply it mysteriously,
adding to it wide murmurs which were carried through all the building,
into the dimmest, remotest recesses. It became in my ears as the
deep-toned and fanatical thunder of Islam, proclaiming possession of the
church of Divine Wisdom which had been dedicated to Christ. It put me
for a time definitely outside of the vast harmony. I was able at last to
notice details both architectural and human.
Santa Sophia has nine gates leading to it from a great corridor or outer
hall, lined with marble and roofed with old-gold mosaic. As you enter
from the Porta Basilica you have an impression of pale yellow, gold, and
gray; of a pervading silvery glimmer, of a pervading gleam of delicate
primrose, brightly pure and warm. You hear a sound of the falling of
water from the two fountains of ablution, great vases of gray marble
which are just within the mosque.
Gray and gold prevail in the color scheme, a beautiful combination of
which the eyes are never tired. But many hues are mingled with them:
yellow and black, deep plum-color and red, green, brown, and very dark
blue. The windows, which are heavily grated, have no painted glass, so
the mosque is not dark. It has a sort of lovely and delicate dimness,
touching as the dimness of twilight. It is divinely calm, almost as
Nature can be when she would bring her healing to the unquiet human
spirit. We know that during the recent war Santa Sophia was crowded with
suffering fugitives, with dying soldiers and cholera patients. I feel
that even upon them in their agony it must have shed rays of comfort,
into their hearts a belief in a far-off compassion waiting the
appointed time to make itself fully manifest.
The great dome is of gold, and of either black or very deep blue.
Myriads of chandeliers, holding tiny glass cups, hang from the roof.
Pale yellow matting covers the plain of the floor. The silvery glimmer
comes from the thousands of cups, the primrose gleam from the matting.
The walls are lined with slabs of exquisite marble of many patterns and
colors. Gold mosaic decorates the roof and the domes. Galleries,
supported by marble arcades, and leaning on roofs of dim gold, run round
a great part of the mosque; which is subtly broken up, and made
mysterious, enticing, and various by curved recesses of marble, by
innumerable arches, some large and heavy, some fragile and delicate, by
screens, and by forests of columns. Two-storied aisles flank the vast
nave, through which men wander looking almost like little dolls. So huge
is the mosque that the eyes are deceived within it, and can no longer
measure heights or breadths with accuracy. When I first stood in the
nave I thought the chandeliers were hanging so near to the ground that
it must be dangerous for a tall man to try to pass underneath them. They
are, of course, really far higher than the head of a giant.
In Santa Sophia intricacy, by some magical process of genius, results in
simplicity. Everything seems gently but irresistibly compelled to
become a minister to the beauty and the calmness of the whole: the
arcades of gray marble and gold; the sacred mosaics of Holy Mary, and of
the six-winged Seraphim, which still testify to another age and another
religion; the red columns of porphyry from Baalbec's Temple of the Sun;
the Ephesus columns of verde antico; the carved capitals and the bases
of shining brass; the gold and gray pulpit, with its long staircase of
marble closed by a gold and green curtain, and its two miraculously
beautiful flags of pearly green and faint gold, by age made more
wonderful than when they first flew on the battle-field, or were carried
in sacred processions; the ancient prayer-rugs fixed to the walls; the
Sultan's box, a sort of long gallery, ending in a kiosk with a gilded
grille, and raised upon marble pillars; the great doors and the curtains
of dull red wool; the piled carpets that are ready against the winter,
when the cool yellow matting is covered up; the great green shields in
the pendentives, bearing their golden names of God and his prophet, of
Ali, Osman, Omar, and Abu-Bekr. Everything slips into the heart of the
great harmony, however precious, however simple, even however crude.
There are a few ugly things in Santa Sophia: whitewash covering mosaics,
stains of fierce yellow, blotches of plaster which should be removed.
They do not really matter; one cannot heed them when one is immersed
in such almost mysterious beauty.
[Illustration: THE MOSQUE OF SANTA SOPHIA]
Men and birds are at ease in Santa Sophia. Doves have made their home in
the holy place. They fly under the long arcades, they circle above the
galleries, they rest against blocks of cool marble the color of which
their plumage resembles. And all day long men pass in through the
gateways, and become at once little, yet strangely significant in the
vastness which incloses and liberates them. They take off their shoes
and carry them, or lay them down in the wooden trays at the edges of
those wide, railed-in platforms covered with matting, called mastaba,
which are characteristic of mosques, and which are supposed to be for
the use of readers of the Koran. Then they are free of the mosque. Some
of them wander from place to place silently gazing; others kneel and
pray in some quiet corner; others study, or sing, or gossip, or sink
into reverie or slumber. Many go up to the mastaba, take off their outer
garments and hang them over the rails, hang their handkerchiefs beside
them, tuck their legs under their bodies, and remain thus for hours,
staring straight before them with solemn eyes as if hypnotized.
Children, too, go to the mastaba, settle cozily down and read the Koran
aloud, interspersing their study with gay conversation. On one of them I
found my singing boy. Small, fanatical, with head thrown back and the
fez upon it, he defiantly poured forth his tune, while an older
companion, opposite to him and looking not unlike an idol in its shrine,
stared impassively as if at the voice.
Santa Sophia is mystical in its twilight beauty. Its vastness, its
shape, its arrangement, its beautifully blended colors, the effects of
light and of sound within it, unite in creating an atmosphere that
disposes the mind to reverie and inclines the soul to prayer. Along the
exquisite marble walls, in the mellow dimness, while Stamboul just
outside is buying and selling, is giving itself to love and to crime,
the murmur of Islam's devotion steals almost perpetually, mysterious as
some faint and wide-spread sound of Nature. The great mosque seems to be
breathing out its message to the Almighty, and another message--to man.
The echoes are not clear, but dim as the twilight under the arches of
marble and beneath the ceilings of gold. They mingle without confusion
in a touching harmony, as all things mingle in this mosque of the great
repose.
[Illustration: IN THE CEMETERY OF EYUB, ON THE GOLDEN HORN]
And yet not all things!
One day I saw standing alone in the emperor's doorway a child in
blood-colored rags. The muezzin had called from the minaret the summons
to the midday prayer, and far off before the mihrab, and the sacred
carpet on which the prophet is said to have knelt, the faithful were
ranged in long lines: pilgrims on the way to Mecca; Turks in quilted
coats and in European dress; two dervishes with small, supple limbs and
pale faces smoldering with reverie; and some hard-bitten, sun-scorched
soldiers, perhaps bound for the battle-fields of the Balkan War. Moving
almost as one man they bent, they kneeled, they touched the floor with
their foreheads, leaned back and again bowed down. Their deep and
monotonous voices were very persistent in prayer. And the echoes, like
secret messengers, bore the sound along the arcades, carried it up into
the vast space of the dome, under the transverse arches and the vaulted
openings of the aisles, past the faint Christ on the wall, and the "Hand
of the Conqueror," with horrible outspread fingers, the Sweating Column,
and the Cradle of Jesus, to the child in the blood-red rags. He stood
there where Theophilus entered, under the hidden words, "I am the Light
of the World," gazing, listening, unconscious of the marvelous effect
his little figure was making, the one absolutely detached thing in the
mosque. The doves flew over his head, vanishing down the marble vistas,
becoming black against golden distances. The murmur of worship increased
in power, as more and more of the faithful stole in, shoeless, to join
the ranks before the mihrab. Like incense from a thurible, mysticism
floated through every part of the mosque, seeming to make the vast
harmony softer, to involve in it all that was motionless there and all
that was moving, except the child in the emperor's doorway, who was
unconsciously defiant, like a patch of fresh blood on a pure white
garment. The prayers at last died away, the echoes withdrew into
silence. But the child remained where he was, crude, almost sinister in
his wonderful colored rags.
Close to Santa Sophia in the Seraglio grounds is the old Byzantine
Church of Saint Irene, now painted an ugly pink, and used by the Turks
as an armory and museum. It contains many spoils taken by the Turks in
battle, which are carefully arranged upon tables and walls. Nothing is
disdained, nothing is considered too paltry for exhibition. I saw there
flags riddled with bullets; but I saw also odd boots taken from Italian
soldiers in Tripoli; caps, belts, water-bottles, blood-stained tunics
and cloaks, saddles, weapons, and buttons. Among relics from Yildiz
Kiosk was a set of furniture which once belonged to Abdul Hamid, and
which he is said to have set much store by. It shows a very distinctive,
indeed a somewhat original taste, being made of red plush and weapons.
The legs of the tables and chairs are guns and revolvers. As I looked at
the chairs I could not help wondering whether ambassadors were invited
to sit in them, after they had been loaded to their muzzles, or whether
they were reserved for subjects whom the ex-Sultan suspected of
treachery. Near them were several of Abdul Hamid's favorite
walking-sticks containing revolvers, a cane with an electric light let
into the knob, his inkstand, the mother-of-pearl revolver which was
found in his pocket, and the handkerchief which fell from his hand when
he was taken prisoner by the Young Turks, who have since brought their
country to ruin.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SANTA SOPHIA]
In a series of galleries, under arches and ceilings of yellow and white,
stands, sits, reclines, and squats, in Eastern fashion, a strange
population of puppets, dressed in the costumes of the bygone centuries
during which Turkey has ruled in Europe. Those fearful ex-Christians,
the Janissaries, who were scourges of Christianity, look very mild now
as they stand fatuously together, no longer either Christian or
Mussulman but fatally Madame Tussaud. Once they tucked up their coats to
fight for the "Father" who had ravished them away from their fathers in
blood. Now, even the wicked man, who flees when no one pursueth, could
scarcely fear them. Near them the chief eunuch, a plump and piteous
gentleman, reclines absurdly upon his divan, holding his large black
pipe, and obsequiously attended by a bearded dwarf in red, and by a thin
aide-de-camp in green. The Sheikh-ul-Islam bends beneath the coiled
dignity of his monstrous turban; a really lifelike old man, with a
curved gray beard and a green and white turban, reads the Koran
perpetually; and soldiers with faces made of some substance that looks
like plaster return blankly the gaze of the many real soldiers who visit
this curious show.
One day, when I was strolling among the puppets of Saint Irene, some
soldiers followed me round. They were deeply interested in all that they
saw, and at last became interested in me. Two or three of them addressed
me in Turkish, which alas! I could not understand. I gathered, however,
that they were seriously explaining the puppets to me, and were giving
me information about the Janissaries, and Orchan, who was the founder of
that famous corps. I responded as well as I could with gestures, which
seemed to satisfy them, for they kept close beside me, and one, a
gigantic fellow with pugnacious mustaches, frequently touched my arm,
and once even took me by the hand to draw my attention to a group which
he specially admired. All this was done with gravity and dignity, and
with a childlike lack of self-consciousness. We parted excellent
friends. I distributed cigarettes, which were received with smiling
gratitude, and went on my way to Seraglio Point, realizing that there is
truth in the saying that every Turk is a gentleman.
Upon Seraglio Point I found many more soldiers, resting in groups by the
edge of the sea, upon the waste ground that lies at the foot of the
walls, beyond the delightful abandoned glades that are left to run wild
and to shelter the birds. If you wish to understand something of the
curious indifference that hangs, like moss, about the Turk, visit
Seraglio Point. There, virtually in Stamboul, is one of the most
beautifully situated bits of land in the world. Though really part of a
great city, much of it has not been built upon. Among the trees on the
ridge, looking to Marmora and Asia, to the Bosporus and the palaces, to
the Golden Horn, Galata, and Pera, lie the many buildings and courts of
the Old Seraglio, fairy-like in their wood. The snowy cupolas, the
minarets, and towers look ideally Eastern. They suggest romantic and
careless lives, cradled in luxury and ease. In that white vision one
might dream away the days, watching from afar the pageant of the city
and the seas, hearing from afar the faint voices of the nations,
listening to strange and monotonous music, toying with coffee and
rose-leaf jam in the jewel-like Kiosk of Bagdad, and dreaming, always
dreaming. There once the Sultan dwelt in the Eski-Serai, which exists no
longer, and there was built the great Summer Palace, which was inhabited
by Suleiman I, and by his successors. Hidden in the Old Seraglio there
are many treasures, among them the magnificent Persian throne, which is
covered with gold and jewels. Beyond this neglected wonder-world the
woods extend toward the waters; hanging woods by the sea--and the Turks
care nothing about them. One may not wander through them; one may not
sit in them; one may only look at them, and long to lose oneself in
their darkness and silence, to vanish in their secret recesses. The Turk
leaves them alone, to rot or to flourish, as Allah and Nature will it.
On the third of Stamboul's seven hills stands the Mosque of Suleiman the
Magnificent, all glorious without, as Santa Sophia is not, but
disappointing within, despite its beautiful windows of jeweled glass
from Persia, and the plaques of wonderful tiles which cover the wall on
either side of the mihrab. Somber and dark, earth-colored and gray,
dark-green and gold, it has a poorly painted cupola and much plastered
stone which is ugly. But there is fascination in its old dimness, in its
silence and desertion. More than once I was quite alone within it, and
was able undisturbed to notice its chief internal beauty, the exquisite
proportions which trick you at first into believing it to be much
smaller than it is.
[Illustration: ST. GEORGE'S GREEK CHURCH, NOW A MOSQUE, CONSTANTINOPLE]
When seen from without it looks colossal. It is splendid and imposing,
but it is much more, for it has a curiously fantastic, and indeed almost
whimsical charm, as if its builder, Sinan, had been a playful genius,
full of gaiety and exuberance of spirit, who made this great mosque with
joy and with lightness of heart, but who never forgot for a moment
his science, and who could not be vulgar even in his most animated
moments of invention. Massiveness and grace are blended together in this
beautiful exterior. Round the central dome multitudes of small
domes--airy bubbles thrown up on the surface of the mosque--are grouped
with delightful fantasy. Four minarets, the two farthest from the mosque
smaller than their brethren, soar above the trees. They are gray, and
the walls of the mosque are gray and white. In the forecourt there is a
fine fountain covered with a cupola; the roof of the cloisters which
surround it is broken up into twenty-four little domes. A garden lies
behind the mosque, and the great outer court is planted with trees.
In the garden are the turbehs, or tombs, of Suleiman the Magnificent and
of Roxalana, "the joyous one," that strange captive from Russia, who by
her charm and the power of her temperament subdued a nation's ruler, who
shared the throne of the sultan, who guided his feet in the ways of
crime, and who to the day of her death was adored by him. For Roxalana's
sake, Suleiman murdered his eldest son by another wife, and crept out
from behind a curtain to look upon him dead; and for Roxalana's sake
that son's son was stabbed to death in his mother's arms. Now the fatal
woman sleeps in a great octagonal marble tomb near the tomb of her lord
and slave.
An atmosphere of peace and of hoary age broods over these tombs and the
humble graves that crowd close about them. Mulberry-trees, fig-trees,
and cypresses throw patches of shade on the rough gray pavement, in
which is a small oval pool, full of water lest the little birds should
go thirsty. A vine straggles over a wall near by; weeds and masses of
bright yellow flowers combine their humble efforts to be decorative; and
the call to prayer drops down from the mighty minarets to this strange
garden of stones, yellow flowers, and weeds, where the lovers rest in
the midst of Stamboul, which once feared and adored them. They were two
criminals, but there was strength in their wickedness, strength in their
pride and their passion. Romance attended their footsteps, and romance
still lingers near them.
One morning, as I sat beneath the noble fig-tree which guards Roxalana's
tomb, and listened to the voice of the muezzin floating over old
Stamboul, and watched the birds happily drinking at the edge of their
little basin in the pavement, I thought of the influence of cities. Does
not Stamboul forever incite to intrigue, to lawlessness, to bloodshed?
The muezzin calls to prayer, but from old Stamboul arises another voice
sending forth an opposing summons. Suleiman heard it echoed by Roxalana,
and slew his son; Roxalana heard and obeyed it; and how many others have
listened and been fatally moved by it! It has sounded even across the
waters of the sea and over the forests of Yildiz; and Armenians have
been slain by thousands while Europe looked on. And perhaps in our day,
and after we are gone, old Stamboul will command from its seven hills
and will be horribly obeyed.
I shall always remember, among many less famous buildings, the small
mosque of Rustem Pasha near the Egyptian Bazaar, with its beautiful
arcade and its strangely confused interior, full of loveliness and bad
taste, of atrocious modern painting and oleographic horrors, mingled
with exquisite marble and perfect tiles. The wall of the arcade gleams
with lustrous faience, purple and red, azure and milk-white, and with
patterns of great flowers with green centers and turquoise leaves. I
recall, too, the Mosaic Mosque, once the church of the monastery of the
Chora, which stands on a hill from which Stamboul looks like a beautiful
village embowered in green, cheerful and gaily fascinating. The church
is ugly outside, yellow and lead-colored, with a white plaster minaret,
and it is surrounded by wooden shanties like booths. But its mosaics are
very interesting and beautiful, and its chief muezzin, Mustafa Effendi,
is a delight in his long golden robe and his yellow turban.
Mustafa Effendi was born near Brusa in Asia Minor, but for forty-two
years he has held the office of chief muezzin at the Mosaic Mosque, on
which all his thoughts seem centered. He speaks English a little, and
has an almost inordinate sense of humor. As he pointed out the mosaics
to me with his wrinkled hand he abounded in comment, and more than once
his thin voice was almost overwhelmed by ill-suppressed laughter. He
seemed specially entertained as he drew my attention to two birds on the
wall--"Monsieur Peacock and Madame Peahen"; and he was obliged to
abandon all dignity and to laugh outright when we came to a company of
saints and angels.
The most sacred mosque in Turkey lies outside of Stamboul, at Eyub, far
up the Golden Horn and not very distant from the "sweet waters of
Europe." In it, on their accession, the sultans are solemnly girded with
Osman's sword instead of being crowned. Eyub is a place of tombs. Chief
eunuchs and grand vizirs sleep near the sea in great mausoleums inclosed
within gilded railings, and some of them surrounded by gardens; on the
hillside above them thousands of the faithful rest under cypresses in
graves marked by dusty headstones leaning awry.
[Illustration: STREET VISTA IN GALATA FROM END OF BRIDGE,
CONSTANTINOPLE]
The center or heart of Eyub is a pleasant village, which gathers closely
about the mosque, and is full of a quietly cheerful life. Just beyond
the court of the mosque is a Turkish bath, where masseurs, with shaven
heads and the usual tuft, lounge in the sunshine while waiting for
customers. Near by are many small shops and cafés. In one of the latter
I ate an excellent meal of rice and fat mutton, cooked on a spit which
revolved in the street. If you stray from the center of the village
toward the outskirts you find yourself in a deserted rummage of tombs,
of white columns, white cupolas, cloisters, rooms for theological
students, mausoleums of white and pink marble. No footsteps resound on
the pavement of the road, no voices are heard in the little gardens, no
eyes look out through the railings. As I wandered through the sunshine
to the small stone platform, where the Sultan descends from his horse
when he comes to be girded with the sword, I saw no sign of life; and
the only noise that I heard was the persistent tap of a hammer near the
sea, where his Majesty is building an imperial mosque of white stone
from Trebizond.
Presently, growing weary of the white and silent streets of the tombs, I
turned into a narrow alley that ran by a grated wall, above which great
trees towered, climbing toward heaven with the minaret of the Mosque of
Eyub, but failing in their journey a little below the muezzin's balcony.
They were cypresses, and creepers climbed affectionately with them. Just
beyond them I came into the court of the mosque, and found myself in the
midst of a crowd of pilgrims before the tomb of Abu Eyub, which is
covered with gilding and faience. Near it is a fountain protected by
magnificent plane-trees which are surrounded by iron railings decorated
with dervish caps.
I had been told more than once that the Christian dog is unwelcome in
Eyub, and I was soon made aware of it. In the façade of the tomb there
is a hole through which one can look into the interior. Taking my turn
among the pilgrims, I presently stood in front of this aperture, and was
about to peep in discreetly when a curtain was sharply drawn across it
by some one inside. I waited for a moment, but in vain; the curtain was
not drawn back, so at last I meekly went on my way, feeling rather
humiliated. A Greek friend afterward told me that an imâm was stationed
within the tomb, and that no doubt he had drawn the curtain against me
because I was an unbeliever.
Duly chastened by this rebuff, I nevertheless went on to the mosque, and
was allowed to go in for a moment on making a payment. The attendant was
very rough and suspicious in manner, and watched me as if I were a
criminal; and the pilgrims who thronged the interior stared at me with
open hostility. I thought it wiser, therefore, to make only a cursory
examination of the handsome marble interior, with its domes and
semi-domes, and afterward, with a sense of relief, took my way up the
hillside, to spend an hour among the leaning gravestones in the shade of
the cypresses. Each stone above the grave of a man was carved with a
fez, each woman's stone with a flower; and tiny holes formed receptacles
to collect the rain-water, so that the birds might refresh themselves
above the dust of the departed.
The great field of the dead was very tranquil that day. I saw only two
closely veiled women moving slowly in the distance near the small tekkeh
of the Mevlevi dervishes, and an old Turk sitting with a child, at the
edge of the hill before a café. The women, who were shrouded in black,
disappeared among the gigantic cypresses, seeking perhaps among the
thousands of graves one stone with a flower or a fez that was dear to
their hearts because of the sleeper beneath it. The old Turk rolled a
cigarette in his knotty fingers, looking dreamily down at the child, who
sat with his little legs under him silently staring at the water below,
upon which no vessels, no caiques were moving. On the bare hill to my
left I saw the white gleam of the stones in a Jewish cemetery; and,
beneath, the pale curve of the Golden Horn, ending not far off in the
peace of the desolate country. Red-roofed Eyub, shredding out into
blanched edges of cupolas and tombs by the sultan's landing-place,
marked the base of the hill; and, beyond, in the distance, mighty
Stamboul, brown, with red lights here and there where the sun struck a
roof, streamed away to Seraglio Point. The great prospect was closed by
the shadowy mountains of Asia, among which I divined, rather than
actually saw, the crest of Olympus.
In these Turkish cemeteries there is a romantic and poignant melancholy
such as I have found in no other places of tombs. They breathe out an
atmosphere of fatalism, of bloodless resignation to the inevitable.
Their dilapidation suggests rather than mere indifference a sense of the
uselessness of care. Dust unto dust--and there an end! But far off in
Stamboul the minarets contradict the voices that whisper over the fields
of the dead. For the land of the Turk is the home of contradictions; and
among them there are some that are welcome.
[Illustration: A VIEW OVER CONSTANTINOPLE SHOWING THE MOSQUE OF SANTA
SOPHIA]
To rid myself of the clinging impression of sadness that stole over me
among the cypresses of Eyub, I took a boat, later in the day, to the
shore of Asia, and visited the English graveyard at Haidar Pasha, where
long ago Florence Nightingale established her hospital for soldiers
wounded in the Crimean War, and where now Germans have built an
elaborate station from which some day we shall be able to set out for
Bagdad. Already smart corridor cars, with white roofs and spotlessly
clean curtains, and with "Bagdad" printed in large letters upon them,
are running from the coast to mysterious places in the interior of
Asia. In the excellent restaurant beer flows freely. If the mystic word
"Verboten" were not absent from the walls, one might fancy himself in
Munich on entering the station at Haidar Pasha. On the hill just above
the station lies the English cemetery, a delightful garden of rest, full
of hope and peace. It is beautifully kept, and contains the home of the
guardian, a British soldier, who lives with his wife and daughters in a
cozy stone bungalow fronted by flower-beds and trees. Close to his house
is a grave with a broken column, raised on a platform which is
approached by three steps and surrounded by a circular grass-plot. Here
I found a serious Montenegrin, one of the workers in the cemetery,
busily employed. He had spread sheets of paper all over the grass-plot,
and up the steps of the grave, and had scattered above them a great mass
of wool which suggested a recent sheep-shearing. When I came up he was
adding more wool to the mass with a sort of grave ardor. I asked him
what the wool was for and why he was spreading it out. He glanced up
solemnly and replied:
"It is for my bed. I live in that shed over there and am preparing my
mattress for the winter."
And he continued quietly and dexterously to scatter the wool over the
tomb.
The cemetery, which looks out over the sea and the beautiful shores of
Europe, is full of the graves of soldiers who died of wounds received in
the Crimean War, or of maladies caught in camp and in the trenches.
Among them lie the bodies of many devoted women who worked to allay
their sufferings.
Bent perpetually on escape from the uproar of Pera, in which at night I
was forced to dwell, I made more than one excursion to the walls and the
seven towers of Stamboul. There are three sets of walls: the land, the
sea, and the harbor walls. The seven towers, Yedi Kuleh, are very near
to the Sea of Marmora, and are now unused and deserted; the home no
longer of imprisoned ambassadors, of sultans and vizirs, but of winds
from the islands and from Asia, of grass, yellow wild-flowers, and the
fallen leaves of the autumn. When I went there I was alone, save for one
very old man, the peaceful successor of the Janissaries who long ago
garrisoned this marvelous place of terror and crime. With him at my
heels I wandered among the trees of the deserted inclosure surrounded by
gray and crenellated walls, above which the towers rose up grimly toward
the windy sky; I penetrated through narrow corridors of stone; I crawled
through gaps and clambered over masses of rubble and fallen masonry; I
visited tiny and sinister chambers inclosed in the thickness of the
walls; peered through small openings; came out unexpectedly on
terraces. And the old man muttered and mumbled in my ears, monotonously
and without emotion, the history of crime connected with the place. Here
some one was starved to death; here another was strangled by night; in
this chamber a French ambassador was held captive; the blood of a sultan
dyed these stones red; at the foot of this bit of wall there was a
massacre; just there some great person was blinded. And, with the voice
in my ears, I looked and I saw white butterflies flitting, with their
frivolous purity, among the leaves of acacia-trees, and snails crawling
lethargically over rough gray stones. Near the Golden Gate, where an
earthquake has shaken down much of the wall, and the Byzantine dove of
carved stone still remains--ironically?--as an emblem of peace, was a
fig-tree giving green figs; Marmora shone from afar; in the waterless
moat, that stretches at the feet of the walls, the grasses were waving,
the ivy grew thickly, here and there big patches of vegetables gave
token of the forethought and industry of men. And beyond, stretching
away as far as eye could see, the cemeteries without the city
disappeared into distances, everywhere shadowed by those tremendous,
almost terrible, cypresses that watch over the dead in the land of the
Turk.
Beauty and sadness, crime and terror, wonderful romance, and a ghastly
desolation seemed brooding over this strange region beyond the reach of
the voices of the city. Even the ancient man was silent at last. He had
recited all the horrors his old memory contained, and at my side he
stood gazing, with bleary eyes, across the moat and the massy cypresses,
and, with me, he turned to capture the shining of Marmora.
On the farther verge of the moat three dogs, which had somehow escaped
the far-flung nets, wandered slowly seeking for offal; some women
hovered darkly among the graves; a thin, piercing cry, that was not
without a wild sweetness, rose to me from somewhere below. I looked down
and there, among the rankly growing grasses of the moat, I saw a young
girl, very thin, her black hair hanging and bound with bright
handkerchiefs, sketching vaguely a danse du ventre. As I looked she
became more precise in her movements, and her cries grew more fierce and
imperative. From some hovel, hidden among the walls, other children
streamed out, with cries and contortions, to join her. For here, among
the ruins, the Turkish Gipsies have made their home. I threw down some
coins and turned away. And as I went, returning through the old places
of assassination, I was pursued by a whining of pipes and a thrumming of
distant guitars. The Gipsies of old Stamboul were trying to lure me down
from my fastness to make merry with them among the tombs.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious spelling and punctuation errors have been repaired. Other
unusual period spellings and grammatical uses were retained.
P. 19: "Blazekovic Park;" diacritical markings were removed in the text
version, but retained in the utf-8 and html versions.
P. 239: three uses of "mastaba;" original used "masbata."
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Near East - Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople" ***
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