CHAPTER VII
ZANTE—COLONEL CHURCH—LEAVES ZANTE TO MAKE TOUR OF THE MOREA—OLYMPIA—BASSÆ—DISCOVERY OF BAS-RELIEFS—FORCED TO DESIST FROM EXCAVATIONS.
"Hitherto we had had an anxious time, but once they were landed we felt at ease about the marbles. Henceforth the business is in Gropius' hands. The auction has been announced in English and continental papers to take place in Zante on November 1, 1812. It took us some time to install them, and altogether we passed an odious fortnight on the island. The Zantiotes, as they have been more under Western influence—for Zante belonged to Venice for about three centuries—are detestable. They are much less ignorant than the rest of the Greeks, but their half-knowledge only makes them the more hateful. Until the island was taken in hand by the English, murder was of constant occurrence, and so long as a small sum of money was paid to the proveditor no notice was taken of it. For accomplishing it without bloodshed they had a special method of their own. It was to fill a long narrow bag with sand, with which, with a blow on the back scientifically delivered, there could be given, without fuss or noise, a shock certain sooner or later to prove fatal. Socially they have all the faults of the West as well as those of the East without the virtues of either. But their crowning defect in my eyes is that they have not the picturesque costumes or appearance of the mainland Greeks.
The most interesting thing in Zante for the moment is Major Church's[24] Greek contingent. He has enrolled and disciplined a number of refugee Greeks, part patriots, part criminals, and generally both, and has taken an immense deal of pains with them. He flatters them by calling them Hellenes, shows them the heads of their heroes and philosophers painted on every wall in his house, and endeavours generally to rouse their enthusiasm. He himself adopts the Albanian costume, to which he has added a helmet which he fancies is like that of the ancient Greeks, although it is certainly very unlike those of the heroes we brought into Zante. Altogether, with a great deal of good management and more fustian, he has contrived to attach to himself some thousand excellent troops which under his command would really be capable of doing great things.
[25]At last, on the evening of the 18th of August, we considered ourselves fortunate in being able to get away, and we started to make the tour of the Morea. Gropius, Haller, Foster, Linckh, and I left Zante in a small boat and arrived next morning at Pyrgi, the port of Pyrgo, from which it is distant two hours and a half. We obtained horses at a monastery not far from where we landed, and rode through a low marshy country, well cultivated, chiefly in corn and melon grounds, and fairly well peopled up to the town.
Pyrgo itself lies just above the marshes which border the Alpheus, and, as it happened to our subsequent cost, there was a good deal of water out at this moment. We ordered horses, and while they were being brought in we entered the house of an old Greek, a primate of the place. I had been so disgusted with the thinly veneered civilisation of the Zantiotes and bored with the affectations of our garrison officers there, that I was congratulating myself on having got back to the frank barbarism of the Morea, when my admiration for it received a check. The old Greek in whose house we were waiting seemed anxious to be rid of us, and, the better to do so, assured me that Meraca, or Olympia, was only 2½ hours distant, equal at the ordinary rate of Turkish travelling, which is 3 miles an hour, to 7½ miles. The horses were so long in coming, on account of their being out among the marshes and the men having to go up to their knees to get them, that Haller and I got impatient and resolved to go on foot as the distance was so little. It turned out, however, to be 7 hours instead of 2½, and at nightfall we arrived dead-beat at a marsh, through which in a pitch darkness, I may thank my stars, although invisible, for having struggled safely. We wandered about, lost our way, waded in pools to our knees, and finally took 8 hours instead of 2½ to get to our destination.
It was two o'clock in the morning when we got to Meraca, utterly tired out, and with our lodging still to seek. We were directed to a tower in which lived an Albanian aga. The entrance was at the top of a staircase running up the side of the house and ending in a drawbridge which led to the door on the first floor. Once inside we went up two other flights of stairs to a room in which we found two Albanians, by whom we were kindly received. When they heard how tired we were they offered us some rasky. Besides that there was some miserable bread, but no coffee or meat to refresh us. We had to lie down and go to sleep without.
There are few visible remains of the once famous Olympia,[26] and not a trace of stadium or theatre that I could make out. The general opinion is that the Alpheus has silted up and buried many of the buildings to a depth of 8 or 10 feet, and our small researches point in the same direction. We dug in the temple, but what we could do amounted to next to nothing. To do it completely would be a work for a king. I had had some difficulty with the Greek labourers at Ægina, but the Turks here were much worse. In the first place, instead of one piastre apiece per day they asked 2½, and in the next they had no proper tools. The earth was as hard as brick, and when with extreme difficulty it had been broken up they had no proper shovels; and when the earth, which they piled along the trench as they dug it out, ran into the hole again, they scooped it out with their hands. The thing was too ludicrous. Worst of all, as soon as we turned our backs for a moment they either did nothing or went away. This happened when we left them to cross the river and try for a better view of the place. We got over in a caique, which the aga himself, from the village across the water, punted over to us; but the view over there was disappointing, and we came back to find, as I say, our workmen all idling. The long and short of our excavations was that we measured the columns of the temple to be 7 feet in diameter, and we found some attached columns and other fragments of marble from the interior, the whole of which I suppose was of marble, that of the pavement being of various colours. Such stone as is used is of a rough kind, made up entirely of small shells and covered with a very white and fine plaster. And that is about all the information we got for a largish outlay.
From Meraca we rode through romantic scenery to Andritzena, a charming village in a very beautiful and romantic situation; and next morning we settled to go on to the Temple of Bassæ—the stylæ or columns, the natives call it. But before we started the primates of Andritzena came in, and after turning over our things and examining and asking the price of our arms, they began to try and frighten us with tremendous stories of a certain Barulli, captain of a company of klephts or robbers who haunted the neighbourhood of the stylæ. They begged us to come back the same evening, and to take a guard with us. As for the first, we flatly refused; and for the second, we reflected that our guards must be Greeks, while the klephts might be Turks, and if so the former would never stand against them, so it was as well for us to take the risk alone. We did, however, take one of their suggestions, and that was to take with us two men of the country who would know who was who, and act as guides and go-betweens; for they assured us that it is not only the professional klephts who rob, but that all the inhabitants of the villages thereabouts are dilettante brigands on occasion.
Our janissary Mahomet also did not at all fancy the notion of living up in the mountain, and added what he could to dissuade us. However, we turned a deaf ear to all objections and set out. Our way lay over some high ground, and rising almost all the way, for 2½ hours.