In the Levant / Twenty Fifth Impression

by Charles Dudley Warner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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