Accidents of an antiquary's life

by D. G. Hogarth

We found a fishing boat waiting approval at the quay, and the bargain was soon struck. One-eyed Antóni, his son, and his nephew bound themselves to do our pleasure for ten days at least, if they might bring back a load of Fíneka oranges, should they chance to meet with it. It sounded a pleasant cargo, and we agreed. In the early afternoon we pushed off, the light breeze being reported fair; but in the open the deceitful airs died away, and we fell to rocking on a sullen oily swell, which was rolling up from south-west to hurl itself on the iron coast, with a distant murmur of surf. There was nothing to do for hours but to follow the shadow of the sail. Our Greek cook (the same who had shared my vigil on the night of the mutiny at Canea) dived under the half-deck, and was presently very sick. He had been engaged on his word that he had served the Messageries Maritimes of France; but he now explained between paroxysms that his service had been done in an engineer’s house ashore. I doubt if even so much was true, for later on I was to hear him through the thin wall of a hut brag to gaping peasants that he was the bastard of a French general, and had known me from my childhood! The one thing sure in his past was that he had sung in cafés on the Galata quay, and the one thing certain in his future that, except in the near neighbourhood of quays, he would prove useless throughout the cruise.

In the waning day the sails filled, and the boat began to slip fast and faster eastward before a whistling breeze, which had caught up the swell. Cliffs loomed near, and in the last of the light a surf-washed wall sheered up right ahead. Antóni smiled at my doubts, and held on his course till it seemed we must crash ashore. Then the rock parted this way and that: we twisted to left, to right, and to left again, and lo! a great water and the long unruffled track of the moon on the land-locked bosom of Kékova. We ran to a berth under a shaggy hillock crowned with dim fantastic outlines of Lycian rock-tombs—the forgotten cemetery of Aperlae—and spying a single light ashore, landed to try the house for supplies. The Greek fishermen who inhabited it, Castellóriziote colonists known to Antóni, sold us eggs and a fowl; but they were strangely disturbed at sight of us, and dumbfoundered when told we were bound for Dembré. I bethought me they might be smugglers on occasion, and asked no questions, but feeling that something was not well with Dembré, planned to avoid the village on the morrow by running to the mouth of the Myra river and walking thence to the ruins. But next morning the south-wester, which sped us merrily on an even keel down the Kékova strait, was beating up so rough a sea in the open that Antóni would not risk the longer run, and beaching us on the nearest sand, sent his boat back to shelter.

LYCIAN TOMBS.

THE THEATRE OF MYRA.

We had to make our way, therefore, towards the village by an unfrequented path through the gardens, and we met no man. The streets were very silent, and reaching a coffee-house we turned into it to seek a guide. A group of Greeks stared at us open-mouthed, and scarcely replying to our salutations, slunk one by one away; nor was the obsequious host less perturbed. In less than a minute a heavy footfall sounded without, and first one police-trooper and then another strode in. Who were we? We told our nationality. Had we papers? Yes, and in order for the coast so far as Adalia. What might be our business here? To see the ruins of Myra. How had we come? By boat, we said. Where was that boat? It had run to Kékova. Then back you go to it at once, said they. I replied that we were come to see Myra, would certainly see it, and must, moreover, sleep the night here, for it would be too long a tramp back to the boat, which was lying we knew not exactly where. Olmáz? Yasák! they said in one breath. Impossible! It is forbidden! Where, then, was their superior officer? Up country, they answered. Well, I said, rising, you will send our papers up to him, and meanwhile we walk on to Myra. And so we did, none hindering us, but none agreeing to guide; and unmobbed for once, we roamed about the vaults and horseshoe of the great Theatre, and climbed unwatched the rock-cut stairway which leads to the great carved cliff of tombs. Thus some hours passed pleasantly before we saw a trooper and an unmounted man coming across the fields. The trooper brought word that since we were here and said we would not go away, we might stay the night, and his companion, a Greek, would house us. Whereafter both settled down to stay beside us; but the trooper, tired by his gallop inland, soon fell asleep in the shade, and the Greek, following me out of earshot, unfolded at last the mystery of the Measuring of Myra.

Dembré, it appeared, has two titles to fame, over and above the fact that it once was Myra. It is the nearest considerable village to the great Kékova harbour, and it possesses, in the half-buried church of the martyr Nicholas, a shrine to which the Orthodox communities of the world pay no small reverence. Now, from time to time European warships find their way into the Kékova pool, and more than one has chanced to make some stay. Their visits have passed not unremarked by the Ottoman government. If Russia, or Austria, or England should seek a Levantine harbour, what better than Kékova? When Russia holds out the Gospel in front, Turks look for a sword at her back, and therefore uneasiness became panic when it was reported that a Russian consul had bought of a Greek farmer the shell of the church of Saint Nicholas and the land about it. It was said he was proceeding to excavate the shrine, to set it in order, and to arrange for the resumption of the holy office, and already was in treaty for the sites of two other churches which stand amid the ruins of Andráki, close to the eastern mouth of Kékova. The Porte resolved to act. A commission of three officials appeared in Dembré, proclaiming a mandate to “measure” the village, its houses and its lands, with a view to readjusting its contribution to the Imperial Exchequer; and measure they did with admirable deliberation, living the while at the charges of the farmers. Here be it observed that the Ottoman Law, as it was then, warned all men to leave buildings, lands, or other real estate untouched during such interval, usually short enough, as must elapse between the making of a survey and the final notification of assessment. Neither might any kind of property be bought or sold, nor could a barn, a house, a fence be built or even repaired. Two years ago the measurers had vanished from Dembré, and from that day to the hour of our arrival the village had heard no word of its assessment.

Imagine those years. The village was frozen as by a spell. A special police-post was established landwards, and all neighbours were searched as they approached or left the suspect community. The weekly market ceased, and all commerce of men whatsoever. Houses gaped to wind and rain, but they might not be made good; and lands went out of cultivation for lack of seed. This state of things endured weeks, months, a year, till, sick with hope deferred, some householders, abandoning all they had, slipped away of dark nights aboard Castellóriziote caiques, and passed on to free Greek soil, fearful of being retrieved from their mother-isle. Round the remainder in Dembré the cordon was drawn closer; but a few others managed to flee as time went on, leaving their houses tenantless and their gardens to the riot of weeds. Outsiders, even kinsmen, shunned the banned village, and were shunned in turn, if bold enough to enter, lest suspicion attach of trafficking or plotting escape. No formal taxes were levied, but the police had to live, which came to the same thing, or to more, in the end; and currency grew rarer and rarer in the village, little or none coming from without. It was the survivors of a lately prosperous community that we had seen hanging about the streets, fearful to act or speak, watching for a release that never came. My informant supposed nothing could be done to help them. He himself would suffer, of course, as soon as we were gone, for his entertainment of us to-night, forced though it was. His plaint was uttered less in anger than with a certain air of apology, as a man, conscious of futility, might complain of the weather or any other act of God. The idea that the Common Law had been shamefully abused to his undoing, had probably never occurred to him, his view of Law being that of most poor folk, that it is wholly external, the voice of an irresponsible will to be endured or evaded like any other tyranny. And his Padishah had only acted as Kings have ever acted in the East, from the Great King, the King of Assyria, to the latest Sultan or Shah.

Afterwards we visited that fatal church. It is claimed for it (perhaps extravagantly) that it is the same in which the great Bishop of Myra, who is become the patron saint of fishermen, and inspires the Christmas dreams of children over half the world, ministered and was buried. St. Nicholas lies at Bari now; but the violated place of his first rest is shown at Dembré in a recess fenced from the northern aisle of the basilica by a low screen of varied marbles somewhat more recent in date than the saint’s day. The apse retains the form of the original Tribunal, with the stone throne set in a semicircle of seats, moss-grown and stained with green slime; and taken for all in all, this church is the most interesting memorial of the early days of Christianity, in the land where Paul conducted the first Christian mission.