Crete has certainly lost much in population and wealth, and the epithet of the “isle of a hundred cities,” which it received from the ancient Greeks, no longer applies to it. Miserable villages occupy the sites of the ancient cities, their houses built from the materials of a single ruined wall, whilst immense quarries had to be opened in order to supply the building materials required in former times. The famous “labyrinth” is one of the most considerable of these ancient quarries. Crete, in spite of its great fertility, exports merely a few agricultural products, and nothing now reminds us of the fruitful island upon which Ceres gave birth to Plutus. The peasants are the reputed owners of the land, but they take little heed of its cultivation. Their olives yield only an inferior oil, and though the wine they make is good in spite of them, it is no longer the Malvoisie so highly prized by the Venetians. The cultivation of cotton, tobacco, and of fruit of all sorts is neglected. The only progress in agriculture which can be recorded during the present century consists in the introduction of orange-trees, whose delicious fruit is highly appreciated throughout the East. M. Georges Perrot has drawn attention to the singular fact that, with the exception of the olive-trees and the vine, the cultivated trees of the island are confined to particular localities. Thus chestnuts are met with only at the western extremity of the island; vigorous oaks and cypresses are confined to the elevated valleys of the Sphakiotes; the valonia oaks are met with only in the province of Retimo; Mount Dicte alone supports stone-pines and carob-trees; and a promontory in South-eastern Crete, jutting out towards Africa, is surmounted by a grove of date-trees—the finest throughout the Archipelago.
Fig. 29.—CRETE, OR CANDIA.
Scale 1 : 2 470,000.
The district inhabited by Mohammedans is shaded vertically.
The inhabitants of Crete and the neighbouring islets are still Greek, in spite of successive invasions, and they still speak a Greek dialect, recognised as a corrupted Dorian. The Slavs, who invaded the island during the Middle Ages, have left no trace except the names of a few villages. The Arabs and Venetians, too, have been assimilated by the aboriginal Cretans; but there still exist a considerable {94} number of Albanians, the descendants of soldiers, who have retained their language and their customs. As to the Mohammedans or pretended Turks, who constitute about one-fifth of the total population, they are, for the most part, the descendants of Cretans who embraced Islamism in order to escape persecution. They are the only Hellenes throughout the East who have embraced, in a body, the religion of their conquerors; but since religious persecution has subsided several of those Mohammedan Greeks have returned to the religion of their ancestors. The Greeks of Crete are thus not only vastly in the majority, but they hold the first place also in industry, commerce, and wealth; it is they who buy up the land, and the Mohammedan gradually retires before them. All Cretans, with the exception of the Albanians, speak Greek, and only in the capital and in a portion of Messara, where the Mohammedans live in compact masses, has the Turkish language made any progress.
We need not be surprised, therefore, if the Greeks lay claim to a country in which their preponderance is so marked. But, in spite of their valour, they were no match against the Turkish and Egyptian armies which were brought against them.
The Cretans are said to resemble their ancestors in the eagerness with which they do business, and in their disregard of truth. They may possibly be “Greeks amongst Greeks—liars amongst liars;” but they certainly cannot be reproached with being bad patriots. On the contrary, they have suffered much for the sake of their fatherland, and during the war of independence their blood was shed in torrents on many a battle-field. The vast cavern of Melidhoni, on the western slope of Mount Ida, was the scene of one of the terrible events of this war. In 1822 more than three hundred Hellenes, most of them women, children, and old men, had sought refuge in this cavern. The Turks lit a fire at its mouth, and the smoke, penetrating to its farthest extremity, suffocated the unfortunate beings who had hoped to find shelter there.
The profound “Sea of Minos,” to the north of Crete, separates that island from the Archipelago. All the islands of the latter have been assigned to the kingdom of Greece—Astypalæa, vulgarly called Astropalæa or Stampalia, alone excepted, which still belongs to the Turks. The ancients called this island the “Table of the Gods,” although it is only a barren rock. It clearly belongs to the eastern chain of the Cyclades, as far as geological formation and the configuration of the sea-bottom go; but the diplomats allowed its fifteen hundred inhabitants to remain under the dominion of Turkey.