The communications between Adrianople and Midea, the ancient Greek colony, famous for its subterranean temples, and with other cities on the Black Sea, are difficult. Its natural outlets are towards the south—on the one hand to Rodosto, on the Sea of Marmara; on the other, down the Maritza valley to the Gulf of Saros. The railway follows the latter, and the Rumelian Railway Company has constructed an artificial harbour at Dede Aghach, enabling merchantmen to lie alongside a pier. The allurements of commerce, however, have not hitherto induced the inhabitants of Enos to exchange their walled and turreted acropolis for the marshy tract on the Lower Maritza, with its deadly atmosphere.

The zone occupied by the Greeks grows narrower as we go west of the Maritza, where the Rhodope Mountains form a kind of international barrier. Only the coast is occupied there by Greek mariners and fishermen, whilst the hills in sight of it are held almost exclusively by Turkish and Bulgarian peasants and herdsmen. The marshy littoral districts, the small valleys on the southern slopes of the mountains, and a few isolated hills of volcanic or crystalline formation constitute a narrow band which connects the Greeks of Thracia with their compatriots of Chalcidice and Thessaly. The Yuruks, or “Wanderers,” a Turkish tribe which has retained its nomadic habits down to the present day, sometimes even extend their excursions to the sea-coast. Their principal seat is in the Pilav Tepe, a mountain mass to the north-west of Thasos, famous in the time of the Macedonian kings for its mines of gold and silver. A wide plain extends immediately to the west of these mountains, watered by the Strymon, or Karasu, and is of marvellous fertility. Seres, a considerable city, occupies its centre, and hundreds of villages, surrounded by orchards, rice, and cotton fields are scattered over it. Looked at from the heights of the Rhodope, this plain assumes the appearance of a huge garden-city. Unfortunately many parts of it are very insalubrious.

The triple peninsula of Chalcidice has no connection whatever with the Rhodope, and is attached to the mainland by an isthmus covered with lakes, swamps, and alluvial plains. It extends far into the sea like a huge hand spread out upon the waters. Chalcidice is a Greece in miniature, with coasts of fantastic contours, deep bays, bold promontories, and mountains rising in the midst of plains, like islands in an archipelago. One of these mountain masses rises in the trunk of the peninsula, and culminates in Mount Kortach, whilst each of its three {108} ramifications possesses its own system of scarped hills. Greek in aspect, this curious appendage to the continent is Greek, too, in its population; and, a rare thing in Turkey, all its inhabitants are of the same race, if we except the Turks in the town of Nisvoro and the Slav monks of Mount Athos.

[Μ]

Fig. 33.—THE PENINSULA OF MOUNT ATHOS.

Scale 1 : 1,020,000.

The easternmost of the three tongues of land of Chalcidice, which jut out far into the waters of the Ægean, is almost entirely detached. Only a low and narrow neck of land connects it with the mainland, and it was across this isthmus that Xerxes dug a canal, 3,950 feet in length, either to enable his fleet to avoid the dangerous promontory of Mount Athos, or to give the awe-struck inhabitants a proof of his power. This is the peninsula of Hagion Oros, the Monte Santo of the Italians. At its extremity rises a limestone mountain, one of the most beautiful in the Eastern Me­di­ter­ra­nean. This is the famous Mount Athos, which an ancient sculptor proposed to convert into a statue of Alexander, holding a city in one hand and a spring in the other, and which Eastern legends point out as the “exceeding high mountain” to which the devil took Jesus, to show him “all the kingdoms of the world.” But whatever old legends may say, the panorama is not as vast as this, though the shores of Chalcidice, Macedonia, and Thracia lie spread out beneath our feet, and the eye can range across the blue waters of the Ægean Sea from Mount Olympus, in Thessaly, to Mount Ida, in Asia Minor. The bold outlines of the fortified monasteries which appear here and there, in the midst of chestnuts, oaks, or pines, on the slope of the mountain, contrast most happily with the faint outline of the coasts on the distant horizon.[30]

This peninsula, which a traveller has compared to a sphinx crouching upon the bosom of the sea, is the property of a republic of monks, who govern {109} themselves according to their own fancy. In return for a tribute, which they pay to the Porte, they alone have the right to live there, and strangers require their permission before they are allowed to enter. A company of Christian soldiers is stationed at the neck of the peninsula to prevent the sacred soil being desecrated by the footsteps of a woman. Even the Turkish governor cannot gain admittance without leaving his harem behind him. For fourteen hundred years, we are told in the chronicles of Mount Athos, no female has set foot upon this sacred soil, and this prohibition extends to animals as well as to human beings. Even the presence of poultry would profane the monasteries, and the eggs eaten by the monks are imported from Lemnos. With the exception of a few purveyors, who reside at the village of Karyes, the 6,000 inhabitants of the peninsula are monks, or their servants, and they live in the monasteries, or in the hermitages attached to the 935 churches and chapels. Nearly all the monks are Greeks, but amongst the twenty large monasteries there are two which were built by the ancient sovereigns of Servia, and one which was founded by Russia. Most of these edifices occupy promontories, and, with their high walls and strong towers, they are exceedingly picturesque. One amongst them, that of Simopetra, appears to be almost inaccessible. It is in these retreats the good fathers of the order of St. Basil spend their lives in contemplative inaction. They are bound to pray eight hours in the day and two in the night, and during the whole of that time they are not allowed to sit. They have, therefore, neither time nor strength for study or manual labour. The books in their libraries are incomprehensible mysteries to them, and, in spite of their sobriety, they might die of starvation if there were not lay-brothers to work for them, and numerous farms on the mainland which are their property. A few shiploads of hazel nuts is all this fertile peninsula produces.

The ancient cities of Olynthus and Potidæa, on the neck of the western peninsula of Chalcidice, have dwindled down into insignificant villages; but the city of Therma, called afterwards Thessalonica, and now known as Saloniki, still exists, for its geographical position is most favourable, and after every siege and every conflagration it again rose from its ashes. Vestiges of every epoch of history may still be seen there: Cyclopean and Hellenic walls, triumphal arches, and remains of Roman temples, Byzantine structures, and Venetian castles. Its harbour is excellent, its roadstead well sheltered; and the high-roads into Upper Macedonia and Epirus lead from it along the valleys of the Vardar and Inje Karasu. These favourable circumstances have not been without their influence, and Saloniki, next to Constantinople and Adrianople, is the most important city of European Turkey. Its population is mixed, like that of other cities in the East, and Jews are exceptionally numerous. Most of them are the descendants of Spanish Jews, expelled by the Inquisition, and they still talk Spanish. Many have outwardly embraced Mo­ham­me­danism to escape persecution, but the true Mussulman spurns these converts with disdain. They are generally known as “Mamins.”