The Balkan Trail

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

THE WALL AND BEYOND, SALONICA.

We often went up to the Turkish quarter, but never learned the road to the gate. But with a few words of Turkish, which one must naturally pick up, and many signs, we could generally manage to get coffee and directions. We always halted at the gates, and, supplied with stools by the café-ji there, sat and rested for half an hour, watching the children come to the fountain with jugs for water, the women slip noiselessly by, covering their faces with special care at spying us, and the men pass through the eye of the needle hunched up on under-sized asses. Truly a Biblical scene, though the characters were Mohamedans.

There is a great dignity about the ruling race, the man for whom all others step aside, who drinks first at the fountain and removes his fez nowhere. He is not loud or voluble, and seldom loses his temper. When he is provoked he does not squabble, but strikes.

The Christian natives of Salonica are generous in warning one of dangers outside the walls, of brigands and revolutionists; but we often strolled through the gates and over to the barren hills beyond, encountering Turks, Albanians, and Bulgarians, perhaps insurgents, without mishap.

The hills were especially attractive in the afternoon, cooler than the closed-in bay below, and pervaded with a quiet in delightful relief from the ceaseless babble of swarming Levantine tradesmen down in the town. At sunset hour we found a favourite spot on the edge of a steep declivity with only a broad expanse of plain between us and the purple mountains of Thessaly. The sun dropped into a dip in these and left the sky for an hour rich in Oriental colouring flaming from behind. To the south a stern bit of the old wall on the precipitous corner of a rock was silhouetted, and we could never tell whether we preferred this in or out of the picture. That is a true test of quality, when either of two things is preferred as it happens to be at hand; generally the unpossessed is the desired.

Tourists do not come to Macedonia, but if they did they would find a show that no other part of Europe can produce. Not only is the comic-opera stage outdone in characters, in costumes, and in complexity of plot, but the scene is set in alpine mountains on a vaster scale than Switzerland affords. But to pass all these—for the play comes in in the course of the book, and scenery baffles description—there are relics of the ages that would interest many a man who has already travelled far. Salonica is said to be richer than any city in Greece in ecclesiastical remains, and its ancient structures, for the most part, have borne well the ravages of time. There are many great edifices, built by the Romans during their occupation and by the Greeks in their time, and a minaret at the corner of each denotes the purpose it serves to-day.

There is a mosque of St. Sophia at Salonica, built, like its great sister at Constantinople, during the reign of Justinian, and with a history also marked by the wars of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. But a fire of four years ago and an earthquake more recently have wrecked the place, so that it is no longer used. The Rotunda, now the Eski Metropoli Mosque, was built by Trajan, after the model, though on a smaller scale, of the Pantheon at Rome, and was dedicated by him to the rites of the mysterious Cabiri. It is circular, the dome unsupported by columns. The whole of the interior is richly ornamented with mosaics which seem to have belonged to the original temple, as nothing about them divulges adjustment at Christian hands.

One of the best preserved models of ancient Greek architecture extant is said to be the Eski Djuma Mosque. In the porch are several Doric columns, and within the building is a double row of massive columns with Corinthian capitals. There are ‘The Church of the Twelve Apostles,’ and the mosque of St. Demetrius, whose shrine within is revered by Moslems and Christians alike.

Between the Rotunda and the sea is the site of the Hippodrome, where Theodosius, the last of the Emperors who were sole masters of the whole Roman Empire, caused to be committed one of the bloodiest of massacres for which Salonica is famous. Although a zealous follower of Christianity, and commended by ancient writers as a prince blessed with every virtue, his moderation and clemency failed signally on this occasion. In order to chastise the people for a movement in favour of a charioteer very popular among them, and who had been arrested at his order, the inhabitants were assembled at the Hippodrome under the pretext of witnessing the races, and then barbarously massacred, without distinction of age or sex, to the number of seven thousand.

At the end of the main street, which once formed part of the Egnatian Way, stands a triumphal arch generally supposed to have been raised in honour of Constantine, to celebrate the return from his victory over the Sarmatians. The supports are faced with white marble highly wrought, representing a battle between Roman troops and barbarians, and a triumphal entry into a city. The arch was repaired and plastered over some years ago in a painful manner, with no regard to conformity with the supports.