Rambles and Studies in Greece

by J. P. Mahaffy

On opening my window, I felt that I had attained one of the strange moments of life which can never be forgotten. The air was preternaturally clear and cold, and the sky beginning to glow faintly with the coming day. Straight before me, so close that it almost seemed within reach of voice, the giant Taygetus, which rises straight from the plain, stood up into the sky, its black and purple gradually brightening into crimson, and the cold blue-white of its snow warming into rose. There was a great feeling of peace and silence, and yet a vast diffusion of sound. From the whole plain, with all its home[pg 444]steads and villages, myriads of cocks were proclaiming the advent of the dawn. I had never thought there were so many cocks in all the world. The ever-succeeding voices of these countless thousands kept up one continual wave of sound, such as I suppose could not be equalled anywhere else; and yet for all that, as I have said, there was a feeling of silence, a sense that no other living thing was abroad, an absolute stillness in the air, a deep sleep over the rest of nature.

How long I stood there, and forgot my hurry, I know not, but starting up at last as the sun struck the mountain, I went down, and found below stairs another curious contrast. All over the coffee-room (if I may so dignify it) were the disordered remains of a disorderly revel, ashes and stains and fragments in disgusting confusion; and among them a solitary figure was mumbling prayers in the gloom to the image of a saint with a faint lamp burning before it. In the midst of the wrecks of dissipation was the earnestness of devotion, prayer in the place of ribaldry; perhaps, too, dead formalism in the place of coarse but real enjoyment.

We left for Mistra before six in the morning, so escaping some of the parting inspection which the whole town was ready to bestow upon us. The way led us past many orchards, where oranges and lemons were growing in the richest profusion on great trees, as large as the cherry-trees in the Alps. The [pg 445]branches were bending with their load, and there was fruit tumbled into the grass, and studding the ground in careless plenty with its ruddy and pale gold. In these orchards, with their deep green masses of foliage, the nightingales sing all day, and we heard them out-carolling the homelier sounds of awakening husbandry. During all the many rides I have taken through Greece, no valley ever struck me with the sense of peace and wealth so much as that of Sparta.

After an hour or so we reached the picturesque town of Mistra, now nearly deserted, but all through the Middle Ages the capital of the district, nestled under the shelter of the great fortress of the Villehardouins, the family of the famous chronicler. Separated by a deep gorge (or langada) with its torrent from the loftier mountain, this picturesque rock with its fortress contains the most remarkable mediæval remains, Latin, Greek, Venetian, Turkish, in all the Morea. Villehardouins and Paleologi made it their seat of power, and filled it with churches and palaces, to which I shall return when we speak of mediæval Greece. An earthquake about fifty years ago destroyed many of the houses, and the population then founded the new Sparta, with its wide, regular streets, on the site of the old classical city. This resettlement is not so serious a hindrance to archæology as the rebuilding of Athens, for we know that in the days of its real greatness Sparta was a mere [pg 446]aggregate of villages, and the walls and theatre which are still visible must have been built in late Greek or Roman times. The so-called tomb of Leonidas, a square chamber built with huge blocks of ashlar masonry, of which three courses remain, appears like building of the best period, but its history is wholly unknown.

We reached in another hour the steep village of Trypi, at the very mouth of the great pass through Taygetus—a beautiful site, with houses and forest trees standing one above the other on the precipitous steep; and below, the torrent rushing into the plain to join the Eurotas. It is from this village that we ought to have started at dawn, and where we should have spent the previous night, for even from here it takes eleven full hours to reach Kalamata on the Gulf of Messene. The traveller should send on his ponies, or take them to Mistra and thence to Trypi on the previous afternoon. The lodging there is probably not much worse than at Sparta.

From this point we entered at once into the great Langada pass, the most splendid defile in Greece—the only way from Sparta into Messene for a distance of thirty miles north and south. It is indeed possible to scale the mountain at a few other points, but only by regular alpine climbing, whereas this is a regular highway; and along it strings of mules, not without trouble, make their passage daily, when [pg 447]the snow does not lie, from Sparta and from Kalamata.

Langada Pass

Nothing can exceed the picturesqueness and beauty of this pass, and nothing was stranger than the contrast between its two steeps. That which faced south was covered with green and with spring flowers—pale anemones, irises, orchids, violets, and, where a stream trickled down, with primroses—a marsh plant in this country. All these were growing among great boulders and cliffs, whereas on the opposite side the whole face was bleak and barren, the rocks being striated with rich yellow and red veins. I suppose in hot summer these aspects are reversed. High above us, as it were, looking down from the summits, were great forests of fir-trees—a gloomy setting to a grandiose and savage landscape. The day was, as usual, calm and perfectly fine, with a few white clouds relieving the deep blue of the sky. As we were threading our way among the rocks of the river-course we were alarmed by large stones tumbling from above, and threatening to crush us. Our guides raised all the echoes with their shouts, to warn any unconscious disturber of this solitude that there were human beings beneath, but on closer survey we found that our possible assassins were only goats clambering along the precipice in search of food, and disturbing loose boulders as they went.

Farther on we met other herds of these quaint [pg 448]creatures generally tended by a pair of solitary children, who seemed to belong to no human kin, but, like birds or flowers, to be the natural denizens of these wilds. They seemed not to talk or play; we never heard them sing, but passed them sitting in curious vague listlessness, with no wonder, no curiosity, in their deep solemn eyes. There, all the day long, they heard no sound but the falling water, the tinkling of their flocks, and the great whisper of the forest pines when the breeze touched them on its way down the pass. They took little heed of us as we passed, and seemed to have sunk from active beings into mere passive mirrors of the external nature around them. The men with us, on the other hand, were constantly singing and talking. They were all in a strange country which they had never seen; a serious man with a gun slung around his shoulder was our guide from Trypi, and so at last we reached the top of the pass, about four thousand feet high, marked by a little chapel to St. Elias, and once by a stone pillar stating the boundary between Sparta and Messene. It was then up this pass, and among these forests, that the young Spartans had steeled themselves by hunting the wolf and the bear in peace, and by raids and surprises in days of war.