Rambles and Studies in Greece

by J. P. Mahaffy

There are indeed no mean traces of this art in Adriatic Italy; the exarchate at Ravenna, the eastern traffic of Venice, have shown their influence on Italian art and architecture. The splendid mosaics of Ravenna, nay, even the seven domes of S. Antonio at Verona, the frescoes of the Giotto Chapel at Padua, above all, the great cathedral at Venice, are all strongly colored—those of Ravenna even produced—by Byzantine art. Yet most travellers who visit S. Mark’s at Venice have never seen a Byzantine church, and do not feel its Eastern parentage; still fewer visit the splendid basilica of Parenzo, which is a still more unmistakable example. But to those who have turned aside from Olympia and Parthenon to study the early Christian remains in Greece, all this art of Eastern Italy will acquire a new interest and a deeper meaning.

These are the reasons which have tempted me to say a few words on this side of Greek travel. I do not pretend to speak as an authority; I only desire to stimulate a nascent interest which will presently make what I say seem simple and antiquated. But [pg 495]as yet even high authorities are very much in the dark about these things. What would a student of Gothic architecture say to a discussion whether an extant building belonged to the fourth century or the eleventh? and yet such divergent views are still maintained concerning the origin of the Athenian churches.

Let us begin with the best and quaintest, the so-called Old Cathedral, which was fortunately allowed to stand beside its ugly and pretentious successor. The first thing which strikes us is the exceeding smallness of the dimensions, it is like one of the little chapels you find in Glendalough and elsewhere in Ireland. I do not know whether the Greeks contemplated a congregation kneeling in the open air, as was the case around these chapels in Ireland, but such edifices were certainly intended in the first instance as holy places for sacerdotal celebrations, not as houses of prayer for the people. I was told on Mt. Athos that it was not the practice of the Greek church to celebrate more than one service in any one Church daily. Hence the monks, who are making prayer continually, have twenty or thirty chapels within the precincts of each monastery. Perhaps a similar motive may have led to the construction of a great number of smaller churches at Athens, where seventy have already been destroyed, and at Salonica, where remains of them are still being frequently discovered. Perhaps, also, that desire [pg 496]to consecrate to the religion of Christ the hallowed places of the heathen, which turned the Parthenon and the temple of Theseus into churches, also prompted the Byzantine bishops to set up chapels upon smaller heathen sanctuaries, where no stately temple existed, and mere consecration would have left no patent symbol of Christian occupation.

But if this Cathedral is small, it has the proper beauty of minute art; it is covered with rich decoration. All its surfaces show carved fragments not only of classical, but of earlier Byzantine work—friezes, reliefs, inscriptions, capitals—all so disposed with a general correspondence or symmetry as to produce the effect of a real design. Moreover, this foreign ornament is set in a building strictly Byzantine in form, with its rich doorway, its tiny windows with their high semicircular arches supported on delicate capitals, and toned by the centuries of Attic dust to that rich gold brown which has turned the Parthenon from marble almost to ruddy gold. Never was there greater harmony and unity attained by the most deliberate patch-work. In the earlier works on Byzantine art, this church was confidently assigned to the sixth century. Buchon found upon it the arms of La Roche and of Villehardouin, so that he assigned it to the thirteenth. The character of the other buildings of these knights makes me doubt that they and their friends could have constructed such a church—the Western monks then [pg 497]built Latin churches in Greece—and I suppose that the arms, which I could not find, were only carved by the Franks upon the existing building. But I will not therefore subscribe to the sixth-century theory.

Of the remaining churches three only, the Kapnikarea, the Virgin of the Monastery, and S. Theodore, are worth studying, as specimens of the typical form of such buildings. The main plan is a square, surmounted by a cupola supported on four pillars, with a corridor or porch on the West side, and three polygonal apses on the East. Lesser cupolas often surround the central dome. The height and slenderness of this central dome is probably the clearest sign of comparative lateness in these buildings, which used to be attributed to the fourth and fifth centuries, but are now degraded to the eleventh. The earliest form is no doubt that of the massive S. George’s at Salonica—a huge Rotunda covered with a flat dome, not unlike the Pantheon at Rome, with nothing but richly ornamented niches, and a splendid mosaic ceiling in the dome, to give relief to a very plain design. The successive complications and refinements added to this simple structure may be studied even in the later churches of Salonica.

The traveller who has whetted his taste for this peculiar form of mediæval art, and desires to study it further, will find within reach of Athens two monasteries well worth a visit, that of the Phæneromené on Salamis, a very fair specimen of an un[pg 498]disturbed Greek monastery, and that of Daphne, which may be ranked with the ruins of Mistra as showing clear traces of the conflict of East and West, of Latin with Greek Christianity. This sanctuary, with its now decaying walls, succeeded as usual to a pagan shrine with hardly altered name. The Saints, still pictured in black and gold upon the walls, and worshipped upon their festivals, have become fantastic and unreal beings, well enough adapted to that mixture of superstition and nationalism which is the body of the Greek religion, and, despite a purer creed, not very far removed from the religious instincts of the old Hellenic race. Five or six wretched monks still occupy the dilapidated building, vegetating in sleepy idleness; they do nothing but repeat daily their accustomed prayers, and receive dues for allowing the people of the neighboring hamlets to kiss, once or twice a year, a dreadful-looking S. Elias, painted olive-brown on a gold background, or to light the nightly lamp at the wayside shrine of a saint black with smoke.

The structure as we now see it is chiefly the work of the Cistercians who accompanied Otho de la Roche from Champagne to his dukedom of Athens, and was established round a far older Byzantine church and monastery. Like all mediæval convents, it is fortified, and the whole settlement, courts and gardens included, is surrounded by a crenelated wall, originally about thirty feet high.

There are occasional towers in the wall, and remains of arches supporting a passage of sufficient altitude for the defenders to look over the battlements. The old church in the centre of the court has had a narthex or nave added in Gothic style by the Benedictines, and here again are battlements, from which the monks could send down stones or boiling liquid upon assailants who penetrated the outer walls. Three sides of the court are surrounded by buildings; beneath, there are massive arcades of stone for the kitchen, store-rooms, and refectory; above, wooden galleries which supplied the monks with their cells. Most of this is now in ruins, occupied in part by peasants and their sheep. But the church, both in its external simplicity and its internal grandeur, is remarkable for the splendid decoration of its walls with mosaics, which, alas! have been allowed to decay as much from the indolence of the Greeks as the intolerance of the Turks. In fact, while some care and regard for classical remains have gradually been instilled into the minds of the inhabitants—of course, money value is an easily understood test—the respect for their splendid mediæval remains has only gained Western intellects within the last two or three years, so that we may expect another generation to elapse before this new kind of interest will be disseminated among the possessors of so great a bequest from the Middle Ages.

The interior of the church at Daphne is a melancholy example. From the effects of damp the mortar has loosened, and great patches of the precious mosaic have fallen to the ground. You can pick up handfulls of glazed and gilded fragments, of which the rich surfaces were composed. Here and there a Turkish bullet has defaced a solemn Saint, while the fires lit by soldiers in days of war, and by shepherds in time of peace, have, in many places, blackened the roof beyond recognition. Within the central cupola a gigantic head of Christ on gold ground is still visible, or was so when I saw the place in 1889; but the whole roof was in danger of falling, and the Greek Government, at the instigation of Dr. Dörpfeld, had undertaken to stay the progress of decay, and so the building was filled with scaffolding. This, however, enabled us to mount close to the figures, which in the short and high building are seen with difficulty from the ground, and so we distinguished clearly round the base of the cupola the twelve Apostles, in the bay arches the prophets, in the transepts the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism, and the Transfiguration of Christ—all according to the strict models laid down for such ornaments by the Greek Church. The drawings are indeed stiff and grotesque, but the gloom and mystery of the building hide all imperfections, and give to these imposing figures in black and gold a certain majesty, which must have been [pg 501]felt tenfold by simple worshippers not trained in habits of æsthetic criticism.

We have, unfortunately, no records of the history of these convents, as in the case of many Western abbeys, and the old chronicles of wars and pestilences seldom mention this quiet life. We should fain, says M. Henri Belle, have followed the fortunes of these monks who left some fair abbey in Burgundy to catechise schismatics in this distant land, and bring their preaching to aid the sword of the Crusaders; but these Crusaders were generally intent on changing their cross for a crown, and were therefore not at all likely to favor the rigid proselytism of the Cistercians. It is very interesting to know that Innocent III., that great pope, who from the outset disapproved of the violent overthrow of the Christian Empire of the East, was the first to recommend, both to the conquerors and their clergy, such moderation as might serve to bring back the schismatic Greeks to the Roman fold. There are still extant several of his letters to the abbeys of the Morea, and to this abbey of the duchy of Athens, showing that even his authority and zeal in this matter were unable to restrain the bigotry of the Latin monks. There were frequent quarrels, too, between these monks of Daphne and their Duke, and frequent appeals to the sovran pontiff to regulate the relations between the civil authority, which claimed the right of suzerain, and the religious [pg 502]orders, which claimed absolute independence and immunity from all feudal obligations. Still, in spite of all disputes, the abbey was the last resting-place of the Frankish Dukes of Athens, and in a vault beneath the narthex were found several of their rude stone coffins, without inscription or ornament. One only has carved upon it the arms of the second Guy de la Roche, third Duke of Athens—two entwined serpents surmounted with two fleurs-de-lis. Guy II., says the chronicle, behaved as a gallant lord, beloved of all, and attained great renown in every kingdom. He sleeps here, not in the darkness of oblivion, but obscured by greater monuments of the greater dead. Yet I cannot but dally over this interesting piece of mediæval history, the more so as it explains the strange title of Theseus, Duke of Athens, in Shakespeare’s immortal Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as the curious fact, at least to classical readers, that the poet should have chosen mediæval Athens as a court of gracious manners, and suitable for the background of his fairy drama.