Neglecting geography, I shall carry the reader next to the very analogous ruins of Mistra, where, however, it was rather the Greek that supplanted the Latin, than the Latin the Greek ecclesiastic.
When the Franks invaded Greece a very remarkable family, the Villehardouins, seized a part of the Morea, and presently built Mistra, above Sparta; it was adorned with fair Gothic churches and palaces, [pg 503]and surmounted by a fortress. Sixty years after the conquest, William Villehardouin was captured by a new Byzantine emperor Palæologus, who was recovering his dominion. The Frank was obliged to cede for his ransom the forts of Mistra and Monemvasia, which from that time were strongholds of the Byzantine power till the conquest of the Turks. Still the Villehardouins long kept hold of Kalamata and other forts; and to the pen of one of the family, Geoffrey, we owe the famous old chronicle La Conquête de Constantinople, which is unique in its importance both as a specimen of old French and a piece of mediæval history.
The architecture of Mistra, begun at a noble epoch by the Latins, was taken up by the Byzantine Greeks, so that we have both styles combined in curious relics of the now deserted stronghold. For, since 1850, when an earthquake shook down many houses, the population wandered to the revived Sparta, which is now a thriving town. But as the old Sparta in its greatest days was only a collection of shabby villages, showing no outward sign of its importance, so the new and vulgar Sparta has no attractions (save the lovely orange and lemon orchards round it) in comparison with the mediæval Mistra. The houses are piled one above another till you reach the summit crowned by the citadel which, itself a mountain, is severed from the higher mountains at its back by a deep gorge with a tumbling [pg 504]river. “The whole town is now nothing but ruined palaces, churches, and houses. You wander up rudely-paved streets rising zigzag, and pass beneath arches on which are carved the escutcheons of French knights. You enter courts overgrown with grass, but full of memories of the Crusaders. It is the very home of the Middle Ages. Passing through these streets, now the resort of lizards and serpents, you come upon Frankish tombs, among others that of Theodora Tocco, wife of the Emperor Constantine Palæologus, who died in 1430. The Panagia is the only church well preserved—a Latin basilica, with a portico in the form of an Italian loggia, and a Byzantine tower added to it. This building is highly ornamented with delicate carving, and its walls are in alternate courses of brick and stone, while the gates, columns, and floor are of marble. The interior is adorned with Byzantine frescoes of scenes from the Old Testament. Higher up is the metropolitan church, built by the Greeks as soon as William Villehardouin had surrendered the fort in 1263. This great church is not so beautiful as that already described, but has many peculiarities of no less interest. The palace of the Frank princes was probably at the wide place on a higher level, where the ruined walls show the remains of many Gothic windows. The citadel was first rehandled by the Greek Palæologi, then by the Turks, then by the Venetians, who in their turn seized this mediæval [pg 505]‘Fetter of Greece.’ And now all the traces of all these conquerors are lying together confused in silence and decay. The heat of the sun in these narrow and stony streets, with their high walls, is intense. But you cannot but pause when you find in turn old Greek carving, Byzantine dedications, Roman inscriptions, Frankish devices, emblazoned on the walls. The Turkish baths alone are intact, and have resisted both weather and earthquake. But the churches occupy the chief place still, dropping now and then a stone, as it were a monumental tear for their glorious past; the Greek Cross, the Latin Cross, the Crescent, have all ruled there in their turn. Even a pair of ruined minarets remain to show the traces of that slavery to which the people were subject for four hundred years.”
The occupation of the Frankish knights had not found an adequate historian, since old Villehardouin, till Gregorovius wrote his Mediæval Athens. The traveller still sees throughout Greece frequent traces of this short domination, but all of one sort—the ruins of castles which the knights had built to overawe their subjects, and of which Mistra was perhaps the most important. The same invaders built the great towers at Kalamata, and most picturesque of all is the keep over the town of Karytena in Arcadia, the stronghold of Hugo de Bruyères. But the Frankish devices which adorned these castles have been mostly torn down by the Turks, or re[pg 506]placed by the Venetian lion, according as new invaders turned the fortifications of their predecessors to their own uses. Nor are any of these castles to be compared in size or splendor with those of northern Europe. The most famous of them, the palace at Thebes, was so completely destroyed by the Catalans, that all vestige of it has disappeared, and we owe our knowledge of it to the description of the Catalan annalist, Ramon Muntaner, who tells of the ravages of his fellows not without some stings of his æsthetic conscience.
But let us pass from these complex ruins, which speak the conflict of the East and West, to the peculiar quiet homes of the Greek monk, who spends his time not in works of charity, not in labors of erudition, not in the toil of education, like his western brother, but simply in performing an arduous and exacting ritual, in praying, or rather in repeating prayers, so many hours in the day, in observing fasts and vigils, above all in maintaining the strict creed which has given the title of orthodox to his Church. These resting-places (μόνη is the suggestive word) are of course settled in quiet regions, in the mountains, upon the islands, so that we cannot expect them near a stirring capital like Athens. Yet in the gorge of the defile which leads up to Phyle there is a little skete (the house of ascetics) lonely and wild in site; and by the sea on Salamis, nearly over against Megara, the traveller [pg 507]will find a small but very characteristic specimen of the Greek monastery, the Panagia Phæneromené.
There he will see the tiny cells, and the library, almost as small as any of them, at the top of dark stairs, and containing some twenty volumes; he will be received by the Hegoumenos with mastic and jam, and then with coffee, and strive to satisfy the simple curiosity of the old men, who seem so anxious to hear about the world, and yet have turned away their eyes from seeing it. Above all, he will find in the midst of the enclosure a little model Byzantine Church, built with the greatest neatness, of narrow bricks, in which string courses and crosses are introduced by an altered setting of the bricks. Here too he will see the curious practice, which led to marble imitations at Venice, of ornamenting the walls by building in green and blue pottery—apparently old Rhodian ware, for it is not now to be found in use. It is a simpler form of the decoration already described in the Cathedral of Athens, that of ornamenting a wall with foreign objects symmetrically disposed, and no one who sees it will say that it is inartistic. Within are the usual ornaments of the Byzantine Church, but not in mosaic; for all the walls are covered with frescoes by a monk of the early eighteenth century, a genius in his way, though following strictly the traditions of the school of Athos. The traveller who ascends the pulpit will thence see himself surrounded by very [pg 508]strange pictures—over the west door, as is prescribed, the Last Judgment, with the sins of men being weighed in a huge balance, and devils underneath trying to pull down the fatal scale. The condemned are escorted by demons to an enormous mouth breathing out flames—the mouth of hell. Beatitudes and tortures supply the top and bottom of the composition. Even more quaint is the miracle of the swine of the Gadarenes running down a steep place into the sea. They are drowning in the waves, and on the head or back of each is a little black devil trying to save himself from sinking. Similar creatures are escaping from the statues of heathen gods which tumble from the walls as the infant Jesus passes by on his flight to Egypt. This points to the belief that the statues of heathen gods were inhabited by an evil spirit, and so far actually bodies with souls within them!
These few details are sufficient to tempt the reader to visit this monastery, which is far better worth seeing than the beautifully situated and hospitable Vourkano described elsewhere in this work. I have no space to speak of Megaspilion, for this book must be kept within handy limits, and can never aspire to even approximate completeness. So also will I here pass by with a mere mention the eyries of Meteora in Thessaly, perched upon strange pinnacles of rock, like S. Simeon upon his pillar. The approach to, and descent from, these monasteries in a swinging [pg 509]net is indeed a strange adventure to undergo, and more painfully unpleasant than most such adventures, but at the top there is little of interest. The hoards of precious MSS. which Curzon describes in his delightful volume, over which the monks quarrelled when he offered gold, and would not sell them because none would allow his brother to enjoy the money—these splendid illuminated books have either been cozened away by antiquarians, or are gathered in the University Library at Athens. They are there in their right place. I understand the peaks of Meteora, when the present occupants die out, are to receive not holy men, but criminals, who are to suffer their solitary confinement not in dungeons beneath the earth, but far above the haunts of men.
But all these monastic settlements pale into insignificance when we turn to Mount Athos, the real Holy of Holies of the Greek Church, which is indeed far from the kingdom of Greece, and therefore beyond the scope of this work, and yet a chapter on the mediævalism of Eastern Europe can hardly be written without some consideration of this strange promontory, in its beauty surpassing all description, in its history unique both for early progress and for subsequent unchangeableness, in its daily life a faithful mirror of long past centuries, even as its buildings are now mediæval castles inhabited by mediæval men. I will here set down the impressions, from a visit made in 1889, not merely of the art, but of the [pg 510]life of this, the most distinctive as well as the largest example of Greek monasticism.
Velificatus Athos is an expression which has a meaning even now, though a very different one from that implied by Juvenal. The satirist would not believe that Xerxes turned it into an island, though the remains of the canal are plainly visible to the present day. But now the incompetence of the Turkish Government has turned Athos, for English travellers, into an island, for it may only be approached by sea. If you attempt to ride there from Salonica or Cavalla, you are at once warned that you do so at your own risk; that the tariff now fixed by a joint commission of Turks, dragomans, and bandits for the release of an English captive is £15,000; that you will have to pay that sum yourself, etc. etc. This is enough to drive any respectable and responsible person from the enterprise of the land journey, and so he must wait for the rare and irregular chances of boat or steamer traffic. It was my good fortune to find one of H. M.’s ships going that way from Salonica, and with a captain gracious enough to drop me on the headland, or rather to throw me up on it, for we landed in a heavy sea, with considerable risk and danger, and the τρικυμία, as they classically call it, lasted all day, and raged around the Holy Mountain. Yet this adventurous way of landing under the great western cliffs of the promontory, with the monasteries of S. Paul, Gregory, [pg 511]and Dionysius, each on their several peaks, looking down upon us from a dizzy height through the stormy mists, was doubtless far the most picturesque introduction we could have had to the long-promised land.
For this had been many years my desire, not only to see the strangest and most perfect relic now extant of mediæval superstition, but to find, if possible, in the early MSS. which throng the libraries of that famous retreat some cousin, if not some uncle or aunt of the great illuminated MSS. which are the glory of the early Irish Church. The other travellers who have reached this place have done so by arriving at some legitimate port on the tamer eastern side; the latest, Mr. Riley,[186] by landing at the gentlest and most humane spot of all, the bay of Vatopédi. We, on the contrary, crept into a little boat-harbor under the strictest, the most primitive, and far the most beautiful of the western eagles’ nests, whither English pickles, tinned lobster, and caviare have not yet penetrated. We were doing a very informal and unceremonious thing, for we were invading the outlying settlements, to demand shelter and hospitality, whereas we should have first of all proceeded to the capital, Karyes, to present pompous letters of introduction from Papas, Prime Ministers, Patriarchs, and to receive equally elaborate [pg 512]missives from the central committee, asking the several monasteries to entertain us.