To-day the gates stood hospitably open, to welcome the people who came and went unchallenged through them, wearing their holiday faces and bearing their burden of bloom and green—lotus flowers for the altars, and rushes to scatter on the steps before them—pausing before they entered the sacred precincts to lave their hands in the 'Fountain of Ablution.'
It was truly a festa of the people, and the Cyprian peasants who were a gentle, superstitious, ignorant race, devoutly subject to their priests and trained to the letter of their religious rites, came in from the mountains and the neighboring villages in numbers but rarely seen in the city: a motley throng—yet no shepherd among them was too poor to wear the boot of dark-green leather reaching to the knee—the bodine roughly fashioned and tough enough to protect them from the bites of the serpents which infested the island.
Here and there some shepherd was leading with pardonable pride a sheep who gave a more than usual promise of fine wool, its extraordinary tail, bushy with soft long fleece, carefully spread out on the tiny cart to which it was harnessed for its own protection. It came, meek-eyed and wondering, if a little weary, to this festa of San Triphilio, to whom its first shearing would be vowed, as a special tribute to the saint and a talisman to shield the flocks upon the mountains.
The shepherd might draw himself away, perchance, with a mingling of caste-feeling and of superstition, from some poorer villager of the sect of the "Linobambaki"—a dark, unkempt figure, with his scarlet fez, his string of undressed poultry hanging from his shoulder, even on this day of festa when the saints give all good Christians holiday! But he, poor man, was neither Christian nor pagan—a wonder that the good Lord made him so!—(expressed with devout crossing and genuflexion)—and he would sell a fowl on a holiday for the asking and the few copper carcie that it would bring him, as though he were quite all Mussulman and not half Christian, as his contemptuous nickname signified—a mixture of royal linen and plebeian cotton! His touch might well defile the sacred sheep!
Here was a picturesque peasant-priest from the province of Ormidia, who had left his work in the fields and was moving among the crowd with a slow dignity of motion and the mien of some antique statue—with sheep-skin garments of no shape, nor fashion, nor color, to mark his date—his hair flowing in loose waves to the throat, from under the high, conical hat, his full curling beard and moustache obscuring the lines of the face and intensifying its impassiveness—only in the eyes, without curiosity, a mild look of question at the strangeness of the ways and sights of cities—such as some shepherd-god might wear,—reserving judgment.
To-day, also, some stray brother of the lower order of the Knights Hospitallers might be seen among the throng,—a white star, eight pointed on the breast of the black gown with which in early ages he had been invested by the Patriarch of Jerusalem: and near him some Crusader, with the red cross on his silver mail.
The burghers, too, were abroad in the arcades of the streets of Nikosia, gathering in groups before the Palazzo Reale which had been the residence of the kings of the island until Janus had removed his capital to Famagosta.
But Nikosia had always been a cradle of loyalty in spite of a floating population of strangers who came thronging to visit her monuments and palaces—to see the wonder of her merchandise gathered from the riches of her own fertile land—fruits and wines and silks and jewels, broideries of gold and silver wrought by her peasant women among their vines—exquisite vessels of beaten copper from the famous mines which had baptised this island of Cyprus. But there were carpets also from Persia, and fabulous Eastern stuffs—linens from Egypt, gossamer-fine; and carvings of ivory and gold, and drugs and spices from Arabia. There were slaves too—most fair to look upon—everything that might minister to the luxury of a great city, as there were churches, of many religions, and altars to many saints.
Suddenly a troop of horsemen dashed rapidly through the open gates and into the heart of the city among all the loitering holiday-wanderers, rousing them to instant strenuousness.