Greece and the Ægean Islands

by Philip Sanford Marden

From the windows of the hotel the most conspicuous object in the middle distance was a picturesque islet in the midst of the bay, almost entirely covered by a yellow fort of diminutive size and Venetian appearance—the home of an interesting functionary, though a gruesome one; to wit, the national executioner. For Nauplia at the present day is above all else the Sing-Sing of Hellas,—the site of the national prison, where are confined the principal criminals of the kingdom, and more especially those who are under sentence of death. The medieval fortifications on the summit behind the town have been converted to the base uses of a jail, and are locally known as the Palamide. We did not make the ascent to the prison, although it cannot be a hard climb, but contented ourselves with purchasing the small wares that are vended by street dealers in the lower town,—strings of “conversation beads,” odd knives, and such like things, which you are assured were made by “brigands” confined in the prison above. Somehow a string of beads made by a Greek “brigand” seems a possession to be coveted.

“M. de Nauplia,” if that is the proper way of referring to the headsman, is a criminal himself. He is generally, and probably always, one who has been convicted of murder, but who has accepted the post of executioner as the price of escaping the extreme penalty of the law. It is no small price to pay, for while it saves the neck of the victim it means virtual exile during the term of the service, and aversion of all good people forever. We were told that the executioner at the time was a man who had indulged in a perfect carnival of homicide—so much so that in almost any other country he would have been deemed violently and irreclaimably insane and would have escaped death by confinement in an asylum. But not so he. Instead he was sentenced to a richly deserved beheading by the guillotine, and the penalty was only commuted by his agreement to assume the unwelcome task of dispatching others of his kind—an office carrying with it virtual solitary imprisonment for a term variously stated as from five to eight years, and coupled with lasting odium. For all those years he must live on the executioner’s island, unattended save by the corporal’s guard of soldiers from the fort, which guard is changed every day or two, lest the men be contaminated or corrupted into conniving at the prisoner’s escape. Others told us that the term of his sanguinary employ was as long as twenty-five years, but this was far greater than the average story set as his limit. On liberation, it is said to be the ordinary practice for these unhappy men to go abroad and seek spots where their condition is unknown. On days when death sentences are to be executed the headsman is conveyed with solemn military pomp to the Palamide prison above the city, and there in the prison yard the guillotine is found set up and waiting for the hand that releases its death-dealing knife. Whether or not the executioner is paid a stated pittance in any event, or whether, as we were told by some, he was paid so much “per head,” we never found out. Meantime the executioner’s island undeniably proves one of the features of Nauplia, quaint to see, and shrouded with a sort of awesome mystery.

The narrow streets of Nauplia furnished diversion for a short time. They proved to be fairly clean, and the morning hours revealed a picturesque array of barbaric colored blankets and rugs hung out of the upper balconies to air. In one street a dense throng about an open door drew attention to the morning session of the municipal court. The men roaming the streets were mainly in European dress, although here and there a peasant from the suburbs displayed his quaint capote and pomponed shoes. It was one of these native-garbed gentry who approached us with a grin and stated in excellent English, that sorted strangely with his Hellenic clothes, that he was once employed in an electric light plant in Cincinnati. Did he like it? Oh, yes! In fact, he was quite ready to go back there, where pay was better than in Nauplia. And with an expressive shrug and comprehensive gesture that took in the whole broad sweep of the ancient kingdom of the Atreidai, he added, “Argos is broke; no good!” One other such deserves mention, perhaps; one who broke in on a reverential reverie one day, as we were contemplating a Greek dance in a classic neighborhood, with some English that savored of the Bowery brand, informing us that he had been in America and had traveled all over that land of plenty in the peregrinations of Barnum’s circus, adding as a most convincing passport to our friendship, "I was wit' old man Barnum w'en he died." Greeks who speak English are plentiful in the Peloponnesus, and even those who make no other pretensions to knowledge of the tongue are proud of being able to say “all right” in response to labored efforts at pidgin Greek.

WOMAN SPINNING ON THE ROAD TO EPIDAURUS

It did not take long to exhaust the interest of the city of Nauplia itself, including a survey of the massive walls that survive from the Middle Ages. And it was fortunate, too, because we had planned to spend the day at Epidaurus, which lies eighteen miles or so away, and was to be reached only by a long and arduous ride in a carriage—the same highly respectable old landau in which we had ridden the length of Agamemnon’s kingdom the day before. Owing to the grade and the considerable solidity of our party a third horse was in some miraculous way attached by ropes to the carriage, the lunch was loaded in the hood forward, and we rattled away through the narrow streets toward the open country east of the town—a country that we soon discovered to be made up of narrow valleys winding among gray and treeless hills, whose height increased steadily as the highway wound along. It was a good highway—the distances being marked in “stadia,” as the Greek classically terms his kilometres, and the stadium posts constantly reminding us that this was an “Odos Ethniké,” or national road. But we missed sadly the large trees that are to be seen in the close neighborhood of the city as we jogged out on the dusty road in the heat of the increasing April day.

The grade, while not steep, was mainly upward through the long valleys, making the journey a matter of more than three hours under the most favorable of conditions; and the general sameness of the scenery made it a rather monotonous drive. Of human habitation there was almost none, for although here and there one might find a vineyard, the greater part of the adjacent land is little more than rocky pasture. It soon developed, however, that the modern Greek shepherd is not afraid to play his pipes at noonday through any fear of exciting the wrath or jealousy of Pan, as was once the case; for from the mountain-sides and from under the scanty shade of isolated olive trees we kept hearing the plaintive wailing of the pipes, faint and far away, where some tender of the flocks was beguiling the time in music. This distant piping is indescribable. The tone is hardly to be called shrill, for it is so only in the sense that its pitch is high like the ordinary human whistling; in quality it is a soft note, apparently following no particular tune but wavering up and down, and generally ending in a minor wail that soon grows pleasant to hear. Besides, it recalls the idyls of Theocritus, and the pastorals and bucolics take on a new meaning to anybody who has heard the music of the shepherd lads of Greece. Nothing would do but we must buy pipes and learn to play upon them; so a zealous inquiry was instituted among the wayfaring men we met, with a view to securing the same. It was not on this day, however, but on the next that we finally succeeded in buying what certainly looked like pipes, but which turned out to be delusions and snares so far as music was concerned. They were straight wooden tubes, in which holes had been burned out at regular intervals to form “stops” for varying the tone. No reed was inserted in them, and if they were to be played upon at all it must be by reason of a most accomplished “lip.” We derived considerable amusement from them, however, by attempting to reproduce on them the mellifluous whistling of the natives; but the nearest approach to awakening any sound at all which any of our party achieved was so lugubriously melancholy that he was solemnly enjoined and commanded never to try it again, on pain of being turned over to “M. de Nauplia” as the only fitting punishment. Later we found that the flute-like notes that we heard floating down over the vales from invisible shepherds came from a very different sort of wind instrument—a reed pipe of bamboo not unlike the American boy’s willow whistle, with six or seven stops bored out of the tube.

The wayfarers were decidedly the most interesting sights on the Epidaurus road. Several stadia out of Nauplia a stalwart man came striding down a hill from his flocks and took the road to town. He was dressed in the peasant garb, and across his shoulders he bore a yoke, from either end of which depended large yellow sacks containing freshly made cheese, the moisture draining through the meshes of the cloth as he walked along to market. These cheeses we had met with in the little markets at Athens and found not unpleasant, once one grows accustomed to the goat’s milk flavor and the “freshness;” although it is probable that a taste for Greek cheese, like that for the resinated wine, is an acquired one.

Groups of shepherds were encountered now and then, especially at the few points along the way where buildings and shade were to be found. They were all picturesque in their country dress, but more especially the women, who spin flax as they walk and who probably ply a trade as old as Hellenic civilization itself in about the same general way that their most remote ancestors plied it. These little knots of peasants readily enough posed for the camera, and were contented with a penny apiece for drink-money. Not the least curious feature of these peasant herdsmen was the type of crook carried—not the large, curved crook that the ordinary preconceived ideal pictures, but straight sticks with a queer little narrow quirk in the end, with which the shepherd catches the agile and elusive goat or lamb by the hind leg and thus holds it until he is able to seize the animal in some more suitable part. These herdsmen proved hospitable folk, ready enough with offers of milk fresh from the herd, which is esteemed a delicacy by them, whatever it might have seemed to our uneducated palates.