THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS
The national costume of the Greeks is taken from the Albanians, but it is much more honored in the breach than in the observance. Like all national costumes, it is only worn, except for political effect and before a camera, by the lower classes, and also by three regiments of the army. You see it in the streets, but it is not so universally popular as one would suppose from the pictures of Athens in the illustrated papers and by the photographs in the shop-windows. It is a most remarkable costume, and as widely different from the flowing robe and short skirt of the early Greeks as men in accordion petticoats and heavy white tights and a Zouave jacket must evidently be. In the country it still obtains, and it is the farmers and peasants and their wives and the soldiers who supply the picturesque element of dress to the streets of the city.
It is an inscrutable problem why, with all the national costumes in the world to choose and pick from, the world should have decided upon the dress of the Frank, that is, of the foreigner—ourselves. In Spain the peasants have discarded their knickerbockers and short jackets, even in the country, for the long trousers and ill-fitting ready-made clothing of a French "sweater," and the Moors cover their robes with overcoats from Manchester, and the Arabs and Chinese and Swiss and Turks are giving up the picturesque garments that are comfortable and becoming to them, and look exceedingly ugly and uncomfortable in our own modern garb, which is the ugliest and most uncomfortable of national costumes yet devised by men or tailors. If you judge by the uniforms of the army of officers and by the dress of the women of Athens, you would think you were in a French city and among French people. It seems a pity that this should be so; that Athens, of all cities, should be built of Italian villas, inhabited by people who ape the French, and governed by a King from Denmark; still, they did not make a success of it when they tried, fifty years ago, to govern themselves. It is perhaps hardly fair to expect the Greeks, or even the Athenians, to live up to the great rock and the monuments that crown it, and the people of Greece are no doubt as fine as those of other little kingdoms or principalities scattered about Europe; but then the other kingdoms and principalities have not the history of early Greece to call their own nor the Acropolis to look up to.
ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN
ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN