Vacation days in Greece

by Rufus B. Richardson

By pressing your way up through a part of the square miles of breast-high thistles about the theatre, you may reach the top of the hill from which Augustus looked down and saw his enemy apparently strong. The whole world for which he was about to grapple affords few scenes of greater beauty than that which lay before his eye.

The road over which our carriage proceeded was a testimonial that the Turks have been misrepresented by the traveller who said:

“It is a favorite idea with all barbarous princes that the badness of the roads adds considerably to the natural strength of their dominions. The Turks and Persians are undoubtedly of this opinion; the public highways are, therefore, neglected, and particularly so toward the frontiers.”

The road was being made into a good one, but as long stretches of it were covered with piles of dirt, and on a level three or four feet above the older parts, getting on was attended with difficulty. But the Turks could not be considered devoid of energy when they put so much work upon the road which everybody was then prophesying would in a few years pass into the hands of the Greeks. It may be that the “sick man” thought he might yet use that road for military operations which would trouble his southern neighbors. At any rate he did so.

Along the foot of the mountains which bound the plain of Ambrakia to the north, out from under the well-built road, copious fountains of clear, cold water gush, contributing to the river Luro, the ancient Charadros, which here overflows its banks far and wide; and a most luxuriant tangle of trees and vines, standing often in several inches of water, impenetrable as an Indian jungle, astonishes one accustomed to judge the vegetation of Greece by its eastern parts.

Our second day’s journey was up the gorge of the Luro to its sources, and then over a ridge into the plain of Joannina. For six hours we had one continuous vale of Tempe. One does not hear enough of this region. Who, for instance, ever hears of Rogus, a ruin which we passed toward evening on the first day? Yet here is an acropolis which one sees from a great distance—such an imposing affair that I supposed for a long time that it must be Ambrakia. There are remains of fine old Hellenic walls, on which stood Byzantine walls now badly crumbled. Leake supposes Rogus to be the ancient Charadra.

Along with us went a large family of Jews, seeking among the Turks a safer residence than the Ionian Islands, where just then the Jew was made very uncomfortable. As we halted at noon of the first day by a large oak-tree, on the shore of a brook, it was interesting to see groups, Christian, Jew, and Turk, taking their meals at quite an interval from one another, but all under the shade of the same tree. As we came into Joannina, the Jews were subjected to a searching examination, but we were not examined at all. We heard afterward that the father of this family was suspected of bringing a lot of letters, thus defrauding the Turkish Government of its postage fee.

But I have delayed so long over preliminaries that I can hardly be just to Joannina itself. In fact, to be just to Joannina one should write a book, and not an article. As one approaches the great plain and lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains, one feels that here, as now, must always have been the principal settlement of the whole region. The name Joannina (pronounced Yanina) appears in Byzantine annals as early as the ninth century, when mention is made of a bishop of Joannina about three hundred and fifty years after the last mention of a bishop of Dodona. Though not standing on the same site, it is the successor of Dodona. But its history is essentially Turkish. Perhaps its greatest distinction is that it was the capital of Ali Pasha, who, in the first twenty years of the present century, had established, by an energetic unscrupulousness which reminds one of Demosthenes’s picture of Philip of Macedon, a sovereignty practically independent of the Sultan, almost as large as the Sultan’s other European possessions. Ali had a sort of thirst for blood, which appears not to have belonged to Philip. The Greeks, however, seem to have forgiven him the slaughter of their fathers and mothers in deference to his genius, and to take a local pride in the monster. Most of the stories told about him are records of some murder or other. Most of the compliments which his satellites used to pay him turned on the idea that he was a good butcher. A place in the lake is still pointed out as the scene of the drowning of a dozen or so Greek women whose morals, forsooth, were not up to the high standard which Ali said he was going to set up. Some of them belonged to the best families in Joannina, and could not believe that Ali meant more than blackmail until the waters were closing over them, when they shrieked and grasped at the boat so wildly that the executioners had to become inhuman in order to carry out the commands of their lord.

But this Albanian Mussulman reckoned ill when he threw down the gauntlet to the Sultan. Retiring to an island in the lake, when he could no longer defend his capital, he was first stabbed treacherously in a parley in which he thought he was going to make terms with his master, and finally killed by shots fired through the floor from the room under that in which he had taken refuge. His head and those of his sons, who had not well supported their father in the struggle, were fastened up over the door of the Seraglio in Constantinople.