“The picturesque beauties of the place had such a powerful attraction for him that he was induced to hazard a longer visit, until his fears having been calmed by my own experience, and that of the Joanninites in general, he prolonged his stay for six weeks. The longer he remained the more he was impressed with the feeling that in the great sources of his art, the sublime and beautiful, and in their exquisite mixture and contrast, Joannina exceeds every place he had seen in Italy or Greece.”
It is a pity that the pictures which Lusieri painted here were lost at sea.
The exit from this place, where tourists are never seen and where newspapers are strictly prohibited, into the Greek world of talk and bustle was as interesting as the approach to it. Our road lay over the great pass of the Pindos into Thessaly, the pass over which Julius Cæsar led his army, when he was about to grapple with Pompey. For the first day’s ride the Arachthos was our road. We crossed it more than twenty times, when it was a credit to our horses not to be carried down the stream. Of course, keeping one’s feet entirely out of the water was impossible. At last we came to the end of that day’s journey, where the stream had dwindled to a harmless looking brook at the Wallachian town of Metzovo. These Wallachians, especially the women, look entirely different from the people round about. They talk a sort of Latin and are supposed to be a remnant of the old Roman colony of Dacia. The quaint old town, where this curious old people is wedged in among other peoples, is within two hours of the backbone of Pindos, over which we passed the next morning. Within an area of a few square miles here nearly all the rivers of Greece that flow all the year round have their head waters.
It was with something of a feeling of exaltation that we left our Turkish guards behind at the ridge of Pindos and soon found ourselves tracing the ever-widening streamlet, which was soon to become the broad Peneios, down into the land of the Greeks, not only of Greek gods and heroes of the past, but of the Greek men of to-day, who have at last here inherited what their fathers possessed.
THE BICYCLE IN GREECE
It has been repeatedly suggested to me, by the regrets of a considerable number of the members of the American School at Athens, that I should give some public expression to the utility of the bicycle in Greece. I put aside certain temptations to praise the bicycle generally, and speak of it only as a help here in the study of archæology.
Every year men come to us saying: “I left my wheel at home, thinking it would be of little use in this rough country.” After some reflection on the difficulty of having it sent over after them, they rent wheels a few times, after which, deterred partly by the awkwardness of having to hunt up a wheel for every little excursion, and partly by suffering from the poorer quality of wheels that are to be had on loan, they drop the habit of bicycling. But the wheel has been so keenly appreciated here by generations of students that this dropping out is to be very much deprecated. Archæology does not consist entirely in the study of books and museums. That it does largely so consist it must be confessed; but a legitimate and important part of Greek archæology is the knowledge of the face of the country; the tracing out of its ancient routes, going over the passes and climbing now and then a mountain; the skirting its coasts; the visiting its places of great renown; the studying of its battle-fields; and the seeing of the landscapes on which rested the eyes of Pericles and Epaminondas, of Sophocles and Pindar. Especially important is this for one who has but one year to spend in Greece. It is well for him, even at the expense of some time which might well be spent in the museum or in the library, so to fill his mind with the landscapes of Greece that, when he goes back and stands before his classes and speaks, for example, of Leuctra, he may be looking with the mind’s eye upon the slopes down which the Spartans came charging, the opposite slope where the Thebans stood, and the valley between, where they clashed. The class is then sure to catch some of this vivid presentation, and feel that they have almost seen Leuctra themselves. If, then, one should spend the whole of his year in museums and libraries, we might say to him, “This ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone.”
Granted that one wishes to see the country and to become familiar with it, so that he will read Greek history, and Greek poetry, too, with other eyes, the bicycle becomes evidently indispensable. To take an example: One morning, to shake off a headache incurred by sitting too long in a close room at an invaluable meeting of the German School the night before, I bicycled with a member of our school, who had never been there before, to Liopesi (Pæania), the birthplace of Demosthenes, stayed long enough to chat with the villagers and take a glass of their resined wine, with which one is supposed to drink in the gift of talking modern Greek, and came back to Athens, all in three hours, taking it very leisurely at that, and returning by a roundabout way, reached home full of oxygen and sans headache. We might have walked, to be sure, but not to Pæania, unless we had given the whole day to it.
Railroads will take you already to many parts of Greece, and one can now proceed by rail from the northern border of Thessaly to Kalamata at the southern end of Messenia. But even railroads cannot do all for us that the bicycle does. Exercise, open air, and, perhaps more than all, the delight in propelling one’s self, will make one prefer the wheel. We can reach Eleusis by bicycle as quickly as the train takes us, and choose our own time for starting, without the alternative of sitting some time at the station or losing the train.