Vacation days in Greece

by Rufus B. Richardson

Now my work began anew; another mountain wall confronted me and the road, which as far as the border had been good, was freshly strewn with cracked stones, the bicyclist’s terror. When at last I reached the top of this second range, a sight worth seeing unfolded itself before my eye. All Montenegro, a mass of gray stone rising here and there into peaks, lay spread out before me. In the far northeast one could see the important hill fortress of Niksic, but no land anywhere appeared. In fact, all the soil in Montenegro, except in the southern part around Lake Skutari, is found in larger or smaller clefts of the rocks; Cettinje itself being simply one of the largest of these. Now it was downhill, and I abused my wheel shamefully, running it hard over the stones as the only way of accomplishing the journey. At about ten o’clock, just after feasting my eyes on the grand chain of snow-covered Illyrian mountains in the background, I turned a large cliff and looked down into a bowl five or ten times as large as that of Njegus, and saw at its farther end Cettinje, looking like a large German country village with roofs of red tiles. This is without doubt the most primitive capital of Europe. Words almost fail to express its plainness. But it is a place worth seeing, and after a reasonable halt I made haste to traverse in the blazing sun the two or three miles which lay between the rim of the bowl where I stood and the town.

It was some years since I had felt myself so out of the world as I did up there among the mountains and men of Slavic speech. I betook myself to a modest inn, Kraljevic Al Marco, for lunch. After wrestling to my satisfaction with Italian, I noticed that the landlady turned to her little boy and said something to him in Greek. Quick as a flash the ice was broken and we were talking Greek like lightning. It was a family of Greeks, the brother of the landlady being the interpreter at the Greek Consulate.

After an hour or two of rest they showed me about the town for awhile, after which I cut loose to see things for myself. What a plain town it is! The palace of the present sovereign, called the New Palace, is one of the few two-story buildings in the place, but even this has hardly any ornament except four pairs of attached Corinthian columns on each of the stories at the front side, and two pairs on each of the other sides. The so-called “Old Palace” is plainer than most modern jails. The one building of interest is the monastery, in which lies buried the ancestor of the ruling family, on whose sarcophagus the Montenegrins lay their hands and swear when they go out to battle to be good and true soldiers. And they have kept their oaths well. These Montenegrins are simply Servians who never bowed the knee to the Turks. It has occurred more than once or twice that a Turkish army has entered this land of rocks eighty thousand strong, sweeping everything before it, only to return decimated, if perchance it escaped destruction. There is a round tower in the rear of the monastery, on which the heads of Turks used to be nailed up.

It was good luck for me that my visit fell on Sunday, for the men were in their best dress. Dress did not make the man; the man was there to begin with. There was hardly an adult who did not measure over six feet; and they looked every inch a man. If there were only enough of them they would soon settle the Eastern question. Alexander III. of Russia knew how to value his “only faithful ally.” In contrast to the men, the women look like drudges. The male sex has really arrogated to itself all the beauty, a result that has come about from the fact that, while the men have for ages borne arms and ranged free, the women have been the tillers of the scanty soil as well as servants of all work. Men are the one product of Montenegro. The only product of the soil beyond the grain and potatoes, which afford scanty sustenance, is tobacco, which is good and cheap. There is a heavy duty on it in Austria, something like two hundred per cent.; everybody tries to smuggle it in, and the trick often succeeds.

The next day was the birthday of the Crown Prince, and when I made ready to depart my new friends said, “Of course you are going to stay to the great festival,” apparently thinking that that was what I came for. I asked if the young man himself was to be present, and they replied, “Oh! no.” "Then," said I, “I think I will not be present either.” So I got off at half-past two in a fierce heat, and by easy stages, meeting as I went several of my stalwart third-class fellow-passengers, I reached the Galatea in season for a good dinner.

On the way from Cattaro to Spalato the chief object of interest is Ragusa, a strongly fortified city of about twelve thousand inhabitants, which, after maintaining itself as a free republic until 1805, often leaning upon Venice the while, went in the next decade through great vicissitudes, being in 1811 annexed by Napoleon to the new “Kingdom of Illyria,” and in 1814 falling into the hands of Austria, so good at taking hold but so slow at letting go. But, after all that may be said of the land-greed of Austria, it has been no evil lot for Dalmatia to fall into her hands. Austria has inherited—let Professor Freeman turn over in his grave to hear it said—the rôle of Rome as road-builder, civilizer, and introducer of general prosperity along this coast. She is now pushing a network of railroads along the coast and up from the coast towns into the interior. Ragusa has a very Venetian look in its old part and a very nineteenth-century look in its new part. Its surroundings are almost as interesting as the city itself. On the lovely island Lacroma, hard by on the south, is a church founded by Richard Cœur de Lion. Somewhat farther off to the north, on the shore, lies Canosa, ever remembered by a spring of pure water shaded by two gigantic plane-trees forty feet in circumference, an enchanted spot. At or near Ragusa lay the Greek city Epidauros.

In this region might well be located the “Islands of the Blessed”; for here we begin to encounter islands by tens and dozens, large and small. The rest of the journey was dodging in and out among islands. We have lakes in America which boast their three hundred and sixty-five islands, one for each day in the year; but the Dalmatian islands are not to be counted by hundreds, but by thousands, if one were to count them at all. They are generally spoken of as innumerable. Geologists say that there has been here a subsidence of great strips of land, and that the sea has in some cases broken up the remaining strips into pieces of a size to suit itself, ranging from fifty rods to fifty miles in length. Here comes the infinite charm of sailing along the Dalmatian coast, this interlocking of sea and shore. No wonder that the Dalmatians are all sailors, wooers of the salt sea gale. I myself longed to get off the steamer and get into one of the numerous sailboats that were ploughing through the dashing waves.

Had the Galatea stopped as long at Spalato as it had at Cattaro, I should have been tempted to crowd my enjoyment of it into the same space; but she had now transformed herself into an express boat, bent on reaching Trieste in the shortest possible time. So, with some regret, I left my hospitable quarters on my floating home to trust myself to the welcome of an inn.

But little did I care for the inn. Within a quarter of an hour from the time when I left the steamer I was in the heart of one of the strangest cities of the world, threading my way through narrow winding streets, passing here and there a temple, generally embedded in some later building, running up against a continuous wall two or three stories high which I followed until I found a gate that would let me go through it; then I followed the outside of this wall until I found another gate that let me in again, when the maze again engulfed me. I was in the famous Palace of Diocletian.