Vacation days in Greece

by Rufus B. Richardson

On a journey to Dodona, the year after this moonlight view, our steamer, in passing from Patras to Prevesa, put in at Bathy, officially called Ithaca, on the east side of the island; and I had just one hour ashore which was more tantalizing than satisfactory as far as studying the topography of Ithaca was concerned; and yet one may believe that he sees in the beautiful bay and harbor the very harbor of Phorkys, where Ulysses landed after his twenty years’ absence. The cave of the Nymphs, where the jolly Phæacians laid him asleep with his treasures about him was not visible; but we were told that this is now farther up the hill.

After an interval of several years, in which I had passed Ithaca several times in the night, I set foot on it again in a more satisfactory fashion. Taking refuge from the August heat of Athens in the Ionian Islands, I was spending a few days in Argostoli, the chief town of Kephallenia, and seized this opportunity to approach Ithaca from the back side, so to speak. A drive of four hours brought us clear across from the west side of Kephallenia to Samos on the east side, over the high backbone of the island. During the last hour of the journey, the descent, as “the sun was setting, and all the ways were growing shady,” our eyes were fastened upon Ithaca lying peacefully in the bosom of Kephallenia—a beautiful sight.

As we had planned for only one day in Ithaca, we determined to make it a long one, and started from Samos in a sail-boat at half-past two in the morning; but, although the sail was filled most of the time, so gentle was the breeze that, even supplemented by the work of the oars, it did not bring us to Ithaca until half-past five. My boy of twelve years, companion of many of my wanderings in Greece, was asleep most of the way, but broke the parallel with Ulysses by waking up when the keel touched the shore.

We landed at the foot of Mount Aëtos, on the top of which Gell and Schliemann place the city of Ulysses, but deferred climbing this until we might see whether our time and strength held out, and pushed at once for our main goal, some ruins near Stauros, at the northern end of the island, nine or ten miles distant. We followed all the way, with an occasional cut-off, the fine carriage road made by the English, to whose occupation the Ionian Islands owe most of their good roads, notably the one on which we had crossed from Argostoli to Samos, which required much difficult and expensive engineering. The road crossed the backbone of Ithaca twice at points where this is somewhat low; but in the last seven miles it followed the western shore about half way up the steep slope which runs down into the sea, leaving almost no strip of level coast. In fact, Ithaca smiles in very few spots, being nearly all mountain, just the country to get attached to. Ulysses naturally enough calls it “rugged, but a good bringer-up of boys,” and adds: “I never could find anything sweeter than my native land.” In one respect it is doubtless somewhat changed. As we passed along the foot of the principal mountain of the island, a bare height of over 2,600 feet, I asked a peasant its name, and was glad to hear him answer “Neriton.” But this is now as undeserving of its constant Homeric epithet of “leaf-shaking” as is Zakynthos of its epithet of “woody.” The denudation of the Greek mountains is a sad theme, and is most strikingly illustrated in the Ionian Islands. Mount Aenos, over 5,000 feet high, on Kephallenia, had until about the beginning of the present century its slopes covered with large pines, which were known in all the world as Abies cephalonica. But at that time a destructive fire swept away nearly half of this treasure; and two years ago about one-third of the remainder went in the same way. What has occurred here goes on every summer all over Greece; but the loss is in no case so conspicuous as in this. I have seen Pentelicus burning for three days—a brilliant illumination for Athens—and, in sailing from Poros to Nauplia in midsummer, I counted twenty-six fires on the mountains of Peloponnesus; but all these could do nothing more in the way of damage than to help on a little the aridity into which Attica and the Argolid are helplessly sinking. Where it scarcely ever rains during six months of the year, the grass and weeds become like tinder, and a fire once started from some shepherd’s carelessness is difficult to stop.

Water was rather scanty on our road, and what we got came from cisterns. Springs are, indeed, rare in Ithaca. But when we came to the famous spring Melanhydro (Blackwater), near Stauros, in the hope of finding something fine, we found the water not only warm, but having three-quarters of a very ripe tomato in it, as well as pieces of a big cactus stalk, and rather full of little pollywogs besides. The proper care of springs is something which the Greeks do not seem to appreciate. I have seen the famous spring Pirene on Acro-Corinth treated even worse than this.

But if the water which we needed for our eighteen-mile walk in the August sun was bad, we found consolation in grapes. I suspect, though I cannot verify it from actual weighing, that my regular allowance of grapes in an August or September day’s walk in Greece is ten pounds. One rarely pays anything for these, inasmuch as they are much cheaper than New England huckleberries. While it is considered contra bonos mores to take them without asking, peasants seem always glad to give them. On the hottest part of the return journey, as we stopped at a house and asked for grapes, the man of the house said that his vineyard was two kilometres distant, but insisted upon going to it at once. This I could not allow, whereupon, in spite of my protests, he got upon the very top round of a rickety ladder, leaning against the wall of his house, and, at the risk of his neck, pulled down from a vine running over a high trellis two clusters which he feared were not ripe, as proved to be the case. In the meantime his wife had been with great difficulty restrained from setting before us eggs, bread, and cheese, which we refused on the ground that we had just eaten. To be strictly truthful, I ought to state that, not being enough used to the Greek language to discriminate fine shades of meaning, I am not sure but that the man meant to send his wife the two kilometres in question. Greek custom would incline me to this supposition.

Although Ithaca is noted for its hospitality, this treatment is not mentioned as an isolated, but as a typical case of Greek hospitality. I doubt whether there is any people so hospitable as the Greek. The longer I live here and the more I travel about, the more I am impressed with this hospitality. It is not only on this rugged island where men live by “wresting little dues of wheat and wine and oil,” “an ill-used race of men,” one might be tempted to call them, that the stranger at the gate must come in and have the best that the house affords; at Platæa, six years ago one November night, a house-holder received the American School at Athens, carrying more mud on their persons than it is often the lot of four men to carry, into the only room in his house which had a fire, turning out his family, who were evidently enjoying it, to pass the night in a colder room. And they seemed to take it as a matter of course.

But I have wandered from our goal. I had expected to find in the remains near Stauros corroboration of my belief that here lay the Homeric city. For I had long supposed, with Leake of the older topographers, and Bursian, Partsch, and Lolling of the later ones, that it must be here. Here are massive walls, rock-cut steps, ancient cisterns, and the niches in the rock passing under the name of the “School of Homer.” But at the close of the day, in order not to be unjust to the dissenters, I climbed Aëtos, and saw that the walls there, resembling those of Tiryns, had about as good claim as those at Stauros to be regarded as those of a Homeric fortress. The question where the Odyssey locates the city is not at present to be decided by remains, but by certain other indications which seem to point to the region of Stauros.

The suitors of Penelope, who wished to kill Telemachus on his return from “Sandy Pylos,” lay in wait for him on an island called Asteris, “midway between Ithaca and rugged Samos.” Opposite the northern end of the island, though much nearer to Samos (Kephallenia) than to Ithaca, is the only island in the whole strait, needing to be magnified a good deal to suit the story of the Odyssey; but what poet ever denied himself the right to magnify? And looking toward this little island is the only harbor on this (western) side of Ithaca, a deep indentation running far into the land, now called “Polis Bay,” a reminiscence of the fact that a city once stood here. This name is a genuine survival from old times, and not a revamping of a classical name, as is the case with Mount Neriton. About this bay and up as far as Stauros, and even farther to the west and north, is the main smiling spot of the island. It was autopsy that I wanted more than anything else; and, as I stood on the rocks near Homer’s school, autopsy forced upon me the conviction that here, and here only, must have been the important city of the island, the city from which the faithful Paladin of Agamemnon ruled not only Ithaca but also Kephallenia. Here, amid the remains of an ancient settlement, one looks into three harbors about equally distant, Polis on the west side of the island, a broader one on the east side, now called Phrikes, in which we saw a good-sized vessel anchored, and on the north end one still more capacious, probably the Reithron of the Odyssey. The situation was well adapted to a city ruling the island and possessing easy communication with the coast, east and west.