Everything nautical has to do with St. Nicholas; in Mykenos a little church built on a rock out in the harbor is dedicated to him; another on the sea shore at Paros is dedicated to Ἅγιος Νικόλαος Θαλασσίτης; his picture, or εἰκὼν is painted on the inside of crabs’ backs, which are gilded outside and worshipped. In nautical songs St. Nicholas is always alluded to as the inventor of the rudder, and is represented as seated at the helm, whilst Christ sits at the prow and the Virgin in the middle. In a storm sailors call on him for assistance, as the ancients did on the Dioscouri, whom they thought to have power to allay storms direct from Poseidon himself.
We always find St. Dionysius as the successor of Dionysos in the Christian ritual. The island of Naxos was a chief centre of the worship of the wine-loving god in antiquity; and a fable about St. Dionysius, still told in the islands and on the mainland, clearly points to the continuity of the myth. It is as follows:—
St. Dionysius was on his way one day from his monastery on Mount Olympus to Naxos, and he sat down to rest during the heat of the day. Close to him he saw a pretty plant which he wished to take with him, and, lest it should wither by the way, he put it into the leg bone of a bird, and to his surprise at his next halting-place he found it had sprouted; so, accordingly, he put it into the leg bone of a lion, and the same thing occurred; finally, he put it into the leg of an ass, and in reaching Naxos he found the plant so rooted in the bones that he planted them altogether. And up came a vine, from the fruit of which he made the first wine, a little of which made the saint sing like a bird, a little more made him strong as a lion, and yet a little more made him as foolish as an ass.
At Melos they have a curious feast which recalls a Bacchic revelry. Every landowner who wishes to plant a vineyard calls together, on a certain day, fifty or more men, when church is over; to these he gives a spade apiece, and slaughters some goats and fills skins with wine. Then they all start off together to their work, preceded by a standard-bearer holding a white banner. In the field they eat the food, drink the wine, and plant the vineyard, all in the space of one day, and return home again, most of them in a decided state of intoxication. This is followed by a dance and further revelry in front of the church, which doubtless the village priest will hallow with his presence. The Greeks, taken as a whole, are a sober race, but on certain occasions and festivals it is almost a religious duty to drink heavily. In the island of Paros there actually exists a church dedicated to the drunken St. George, whose feast-day is on the 3rd of November. The priest thereof, in answer to my inquiries about this strange name, remarked that the 3rd of November is the anniversary of St. George’s burial, and then the inhabitants usually tap their new-made wine and get drunk; but why they should on such a solemn occasion speak of Ἅγιος ΓἍοργιος μεθύστης I could not divine, unless we take into account the hereditary tendency of the Greeks to deify passions.
A curious instance of the survival of the mythical Titans I met at Chios, at the southern point of which island exists a colossal white rock; this the natives told me was a stone which Samson had once hurled against God, and it had fallen here. But of all the myths of antiquity which exist to-day none is more marked than the belief in Charon, the Styx, and Hades. In Thermià they believe that in Charon’s infernal kingdom are lamps which represent the life of men, and when each man’s lamp is extinguished for want of oil he will die.
A Greek peasant looks upon death quite differently from what a peasant of the western world is taught to believe. To him it is the end of all joy and gladness; the songs over his body (myriologues) speak of the black earth, the end of light and brilliancy. A popular Klephtic song on the death of Zedros, when read by the side of Sophocles’ description of the death of Ajax, shows how curiously alike are the ideas of death as painted in the two poems. Charon is still believed to be a white-haired old man with long and fearful nails, and in myriologues or lamentations, which are still of every-day occurrence in the islands, you actually hear of Charon’s caïque. He is now spoken of as Charos. I had been told that, in some parts of Greece they still put money on the mouth of a deceased person to pay the passage (ναὗλον). I sought in vain for instances of it in the islands; but one day, whilst attending a child’s funeral in a mountain village of Naxos, I saw a wax cross put on the childs’ mouth by the priest, and on inquiry I was told it was the ναὗλον, i.e., freight money—so completely has the Eastern Church incorporated into itself the ancient ideas.
In a popular song I have heard Charon spoken of as a “bird like unto a black swallow,” which compares curiously with the passage in the twenty-second Odyssey, where Athena is represented as sitting on the roof of the palace at Ithaca like a swallow, on the day of vengeance for Penelope’s suitors.
It will be apparent from the above remarks that at the time of the change of religion from paganism to Christianity, names were given to saints to supply wants felt by the abandonment of polytheism. There are many instances of this. For example, St. Eleutherius is the saint called upon by women in childbirth to deliver them; deaf people are recommended to consult St. Jacob (Ἄκουφος as he is called, κουφος—deaf), and in Lesbos I was told that St. Therapon could heal all manner of diseases. In the same way young married people who wish for a numerous progeny chose St. Polycarp as their patron saint, so that they may have many teeth in their house, as the saying goes (πολὺ 'δοντια 'στὸ σπίτι).
St. Charalambos is, however, the Æsculapius of modern days. He used to hold jurisdiction over the plague, and is represented as a hideous wizard, trampling under foot a serpent with smoke issuing out of its mouth; and in fever-stricken, marshy districts St. Charalambos still reigns supreme. In many places it is the custom on the outbreak of a pestilence for forty women to make a garment in one day, which is hung up in the saint’s church. For instance, at Zephyria, the mediæval capital of the island of Melos, which was abandoned altogether about twenty years ago as unfit to live in, I visited the ruins, and in the centre of them saw still standing the church of St. Charalambos, and an old man, who happened to be picking his olives there at the time, told me the history of the desolation, and the methods they used to resort to when he was young to rid the place of disease; how they used to bury heifers whole; and how they used to fasten up illnesses in a cauldron—that is to say, they wrote down the names of the various maladies on paper, and boiled them in a cauldron with some money and a cock in front of the shrine of the modern Æsculapius. But in vain; the town had to be abandoned, for it had been cursed by a priest, and never could hope to recover salubrity.
It is a very common custom for Greek peasants to pass the night in a church of St. Charalambos with a view to cure an ailment; at festivals too, near miraculous eikons, such as the one at Tenos, the invalids pass whole nights in the church, reminding one forcibly of that ridiculous scene in Aristophanes (Plut. vv. 655) when the priests stole the food from the invalids who were asleep in the temple of Æsculapius, and we can easily see in this custom a mild form of the ancient ἐγκοίμησις when the sick folks lay down in the skin of a newly killed ram in the churches, and in this luxurious couch awaited the inspiration of the divinity.