The Turk and his lost provinces

by William Eleroy Curtis

A YOUNG AND AN OLD CORINTHIAN

Old Corinth, that St. Paul visited three times and possibly four, and which was one of the most important, populous, immoral and enterprising cities of his day, is dead and buried. Buttercups and dandelions are growing upon its grave, as bright and cheerful as those that decorate the prairies of Kansas or the dooryards of New England. The Grecian buttercup is not so large nor so beautiful as that we found in Norway, but it gives one a home feeling to find it everywhere—a universal flower. New Corinth resembles Santa Fé and other of the adobe towns of New Mexico and Arizona. It is surrounded by clay cliffs, weatherworn into fantastic shapes like those of the Rio Grande valley, and the dust is deep in the unpaved streets. The same lean cattle, mangy dogs and half-naked children playing in the sunshine; the same diminutive donkeys, the modern “Greek slaves,” bearing burdens that hide their bodies and leave only their legs and ears exposed; the same mud fences and adobe walls that are found in New Mexico; the same bake-ovens beside the cabins, and women of similar features, wearing similar garments, picking the live stock out of the children’s hair. Crowds of men are sitting at tables in front of the cafés, drinking coffee and talking politics, and the same dilapidated vehicles that you see in the old Spanish-American settlements were waiting for our arrival at the railway station.

The town has a beautiful site, at the head of the gulf. The water has a deep-blue color, with opalescent tints upon the surface. It receded in ancient times and left a sandy beach upon which goats were browsing among old barrel-hoops, piles of rubbish and struggling weeds, and fishermen were leisurely mending their nets beside their boats, or in the shade of the little shanties in which they keep their implements. Modern Corinth is surrounded by mighty hills upon which shepherds were guarding sheep and cattle, and when storms come upon them they find shelter in the caves that the wind and the rain have burrowed in the clay cliffs. At the top of the highest hill, the Acro-Corinth, as it is called, is a medieval fortress erected by the Venetians when they possessed the country. It is surrounded by ruins of houses and temples from which the material to build the fort was taken. The view from the peak, famous even in antiquity, embraces a great part of the mountainous district on both sides of the Gulf of Corinth, which is spread out like a map around the observer. In ancient times a watch was always kept there to signal the approach of an enemy to the people of the towns and the farmers in the valley below.

The traveler who enters Greece from the west has a continuous view of Parnassus, which rears its snow-clad summit among less famous mountains upon the opposite side of the gulf, and beside it is the beautiful Helicon, the haunt of the Muses. In clear weather the Acropolis of Athens is visible, the pillars of the Parthenon and the glistening marble walls of the royal palace.

Near the base of Acro-Corinth is the remarkable spring of Pirene, which, according to mythology, gushed forth at a stroke of the hoof of Pegasus, and was bestowed on Sisyphus by the river god Asopus, in return for his having revealed the hiding-place of the owner’s daughter, Aegina, who had been carried off by Zeus. Near by are ruins of a barracks and several dismounted cannon.

In the golden age, four hundred years before Christ, old Corinth was the most splendid, luxurious and wealthy, the most frivolous and wicked of all the cities of Greece. It was a commercial metropolis, the Chicago of that period, a center and focus of financial affairs, and stood upon a plateau about six miles from the sea, upon the side of the hill called Acro-Corinth, looking down upon a narrow and beautiful inlet of blue water, between two ranges of mountains. The Gulf of Corinth is often compared to the fjords of Norway, but its surroundings are mild and modest beside their rugged grandeur. It bears a closer resemblance to the Bosphorus and to the Inland Sea of Japan.

The road which leads from the railway station at new Corinth to the ruins of the old city is exceptionally good for Greece. It rises with an almost imperceptible grade toward a group of seven majestic columns, the earliest examples of the Doric school of architecture extant, and one of the oldest and most precious monuments of the art, scholarship and religion of ancient Greece. They are deeply fluted monoliths, twenty-three and one-half feet high, five feet and eight inches in diameter at the base and four feet and three inches at the top, with projecting capitals and heavy entablature. They were once covered with enamel. Five of them are nearly perfect. The other two have been broken and the pieces are now held together by iron bands. All have been gnawed more or less by the tooth of time and show curious wounds, which look as if they had been cut with a chisel. These pillars are all that remain of the famous Temple of Apollo, the ideal of Doric architecture, the noblest, simplest and most natural of all the schools.

Unconscious of their artistic and archeological advantages, which students travel four thousand miles to enjoy, the Grecian peasants continue to plow the adjacent fields, and, the day that we rode through, groups of women with tucked-up skirts were breaking the earth with heavy hoes and heaping it around the roots of the currant bushes. Fields of winter wheat were vivid with tender shoots of green, and a fodder plant that resembles alfalfa was growing bravely on the other side of formidable fences built with stones stolen from the ruins of the old metropolis. Here and there is an old-fashioned threshing-floor, almost as venerable as the pillars of the temple, a circle thirty or forty feet in diameter, paved with smooth stones, upon which, after the harvest, the grain is separated from the stalk by driving hoofed cattle over it. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul recalled to them that pious injunction in Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn,” but he might have appealed to them also in behalf of the blindfolded donkeys that patiently follow the treadmills to fill the irrigation reservoirs so that the plants may live when the earth is dry.

Women were washing at the reservoirs and spreading the garments out upon the grass and cobble-stones to dry, and little children were amusing themselves with the same simple games that absorb the attention of childhood in America.