The Turk and his lost provinces

by William Eleroy Curtis

In the center of the village is an enormous plane-tree, which shades a triangular market-place. Several men were sipping coffee at little tables and babbling children were playing around them who evidently did not realize the historical sanctity of their surroundings.

Old Corinth has as much interest for religious people as for archeologists and historians, for it is closely associated with the missionary work of St. Paul. In the year 51, in company with Luke the Evangelist, he visited Macedonia—where Miss Stone was captured by brigands. At Philippi he was scourged, imprisoned and put into the stocks. There was an earthquake while he was in prison and he converted the jailer. Having frightened the officials by telling them that he was a Roman, they permitted him to depart, and he sailed to Athens, where he preached an eloquent sermon from Mars Hill. Then he came to Corinth, lodged at the house of Gaius, and found Aquila and Priscilla, and there Silas and Timotheus joined him. He lived at Corinth a year and a half, and there wrote his first epistle to the Thessalonians, which he sent by the hand of Timotheus. He was then brought before Gallio, the proconsul, a brother of Seneca, the great philosopher, who was prime minister for the Emperor Nero, at Rome, at that time. After this he “tarried there yet a good while” before returning to Syria and Jerusalem. Six years later he visited Corinth again, “and there abode three months” at the house of Gaius, where he wrote his epistles to the Romans and Galatians, after which he returned again to Jerusalem and then made his fatal journey to Rome.

Timotheus was left in charge of the church at Corinth, and when Paul sent him there he said: “Let no man despise him.” It would be interesting to know the places in Corinth where Paul lived and preached, and perhaps American shovels may yet discover some evidences of his life there, although beyond his own testimony we know nothing about it. The lintel of the Jewish synagogue has been found already by the American excavations.

XVI
MODERN ATHENS

Modern Athens is a city of marble. Many of the dwellings and business houses and nearly all the public edifices are of that material, and even the sidewalks on some of the streets are paved with it. Upon the bosom of Mount Pentelikos are two great gashes which can be seen for many miles. One of them is the quarry from which was hewn the marble for the Parthenon, the Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of Theseus and other famous structures of ancient Athens. The other wound was made in modern times, and shows the source of the material of which the present city of Athens was built. The authorities have protected the old quarry for historical and archeological reasons, and nothing has been taken from it for several centuries. The other quarry is just as good. The stone is easily cut and removed, and, although the grain is not so fine as the Parian marble from the quarries in southern Greece, it is equal to that from the famous Carrara quarries of Italy, and costs much less. I was wondering why some enterprising American did not build a railway to the quarry from Piræus, the seaport of Athens, so as to export the marble, for none is exported now. It need be only about eighteen miles long, not counting the curves necessary to make the grade, and it could be run on the gravity principle.

MODERN ATHENS Royal Palace

The use of marble and white stucco gives modern Athens an appearance of neatness and beauty which there is no soot to deface. The dust is very bad, however, when the wind blows. The streets are unpaved and the soil is a clay that moistens into mud or dries into dust very readily, and a waiter always stands at the door of the hotel with a feather duster to brush off your boots. One of the streets is named in honor of Æolus, the god of the winds, but he does not confine his attentions to that thoroughfare. In the old part of Athens is a well-preserved octagonal structure of marble called the Tower of the Winds, and one might suppose that it was the place where they originated, but the name seems to have been given merely because it was surmounted by a weather-vane. The tower was built about a hundred years before Christ by Andronicus of Syria, so an inscription tells us, as a compliment to the city of Athens, and was adorned with a sun-dial and a clock that was run by water-power in some ingenious manner; but the exact plan of its operation is not understood by modern mortals. An aqueduct supplied a cistern and the cistern fed machinery too complicated for modern horologists to comprehend.

The streets leading east from the Tower of the Winds enter a depression in the side of a hill, inclosed by a wall which was formerly the site of a school called the Diogeneion, supposed to have been founded by Diogenes, the famous cynic in the third century before Christ.

The palace of the king is an ugly modern structure, of which a nation with the taste of the Greeks ought to be ashamed. It looks like a factory, but the other public buildings are so imposing and appropriate, particularly a group of three—the university, the Academy of Sciences and the library—that they more than offset the atrocity in which the king resides. I doubt if there is a more beautiful combination of buildings in all the world. The academy, designed by a Vienna architect, is asserted to be the purest example of the classic school that has arisen in modern times. The surroundings are appropriate, and the entire street, called University Street, is worthy of the artistic traditions of the Athenians, as well as the spirit of modern enterprise.