ZANTE--COLONEL CHURCH--LEAVES ZANTE TO MAKE TOUR OF THE MOREA--OLYMPIA
--BASSÆ--DISCOVERY OF BAS-RELIEFS--FORCED TO DESIST FROM EXCAVATIONS.
"Hitherto we had had an anxious time, but once they were landed we felt
at ease about the marbles. Henceforth the business is in Gropius' hands.
The auction has been announced in English and continental papers to take
place in Zante on November 1, 1812. It took us some time to install
them, and altogether we passed an odious fortnight on the island. The
Zantiotes, as they have been more under Western influence--for Zante
belonged to Venice for about three centuries--are detestable. They are
much less ignorant than the rest of the Greeks, but their half-knowledge
only makes them the more hateful. Until the island was taken in hand by
the English, murder was of constant occurrence, and so long as a small
sum of money was paid to the proveditor no notice was taken of it. For
accomplishing it without bloodshed they had a special method of their
own. It was to fill a long narrow bag with sand, with which, with a blow
on the back scientifically delivered, there could be given, without
fuss or noise, a shock certain sooner or later to prove fatal. Socially
they have all the faults of the West as well as those of the East
without the virtues of either. But their crowning defect in my eyes is
that they have not the picturesque costumes or appearance of the
mainland Greeks.
The most interesting thing in Zante for the moment is Major Church's[24]
Greek contingent. He has enrolled and disciplined a number of refugee
Greeks, part patriots, part criminals, and generally both, and has taken
an immense deal of pains with them. He flatters them by calling them
Hellenes, shows them the heads of their heroes and philosophers painted
on every wall in his house, and endeavours generally to rouse their
enthusiasm. He himself adopts the Albanian costume, to which he has
added a helmet which he fancies is like that of the ancient Greeks,
although it is certainly very unlike those of the heroes we brought into
Zante. Altogether, with a great deal of good management and more
fustian, he has contrived to attach to himself some thousand excellent
troops which under his command would really be capable of doing great
things.
[25]At last, on the evening of the 18th of August, we considered
ourselves fortunate in being able to get away, and we started to make
the tour of the Morea. Gropius, Haller, Foster, Linckh, and I left Zante
in a small boat and arrived next morning at Pyrgi, the port of Pyrgo,
from which it is distant two hours and a half. We obtained horses at a
monastery not far from where we landed, and rode through a low marshy
country, well cultivated, chiefly in corn and melon grounds, and fairly
well peopled up to the town.
Pyrgo itself lies just above the marshes which border the Alpheus, and,
as it happened to our subsequent cost, there was a good deal of water
out at this moment. We ordered horses, and while they were being brought
in we entered the house of an old Greek, a primate of the place. I had
been so disgusted with the thinly veneered civilisation of the Zantiotes
and bored with the affectations of our garrison officers there, that I
was congratulating myself on having got back to the frank barbarism of
the Morea, when my admiration for it received a check. The old Greek in
whose house we were waiting seemed anxious to be rid of us, and, the
better to do so, assured me that Meraca, or Olympia, was only 2½ hours
distant, equal at the ordinary rate of Turkish travelling, which is 3
miles an hour, to 7½ miles. The horses were so long in coming, on
account of their being out among the marshes and the men having to go up
to their knees to get them, that Haller and I got impatient and
resolved to go on foot as the distance was so little. It turned out,
however, to be 7 hours instead of 2½, and at nightfall we arrived
dead-beat at a marsh, through which in a pitch darkness, I may thank my
stars, although invisible, for having struggled safely. We wandered
about, lost our way, waded in pools to our knees, and finally took 8
hours instead of 2½ to get to our destination.
It was two o'clock in the morning when we got to Meraca, utterly tired
out, and with our lodging still to seek. We were directed to a tower in
which lived an Albanian aga. The entrance was at the top of a staircase
running up the side of the house and ending in a drawbridge which led to
the door on the first floor. Once inside we went up two other flights of
stairs to a room in which we found two Albanians, by whom we were kindly
received. When they heard how tired we were they offered us some rasky.
Besides that there was some miserable bread, but no coffee or meat to
refresh us. We had to lie down and go to sleep without.
There are few visible remains of the once famous Olympia,[26] and not a
trace of stadium or theatre that I could make out. The general opinion
is that the Alpheus has silted up and buried many of the buildings to a
depth of 8 or 10 feet, and our small researches point in the same
direction. We dug in the temple, but what we could do amounted to next
to nothing. To do it completely would be a work for a king. I had had
some difficulty with the Greek labourers at Ægina, but the Turks here
were much worse. In the first place, instead of one piastre apiece per
day they asked 2½, and in the next they had no proper tools. The earth
was as hard as brick, and when with extreme difficulty it had been
broken up they had no proper shovels; and when the earth, which they
piled along the trench as they dug it out, ran into the hole again, they
scooped it out with their hands. The thing was too ludicrous. Worst of
all, as soon as we turned our backs for a moment they either did nothing
or went away. This happened when we left them to cross the river and try
for a better view of the place. We got over in a caique, which the aga
himself, from the village across the water, punted over to us; but the
view over there was disappointing, and we came back to find, as I say,
our workmen all idling. The long and short of our excavations was that
we measured the columns of the temple to be 7 feet in diameter, and we
found some attached columns and other fragments of marble from the
interior, the whole of which I suppose was of marble, that of the
pavement being of various colours. Such stone as is used is of a rough
kind, made up entirely of small shells and covered with a very white and
fine plaster. And that is about all the information we got for a
largish outlay.
From Meraca we rode through romantic scenery to Andritzena, a charming
village in a very beautiful and romantic situation; and next morning we
settled to go on to the Temple of Bassæ--the stylæ or columns, the
natives call it. But before we started the primates of Andritzena came
in, and after turning over our things and examining and asking the price
of our arms, they began to try and frighten us with tremendous stories
of a certain Barulli, captain of a company of klephts or robbers who
haunted the neighbourhood of the stylæ. They begged us to come back the
same evening, and to take a guard with us. As for the first, we flatly
refused; and for the second, we reflected that our guards must be
Greeks, while the klephts might be Turks, and if so the former would
never stand against them, so it was as well for us to take the risk
alone. We did, however, take one of their suggestions, and that was to
take with us two men of the country who would know who was who, and act
as guides and go-betweens; for they assured us that it is not only the
professional klephts who rob, but that all the inhabitants of the
villages thereabouts are dilettante brigands on occasion.
Our janissary Mahomet also did not at all fancy the notion of living up
in the mountain, and added what he could to dissuade us. However, we
turned a deaf ear to all objections and set out. Our way lay over some
high ground, and rising almost all the way, for 2½ hours.
It is impossible to give an idea of the romantic beauty of the situation
of the temple. It stands on a high ridge looking over lofty barren
mountains and an extensive country below them. The ground is rocky,
thinly patched with vegetation, and spotted with splendid ilexes. The
view gives one Ithome, the stronghold and last defence of the Messenians
against Sparta, to the south-west; Arcadia, with its many hills, to the
east; and to the south the range of Taygetus, with still beyond them the
sea.
Haller had engagements, which I had got him, to make four drawings for
English travellers. I made some on my own account, and there were
measurements to be taken and a few stones moved for the purpose, all of
which took time. We spent altogether ten days there, living on sheep and
butter, the only good butter I have tasted since leaving England, sold
to us by the few Albanian shepherds who lived near. Of an evening we
used to sit and smoke by a fire, talking to the shepherds till we were
ready for sleep, when we turned into our tent, which, though not exactly
comfortable, protected us from weather and from wolves. For there are
wolves--one of them one night tore a sheep to pieces close to us. We
pitched our tent under the north front. On the next day after our
arrival, the 25th, one of the primates of Andritzena came begging us to
desist from digging or moving stones, for that it might bring harm on
the town. This was very much what happened at Ægina. He did not specify
what harm, but asked who we were. We in reply said that we had firmans,
that it was not civil, therefore, to ask who we were, and that we were
not going to carry away the columns. When he heard of the firmans he
said he would do anything he could to help us. All the same, he seemed
to have given some orders to our guide against digging; for the
shepherds we engaged kept talking of the fear they were in, and at last
went away, one of them saying the work was distasteful to him. They were
no great loss, for they were so stupid that I was obliged to be always
with them and work too, in doing which I tore my hand and got
exceedingly fatigued. I was repaid by getting some important
measurements.
In looking about I found two very beautiful bas-reliefs under some
stones, which I took care to conceal again immediately."
This incident is described in greater detail by Stackelberg in the
preface to his book.[27] The interior of the temple--that is to say, the
space inside the columns--was a mass of fallen blocks of some depth.
While Haller and Cockerell with the labourers were scrambling about
among the ruins to get their measurements, a fox that had made its home
deep down amongst the stones, disturbed by the unusual noise, got up and
ran away. It is not quite a pleasant task to crawl down among such
insecure and ponderous masses of stone with the possibility of finding
another fox at the bottom; but Cockerell ventured in, and on scraping
away the accumulations where the fox had its lair, he saw by the light
which came down a crack among the stones, a bas-relief. I have heard
this story also from his own lips. Stackelberg further says that the
particular relief was that numbered 530 in the Phigaleian Marbles at the
British Museum, and naïvely adds, "indeed one may still trace on the
marble the injuries done by the fox's claws." He managed to make a rough
sketch of the slab and carefully covered it over again. From the
position in which it lay it was inferable that the whole frieze would
probably be found under the dilapidations.
"Early one morning some armed shepherds came looking about for a lost
sheep. They eventually found it dead not far from our tent, and torn to
pieces by a wolf--as I mentioned before. The day being Sunday we saw
some grand specimens of the Arcadian shepherds. They stalk about with a
gun over their shoulders and a long pistol in the waist, looking very
savage and wild--and so they are: but, wild as they may be, they still
retain the names which poetry has connected with all that is idyllic and
peaceful. Alexis is one of the commonest.
As our labourers had left us, there was nothing for it but to work
ourselves. We were doing so and had just lit upon some beautiful
caissons, when a man on horseback, Greek or Turk (they dress so much
alike there is no distinguishing them), rode up accompanied by four
Albanians all armed. He told us he was the owner of the land, and,
although he was very civil about it, he forbade our digging any more. We
asked him to eat with us, but being a fast day in the Greek Church, he
declined. Finally, after writing to Andritzena, he left us.
After so many objections being made to our excavations we felt it would
be too dangerous to go on at present, and promised ourselves to come
again next year in a stronger party and armed with more peremptory and
explicit authority to dig, and in the meantime there was nothing to do
but to get through our drawings and studies as quickly as we could.
The uneasiness of our janissary Mahomet, since our camping out began,
gave us serious doubts of his courage, and a plan was invented for
testing it. This was to raise an alarm at night that we were attacked by
klephts. Our Arcadian shepherds entered into the joke with surprising
alacrity and kept it up well. Just after supper a cry was heard from the
mountain above that robbers were near. In an instant we all sprang up,
seized pistols and swords, and made a feint as though we would go up the
hill. Our janissary, thunderstruck, was following, when we proposed that
he should go on alone.
But he would not do that. In the first place he was ill; in the next
place, Would it not be better to go to Andritzena? He begged we might go
to Andritzena."
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Afterwards Sir Richard Church, and commander-in-chief of the Greek
forces up to his death in 1872.
[25] An epitome of the following appears in Hughes's _Travels in Sicily,
Greece, and Albania_, p. 190.
[26] Olympia was thoroughly excavated by the Germans in 1875-76, when
the Hermes of Praxiteles and the Victory of Pæonios were discovered.
[27] _Der Apollotempel zu Bassae._