I think so.”
“So am I,” responded Abd-el-Atti in his most serious manner. The
“Eastern question,” with these experienced dragomans, instantly
resolves itself into a question of money, whoever is concerned and
whatever is the tribunal. I said that I would see the consul in the
morning, and that I hoped to have all proceedings stopped, so that we
could get off in the steamer. Abd-el-Atti shook his head.
“The consul not to do anything. Ouardy have lent him money; so I
hunderstood.”
Beyrout had a Sunday appearance. The shops were nearly all closed, and
the churches, especially the Catholic, were crowded. It might have been
a peaceful day but for our imbroglio, which began to be serious; we
could not afford the time to wait two weeks for the next Cyprus steamer,
we did not like to abandon our dragomans, and we needed their services.
The ladies who depended upon Achmed were in a quandary. Notes went to
the consul, but produced no effect. The bankers were called into the
council, and one of them undertook to get Achmed free. Travellers,
citizens, and all began to get interested or entangled in the case.
There was among respectable people but one opinion about the consul's
dragoman. At night it was whispered about that the American consul had
already been removed and that his successor was on his way to Beyrout.
Achmed came to us in the highest spirits with the news.
All day Monday we expected the steamer. The day was frittered away in
interviews with the consul and the pasha, and in endeavoring to learn
something of the two cases, the suit for damages and for the debt,
supposed to be going on somewhere in the seraglio. After my interview
with the consul, who expressed considerable ignorance of the case and
the strongest desire to stop it, I was surprised to find at the seraglio
all the papers in the consul's name, and all the documents written
on consular paper; so that when I appeared as an American citizen,
to endeavor to get my dragoman released, it appeared to the Turkish
officials that they would please the American government by detaining
and punishing him.
The court-room was a little upper chamber, with no furniture except a
long table and chairs; three Moslem judges sat at one end of the table,
apparently waiting to see what would turn up. The scene was not unlike
that in an office of a justice of the peace in America. The parties to
the case, witnesses, attendants, spectators, came and went as it pleased
them, talked or whispered to the judges or to each other. There seemed
to be no rule for the reception or rejection of evidence. The judges
smoked and gathered the facts as they drifted in, and would by and by
make up their minds. It is truth to say, however, that they seemed to
be endeavoring to get at the facts, and that they appeared to be above
prejudice or interest. A new complication developed itself, however;
Antoine Ouardy claimed to be a French citizen, and the French consul was
drawn into the fray. This was a new device to delay proceedings.
When I had given my evidence to the judges, which I was required to
put in writing, I went with Abd-el-Atti to the room of the pasha. This
official was gracious enough, but gave us no hopes of release. He took
me one side and advised me, as a traveller, to look out for another
dragoman; there was no prospect that Abd-el-Atti could get away to
accompany me on this steamer,—in fact, the process in court might
detain him six months. However, the best thing to do would be to go to
the American consul with Ouardy and settle it. He thought Ouardy would
settle it for a reasonable amount. It was none of his business, but
that was his advice. We were obliged to his Excellency for this glimpse
behind the scenes of a Turkish court, and thanked him for his advice;
but we did not follow it. Abd-el-Atti thought that if he abandoned the
attempt to collect a debt in a Turkish city, he ought not, besides, to
pay for the privilege of doing so.
Tuesday morning the steamer came into the harbor. Although we had
registered our names at the office of the company for passage, nothing
was reserved for us. Detained at the seraglio and the consul's, we
could not go off to secure places, and the consequence was that we were
subject to the black-mail of the steward when we did go. By noon there
were signs of the failure of the prosecution; and we sent off our
luggage. In an hour or two Abd-el-Atti appeared with a troop of friends,
triumphant. Somewhere, I do not know how, he and Achmed had raked up
fourteen witnesses in his favor; the judges would n't believe Ouardy
nor any one he produced, and his case had utterly broken down. This
mountain of a case, which had annoyed us so many days and absorbed our
time, suddenly collapsed. We were not sorry to leave even beautiful
Beyrout, and would have liked to see the last of Turkish rule as
well. At sunset, on the steamer Achille, swarming above and below with
pilgrims from Jerusalem and Mecca, we sailed for Cyprus.
XVIII.—CYPRUS.
IN the early morning we were off Cyprus, in the open harbor of
Larnaka,—a row of white houses on the low shore. The town is not
peculiar and not specially attractive, but the Marina lies prettily
on the blue sea, and the palms, the cypresses, the minarets and
church-towers, form an agreeable picture behind it, backed by the lovely
outline of mountains, conspicuous among them Santa Croce. The highest,
Olympus, cannot be seen from this point.
A night had sufficed to transport us into another world, a world in
which all outlines are softened and colored, a world in which history
appears like romance. We might have imagined that we had sailed into
some tropical harbor, except that the island before us was bare of
foliage; there was the calm of perfect repose in the sky, on the sea,
and the land; Cyprus made no harsh contrast with the azure water in
which it seemed to be anchored for the morning, as our ship was. You
could believe that the calm of summer and of early morning always rested
on the island, and that it slept exhausted in the memory of its glorious
past.
Taking a cup of coffee, we rowed ashore. It was the festival of St.
George, and the flags of various nations were hung out along the riva,
or displayed from the staffs of the consular residences. It is one of
the chief fête days of the year, and the foreign representatives, who
have not too much excitement, celebrated it by formal visits to the
Greek consul. Larnaka does not keep a hotel, and we wandered about for
some time before we could discover its sole locanda, where we purposed
to breakfast. This establishment would please an artist, but it had
few attractions for a person wishing to break his fast, and our unusual
demand threw it into confusion. The locanda was nothing but a kitchen in
a tumble-down building, smoke-dried, with an earth floor and a rickety
table or two. After long delay, the cheerful Greek proprietor and his
lively wife—whose good-humored willingness both to furnish us next to
nothing, but the best they had, from their scanty larder, and to cipher
up a long reckoning for the same, excited our interest—produced some
fried veal, sour bread, harsh wine, and tart oranges; and we breakfasted
more sumptuously, I have no doubt, than any natives of the island that
morning. The scant and hard fare of nearly all the common people in the
East would be unendurable to any American; but I think that the hardy
peasantry of the Levant would speedily fall into dyspeptic degeneracy
upon the introduction of American rural cooking.
After we had killed our appetites at the locanda, we presented our
letters to the American consul, General di Cesnola, in whose spacious
residence we experienced a delightful mingling of Oriental and Western
hospitality. The kawâss of the General was sent to show us the town.
This kawâss was a gorgeous official, a kind of glorified being, in silk
and gold-lace, who marched before us, huge in bulk, waving his truncheon
of office, and gave us the appearance, in spite of our humility, of a
triumphal procession. Larnaka has not many sights, although it was the
residence of the Lusignan dynasty,—Richard Cour de Lion having, toward
the close of the twelfth century, made a gift of the island to Guy de
Lusignan. It has, however, some mosques and Greek churches. The church
of St. Lazarus, which contains the now vacant tomb of the Lazarus who
was raised from the dead at Bethany and afterwards became bishop of
Citium, is an interesting old Byzantine edifice, and has attached to
it an English burial-ground, with tombs of the seventeenth century. The
Greek priest who showed us the church does not lose sight of the gain
of godliness in this life while pursuing in this remote station his
heavenly journey. He sold my friend some exquisite old crucifixes,
carved in wood, mounted in antique silver, which he took from the
altar, and he let the church part with some of its quaint old pictures,
commemorating the impossible exploits of St. Demetrius and St. George.
But he was very careful that none of the Greeks who were lounging about
the church should be witnesses of the transfer. He said that these
ignorant people had a prejudice about these sacred objects, and might
make trouble.
The excavations made at Larnaka have demonstrated that this was the site
of ancient Citium, the birthplace of Zeno, the Stoic, and the Chittim so
often alluded to by the Hebrew prophets; it was a Phoenician colony, and
when Ezekiel foretold the unrecoverable fall of Tyre, among the luxuries
of wealth he enumerated were the “benches of ivory brought out of the
isles of Chittim.” Paul does not mention it, but he must have passed
through it when he made his journey over the island from Salamis to
Paphos, where he had his famous encounter with the sorcerer Bar-jesus.
A few miles out of town on the road to Citti is a Turkish mosque, which
shares the high veneration of Moslems with those of Mecca and Jerusalem.
In it is interred the wet-nurse of Mohammed.
We walked on out of the town to the most considerable church in the
place, newly built by the Roman Catholics. There is attached to it
a Franciscan convent, a neat establishment with a garden; and the
hospitable monks, when they knew we were Americans, insisted upon
entertaining us; the contributions for their church had largely come
from America, they said, and they seemed to regard us as among the
number of their benefactors. This Christian charity expressed itself
also in some bunches of roses, which the brothers plucked for our
ladies. One cannot but suspect and respect that timid sentiment the monk
retains for the sex whose faces he flies from, which he expresses in the
care of flowers; the blushing rose seems to be the pure and only link
between the monk and womankind; he may cultivate it without sin, and
offer it to the chance visitor without scandal.
The day was lovely, but the sun had intense power, and in default of
donkeys we took a private carriage into the country to visit the church
of St. George, at which the fête day of that saint was celebrated by a
fair, and a concourse of peasants. Our carriage was a four-wheeled cart,
a sort of hay-wagon, drawn by two steers, and driven by a Greek boy in
an embroidered jacket. The Franciscans lent us chairs for the cart; the
resplendent kawass marched ahead; Abd-el-Atti hung his legs over the
tail of the cart in an attitude of dejection; and we moved on, but so
slowly that my English friend, Mr. Edward Rae, was able to sketch us,
and the Cyprians could enjoy the spectacle.
The country lay bare and blinking under the sun; save here and there a
palm or a bunch of cypresses, this part of the island has not a tree or
a large shrub. The view of the town and the sea with its boats, as we
went inland, was peculiar, not anything real, but a skeleton picture;
the sky and sea were indigo blue. We found a crowd of peasants at the
church of St. George, which has a dirty interior, like all the Greek
churches. The Greeks, as well as the other Orientals, know how to mingle
devotion with the profits of trade, and while there were rows of booths
outside, and traffic went on briskly, the church was thronged with men
and women who bought tapers for offerings, and kissed with fervor the
holy relics which were exposed. The articles for sale at the booths and
stands were chiefly eatables and the coarsest sort of merchandise. The
only specialty of native manufacture was rude but pleasant-sounding
little bells, which are sometimes strung upon the necks of donkeys. But
so fond are these simple people of musical noise, that these bells
are attached to the handles of sickles also. The barley was already
dead-ripe in the fields, and many of the peasants at the fair brought
their sickles with them. They were, both men and women, a good-humored,
primitive sort of people, certainly not a handsome race, but picturesque
in appearance; both sexes affect high colors, and the bright petticoats
of the women matched the gay jackets of their husbands and lovers.
We do not know what was the ancient standard of beauty in Cyprus; it may
have been no higher than it is now, and perhaps the swains at this
fête of St. George would turn from any other type of female charms as
uninviting. The Cyprian or Paphian Venus could not have been a beauty
according to our notions.
The images of her which General di Cesnola found in her temple all have
a long and sharp nose. These images are Phoenician, and were made six
hundred to a thousand years before the Christian era, at the time that
wonderful people occupied this fertile island. It is an interesting
fact, and an extraordinary instance of the persistence of nature in
perpetuating a type, that all the women of Cyprus to-day—who are,
with scarcely any exception, ugly—have exactly the nose of the ancient
Paphian Venus, that is to say, the nose of the Phoenician women whose
husbands and lovers sailed the Mediterranean as long ago as the siege of
Troy.
It was off the southern coast of this island, near Paphos, that Venus
Aphrodite, born of the foam, is fabled to have risen from the sea. The
anniversary of her birth is still perpetuated by an annual fête on
the 11th of August,—a rite having its foundation in nature, that
has proved to be stronger than religious instruction or prejudice.
Originally, these fêtes were the scenes of a too literal worship
of Venus, and even now the Cyprian maiden thinks that her chance of
matrimony is increased by her attendance at this annual fair. Upon that
day all the young people go upon the sea in small boats, and, until
recently, it used to be the custom to dip a virgin into the water
in remembrance of the mystic birth of Venus. That ceremony is still
partially maintained; instead of sousing the maiden in the sea,
her companions spatter the representative of the goddess with salt
water,—immersion has given way here also to sprinkling.
The lively curiosity of the world has been of late years turned to
Cyprus as the theatre of some of the most important and extensive
archaeological discoveries of this century; discoveries unique, and
illustrative of the manners and religion of a race, once the most
civilized in the Levant, of which only the slightest monuments had
hitherto been discovered; discoveries which supply the lost link between
Egyptian and Grecian art. These splendid results, which by a stroke of
good fortune confer some credit upon the American nation, are wholly
due to the scholarship, patient industry, address, and enthusiasm of one
man. To those who are familiar with the magnificent Cesnola Collection,
which is the chief attraction of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, I
need make no apology for devoting a few paragraphs to the antiquities of
Cyprus and their explorer.
Cyprus was the coveted prize of all the conquerors of the Orient
in turn. The fair island, with an area not so large as the State of
Connecticut, owns in its unequal surface the extremes of the temperate
climate; snow lies during the greater part of the year upon its
mountains, which attain an altitude of over seven thousand feet, and
the palm spreads its fan-leaves along the southern coast and in the warm
plains; irregular in shape, it has an extreme length of over one hundred
and forty miles, and an average breadth of about forty miles, and its
deeply indented coast gives an extraordinarily long shore-line and
offers the facilities of harbors for the most active commerce.
The maritime Phoenicians early discovered its advantages, and in the
seventeenth century b. c., or a little later, a colony from Sidon
settled at Citium; and in time these Yankees of the Levant occupied
all the southern portion of the island with their busy ports and royal
cities. There is a tradition that Teucer, after the Trojan war, founded
the city of Salamis on the east coast. But however this may be, and
whatever may be the exact date of the advent of the Sidonians upon the
island, it is tolerably certain that they were in possession about the
year 1600 b.c., when the navy of Thotmes III., the greatest conqueror
and statesman in the long line of Pharaohs, visited Cyprus and collected
tribute. The Egyptians were never sailors, and the fleet of Thotmes III.
was no doubt composed of Phoenician ships manned by Phoenician sailors.
He was already in possession of the whole of Syria, the Phoenicians were
his tributaries and allies, their ships alone sailed the Grecian
seas and carried the products of Egypt and of Asia to the Pelasgic
populations. The Phoenician supremacy, established by Sidon in Cyprus,
was maintained by Tyre; and it was not seriously subverted until 708
b. c., when the Assyrian ravager of Syria, Sargon, sent a fleet and
conquered Cyprus. He set up a stele in Citium, commemorating his
exploit, which has been preserved and is now in the museum at Berlin.
Two centuries later the island owned the Persians as masters, and was
comprised in the fifth satrapy of Darius. It became a part of the empire
of the Macedonian Alexander after his conquest of Asia Minor, and was
again an Egyptian province under the Ptolemies, until the Roman eagles
swooped down upon it. Coins are not seldom found that tell the story of
these occupations. Those bearing the head of Ptolemy Physcon, Euergetes
VII., found at Paphos and undoubtedly struck there, witness the
residence on the island of that licentious and literary tyrant, whom a
popular outburst had banished from Alexandria. Another with the head
of Vespasian, and on the obverse an outline of the temple of Venus at
Paphos, attests the Roman hospitality to the gods and religious rites of
all their conquered provinces.
Upon the breaking up of the Roman world, Cyprus fell to the Greek
Empire, and for centuries maintained under its ducal governors a sort of
independent life, enjoying as much prosperity as was possible under the
almost uniform imbecility and corruption of the Byzantine rule. We have
already spoken of its transfer to the Lusignans by Richard Cour de Lion;
and again a romantic chapter was added to its history by the reign of
Queen Catharine Cornaro, who gave her kingdom to the Venetian republic.
Since its final conquest by the Turks in 1571, Cyprus has interested the
world only by its sufferings; for Turkish history here, as elsewhere, is
little but a record of exactions, rapine, and massacre.
From time to time during the present century efforts have been made
by individuals and by learned societies to explore the antiquities of
Cyprus; but although many interesting discoveries were made, yet the
field was comparatively virgin when General di Cesnola was appointed
American consul in 1866. Here and there a stele, or some fragments of
pottery, or the remains of a temple, had been unearthed by chance or by
superficial search, but the few objects discovered served only to pique
curiosity. For one reason or another, the efforts made to establish the
site of ancient cities had been abandoned, the expeditions sent out by
France had been comparatively barren of results, and it seemed as if
the traces of the occupation of the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the
Assyrians, the Persians, and the Romans were irrecoverably concealed.
General L. P. di Cesnola, the explorer of Cyprus, is of a noble
Piedmontese family; he received a military and classical education at
Turin; identified with the party of Italian unity, his sympathies were
naturally excited by the contest in America; he offered his sword to our
government, and served with distinction in the war for the Union. At
its close he was appointed consul at Cyprus, a position of no
pecuniary attraction, but I presume that the new consul had in view the
explorations which have given his name such honorable celebrity in both
hemispheres.
The difficulties of his undertaking were many. He had to encounter at
every step the jealousy of the Turkish government, and the fanaticism
and superstition of the occupants of the soil. Archaeological researches
are not easy in the East under the most favorable circumstances, and in
places where the traces of ancient habitations are visible above ground,
and ancient sites are known; but in Cyprus no ruins exist in sight to
aid the explorer, and, with the exception of one or two localities, no
names of ancient places are known to the present generation. But the
consul was convinced that the great powers which had from age to age
held Cyprus must have left some traces of their occupation, and that
intelligent search would discover the ruins of the prosperous cities
described by Strabo and mentioned by the geographer Ptolemy. Without
other guides than the descriptions of these and other ancient writers,
the consul began his search in 1867, and up to 1875 he had ascertained
the exact sites of eleven ancient cities mentioned by Strabo and
Ptolemy, most of which had ceased to exist before the Christian era, and
none of which has left vestiges above the soil.
In the time of David and of Solomon the Phoenicians formed the largest
portion of the population of the island; their royal cities of Paphos,
Amathus, Carpassa, Citium, and Ammochosto, were in the most flourishing
condition. Not a stone remained of them above ground; their sites were
unknown in 1867.
When General di Cesnola had satisfied himself of the probable site of
an ancient city or temple, it was difficult to obtain permission to dig,
even with the authority of the Sultan's firman. He was obliged to
wait for harvests to be gathered, in some cases, to take a lease of the
ground; sometimes the religious fanaticism of the occupants could not be
overcome, and his working parties were frequently beaten and driven away
in his absence. But the consul exhibited tact, patience, energy, the
qualities necessary, with knowledge, to a successful explorer. He evaded
or cast down all obstacles.
In 1868 he discovered the necropoli of Ledra, Citium, and Idalium, and
opened during three years in these localities over ten thousand tombs,
bringing to light a mass of ancient objects of art which enable us
to understand the customs, religion, and civilization of the earlier
inhabitants. Idalium was famous of old as the place where Grecian
pottery was first made, and fragments of it have been found from time to
time on its site.