as the birthplace of Apelles and of Hippocrates; the inhabitants still
venerate an enormous plane-tree under which the good physician is said
to have dispensed his knowledge of healing. The city of Kos is on a fine
plain, which gradually slopes from the mountain to the sea and is well
covered with trees. The attractive town lies prettily along the shore,
and is distinguished by a massive square mediaeval fortress, and by
round stone windmills with specially long arms.
As we came around the corner of Kos, we had a view, distant but
interesting, of the site of Halicarnassus, the modern town of Boudroum,
with its splendid fortress, which the Turks wrested from the Knights of
St. John. We sail by it with regret, for the student and traveller in
the East comes to have a tender feeling for the simple nature of the
father of history, and would forego some other pleasant experiences to
make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Herodotus. Here, also, was born
the historian Dionysius. And here, a few years ago, were identified the
exact site and rescued the remains of another of the Seven Wonders, the
Tomb of Mausolus, built in honor of her husband by the Carian Artemisia,
who sustained to him the double relation of sister and queen. This
monument, which exhibited the perfection of Greek art, was four hundred
and eleven feet in circumference and one hundred and forty feet high.
It consisted of a round building, surrounded by thirty-six columns
surmounted by a pyramid, and upon the latter stood a colossal group of
a chariot and four horses. Some of the beautiful sculpture of this
mausoleum can be seen in the British Museum.
We were all the afternoon endeavoring to get sight of Patinos, which
the intervening islands hid from view. Every half-hour some one was
discovering it, and announcing the fact. No doubt half the passengers
will go to their graves comforted by the belief that they saw it. Some
of them actually did have a glimpse of it towards night, between the
islands of Lipso and Arki. It is a larger island than we expected to
see; and as we had understood that the Revelations were written on a
small rocky island, in fact a mere piece of rock, the feat seemed less
difficult on a good-sized island. Its height is now crowned by the
celebrated monastery of St. John, but the island is as barren and
uninviting as it was when the Romans used it as a place of banishment.
We passed Astypatæa, Kalyminos, Leros, and a sprinkling of islets (as
if a giant had sown this sea with rocks), each of which has a history,
or is graced by a legend; but their glory is of the past. The chief
support of their poor inhabitants is now the sponge-fishery. At sunset
we had before us Icaria and Samos, and on the mainland the site of
Miletus, now a fever-smitten place, whose vast theatre is almost the
sole remains of the metropolis of the Ionic confederacy. Perhaps the
centre of Ionic art and culture was, however, the island of Samos, but I
doubt not the fame of its Samian wine has carried its name further than
the exploits of its warriors, the works of its artists, or the thoughts
of its philosophers. It was the birthplace of Pythagoras; it was
once governed by Polycrates; there for a time Antony and Cleopatra
established their court of love and luxury. In the evening we sailed
close under its high cliffs, and saw dimly opposite Icaria, whose only
merit or interest lies in its association with the ill-judged aerial
voyage of Icarus, the soil of Daedalus.
Although the voyager amid these islands and along this historic coast
profoundly feels the influence of the past, and, as he reads and looks
and reflects, becomes saturated with its half-mysterious and delicious
romance, he is nevertheless scarcely able to believe that these denuded
shores and purple, rocky islets were the homes of heroes, the theatres
of world-renowned exploits, the seats of wealth and luxury and power;
that the marble of splendid temples gleamed from every summit and
headland; that rich cities clustered on every island and studded the
mainland; and that this region, bounteous in the fruits of the liberal
earth, was not less prolific in vigorous men and beautiful women,
who planted adventurous and remote colonies, and sowed around the
Mediterranean the seeds of our modern civilization. In the present
desolation and soft decay it is difficult to recall the wealth, the
diversified industry, the martial spirit, the refinement of the races
whose art and literature are still our emulation and despair. Here,
indeed, were the beginnings of our era, of our modern life,—separated
by a great gulf from the ancient civilization of the Nile,—the life of
the people, the attempts at self-government, the individual adventure,
the new development of human relations consequent upon commerce, and the
freer exchange of products and ideas.
What these islands and this variegated and genial coast of Asia Minor
might become under a government that did not paralyze effort and rob
industry, it is impossible to say; but the impression is made upon the
traveller that Nature herself is exhausted in these regions, and that it
will need the rest or change of a geologic era to restore her pristine
vigor. The prodigality and avarice of thousands of years have left the
land—now that the flame of civilization has burned out—like the
crater of an extinct volcano. But probably it is society and not nature
that is dead. The island of Rhodes, for an example, might in a few years
of culture again produce the forests that once supplied her hardy sons
with fleets of vessels, and her genial soil, under any intelligent
agriculture, would yield abundant harvests. The land is now divided into
petty holdings, and each poor proprietor scratches it just enough to
make it yield a scanty return.
During the night the steamer had come to Chios (Scio), and I rose
at dawn to see—for we had no opportunity to land—the spot almost
equally famous as the birthplace of Homer and the land of the Chian
wine. The town lies along the water for a mile or more around a shallow
bay opening to the east, a city of small white houses, relieved by
a minaret or two; close to the water's edge are some three-story
edifices, and in front is an ancient square fort, which has a mole
extending into the water, terminated by a mediaeval bastion, behind
which small vessels find shelter. Low by the shore, on the north,
are some of the sturdy windmills peculiar to these islands, and I can
distinguish with a glass a few fragments of Byzantine and mediaeval
architecture among the common buildings. Staring at us from the middle
of the town were two big signs, with the word “Hotel.”
To the south of the town, amid a grove of trees, are the white stones
of the cemetery; the city of the dead is nearly as large as that of the
living. Behind the city are orange orchards and many a bright spot
of verdure, but the space for it is not broad. Sharp, bare, serrated,
perpendicular ridges of mountain rise behind the town, encircling it
like an amphitheatre. In the morning light these mountains are tawny and
rich in color, tinged with purple and red. Chios is a pretty picture in
the shelter of these hills, which gather for it the rays of the rising
sun.
It is now half a century since the name of Scio rang through the
civilized world as the theatre of a deed which Turkish history itself
can scarcely parallel, and the island is vigorously regaining its
prosperity. It only needs to recall the outlines of the story. The
fertile island, which is four times the extent of the Isle of Wight, was
the home of one hundred and ten thousand inhabitants, of whom only six
thousand were Turks. The Greeks of Scio were said to differ physically
and morally from all their kindred; their merchants were princes at home
and abroad, art and literature flourished, with grace and refinement of
manner, and there probably nowhere existed a society more industrious,
gay, contented, and intelligent. Tempted by some adventurers from Samos
to rebel, they drew down upon themselves the vengeance of the Turks, who
retaliated the bloody massacre of Turkish men, women, and children by
the insurrectionists, with a universal destruction. The city of Scio,
with its thirty thousand inhabitants, and seventy villages, were reduced
to ashes; twenty-five thousand of all ages and both sexes were slain,
forty-five thousand were carried away as slaves, among them women
and children who had been reared in luxury, and most of the remainder
escaped, in a destitute state, into other parts of Greece. At the end of
the summer's harvest of death, only two thousand Sciotes were left on
the island. An apologist for the Turks could only urge that the Greeks
would have been as unmerciful under like circumstances.
None of the first-class passengers were up to see Chios,—not one for
poor Homer's sake; but the second-class were stirring for their own,
crawling out of their comfortables, giving the babies a turn, and the
vigilant flea a taste of the morning air. When the Russian peasant, who
sleeps in the high truncated frieze cap, and in the coat which he
wore in Jerusalem,—a garment short in the waist, gathered in
pleats underneath the shoulders, and falling in stiff expanding folds
below,—when he first gets up and rubs his eyes, he is an astonished
being. His short-legged wife is already astir, and beginning to collect
the materials of breakfast. Some of the Greeks are making coffee; there
is a smell of coffee, and there are various other unanalyzed odors.
But for pilgrims, and pilgrims so closely packed that no one can stir
without moving the entire mass, these are much cleaner than they might
be expected to be, and cleaner, indeed, than they can continue to be,
and keep up their reputation. And yet, half an hour among them, looking
out from the bow for a comprehensive view of Chios, is quite enough. I
wished, then, that these people would change either their religion or
their clothes.
Last night we had singing on deck by an extemporized quartette of young
Americans, with harmonious and well-blended voices, and it was a most
delightful contrast to the caterwauling, accompanied by the darabouka,
which we constantly hear on the forward deck, and which the Arabs call
singing. Even the fat, good-humored little Moslem from Damascus, who
lives in the pen with the merchant-prince of that city, listened with
delight and declared that it was tyeb kateer. Who knows but these
people, who are always singing, have some appreciation of music after
all?
XXI.—SMYRNA AND EPHESUS.
WHEN we left Chios we sailed at first east, right into the sun,
gradually turned north and rounded the promontory of the mainland, and
then, east by south, came into the beautiful landlocked bay of Smyrna,
in which the blue water changes into a muddy green. At length we passed
on the right a Turkish fortress, which appeared as formidable as
a bathing establishment, and Smyrna lay at the bottom of the gulf,
circling the shore,—white houses, fruit-trees, and hills beyond.
The wind was north, as it always is here in the morning, and the
landing was difficult. We had the usual excitement of swarming boats and
clamorous boatmen and lively waves. One passenger went into the water
instead of the boat, but was easily fished out by his baggy trousers,
and, as he was a Greek pilgrim, it was thought that a little water would
n't injure him. Coming to the shore we climbed with difficulty out
of the bobbing boat upon the sea-wall; the shiftless Turkish government
will do nothing to improve the landing at this great port,—if the
Sultan can borrow any money he builds a new palace on the Bosphorus, or
an ironclad to anchor in front of it.
Smyrna may be said to have a character of its own in not having any
character of its own. One of the most ancient cities on the globe, it
has no appearance of antiquity; containing all nationalities, it has no
nationality; the second commercial city of the East, it has no chamber
of commerce, no Bourse, no commercial unity; its citizens are of no
country and have no impulse of patriotism; it is an Asiatic city with
a European face; it produces nothing, it exchanges everything,—the
fabrics of Europe, the luxuries of the Orient; the children of the
East are sent to its schools, but it has no literary character nor any
influence of culture; it is hospitable to all religions, and conspicuous
for none; it is the paradise of the Turks, the home of luxury and of
beautiful women, but it is also a favorite of the mosquito, and, until
recently, it has been the yearly camp of the plague; it is not the
most healthful city in the world, and yet it is the metropolis of the
drug-trade.
Smyrna can be compared to Damascus in its age and in its perpetuity
under all discouragements and changes,—the shocks of earthquakes, the
constant visitations of pestilence, and the rule of a hundred masters.
It was a great city before the migration of the Ionians into Asia Minor,
it saw the rise and fall of Sardis, it was restored from a paralysis
of four centuries by Alexander. Under all vicissitudes it seems to have
retained its character of a great mart of exchange, a necessity for
the trade of Asia; and perhaps the indifference of its conglomerate
inhabitants to freedom and to creeds contributed to its safety.
Certainly it thrived as well under the Christians, when it was the seat
of one of the seven churches, as it did under the Romans, when it was a
seat of a great school of sophists and rhetoricians, and it is equally
prosperous under the sway of the successor of Mohammed. During the
thousand years of the always decaying Byzantine Empire it had its share
of misfortunes, and its walls alternately, at a later day, displayed the
star and crescent, and the equal arms of the cross of St. John. Yet,
in all its history, I seem to see the trading, gay, free, but not
disorderly Smyrna passing on its even way of traffic and of pleasure.
Of its two hundred thousand and more inhabitants, about ninety thousand
are Rayah Greeks, and about eighty thousand are Turks. There is a
changing population of perhaps a thousand Europeans, there are large
bodies of Jews and Armenians, and it was recently estimated to have as
many as fifteen thousand Levantines. These latter are the descendants
of the marriage of Europeans with Greek and Jewish women; and whatever
moral reputation the Levantines enjoy in the Levant, the women of this
mixture are famous for their beauty. But the race is said to be not
self-sustaining, and is yielding to the original types. The languages
spoken in Smyrna are Turkish, a Greek dialect (the Romaic), Spanish,
Italian, Trench, English, and Arabic, probably prevailing in the order
named. Our own steamer was much more Oriental than the city of Smyrna.
As soon as we stepped ashore we seemed to have come into a European
city; the people almost all wear the Frank dress, the shops offer little
that is peculiar. One who was unfamiliar with bazaars might wonder at
the tangle of various lanes, but we saw nothing calling for comment. A
walk through the Jewish quarter, here as everywhere else the dirtiest
and most picturesque in the city, will reward the philosophic traveller
with the sight of lovely women lolling at every window. It is not
the fashion for Smyrniote ladies to promenade the streets, but they
mercifully array themselves in full toilet and stand in their doorways.
The programme of the voyage of the Achille promised us a day and a half
in Smyrna, which would give us time to visit Ephesus. We were due Friday
noon; we did not arrive till Saturday noon. This vexatious delay had
caused much agitation on board; to be cheated out of Ephesus was an
outrage which the tourists could not submit to; they had come this way
on purpose to see Ephesus. They would rather give up anything else in
the East. The captain said he had no discretion, he must sail at 4 p. M.
The passengers then prepared a handsome petition to the agent, begging
him to detain the steamer till eight o'clock, in order to permit them
to visit Ephesus by a special train. There is a proclivity in all those
who can write to sign any and every thing except a subscription paper,
and this petition received fifty-six eager and first-class signatures.
The agent at Smyrna plumply refused our request, with unnecessary
surliness; but upon the arrival of the captain, and a consultation
which no doubt had more reference to freight than to the petition, the
official agreed, as a special favor, to detain the steamer till eight
o'clock, but not a moment longer.
We hastened to the station of the Aidin Railway, which runs eighty miles
to Aidin, the ancient Tralles, a rich Lydian metropolis of immemorial
foundation. The modern town has perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants, and
is a depot for cotton and figs; that sweetmeat of Paradise, the halva,
is manufactured there, and its great tanneries produce fine yellow
Morocco leather. The town lies only three miles from the famous
tortuous Mæander, and all the region about it is a garden of vines
and fruit-trees. The railway company is under English management, which
signifies promptness, and the special train was ready in ten minutes;
when lo! of the fifty-six devotees of Ephesus only eleven appeared. We
were off at once; good engine, solid track, clean, elegant, comfortable
carnages. As we moved out of the city the air was full of the odor of
orange-blossoms; we crossed the Meles, and sped down a valley, very
fertile, smiling with grain-fields, green meadows, groves of midberry,
oranges, figs, with blue hills,—an ancient Mount Olympus, beyond which
lay green Sardis, in the distance, a country as lovely and home-like as
an English or American farm-land. We had seen nothing so luxuriant and
thriving in the East before. The hills, indeed, were stripped of trees,
but clad on the tops with verdure, the result of plentiful rains.
We went “express.” The usual time of trains is three hours; we ran
over the fifty miles in an hour and a quarter. We could hardly believe
our senses, that we were in a luxurious carriage, flying along at this
rate in Asia, and going to Ephesus! While we were confessing that the
lazy swing of the carriage was more agreeable than that of the donkey
or the dromedary, the train pulled up at station Ayasolook, once the
residence of the Sultans of Ayasolook, and the camp of Tamerlane, now a
cluster of coffeehouses and railway-offices, with a few fever-stricken
inhabitants, who prey upon travellers, not with Oriental courtesy, but
with European insolence.
On our right was a round hill surmounted by a Roman castle; from the
hills on the left, striding across the railway towards Ephesus, were the
tall stone pillars of a Roman aqueduct, the brick arches and conductor
nearly all fallen away. On the summit of nearly every pillar a white,
red-legged stork had built, from sticks and grass, a high round nest,
which covered the top; and the bird stood in it motionless, a beautiful
object at that height against the sky.
The station people had not obeyed our telegram to furnish enough horses,
and those of us who were obliged to walk congratulated ourselves on the
mistake, since the way was as rough as the steeds. The path led over a
ground full of stone débris. This was the site of Ayasolook, which had
been built out of the ruins of the old city; most picturesque objects
were the small mosque-tombs and minarets, which revived here the most
graceful forms and fancies of Saracenic art. One, I noticed, which had
the ideal Persian arch and slender columns, Nature herself had taken
into loving care and draped with clinging green and hanging vines. There
were towers of brick, to which age has given a rich tone, flaring at the
top in a curve that fascinated the eye. On each tomb, tower, and minaret
the storks had nested, and upon each stood the mother looking down
upon her brood. About the crumbling sides of a tower, thus draped and
crowned, innumerable swallows had built their nests, so that it was
alive with birds, whose cheerful occupation gave a kind of pathos to the
human desertion and decay.
Behind the Roman castle stands the great but ruinous mosque of Sultan
Selim, which was formerly the Church of St. John. We did not turn
aside for its empty glory, but to the theologian or the student of the
formation of Christian dogmas, and of the gladiatorial spectacles of an
ancient convocation, there are few arenas in the East more interesting
than this; for in this church it is supposed were held the two councils
of a. d. 431 and 449. St. John, after his release from Patmos, passed
the remainder of his life here; the Virgin Mary followed him to the
city, so favored by the presence of the first apostles, and here she
died and was buried. From her entombment, Ephesus for a long time
enjoyed the reputation of the City of the Virgin, until that honor
was transferred to Jerusalem, where, however, her empty tomb soon
necessitated her resurrection and assumption,—the subject which
inspired so many artists after the revival of learning in Europe. In the
hill near this church Mary Magdalene was buried; in Ephesus also reposed
the body of St. Timothy, its first bishop.
This church of St. John was at some distance from the heart of the city,
which lay in the plain to the south and near the sea, but in the fifth
century Ephesus was a city of churches. The reader needs to remember
that in that century the Christian controversy had passed from the
nature of the Trinity to the incarnation, and that the first council of
Ephesus was called by the emperor Theodosius in the hope of establishing
the opinion of the Syrian Nestorius, the primate of Constantinople, who
refused to give to the mother of Christ the title, then come into use,
of the Mother of God, and discriminated nicely the two natures of
the Saviour. His views were anathematized by Cyril, the patriarch
of Alexandria, and the dispute involved the entire East in a fierce
contest. In the council convened of Greek bishops, Nestorius had no
doubt but he would be sustained by the weight of authority; but the
prompt Cyril, whose qualities would have found a conspicuous and useful
theatre at the head of a Roman army against the Scythians, was first on
the ground, with an abundance of spiritual and temporal arms. In reading
of this council, one recalls without effort the once famous and now
historical conventions of the Democratic party of the State of New
York, in the days when political salvation, offered in the creeds of
the “Hard Shells” and of the “Soft Shells,” was enforced by
the attendance of gangs of “Short boys” and “Tammany boys,” who
understood the use of slung-shot against heretical opinions. It is true
that Nestorius had in reserve behind his prelates the stout slaves of
the bath of Zeuxippus, but Cyril had secured the alliance of the bishop
of Ephesus, and the support of the rabble of peasants and slaves who
were easily excited to jealousy for the honor of the Virgin of their
city; and he landed from Egypt, with his great retinue of bishops, a
band of merciless monks of the Nile, of fanatics, mariners, and slaves,
who took a ready interest in the theological discussions of those days.
The council met in this church, surrounded by the fierce if not martial
array of Cyril; deliberations were begun before the arrival of the
most weighty supporters of Nestorius,—for Cyril anticipated the
slow approach of John of Antioch and his bishops,—and in one day the
primate of Constantinople was hastily deposed and cursed, together with
his heresy. Upon the arrival of John, he also formed a council, which
deposed and cursed the opposite party and heresy, and for three
months Ephesus was a scene of clamor and bloodshed. The cathedral was
garrisoned, the churches were shut against the Nestorians; the imperial
troops assaulted them and were repelled; the whole city was thrown into
a turmoil by the encounters of the rival factions, each council
hurled its anathemas at the other, and peace was only restored by
the dissolution of the council by command of the emperor. The second
session, in the year 449, was shorter and more decisive; it made quick
work of the heresy of Nestorius. Africa added to its delegation of
bullies and fanatics a band of archers; the heresy of the two natures
was condemned and anathematized,—