THE LEVANT AGAIN
The end of the official war and the hopelessness of seeking to
reestablish myself in a literary career in London, as well as the
desire of my wife to try a residence in a climate and surroundings
more attractive than those of the Isle of Wight--the fact, too, of
being without local ties--led to the determination to find a residence
for a time abroad, and the family came to meet me at Turin, _en route_
for Corfu, where we decided to pass the winter. If I had hoped to
escape political agitation there, I was mistaken. The Greeks had hung
fire in joining in the Balkan movement, hoping that the powers would
include them in the arrangements for a final settlement of the Eastern
question. When, in the negotiations which accompanied the conclusion
of peace, Greece found that she was ignored, the inflammable public
opinion broke out in a violent demonstration against the treaty of
peace. When the Russian government had decided to declare war, it
proposed to Greece that if a Greek army were sent across the frontiers
for even a fruitless attack on Turkey when that of Russia entered
on the other side, Greece should participate in the benefits of the
settlement. Greece did nothing, and the offer was renewed at a later
period, when the war was evidently tending to the complete triumph
of Russia, but still there was no action at Athens, and Greece was
consequently ignored by Russia when the treaty was negotiated.
Desperate at this delusion of all their hopes, the Greeks demanded
that the invasion of Epirus and Thessaly should be at once undertaken,
the semblance of an army corps was formed for the latter destination,
and the insurrectionary committees organized (if the word can be
applied to the huddling together of a mass of volunteers without
organization) the invasion of Epirus from the coast. A few hundred men
of many nations, amongst whom were a number of gallant Italians, full
of Hellenic enthusiasm, were landed at Aghia Saranda, a port opposite
Corfu and in sight of the city, a scant allowance of food and
ammunition was thrown on shore with them, and the steamer which
brought them steamed away, leaving them to their fate, which was to be
butchered under the eyes of the spectators at Corfu, looking on
with horror. Only a few of the hapless volunteers escaped under the
guidance of one of the Greeks, who knew the country and guided a party
through the mountains to the Gulf of Corinth, the rest being killed
almost without resistance, no provision for their escape by sea having
been thought of. At the other extremity of the frontier the same
tactics were successful in raising a brief insurrection about
Volo, which collapsed after a few days' fighting, during which a
correspondent of the "Times," Mr. Ogle, was killed by the Turkish
troops. The Greek ministry, in the dilemma of acting or being left out
of the settlement, decided that the army to cross the frontier should
be commanded by the King in person, but the King so earnestly declined
the honor put upon him that the plan was abandoned. One of the
ministers assured me that the King with tears in his eyes begged to be
excused from going. He had never been popular in the country, and this
failure to realize a step in the Panhellenic policy made him for
the time the object of all the popular indignation. But he probably
realized that nothing was ready for such a movement and that it was
certain to end in disaster.
The real cause of failure was in the general indifference to all
preparation, in which the government was supported by the nation. The
overweening confidence in themselves, which was so great as to permit
them to believe that without any organization or discipline they were
more than a match for the Turkish army, has always been their fatal
weakness. One of the leaders of the war party said to me a little
later, "The Greeks are so clever that they do not need to be trained;
they can fight without it well enough to beat the Turks." We saw at
Corfu how ill-prepared they were, for the classes were called out to
go to the frontier of Epirus, and those of Corfu marched through the
streets to the place of embarkation weeping as if they went to
death. This delusion as to their natural military capacity was never
dispelled until the later disaster in Thessaly. The army did in fact
cross the frontier, but within forty-eight hours they were obliged to
return to Greek territory for want of provisions--the commissariat had
been forgotten!
Outside of political agitation we found living in Corfu delightful,
and I question if there is, within the limits of the north temperate
zone, any more delightful winter residence than was that of Corfu in
the period we were there. What remained of the advanced civilization
of the English garrison period gave the island a distinct advantage
over all the other Greek isles, and even over Crete with its superior
natural advantages. Greek enterprise and civilization are so far
superior to that found anywhere in the Turkish territory that they
are capable of maintaining the substantial progress which the English
occupation achieved in Corfu; and, though we found the peasantry not
largely inoculated by the fever of progress, the better classes of the
city population succeed in supporting the better condition attained
to. But the obstinacy of the conservatism retained by the agricultural
classes is equal to that in the least frequented islands of the
Aegean. A relative, on whose estate we passed a part of the winter,
remote from the city of Corfu, had tried to introduce improvements
in the culture of his olives; but the laborers not only refused to
coöperate with him, but opposed the introduction of laborers who would
lend themselves to his operations. As the olives had been gathered in
the days of Nausicaa they should be gathered still, and so should the
oil be made, and he was obliged to yield. But as we from the west
suffer not a little from over-civilization and artifice, it is
grateful to repose the eyes and the aesthetic sense in a land
where there still remains something of the antique simplicity and
picturesque uncouthness, and the winter in Scheria remains one of the
grateful memories of a wandering life.
Leaving Corfu with freedom from any local obligations, and a keen
enjoyment of the change from life in England, we decided to establish
ourselves for a time in Florence, where we passed the whole of the
summer. In October a son was born to us, and we took a house and
furnished it. I took a studio, too, and returned to painting, as well
as the long interval permitted me to gather up the threads of habit.
Art is not to be followed in that way, and there is no cause for
surprise, nor, perhaps, for regret, that literature had the stronger
hold on my mind; and that, between the "Times," letters for which were
provoked by so many themes of interest to the English public, and
archaeology, especially the study of the prehistoric monuments of
central Italy, so important in their yet hardly determined relations
to the classical world, the pencil found less attraction than the pen.
To my wife, whose enjoyment of Italian art was intense, Florence
was an ideal residence; and on some accounts I still regret the
circumstances which drove us out of the lily city,--to me still the
most desirable residence I have ever known, when one is able to adapt
one's self to the life there. After the first summer we found the
Italian Alps one of the most delectable of retreats, Cadore and
Auronzo, with Cortina and Landro,--all places full of picturesque and
natural fascination. And now, as the strength wanes and we live more
in memory than in act, the recollection of the summers passed in the
land of Titian remains a gallery of the most delightful pictures.
At Cortina I met and first knew Browning, who, with his sister
Sariana, our old and dear friend, came to stay at the inn where we
were. I am not much inclined to reckon intellectual greatness as a
personal charm, for experience has shown me that the relation is very
remote; but Browning always impressed me--and then and after I saw a
good deal of him--as one of the healthiest and most robust minds I
have ever known, sound to the core, and with an almost unlimited
intellectual vitality and an individuality which nothing could
infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others
prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a
strong man armed in the completest defensive armor, but with no
aggressive quality. His was a nature of utter sincerity, and what had
seemed to me, reading his poetry before knowing him, to be more or
less an affectation of obscurity, a cultivation of the cryptic sense,
I found to be the pure expression of his individuality. He made short
cuts to the heart of his theme, perhaps more unconscious than uncaring
that his line of approach could not be followed by his general
readers, as a mathematician leaves a large hiatus in his
demonstration, seeing the result the less experienced must work out
step by step.
At Cortina, too, I saw again Gladstone, late in the summer, when the
place was abandoned by the general crowd. I had begun a study of
running water, over which I lingered as long as the weather permitted,
when he came with Mrs. Gladstone and his son Herbert and daughter
Helen. The old man was full of physical and mental energy, and we had
several moderate climbs in the mountains of the vicinity. They had
not come out to be together as at home, and each took generally
a different walk. Gladstone was a good walker, and talked by the
way,--which not all good walkers can do,--but I do not remember his
ever talking of himself; and in this he was like Ruskin,--he assumed
himself as an element in the situation, and thought no more about it;
never in our conversations obtruding his views as of more importance
than the conversation demanded, and never opinionated, not even
dogmatic, but always inquiring, and more desirous of hearing of the
things that had interested him than of expressing his own views about
them. It was a moment in which, for some reason I do not now recall,
Beaconsfield was much in evidence, and we discussed him on one of
our walks; on his part with the most dispassionate appreciation and
kindness of manner. I had said of his great rival that he had struck a
blow at the prestige of the English aristocracy, from which it would
never recover, and he asked with a quickened interest what that might
be, and when I replied that it was by his putting himself at the head
of it, he thought a moment and replied, nodding his head, "That is
true."
He was very fond of talking with the people of the valley, who are
Italians, and his Italian was better than one is accustomed to hear
from English people, even from those who live in Italy. We passed a
fountain one day, at which a washerwoman was washing her linen, and he
stopped to talk to her, and asked her, among other questions, if she
had always been a washerwoman. No, she replied, she had been a _bália_
(nurse) once. He was struck by her pronunciation of the word _bália_
and walked on; but presently he said, "I thought that that word
was pronounced _balía_" and, when I explained that there were two
words--_bália_ which meant a nurse, and _balía_, which came from the
same root as our "bailiff," and meant a charge, custody,--he seemed
annoyed, and made no more remarks during the continuation of our
climb. It was evident that he was vexed, not at me, who corrected
him, but at his not having known the trivial detail of a language
efficiency in which he prided himself on. It was the only foible I
detected in him. He was very much interested in America, and asked
many questions about our politics. Two things, he said, in the future
of America, seemed to him ominous of evil: the condition of our civil
service, and the amount of our Western lands going into mortmain
through the gifts to the great railway systems.
It would be, perhaps, unjustifiable to form a firm opinion on a man of
Gladstone's calibre from the few days of our intercourse, even in
the freedom and openness of mind of a mountain walk, politics and
Parliament forgotten; but the final impression he gave me was that of
a man, on the whole, immensely greater than I had taken him to be, but
with conflicting elements of greatness which neutralized each other to
a certain extent. He had in him the Platonist, the Statesman, and the
Theologian, of each enough for an ordinary man, and one crowded the
other in action. The Platonist crowded the Statesman, and, at certain
dangerous moments, the broad humanitarian feeling overlooked the
practical dangers of the critical juncture in which he had to act. His
idealism took off the point of his statecraft, and what has always
seemed, and still seems, to me his aberration in the artificial
problems of our ecclesiastical theology, is the only thing I cannot
yet understand in so great a man.
That winter I had a commission from the "Century" (then "Scribner's")
to make an archaeological and literary venture in Greek waters, the
results of which in a series of papers in the magazine were afterwards
published in a volume entitled "On the Track of Ulysses."
Accompanied by Mr. H.M. Paget, the artist, I went to Corfu and hired
the Kestrel, my old friend of the Cretan days, and I decided to follow
the track of Ulysses in his return to Ithaca from Troy. Beginning at
Santa Maura we examined every point in the Ionian Islands to which
any illusion is made in the "Odyssey" as far as Cerigo and Cerigotto,
meeting a storm off the former island which might well have ended our
trip. A well-found Greek brig foundered only a short distance from us
in the gale, and we drifted all day and till early in the morning of
the day following, when we managed to make the port of Cerigo, during
which time we could neither eat a meal nor even get a cup of coffee.
Paget made a capital sailor, and, though the old Maltese captain of
former days was dead, his two sons, lads then, were dexterous sailors
in the rough-and-ready, rule-of-thumb manner of the Levantine boatman,
knowing nothing of navigation and little more of geography than
Ulysses himself. We had no charts, and only a very primitive compass,
but we all had the antique love of adventure and indifference to
danger. Leaving Cerigotto, an island out of the line of traditional or
historic interest, but, curious for its fine and extensive Pelasgic
remains, we laid our course for Crete, starting with the breeze that
at nightfall generally blows towards the land, which was visible from
where we took our departure, and counted on being at Canea with the
morning.
But the Aegean is a tricky sea, and furnishes many surprises, as St.
Paul knew, and, when not more than ten miles from the shelter of the
Cretan coast, it came on to blow from the southwest with such violence
that we were unable to beat up to the shelter of the Cretan highlands,
and under a mere rag of canvas had to run before the wind, wherever it
might drive us. I was the only one on board who knew anything of the
Archipelago, and I had to decide the course, which it was possible
to vary only a point or two either way, for the yacht would only run
free, or, under favorable weather, with a beam wind. I had to guess
our course, which from my knowledge of the islands I saw could only be
directly to Milo, about forty miles away. If we hit the harbor, well
and good, for it gives excellent shelter in all weather, but if we
missed it we had two chances--to find an opening between the islands
and reefs, or to hit a lee shore and go on it, for there was no hope
of clawing off. I set the course, left the boys in charge, and went to
bed. The boat was jumping through the sea with a shock at each wave
she struck, as if she had leaped out of the water, and it seemed as if
she must be showing her keel with each jump. I awoke in the night and,
getting out of my berth to take a look outside, put my feet in the
water which had risen to cover the cabin floor. All hands at the pumps
kept it down, but it was clear that the old craft, nearly twenty years
older than when I first saw her, was no longer seaworthy, and we
had no hope of the weather lifting, for these southwesterly gales
generally blow at least a day. I went back to bed again, for there was
nothing to be done but wait on fortune, and be glad that we should
make Milo by daylight.
My previsions justified themselves, for in the course of the afternoon
we made the entrance to the harbor, and ran in before such a sea as I
never saw in those waters before. The waves broke against the great
pillar of rock that stands in the entrance of the harbor, sending
the spray to its very summit, and as we ran to the anchorage off the
little port the whole population poured down to see the arrival,
wondering what sent the tiny craft out in such weather. The old pilot
said that it had been the worst gale of forty years, which I could
well believe. The weather having abated, we ran over to Crete, where
I found the island laboring with reforms, a constitution, and a
Christian governor, in the person of my old friend Photiades Pasha. We
were invited to dine at the Konak, and of the company was Edhem Pasha,
a charming, intelligent, and thoroughly civilized Turk, by far the
most liberal and progressive of his race I had met, with the single
exception of A'ali Pasha. We played at "Admiration" that evening, a
game which puts a series of questions as to the qualities one admires.
In reply to the question "What kind of courage do you admire?" the
pasha, turning to me, replied, "I admire the courage of that gentleman
in going to sea in so small a boat in such weather," and he admitted
laughingly that his courage was not at that level.
I found in the place of my old friend Dickson, consul for England and
colleague of the Cretan days, since dead, Humphrey Sandwith, a noble
and faithful representative of the dignity and humanity of his
nation, and for many years subsequently my intimate friend, who has
disappeared while I write from the lessening list of living friends,
but who will ever keep his place in my regards as a noble, just, and
humane representative of his race, as of his government. In the years
of the subsequent Cretan difficulties, Sandwith was always the good
and wise friend of the islanders. It is good to remember such a
representation of the power and dignity of England in lands where his
colleagues have not always honored England or humanity, and I shall
always think of Sandwith with greater respect for his nation.
The results of the "Century" expedition were nothing in respect of
excavation, and the records of the tracing of the route of the Great
Ithacan were written out in the Dolomites in the course of the summer.
We found that excavation was a matter beyond achievement with the
limited funds at my disposal, but Photiades was munificent in promises
of support if I wished to return for serious undertaking in that
direction. In the following winter I was accordingly requested to take
charge, for the American Archaeological Institute, of an expedition
for research and if possible for excavation. Trusting to the
benevolent promises of the pasha, I accepted the mission. He renewed
his assurances of aid, and showed me the greatest cordiality and
benevolence, invited me to dinner and to spend the evening, and
treated me generally with a friendliness which astonished the old
Turkish element, who considered me the devil of the island. (In fact,
my appearance was considered the omen of trouble, and the Mussulmans
said when they saw me, "Are we going to have another war?") It was
easy to see, however, that the elements of trouble in the island had
not been eliminated by the appointment of a Christian governor or the
concessions which had been made to the Christian majority. So long as
the power of rendering ineffective any reforms, or blocking the way
to progress of the higher civilization of the island, remained at
Constantinople, the Turkish minority in the island would retain their
faculty of making the concessions to the majority fallacious.
Photiades Pasha, an amiable and very intelligent man, recognized the
dominant fact of his position to be the necessity of keeping the favor
of the Mussulman oligarchy at the capital, and he could not offend
the Mussulmans of the island by even a maintenance of equal justice
between the two religions. He was therefore obliged to satisfy
the leaders of the Christian agitators by the concession of minor
advantages in the local conflicts, oftener of Christian against
Christian than of the same against the Turk, and finally he was
obliged to resort to the inciting of feud and jealousy between the
clans, villages, and provinces in the island, to keep them from
uniting against him. He found it convenient to employ me as a tub to
the whale, and, having first excited the insular jealousy against
archaeological intrusion by foreigners, and inducing his clique of
subordinate intriguers to oppose my operations, though the Christian
population in general were in favor of permitting me to excavate
wherever I liked, he made them the concession of refusing me the
permission I sought. Therefore, while he promised me all things and
urged me to go at once to select my locality, he wrote to the Porte
advising the refusal of the firman, which had been applied for
directly by the Institute, through the minister at Constantinople.
My assistant, Mr. Haynes, who had been sent by the Institute to take
his first lessons in archaeology and photography, having arrived, we
went to Candia to select our site. We decided on attacking a ruin on
the acropolis of Gnossus, already partially exposed by the searches
of local diggers for antiques. It had a curiously labyrinthine
appearance, and on the stones I found and described the first
discovered of the characters whose nature has since been made the
subject of the researches of Mr. Evans. I made an agreement with the
Turkish proprietor of the land, and prepared to set to work when the
firman should arrive. After more than one letter from Photiades,
assuring me in unqualified terms that I might confidently count on the
reception of the firman, I received a communication from the minister
at Constantinople, that on the advice of Photiades Pasha the firman
was refused. I had selected as the alternative locality the cave known
as the burial-place of Zeus, on the summit of Mount Yuctas, not
far from Gnossus, in the excavation of which I am convinced that
archaeology will one day receive great light on early Cretan myth. The
importance of the locality in the prehistoric research in which Crete
is one of the most important sections of our field of study, will,
I am convinced, one day justify my anxiety to attack it; and the
subsequent discoveries, so important, made by Halbherr in the
companion cave on Mount Ida, where Zeus was believed to have been
hidden and nursed, confirm my conviction of the value of the evidence
still hidden on Yuctas.
Debarred from carrying out the purpose of my expedition, I contented
myself with making such a survey of that part of the island as should
serve the Institute for another attempt when the artificial obstacles
should be removed; and I was on the point of visiting Gortyna when
troubles broke out, initiated by the murder of two Mussulmans at
Gortyna, revenged by the murder of Christians at Candia, and there
was nothing to be done but to get back to civilization. From the
Mussulmans of the island I had less hostility to endure than from the
more influential of the Christian Cretans, with whom the dominant
passion of life seemed to be that of intrigue, and with whose
mendacity and unscrupulousness I could not contend.
I had a curious instance of the honesty of the Mussulman in a dealer
in bricabrac, embroideries, and stuffs with whom I used to deal at
Candia. Arapi Mehmet, as he was called, i.e. Mahommed the Arabian, was
a man in whom no religious fanaticism disturbed his relations with his
fellow-men; no English agnostic could be more liberal, and we often
had dealings in which his honesty was evident. On one of the last
visits I made to his shop I looked at two embroidered cushion covers
which I wanted to purchase, but the price he put on them made it
out of the question, and as he refused to take less I gave up the
bargaining, and he called for the coffee. While we were drinking it
and conversing of other matters, I said to him, "Arapi, why do you ask
such absurd prices? You know that the cushions are not worth so much."
"Oh," he replied, "you are rich and can afford it." "What makes you
think I am rich?" I asked. "You travel about and see the world, and
take your pleasure," he said. "But I am not rich," I said; "I am a
workingman; I do not travel for pleasure, but to earn my living. I am
a scribe, and am paid for what I write, and what I earn is all I
have to live on. I have no property." "Is that true?" he asked me,
earnestly, looking me in the eyes. "That is quite true; I have nothing
but what I earn," I replied; "I make the living of my family in this
way. If I do not write we have no bread." The cushions had meanwhile
been sent back to his house, as he kept all his fine goods there; and,
without another word to me, he shouted to his shop boy to go and get
them, and, when brought, he threw them to me, saying, "Take them and
give me what you like."
I always found that the Mussulman merchants were more trustworthy in
their dealings with me than the Christians, and, though there was, as
a matter of course, at first an amount of bargaining and beating down
the prices, which was expected, they never attempted to deceive me
in the quality of the goods, and they often called my attention to
articles of artistic or archaeological value, which were cheap, and
when they came to know me well they gave me, at the outset, the lowest
price they could take, while it never happened with a Christian
shopman in Crete that I was treated with frankness or moderation. The
next time I went back to Candia, Arapi was dead.
Returning to Canea, my archaeological mission being abortive, I was
told by the Christian secretary of the pasha that the difficulty had
been that I had not offered to give to His Excellency the coins that
might be found in the excavations, and that if I did this I might hope
for a firman. As it was not in my power to give what, by the agreement
arrived at with the proprietor of the soil, had been definitely
disposed of, half to him and the other half to the museums of the
island, and as the troubles had begun, there was nothing more to be
done, and I made a flying trip to some parts of the island which I had
not seen. Of this, the passage through the valley of Enneochoria
(the nine villages) will remain in my memory as the most delightful
pastoral landscape I have ever seen, and the ideal of Greek pastoral
poetry. A beautiful brook, to the perennial flow of whose waters the
abundant water-cresses testified, which is a very rare thing in an
Aegean scene, meandered amongst mingled sycamores and olives, and gave
freshness to glades where the sheep fed under the keepership of the
antique-mannered shepherd lads and lasses; and in the opening of the
bordering trees we saw the far-off and arid mountains, rugged and
picturesque peaks. The Cretan summer for three or four months is
rainless, and a valley where the vegetation is fed by the springs so
abundantly as to sustain a perpetual flora is rarely to be met in
one's travels there. I saw many new flowers there, and amongst them
a perfectly white primrose, in every other respect like the common
flower of the English hedgerows. The scenery had that attractive
aspect which can be found only where immemorial culture, without
excessive invasion of the axe, has left nature in the undiminished
possession of her chief beauties, without a trace of the savage
wildness--a nature which hints at art. It was classic without being
formal, but no description can give an idea of the charm of it in
contrast with the general aridity of the Cretan landscape.
As we rode through the villages we found the population animated by
that joyous hospitality which belongs to an antique tradition, to
which a stranger guest is something which the gods have sent, and
sent rarely so that no tourist weariness had worn out the welcome.
Something of the welcome was, no doubt, due to the reputation I had
acquired in former times as a friend of the Christians of the island,
but I found that in Crete, where the invasion of the foreign element
had been at a minimum and the people were most conservative, ancient
usages and ancient hospitality had retained all their force, as, to
a lesser extent, I had found them in the Peloponnesus, while in
continental Greece I never found hospitality in any form. The Cretans
are probably the purest remnant of the antique race which resulted
from the mixture of Pelasgian, Dorian, Achaian, Ionian, and the best
representative of the antique intellect.
It was almost impossible to travel in the interior of the island,
where the Christian element still held its own unmixed, without coming
in contact with remnants of the most ancient superstitions. In one
place my guide pointed out to me a cave where Janni the shepherd one
day gathered his sheep in the midday heats to fiddle to them, when
there came out of the sea a band of Nereids, who begged him to play
for their dancing. Janni obeyed and lost his heart to one of the sea
damsels, and, sorely smitten, went to a wise woman to know what he
should do to win her, and was told that he must boldly seize her in
the whirl of the dance and hold her, no matter what happened. He
followed the direction, and though the nymph changed shape many times
he kept his hold and she submitted to him and they were married. In
process of time she bore a child, but all the while she had never
spoken a word. The wise woman, consulted again, told Janni to take the
child and pretend to lay it on the fire, when his wife would speak. He
obeyed again, but made a slip, and the child, falling into the fire,
was burned to death, whereupon the wife fled to the sea and was never
seen again. This was told me in all seriousness as of a contemporary
event, and was evidently held as history. I bought from a peasant one
of the well-known three-sided prisms with archaic intaglios of animals
on the faces, and had the curiosity to inquire the virtues of it, for
I was told that it was greatly valued and had been worn by his wife,
who reluctantly gave it up. He replied that it had the power of
preventing the mother's milk from failing prematurely.
We passed through Selinos, where the riflers of the antique necropolis
brought me quantities of glass found in the graves, and a few bronze
and gold ornaments; and when I had loaded myself and my attendants
with all the glass we could safely carry, the people begged me still
to buy, if only for a piastre each piece, what they had accumulated
for want of a buyer. But what is found in this district is mainly or
entirely of a late period, that of the Roman occupation of the island,
I suppose, for we found no archaic objects of any kind, or early
inscriptions, and only a few in late characters. But the ride through
this section of the island is one of the most delightful one could
take, so far as I know, in classical lands. The kindly, hospitable
Seliniotes, known for centuries as the bravest of all the Cretan
clans, persecuted with all the cruelty of Venetian craft in the days
when the island city ruled the island sea, always refractory under
foreign rule and often unruly under their own régime, seem to have
enjoyed in the later centuries of Roman rule and the earlier of the
Byzantine a great prosperity, if one may judge from the evidence of
the necropolis, the graves in which yield a singular indication of a
well-distributed wealth. These graves lie for great distances along
every road leading to what must have been the principal centre of the
civilization, though there are no ruins to mark its location. This
singular absence of ancient ruin indicates a peculiarity in the
civilization of that section of the island which history gives no clue
to. Northward, near the sea, there are the remains of great Pelasgic
cities, of which when I first traveled in the island the walls were in
stupendous condition, but of which at this visit I had found hardly
a trace--the islanders had pulled them down to get stone for their
houses. The site of Polyrhenia, connected in tradition with the return
of Agamemnon from Troy, was one of the finest Pelasgic ruins I have
ever seen when I first visited it, but on this visit I could hardly
find the locality, and of the splendid polygonal wall I saw in 1865
not a stone remained.
Our route brought us through Murnies, celebrated for its orange groves
and for the horrible execution of many Cretans by Mustapha Kiritly in
the "great insurrection"--that of 1837--to punish them for assembling
to petition the Sultan for relief. It is one of the most ghastly of
all the dreadful incidents of Turkish repressions, for the Cretans,
pacifically assembled without arms, were arrested, and all their
magnates, for the better repression of discontent and to overawe
rebellions to come, were hanged on the orange-trees in such numbers
that, as the old consul of Sweden, an eye-witness, told me during my
consulate, the orchard was hung with them, and left there to rot.
According to the statement of the consul, not less than thirty of the
chief men of that district were so executed.
But the history of the Venetian rule shows that it was no less cruel
and even more treacherous, and Pashley gives from their own records
the story of the slaughter of many of the chief people of the same
district to punish refractoriness against the government of that day.
Read where we will, so long as there is anything to read, we find
the history of Crete one of the most horrible of the classic
world--rebellion, repression, slaughter, internecine and
international, until a population, which in the early Venetian times
was a million, was reduced in 1830 to little more than a hundred
thousand, and during my own residence was brought nearly as low, what
with death by sword and bullet, by starvation and disease induced by
starvation, added to exile, permanent or temporary. Yet in 1865 it
had been reckoned at 375,000, Christian and Mussulman. But it must be
admitted that the Cretan was always the most refractory of subjects,
and, though at the time of this visit the island had obtained the
fundamental concessions which it had fought for, in the recognition of
its autonomy with a governor of the faith of the majority, in a later
visit in 1886 I found it ravaged by a sectional war of vendetta,
Christian against Christian, in which, as Photiades Pasha assured
me, in one year 600 people had been killed and 25,000 olive-trees
destroyed in village feuds. But the evidence was at hand to show that
the pasha himself, finding the islanders no less difficult to control
for all the concessions made them, had been obliged in the interest of
his own quiet and permanence in government to turn the restlessness
of the Cretans into sectional conflicts during which they left him in
peaceful possession of his pashalik. In eastern countries government
becomes a fine art if not a humane one.