Grecian Calendar

LJJ <

>C
^ DO

73

OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Call No. CVVtj . <^ s \ R \ < Gn Accession No. Gi \1S 1 S

Author
Title
This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below.

GRECIAN CALENDAR

GRECIAN
CALENDAR

CHRISTOPHER RAND

NEW YORK - OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1962

CopYRiciii (r) 1962 BY CHRISTOPHER RAND
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUE CARD NUMBER: 62-16578

A lust of the material in this book appeared originally in The New Yorker
in somewhat different form; <) 1962 The New Yorker Alagazine, Inc.

PRINIED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MY FAMILY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This whole work was undertaken by The New Yorker and me
together, and without the New Yorker it could not have been done.

I have also been helped by innumerable Greek and other
friends. I cannot list them all, but they know what they did
for me, and I trust they know how thankful I am.

CONTENTS

I. ATTICA, 3

II. THE SEASON BEGINS, 35

III. THE BIG LAND TOUR, 60
IV. WYKONOS, 95

V. THE SEASON CONTINUES, 125

VI. THE BIG SEA TOUR, 144
VII. ATHENS, 169

EPITOME OF GREEK HISTORY, 199
INDEX, 201

GRECIAN CALENDAR

>g|"''*'' p *>wW-t "*N- /A" 'ViT-V^Vvr.-.i-M^pvWWlk ' " -

ij^aaaJSa^i^lllJ!^ T _--^^.. fI -^^

|%^

"

MAINLAND
GREECE "'"'

1

ATTICA

I came back to Greece in January, 1960, with the intention
of writing about Greek "tourism," a plan that I modified as
the year went on. I came by the Greek ship Angelica,
sailing from Brindisi on the Italian heel. Greece is interesting
even before you get to it, because of the approach question.
There is only one Greek land frontier, on the north, and
this is cut off by the Balkan wilds from western Europe

or simply "Europe," as many Greeks call it, in distinc-
tion to their own country, which they see as belonging to
no continent. The Balkans are an obstacle on the way to
Greece, and so is the sea. Of course one can fly to Athens,
and that is like flying anywhere else, but otherwise one
has a problem. One can take the train through Yugoslavia

and through some gorgeous scenery but from "Eu-
rope" that is a two-day trip. One can also drive through
Yugoslavia, but that is rough going and takes still longer.
I declined these alternatives in favor of sea travel, which I
think is the most fitting. Greece can be called amphibious.
It consists of two parts, which are sometimes referred to
as Dry Greece the mainland and Wet Greece the
islands. The wet part has been moistening the national life

4 GRECIAN CALENDAR

since before Ulysses, and if one wants to get into a Grecian
mood one should (I think) get near the water.

The particular trip from Brindisi is appropriate, too, for
it is small in scale, like the Greek maritime world. Brindisi
itself need not detain us. In A Farewell to Arms one of
Hemingway's Italian soldiers, named Gino, speaks slight-
ingly of it.

" 1 am a patriot,' Gino said, 'but I cannot love Brindisi
or Taranto.' "

I don't think Brindisi is that bad, though it isn't one of
Italy's wonders. It is interesting historically, because even
in Roman days it was a jump-off spot for Greece and Asia.
It was the end of the Appian Way, and a column still
stands in it to mark that fact.

As for the Angelica, she was built in Glasgow around
1900, and for a time was used by the Canadian Pacific Rail-
way, under the name of Princess Adelaide, to run up and
down the Inland Passage between Alaska and Vancouver,
British Columbia. This is a common situation with Greek
ships often they have had earlier lives, in other waters,
under other names. If you get up on the bridge of a
Greek ship you are apt to find that the instruments have
English or Scandinavian words on them. I don't think the
ships have often made long voyages in those earlier lives
they are too small for that. Rather they have sailed on
the Irish Sea, perhaps, or in the archipelago around Copen-
hagen. An impressionable tourist can get a good whiff of
the Northern past, as well as the Greek present, from riding
on them. I found the Angelica delightfully Victorian
full of old red-brown paneling and monumental plumbing.
It also had two mellowing charts on display of Alaskan
waters.

ATTICA 5

We embarked around dusk, then in time had dinner and
went to bed, while the Angelica sailed out across the
Adriatic. The next day at dawn we were off Corfu, a Greek
island on the other coast, near Albania. I was up watching,
a little after six. There were dark clouds in the distance, lit
by red, and above that the sky was a pale blue, with stars
in it. Corfu itself was a long, low, black silhouette, all
sharply outlined, with domes and towers to point it up.

We docked and stayed there till mid-morning, and after
breakfast I took a walk in the town with a fellow passenger,
a young American classical scholar. "As you will remember
from your Thucydides," he told me flatteringly, "Corfu, or
Corcyra, helped to start the Peloponnesian War. It was a
colony of Corinth, and like all Greek colonies it soon
wanted to be independent. It got the help of Athens, then
Corinth got the help of Sparta, and so it went. . . ."

He told me other ancient history as we walked about,
and meanwhile we saw traces of the more recent past
among them massive fortifications built by the British in
the nineteenth century, when they ruled Corfu awhile.
The Italians have also held the place in the past, for cen-
turies, and the culture is said to have more Italian flavor
there than it has elsewhere in Greece. In ways Corfu seems
almost a nation apart. In the months since then I have
mulled over Greece a good deal visualizing its map and
disposition and I find I am apt to leave Corfu out of my
picture, though I have no idea if the Greeks themselves
do that.

We went through Greek customs at Corfu, and for the
rest of our voyage almost twenty-four hours we were
in Greek waters, essentially. This change was more than a
technicality, for we began picking up the hordes of peasants
who move about on the Wet Greece shipping. The Angel-

6 GRECIAN CALENDAR

lea had three classes, which is usual on such boats. The
first was the only one that approached American ideas of
comfort. The second had individual berths for the passen-
gers, but these were small, hard, and crowded many to a
cabin. The third had nothing but deck space and broad
bunk-shelves where people could sit or lie down side by
side, with their clothes on.

I have traveled in that third class on other Greek boats,
and I prefer it to second for short trips; there is room to
move around, along with the satisfaction of roughing it
and of course the company of Greek peasants, who are
among the most gracious people on earth. From Corfu on,
the Angelica was teeming with peasants I was in first
class, but I went down to third at times and wandered
among them. They came on or got off at our ports of call.
They were of both sexes and all ages, and they brought all
manner of things along, including chickens, sacks, baskets,
and big demijohns of wine. The chickens were cooped in
crates, but their owners let them out a good deal, for water
or exercise, and they scrambled on the decks along with
the children.

After Corfu we sailed down the Greek west coast in
fine weather, with a blue sky and blue sea. The hills ashore
were sometimes gray and bare, sometimes green with a
brush cover they always looked dry in either case. We
stopped briefly that afternoon, without getting off, at the
islands of Ithaca and Cephalonia, the former having been
the home of Ulysses. No trace of his town or palace has
been found there yet, but one gets a fair notion of his
environment by just gazing from the boat. Ithaca is a
hard, rocky little island, with much character but little
luxury Tennyson hits it off well in his poem Ulysses.
From a mere glance at it one sympathizes with Ulysses'

ATTICA 7

expressed longing to get back to it, and also with his actual
delay in doing so.

That night we turned into the Gulf of Corinth, which
cuts almost across the Greek peninsula, and at dawn we
reached the Corinth Canal, which finishes the cutting by a
few miles of ditch across an isthmus. The Canal was dug
in the nineteenth century, but the idea of it is much older
than that. Even Nero set out to dig it, but he stopped
before long, and I have heard a strange explanation, from
a Greek tourist-guide, of why he did so that he was
dissuaded by some hangers-on, whose motives were not
specified, but who convinced him that the Adriatic Sea,
in the west, was higher than the Aegean, in the east, and
that its waters would pour through the Canal and swamp
the island of Aegina, near Athens. (I have not confirmed
this story, I must say, from any other source.)

There was a faint dawn as we approached the Canal,
then as we entered it this was dimmed out by electric lights
along the waterside. They were like streetlights on a New
York highway the Canal was no wider than that, and
for the first part the banks were low. Soon they rose up,
though, and in time we were passing through a deep cut
of buff stone or earth, with only a few feet of room on
either side. The water of our wake rushed and splashed in
the interval. Later we passed under two bridges, one for
trains and one for autos, which appeared to sit up in the
sky along with the stars they were, I think, more than
two hundred feet above us. Then we left the Canal, with
its illumination, and the dawn showed pink and green by
that time the roosters in third class were crowing.

The Canal is a big factor in Wet Greece. Boats of much
size can't get through it, so it helps to keep Aegean shipping
down to the cozy Greek scale. Non-Greek shippers some-

GRECIAN CALENDAR

times complain that it is discriminatory, designed to keep
them out of Greek waters. It doesn't keep them out en-
tirely not even from the Canal itself for I have seen
Italian and Turkish boats in it. But they were small by the
standards of their nations, and their captains may well have
been grumbling, too, about unreasonable delays rigged
against them by the Greek Canal authorities. The Canal is
small, the ships are small, the Aegean is small it is all a
small world of its own. Its true capital is the Piraeus, which
despite its great age and importance is also small, and fre-
quented mainly by the toy-sized merchant marine. Athens
is the official capital of Greece, but many of the island
people look on it as a mere shadow of the Piraeus, although
the latter, to a hasty tourist's eye, seems hardly more than
a miniature Hoboken.

By the time we reached the Piraeus, an hour or two from
the Canal, we had a good sunny morning. I disembarked,
got into a taxi with my things, and drove up through Athens
to a resort named Kifissia, in the hills beyond it. I had
stayed there the summer before and had grown attached
to a hotel, the Cecil, where I planned to live for the next
few months, until the tourist season got under way.

The Cecil is one of the pleasantest hotels I know, in
Greece or anywhere. It has been kept so largely by the
conservatism, even the parsimony, of the Greek brothers
who own it, and who firmly refuse to put in swimming
pools, tennis courts, chromium bars, public radios, or any
other gadgets, despite the example of their competitors and
the world at large. What they have, as a result, is a fine,
simple, old-fashioned structure whose design reminds one
of a hospital and also of the Potala at Lhasa, the former
center of Tibetan Buddhism. The building is a wide, shallow
slab, about six stories high, rising from a verdant pan of

ATTICA 9

Kifissia not far from Mount Pentelicon, where much of the
marble for the Acropolis was quarried. Like many other
Greek buildings, the Cecil has a good deal of marble in it,
too marble stairways, marble terraces at front and back,
and marble in the bathrooms.

The hotel's layout is simple and very like a hospital's

each floor has a wide, straight corridor running through
it, with rooms on either side. When I arrived, in winter,
the place was nearly deserted, and only the lower part
was heated. I got a room and bath on the "second" story

the third, by our reckoning for only two dollars a
day. It had a parquet floor, a high ceiling, a high, narrow,
hospital-like bed, and French windows, these looking out
southward across the driveway to a stand of ever-
greens, and beyond their tops to Athens and the Aegean.
We often had good weather as the winter continued, and
then I would open the French windows and take sun-baths.
We also had snowstorms on occasion, and then big flakes
would hover dreamily outside.

The staff was small in winter. On my floor there were
two men-servants and a chambermaid; in the dining-room
there was a headwaiter, a waiter, and a bus-boy; and in
the lobby there was a concierge and two or three other
porters or bell-boys. I can't describe how kind they were
to me. Some Greeks say their countrymen are afflicted with
xenomania, or madness for foreigners. I have detected no
madness in it, but they have got a tremendous courtesy,
cheerfulness, and sense of hospitality. A foreigner almost
always gets from Greeks a smile, a pleasantry or two, and
whatever help he needs. This was especially true at the
Cecil, which seemed to have a very high morale, although
the servants were not paid much. I went through my days
continually supported by good cheer.

10 GRECIAN CALENDAR

Soon after I arrived I began taking Greek lessons, from
a lady who came in twice a week, and after that the servants
all joined in to coach and give me practice. They were
better linguists than I ever hope to be. Aside from Greek
most of them spoke French and English at least. The head-
waiter spoke English that was more than adequate for his
job, though I understand it was less good than his Italian,
his French, his Arabic, or his Turkish. The concierge,
George, was highly voluble touchingly so in both
French and English. He was a thin, nervous man with a
long nose, bushy brows, and thinning hair that he kept
smoothly brushed.

George was always solving my problems lending me
money and telling me how to get things done in Athens.
He used to tell me about his problems, too, including his
nightmares. He even had nightmares of lions coming and
beating on his chest, and he sometimes inveighed to me
passionately, and suddenly, about injustices in Greek soci-
ety. But I think he was happy on the whole. He had good
cause to be. He had married off his sisters an onerous
duty in Greece, where dowries are the rule and was
raising two fine little non-dowriable boys of his own.

For my taste the food at the Cecil was only so-so, or
etsi-ketsi as the Greeks say. Most dishes on the menu were
of a type that I associate with the word "tourism/ 7 which
came, in 1960, to have a phony connotation for me they
were feeble imitations, that is, of French, British, or other
West European models. The Greeks have a good cuisine of
their own, but when they start turning out wiener schnitzels
and tournedos rossini they achieve products not much more
edible, in my opinion, then color photographs of food. Yet
the idea is current that quality folk must eat such things,
and if you are caught in the meshes of high-level Greek

ATTICA II

tourism you may never taste anything else. The big hotels
in Athens concentrate overwhelmingly on photograph
food, and so the city's cheap restaurants, as a rule, are better
than its expensive ones. The only case I know where one
can gain something by eating at a big Athenian hotel is
in the Grande Bretagne at lunchtime, where they do roll
around a fine collection of mezedes or Greek hors d'oeuvres.
Otherwise I would recommend those hotels only for bed
and breakfast.

As for the Cecil, it offered seventy or eighty per cent
photographs, perhaps, but it always had a few Greek dishes
too. The Greeks favor lamb or veal stewed with vegetables
in olive oil, and one such stew was usually available. The
Cecil was also terribly good with moussaka, a dish made
from layers of ground meat alternated with either eggplant,
zucchini, or artichoke hearts depending on the season

then wet with olive oil, topped off with a little cheese
and dough or mashed potato, and put into the oven.* In
most restaurants the moussaka is baked in big pans, for
many portions, and left standing, so it gets cool, but the
Cecil always did it fresh and piping hot in individual dishes.
Sometimes a dish was left in the oven too long, perhaps, but
the oil always kept it juicy.

* It isn't really so simple, I have learned since writing the above. To
make moussaka you slice the vegetables and fry them. You cook the
ground meat in oil, with onions and other flavoring as desired. You
put a layer of the vegetables in the bottom of a pan and put the meat
on top of it. Meanwhile you will have made a white sauce as follows

heat butter and flour in a pan together till the flour is cooked; beat
in one or two eggs; add milk gradually, to make a thick sauce; and
continue cooking, adding cheese if desired. When the sauce is done,
pour it over the meat in the pan, then bake the dish in an oven. The
formula can be varied the layers can be made more complex, the
sauce can be mixed with the meat layer, etc. And potatoes can be used
instead of the eggplant or other vegetable.

12 GRECIAN CALENDAR

Olive oil is a great feature of Greek food it sloshes
about everywhere. The Greek oil seems to be thicker than
the Italian, but also light somehow, and tasty. One gets
addicted to it, to the detriment of one's figure though one
doesn't have to worry much about butter, which is scarce
in Greece; the oil takes its place. It is proper in Greece to
put a lot of oil on salads and then sop up the remains with
coarse brown bread.

The Cecil had good salad material, but its bread was
pretty photographic no fun to sop with and we should
not pursue the salad question farther now. The Cecil is
really not a good occasion, at all, for discussing Greek
food. I might add, though, that every morning, in my room,
I had breakfast consisting of tea, yoghurt with honey on it,
and at that season very juicy oranges. The oranges
came mainly from Corfu, from the island of Crete, and
from the Peloponnesus below the Gulf of Corinth and
they were cheap and good till well into the spring. The
yoghurt was made in Kifissia, I think from sheep's milk.
The honey was often labeled as coming from Mount Hy-
mettus, east of Athens a famous source in classical times
but I don't think much of it really did. Anyway it was
good the Greeks are honey fanciers and on the yo-
ghurt it was wonderful. (I say I think the yoghurt was
made from sheep's milk, but there is a seasonal factor here
that I haven't figured out. Ewes have lambs only at certain
seasons, and therefore give milk only at certain seasons
too. Cows, on the other hand, are not seasonal in this re-
gard or not very seasonal and among them give milk
the year round. Therefore even in good sheep country the
yoghurt is often being made from cows' milk, though I
have yet to check on the exact Kifissia calendar in this.)

ATTICA 13

Until Easter I kept clear of writing about Greece, not
feeling ready for it, and I also did not pursue tourism dili-
gently, as the season for that was yet to come. I secluded
myself in the Cecil, went on the wagon for Lent, and
practised writing of another kind. Of course I went into
Athens often, and kept up my Greek lessons, and read about
Greece, but I did these things in a peripheral way I
was shy of assaulting Athens too directly.

My only other activity worth talking about, at this stage,
is the walking I began to do, on and near Mount Pentelicon,
which takes up the ten miles between Kifissia and the sea-
coast to its east. I have walked a good deal for years now.
I have theories about why one should do it that it is
good for the health, is conducive to thought, makes one
able to observe things at close hand, etc. and I think all
these arguments are sound, but the main point is simply that
I enjoy walking; I feel calm and happy while doing it.
Greece is a good country to walk in, too it is fast being
motorized, with new highways shooting out in all directions,
but as of today much of its life still moves on foot, and can
be reached only on foot. This is true even of Attica, the
promontory surrounding Athens, and it is even more so
of the lesser islands and more distant mountains. Anyone
visiting Greece would do well to practise walking before-
hand it is especially desirable to get one's feet hard,
as the paths are apt to be rocky.

I was not in good shape when I came to Greece this time

I had been walking but little for the past few months

and so I set about improving myself. I began walking
for half days out of the Cecil on Sunday mornings
then for whole days or close to it. The days were still
short then, but I found that in six or seven hours, at my

14 GRECIAN CALENDAR

natural slow speed, I could reach Attica's east coast, from
where I could get home by bus.

The plain and bay of Marathon, where the Persians
were stopped in 490 B.C., is over on that coast, to Penteli-
con's northeast. You can't see the plain well from the
mountain's summit, because of an intervening peak, but if
you walk over the spurs in certain ways you can get good
views down onto it, and then can descend on it yourself.

Pentelicon is interesting, too. It was being quarried then as
never before, since there was a building boom in Athens. On
weekdays I used to hear drills and blasting on Pentelicon;
and great areas of the mountain's south side were white
with new heaps of marble-chips.

When walking on that part I could look down toward
the Acropolis, ten miles away, and could imagine how the
work must have gone under Pericles. At least one famous
Athenian sculptor Phidias, I think used to visit Pentel-
icon and choose his own marble from the quarries. It must
have taken him half a day to get to the mountain, I have
figured, and then I suppose he camped there for a while.
The quarried marble blocks were moved down the moun-
tainside on tracks or skids, and one can still find the marks
of such operations in the stone. There is at least one ancient
quarry on the mountain, too a big straight cliff -like cut,
with brush growing off its top and with a grotto and other
indentations in its base, including a primitive Byzantine
chapel, which may have been preceded on that site by a
pagan shrine.

The age of such holy places is hard to learn. It is known
that there were sanctuaries on Pentelicon in classical times
there was a huge statue of Athena there, for instance,
and caves that were sacred to Pan. Then the early Christians
used the mountain for worship, apparently hiding out

ATTICA 15

from the Romans. Under the Byzantine Empire it prob-
ably had less attention, but under the Turks it seems to
have had some fugitive Christians once again. Any grotto
or other sacred place there might have been used and
re-used, with alterations, during all these changes, but the
experts have not yet untangled the story. So one gets little
precise information on Pentelicon. What one does get, in
walking there, is a sense of great age, adorned with repeated
quarrying, worship, and herding of sheep and goats.

The guide-books available on Greece are poor, for the
most part. There was a Baedeker in the days when such
books were good, but this is out of print now, and much
of it is cut of date as well. The most obvious modern sub-
stitute is the Guide Bleu, published by Hachette in Paris,
but this is sketchy on some things and so enragingly
pedantic on others that many people give it up in disgust.
There are other, more readable guides such as that edited
by Fodor and published also in Paris but these, while
giving interesting impressions of Greece, do not go into
much local detail. This failure of guide-books seems to be
a world-wide condition now, barring subsidized efforts like
our own federal guide project of the 1930'$, and one sus-
pects that the times are too uncertain to justify a writer's
giving such a book the long devoted care required, or a
publisher's giving it the investment. So one gets hasty
improvisations instead of the detailed, well-proportioned
works that one would like.

As a result the best available guide to classical Greece is
still the Description of Hellas written by Pausanias in the
second century A.D., and brought up to date with a com-
mentary by James G. Frazer, of Golden Bough fame, in
the i89o's. Pausanias traveled through all the more cele-
brated parts of ancient Greece, except the islands, and wrote

l6 GRECIAN CALENDAR

voluminously on them; then Frazer followed in his foot-
steps and brought him up to date still more voluminously

sometimes he even took off, too, and wrote about things
that Pausanias had omitted. Between them the pair have
done a building-by-building if not a stone-by-stone
job of coverage, but it comes in six chunky volumes and
is also out of print. It is not a work for the casual tourist
to buy, transport, and brandish among the ruins, * but it
is excellent in libraries, where scholars and low-speed
travelers may dip into it.

Concerning Mount Hymettus, Pausanias said that it
"produces the best food for bees [in the world], except for
the land of the Alazones. For the Alazones leave the bees
free to follow the cattle to pasture, and do not keep them
shut up in hives; so the bees work anywhere, and the
product is so blent that wax and honey are inseparable."

To this rather mystifying statement Frazer later added

among other things that the Alazones had been a
Scythian tribe in South Russia; that the bees on Hymettus
still had thyme, lavender, savory, and sage to eat; that
their output had been praised by Horace, Ovid, Cicero,
and Pliny; and that they were said to have put honey in
the mouth of Plato when he was a baby.

So it went. Pausanias said that in his time there were
bears and wild boars on Parnis, another mountain near
Athens, to which Frazer added that there were still boars
on Parnis when he checked up, and even on Pentelicon
(though I got no hint of them in 1960). Pausanias men-
tioned the shrines of Pan and other gods that abounded in

* The best book, in English, for a traveler to carry is probably The
Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. This is an encyclopedia, not
a guide-book, yet it is handy in size and contains a wealth of informa-
tion on ancient Greece (as well as ancient Rome). Its scholarship is
expert, its style terse and clear. It is a little gem.

ATTICA 17

the Attic landscape, and Frazer rediscovered most of these
and reported on their condition. Pausanias, sticking his
neck out, said of the Marathon battlefield that "here every
night you may hear horses neighing and men fighting."
Frazer capped this statement with a long list of other
ghostly sights and sounds to be enjoyed on old battlefields,
including that of Napoleon "passing like the wind" at
Marengo. One feels The Golden Bough a good deal when
reading Frazer's Pausanias. One also has a pleasant time out
of it, at least if one is living on the scene.

I cared less about Attica's ruins, though, than about her
landscape as a whole, and what had happened to it in
ancient and modern times. Of all great states of the past,
Attica is perhaps the most easily visualized by someone on
the spot. This is especially true of its heart, the so-called
Athenian plain. The plain's southern edge is the Aegean
shore, centering on the Piraeus. Then from there it slopes
gently upward for some fifteen miles, passing Athens itself
rather early in the game, and ending eventually, after ex-
panses of fields and pastures, against some mountains. The
plain is, in fact, hemmed in by mountains, except for the
narrow passes that open through them. There is Hymettus
on the east, then Pentelicon on the northeast, then Parnis
on the northwest, and finally Aigaleos, a lesser eminence,
on the west. In ancient times the mountains guarded the
plain, the plain grew the food, and the food nourished the
city that clustered around the Acropolis in bad times
the Acropolis was a safe refuge, and in good ones the
Piraeus was a fine outlet for trade. That, in essence, was
the foundation of Athens's greatness the outer parts of
Attica, like Marathon beyond Pentelicon, were subordinate,
and had been since the dawn of history.

I could observe the foundation as I walked around, and

l8 GRECIAN CALENDAR

meanwhile I saw the modern city planted on it. Athens
is growing fast and chaotically now. It is no longer distinct
from the Piraeus, though the centers of the two are five
miles apart. It has spilled up against the bases of Hymettus
and Pentelicon, too, and is threatening to spill against
Parnis, which is farther away. It is also up against Aigaleos
in the west, and in that quarter there are patches of new
industry. These patches, together with the heart of Athens
itself, throw up a pall of brown, dusty smog on most days,
so that the visibility over the city famous in history
for its clarity is often poor now.

(The smog doesn't reach the mountains yet, but modern
times are being felt there in other ways. During 1960,
even as I walked, a huge radar device was set up on top
of Pentelicon. Hymettus has some vast new beacon on it,
too, and Parnis has a couple of such installations plus a
new hotel. Even Lycabettus, a nice little peak right in
Athens, has acquired unsightly antennas recently, and it
seems that the Acropolis itself is the only height still
sacred.)

On my Sundays in winter it often rained or snowed, but
as a rule I walked anyway. Sometimes I got wet through,
but sometimes, too, the sun came out and dried me again.
The herdsmen on the mountain would be out in the rain,
of course they couldn't come in. They wore big heavy
woolen capes in winter, and on stormy days I would see
them squatting in these for long stretches, with their backs
to the wind. Their clothing seemed old-style and tradi-
tional for the most part made of felt or homespun but
an occasional modern thing a Gl-style cap or coat, for
instance might appear in it.

On the mountain's upper slopes the herdsmen tended
goats almost exclusively the sheep of Attica, it seems,

ATTICA 19

are kept to the rich and easy lower ground. I believe that
the herding of goats on Pentelicon is illegal, actually, since
they are thought to prevent a new forest cover, which is
badly needed, from growing up there. A Greek planning
expert once expressed doubt to me that there was anything
more formidable than single tethered goats on the whole
mountain. But he was wrong, and I used to see flocks of
over a hundred there. The goats were black for the most
part, and with their horns they were apt to have a weird
look, almost like that of insects, as they nibbled at the stiff
green brush. Each big flock had two or more dogs with
it, and one or more herdsmen, the latter living right along
with the animals, sleeping with them, and sharing their
fate for the moment. The dogs were nondescript, and
smaller than Tibetan mastiffs, but still they were fierce.
They growled and barked and showed their teeth as I
passed by, and they seemed capable of hurting a defense-
less man. But stones are handy in Attica, and I used to
pick one up and show it tossing it a little whereupon
the dogs would slink away.

My impression was that the goatherds on Pentelicon
stayed in the open for days at a time, but they did have
bases chiefly on the mountain's northern side, toward
the Marathon plain. The sheepf olds or goatf olds there were
of pine-boughs. They looked like extra- wide brush huts
without roofs, and in principle they resembled the tradi-
tional Mediterranean house, with a courtyard in the middle,
and with sheltered space surrounding it the latter being,
in this case, merely a circular lean-to.

The herdsmen's houses, also of brush, but fully roofed,
were not much better than their animals'. Those goatherds
lived a very primitive life, more so than that of the farmers
in Attica, or even of the shepherds, who were closer to

20 GRECIAN CALENDAR

the plains and the amenities. I got to know these classes
superficially as the winter wore on. I could talk with them
a little and ask them the way. They would answer partly
by gestures. The Greeks have a wonderful method, which
1 have not seen elsewhere, of pointing in three dimensions.
They will make their hand swoop up and down again, to
indicate that you must cross a mountain at some stage.
Or they will run their hand straight out, then curve it to
the left or right to show a turning. It is a graphic method,
hard to describe in words, but most helpful in communica-
tion; it is one tiny manifestation of what I hold to be a
superiority, in many respects, of Greek culture over others.

The giving of directions was always done gladly on the
mountain. I think this was partly because of the Greek
nature and partly because of a camaraderie that springs up
between people who are walking over the same rocks and
up the same steeps. I claim that if one walks with any
gusto one is respected by other walkers, and I even boast
that it is a good thing, nationalistically, to have a few Ameri-
cans walking about in far countries. It explodes the general-
ization that we have forgotten how. Again and again, while
walking in Attica, I have been asked whether I was a Ger-
man or an Englishman. I was neither, I have answered
certainly not; I was an American; and I have felt that some
of the nonsense about our country was dispelled thereby.

There are two reasons, I think, for the rockiness of
Greek paths the country itself, which is rocky in the
extreme, and the fact that hoofed animals are the paths'
main users. The link between hooves and rockiness is a
rule of life, apparently, and I have seen its workings else-
where. In China, where the paths are used almost entirely
by humans, they are smooth, but right next door on the

ATTICA 21

Tibetan plateau, where yaks and mules come into play,
they immediately get rough and rocky and dusty. In Attica
the rockiness often appears as a coating, on paths, of
sharp, prismatic gravel, and one must watch one's step.

Some paths are wide and much traveled, some so narrow
as to be hardly discernible. Many of them represent cen-
turies millennia of thought and experience, and so far
as I have learned they always follow the best route. It is
often tempting to strike out for oneself when walking in
Greece, but if one does this one usually gets trapped in
thick brush or a dead-end ravine. So paths are important,
and the type of path is important, too. Those used by
donkeys and mules nearly always lead from one settlement
to another, while those used only by goats may lead into
wilderness. One learns to tell the two apart by the tracks
and droppings on them. One can also tell goat- from sheep-
paths by the droppings, and this is useful because of the
sheep's greater tendency to stick to civilization a goat-
path is a snare, always being apt to peter out on a clifftop.

Attica had two false springs that, winter, when the air
was sunny and balmy for days on end. Fruit trees bloomed
on the plains then, and crocuses came out all over Penteli-
con. Yet these spells led only to new frosts, and the real
spring did not begin till just before Easter. Then green
leaves sprouted on the gray branches of the fig trees, and
green tendrils on the grape plants, which in the winter had
been pruned back to stumps the size of one's forearm.

I saw all this while walking, but then I interrupted the
process I went for Holy Week to Mount Athos, up in
Greece's north, and when I came back the green had burst
out everywhere. I made a seasonal change in my work

22 GRECIAN CALENDAR

then I began writing articles about Greece itself but
I didn't leave the Cecil and I didn't really change my activ-
ities; I merely intensified them.

It was in May that I reached the high point, for the year,
in my language study. Up through May I took lessons
regularly, and did homework on them, but in June I tapered
off. As a boy I had studied ancient Greek, after a fashion,
but since leaving college I had forgotten most of it and
I don't know, anyway, whether ancient Greek, as taught
in our classrooms, is a help or hindrance in learning the
modern kind.

From it one remembers the Greek alphabet, at a mini-
mum, but the sounds of that alphabet have changed so
much that even this is of doubtful value. The hard B, G,
and D of classical Greek have all gone soft in modern.
The letter B beta which used to be pronounced "bee,"
is now pronounced "vee." This means that Bop^a?
known to us as Boreas, the north wind is now pro-
nounced "Voreas." It also means that a new way of writing
the hard B has to be devised, for the sake of words borrowed
from other languages. This is done by putting an M sound
before a P; the word "bar," for instance a dispensary
of drinks which is common in Greek, is written ///Trap,
which by our schoolroom methods of transliteration would
be "mpar."

In much the same way A delta the old D sound,
has softened to a deep TH (as in "them"), and the gap
has been made up by writing an N before a T; "divan"
in modern Greek is vriftdvi, which by classroom trans-
literation would be "ntibani."

Similarly T gamma the old hard G, has faded to a
Y, or merely to a rustle of the soft palate, and has been

ATTICA 23

replaced by a G before a K sound "garage" is y/ca/>a,
or "gkaraz" as the classroom would write it.

For these reasons the signs in downtown, cosmopolitan
Athens carry much bewilderment for a pure classical
scholar "Wagons-Lits Cook," for instance, is written
Bayxw-Ai KOVK in Greek, which the scholar would tend
to read as "Bagkon-Li Kouk."

That isn't the whole story, either, for many vowels and
diphthongs in Greek have changed, too. Especially 17, i, v, ei,
and ot which used to be pronounced "ay," "oo," "ee," "ay,"
and "oy," are now all pronounced "ee." The old short
and long O sounds O and fl are also pronounced alike
now. These consolidations puzzle not only foreign classi-
cal scholars but also the Greeks themselves, who often
cannot tell by ear just what vowels they should write
into a word it is almost impossible, according to my
teacher, for a Greek with anything less than a high-school
education to be a good speller.*

My teacher's name was Miss Sophie or Sophia (which
means wisdom). She was a young lady of radiant com-
plexion and the purest character imaginable, who had
taught herself both French and English. In the mornings
she ran a nursery school and in the afternoons she gave
Greek lessons to foreigners in and around Kifissia, going
from one to the other, rain or shine, on a bicycle. My les-
sons were held at first in the Cecil's lounge and then later,
when the weather got warm, on one of the marble terraces

* The Romanization of Greek names and words in this book follows
no strict rule. 'T" may be represented by "g," "gh" or "y," "<5" by
"d" or "dh." An attempt is made to convey the sound if it seems im-
portant, but not in a true grammarian spirit. Often the supposed classi-
cal pronunciation of a word is followed, too, and here again the style
of Romanization is variable.

24 GRECIAN CALENDAR

outside. We studied from a grammar-book and practised
conversation, telling each other about our daily doings.

I was determined to concentrate on "demotic" Greek
dvmotiki and Miss Sophie went along with this, though
sometimes, I think, against her better judgment. Modern
Greek is a hard language, and not the least of its troubles
is the conflict between dimotiki, the common man's tongue,
which is vastly corrupted from the ancient one, and ka-
tharevusa, a more stately medium that has been kept near
the ancient by literary emulation. The clergy, the legal
profession, and the bureaucracy in Greece use kathareviisa,
and thus keep it firmly entrenched, although the unedu-
cated can't handle it and although the young intellectuals
are dead against it. Respectability is on the side of kathare-
vusa, youth and change on that of demotic nearly all
modern Greek fiction and poetry is in the latter. Sentimen-
tally I would have favored demotic anyway, I suppose, but
there was a practical reason in support of it, too, for I
wanted my smattering of Greek for use with peasants,
waiters, bus conductors and the like, rather than the edu-
cated, who I knew were often fluent in English themselves.

My study of Greek isn't worth dwelling on. I became
able to order a meal with it, to exchange politenesses, or to
get a hotel room. Beyond that I didn't go, and the accom-
plishment had little use, but it was a pleasant and interesting
thing to do, and a way of learning more about the country.

In spring the vineyards grew, the days got longer, and
I stretched out my walking. I took to leaving the Cecil at
noon on Saturday, walking to Raphina, a little port on At-
tica's east coast, spending the night there, walking along
the shore itself on Sunday, and coming home that evening
as before. I would carry a knapsack with a change of

ATTICA 25

clothes, a bathing suit, a book, and so forth. I would walk
to Raphina by the path system in Pentelicon's southern
foothills, a nearly straight route that would take about six
hours, with a stop for lunch and perhaps a later one for
refreshments. At the start of the trip I would still be vir-
tually in the Athenian suburbs walking among little ma-
sonry summer-houses, like sugar-cubes, that had been built
there by the poor. After that I would be in near- wilderness
for a couple of hours. Then at the end, in descending on
the coast, I would be on roads again, and for the last half
hour would actually be on asphalt, though it would be
pleasant then smooth and comfortable in the dusk, and
with few cars on it.

In Raphina I would go to the Hotel Diana, a simple little
place with bare rooms and white enameled bedsteads. In the
early spring I would take a hot bath there, then later as
the evenings grew warm and light I would take a swim
in the ocean, for Raphina has a good beach. When dressed
I would go to a fish restaurant, of which there are several
excellent ones in the port little establishments on a street
that curves around the waterfront.

Raphina is not the best place in Attica for seafood the
best is a small subordinate harbor in the Piraeus, called
Tourko Limano, where one may sit outdoors and eat a great
variety of fish and other things, including sea-urchins, oys-
ters, and several kinds of clams. But Raphina is probably
second to this place for variety, and it is infinitely better
than the Piraeus for walking or swimming.

I used to find many lands of fish on sale there, plus
shrimps, lobsters, octopus, and squid. In the restaurants in
such places one is supposed to choose one's own fish from
the icebox, and Greek men are great experts at this; they tap
and feel all the fish, and gaze into their eyes, and thereby

26 GRECIAN CALENDAR

get the very best ones, or so they believe. I am not versed
in that art, though, and I would usually just have a quick
look and point, or merely tell the proprietor my wishes.
Often I would have fried calamarakia, or squids, which are
a great delicacy they might be classed, vaguely, with our
own fried scallops and fried clams, but I think they are bet-
ter. Or I would have red mullet a tender, tasty, flaky
fish grilled over charcoal and wet with olive oil.

If I had mullet I would probably have some octopus be-
fore it. One could write a whole book about the octopus,
which is eaten in all Greek settlements near the sea. It hides
under water in the rocks, I understand, and is speared when
it comes out. It is never very big; its body is smaller than
a football, and its arms are no more than two feet long
I don't know where the fearful giant octopus of Northern
fancy comes from. These Mediterranean octopuses are not
fearful to man, anyway, but are said to be very much so to
lobsters, which reputedly go all to pieces on seeing them.
The Greek octopuses are tough, and are beaten to make
them tender. Once in the islands, during the summer, I
watched three men hurling octopuses, rhythmically, against
a cliff for more than half an hour. Greeks also beat octopuses
with clubs, and rub them across rough stones. They cook
them in various ways, but the most common is to boil them,
let them chill, and serve them, cut up, with olive oil and
capers, as an hors d'oeuvre.

The octopus must have been a feature of civilization for
a long time octopuses abound in Minoan and Mycenean
art of more than three thousand years ago. The octopus
makes a lovely motif because of the freedom and rhythm
in its arms it is especially good for painting on pottery,
for an octopus can be made to cover, or embrace, a pot in
various satisfying ways. Many of the golden octopus orna-

ATTICA 27

mcnts found at Mycenae, oddly enough, have only seven
arms, though nature and language call for eight. Whatever
is the reason for this and the experts haven't found it, to
my knowledge it seems true, anyway, that in Greek art
the octopus is always a thing of pleasure and beauty.

Before or after the fish I would have a green salad per-
haps of boiled dandelion-greens or wild asparagus, perhaps
a mixture of sliced tomatoes, peppers, ripe olives, and bits
of f eta, or crumbly cheese the whole of this wet down
with oil and a little vinegar and consumed with the help
of bread, which in those restaurants would be the good
coarse-grained stuff of the common man. If I wanted dessert
I would usually have cherries at that season delicious
whether red or white.

The drink accompanying it all would be resinated wine,
called retsina, usually white then, though pink at certain
other times, and sold in carafes from casks right on the
premises. Retsma is overwhelmingly the favorite drink of
the taverns in Attica. It is cheap, being made from grapes
grown near at hand, on the Attic plains, and flavored with
resin from the Attic pine trees. In the foothills of Penteli-
con I have often passed trees that had been tapped a
gash would have been made in them with an axe, then
part of an old tin can would have been nailed on below it,
to catch the gummy sap. This seems to be the universal
method now getting resin and adding it to the wine
but I have been told that in ancient times the flavor came
from pine staves in the casks themselves, and that the resin
was useful as a preservative. Now other preservatives are
available, and there is no pine in the casks, but the people
of Attica, and many other parts of Greece, have become
addicted to the resin taste.

Some Americans don't like retsina I know one South-

28 GRECIAN CALENDAR

ern lady who says it tastes like North Carolina but I have
grown fonder and fonder of it with time (I am apt, I must
confess, to let my palate be governed by my enthusiasm for
a country). Those sympathetic to retsina can get pleasant
side-effects by merely passing under pine trees. When on
the wagon in Lent I used to get very thirsty when smelling
pines, or even just hearing them. I like to sit among pines,
too, when drinking retsina, especially on a sunny, windy
day.

Arising at Raphina, I would have all of Sunday for walk-
ing on the coast, with swimming interjected now and then.
Raphina is off the southeast corner of Pentelicon. I could
walk north from there, between the mountain and the sea,
and reach the plain of Marathon, or I could walk south and
skirt another plain, called the Mesoghia the "Center of
the Earth" which lies below Pentelicon and east of Hy-
mettus, and is the most fertile part of Attica. It is especially
rich in grapes, and I went through parts of it, in the spring,
where green vineyards stretched interminably on every side.

If I left the coast, on these southward forays, and circled
back through the Mesoghia, I could get home on foot by
nightfall. Otherwise I would push on downward, in the
afternoon, and turn inland eventually to catch a bus. There
were several busy market towns in the Mesoghia, and these
had good road communications, though the country around
them seemed much in its ancient state many classical re-
mains have been found in the Mesoghia as well as pre-
classical ones, going back to Mycenean times, which even
Pausanias didn't know about. The plain seems to be an old,
old theater of civilization it was probably once independ-
ent of Athens, having its own relations with the Aegean
world, on which it fronts directly to the east.

If I stuck to the coast I would lunch at a taverna, as the

ATTICA 29

Greeks call their less pretentious restaurants either on the
bay of Marathon, if in the north, or at a place called Porto
Raphti in the south. (This is a little harbor with a big statue,
dating from Roman times, on an island in its mouth the
people, through the centuries, have come to liken the statue
to a tailor, or raphtis, so that they call the whole place
Porto Raphti, or Tailor's Port).

The tavernas at Marathon and Porto Raphti small es-
tablishments, mainly outdoors were delightful in early
spring, but as summer drew near they became crowded.
The Greeks love nature; they like nothing better than to
pass a Sunday in it; and in summer the heat of Athens gives
them an extra, violent push toward it. As a result the beaches
of Attica swarm then with holiday folk, who are much more
urban than the peasants and fishermen there already, but
still less fully in the machine-age than a crowd at, say,
Jones's Beach would be.

In regard to the machine-age, Greece is still a backward
country. She was backward in the i93o's, and the war and
civil wars of the 'forties and early 'fifties have kept her that
way. Now she is trying to catch up, and her people are
acquiring new gadgets in which they revel and in whose
capacity for noise-making they seem to revel especially.
They honk the horns of their autos with abandon, and they
are wild about little transistor radios, which they take to
the loneliest places and turn on, listening to scratchy rendi-
tions of almost anything. These radios began appearing in
the coastal tavernas as spring wore on planting them-
selves on tables and competing with each other and after
that the landscape was not the same.

I got a strong warning of this change on May first, which
is the spring-festival day in Greece, and which in 1960 fell

30 GRECIAN CALENDAR

also on a Sunday. It is a day, I have learned since then, when
people hang up on their houses wreaths made from
various plants, and when they also, customarily, swarm into
the country with unusual fervor. But I was ignorant of this
when I left Raphina that morning and headed northward,
going toward Marathon.

The first odd-looking thing I met was a group of the local
people both grown-ups and children, all well-dressed
moving past me toward Raphina and each carrying a bundle
of bright-colored toy shepherd's crooks. They meant to
sell them, and I later saw others doing so, much as people
sell fancy canes at our county fairs.

I passed them and kept on for two or three more miles,
along a coastline not very accessible to the public, and after
that I came to a resort named Aghios Andreas Saint
Andrew which I found already crowded, at nine or ten
in the morning. Holiday folk were everywhere there, on
the grass and underneath the trees. The middle-aged ones
were spreading provisions out, and many of the youthful
ones had begun to sing and dance boys and girls together
in a circle, in the Greek fashion. Other people were wander-
ing about, enjoying the sun, the air, and the sea. I was ac-
costed by a pretty red-haired girl, with two little boys in
tow, who said she had come from the Piraeus that morning
and who asked me to sit down and join them. I did so for
a while, and we had a halting conversation, after which I
said good-by and continued northward.

I had to move inland for a little way, to get around an
army camp, but when I had passed that I returned to the
coast. I found a rock to hide behind and changed into my
bathing trunks, after which I sometimes waded and some-
times walked along the shore, moving ever northward and
meeting, and greeting, city folk of all descriptions.

ATTICA 31

By one o'clock I made Marathon, and the tavernas there
were a madhouse, with autos pulling in, dust flying, chil-
dren crying, radios blaring, and people squirming every-
where. I managed to find a table on the beach, though
beneath some matting in a breeze and there I lunched
eventually on octopus, grilled lamb, tomato salad, cheese,
and pink retsina. I say "eventually" because the service was
agonizingly slow that day, a condition I was to find in resort
tavernas throughout the summer. Such places hire little
extra help when summer comes, although their business in-
creases fiftyfold. The same old servants must stagger under
the new load and I've seen them really staggering, too,
especially the little bus-boys, who go around in a daze on
heavy Sundays.

The weather was hot that day, and after lunch I was of
two minds whether to walk home or take a bus, but I settled
on walking. I struck out inland on the plain, first passing
a big mound where the Greek heroes who fell at Marathon
are buried, then crossing the highway, then going through
some olive groves, and finally coming out in open grain
fields. The fields were very green, and the sun was bright.

I was not sure of the path I wanted to try a new way
over Pentelicon's spurs and I worked down to the plain's
southern edge, where I met a shepherd. He had a few dozen
sheep and was grazing them along the border of the grain
fields carefully, it seemed, to keep them out of the grain
itself. I walked and talked with him awhile, telling him I
wanted to go to a village called Stamata, which was epano
"up on top" and I pointed. He told me I was on the
right track, and I left him and pushed onward, coming in
a mile to a village called Vrana. It is a poor and primitive-
looking place, but is on an ancient site a rich town of
the Persian War period, according to Frazer.

32 GRECIAN CALENDAR

In the village outskirts I met an old woman dressed in
widow's black. She wanted to sell me some eggs, but I said
no, thanks, I was just walking for my pleasure. Then I
mentioned Stamata, and she pointed out the path to me;
it went up a hill near the village and soon disappeared in
a gorge there, and she informed me roughly, by three-
dimensional gestures of its course thereafter. I started
up it, and before I had climbed far I met two German boys
with knapsacks coming down, who told me there was no
trail ahead, only wilderness. But I kept faith in the old
woman and climbed onward, passing through an empty
cluster of goatfolds and then finding the trail again, after
a moment of obscurity. It turned out to be a fine one,
although steep and rocky. It had nicely calculated switch-
backs, and its grade was never really trying. It must have
been very old, I guessed the main route between those
heights and the plain and it may have been the way
actually used by Phidippides in bringing the news of Mara-
thon to Athens. I didn't run up the hill as he did, of course,
but walked slowly, stopping once to rest and read awhile.

After an hour amid wilderness the path leveled off, and
then I came to a tiny cultivated field in what looked like
a glacial hollow. Above and all around it were gray rocks
and scrubby brush not a sign of habitation. I went on,
passing a few more fields in time and crossing a rocky
barren, and soon I came out on a wonderful swale of tall,
green, succulent wheat, with no less than three big flocks
of sheep being maneuvered around it. The place was rich
looking, but still it had no visible links with modern times
or the machine-age I had seen no machinery, indeed,
since way down on the plain. After passing that spot I con-
tinued for another mile, perhaps, then climbed a hill and
reached Stamata itself, which still looked, as I entered it,

ATTICA 33

like a village in another age. But on its far side I found an
asphalt road, with cars; and I was back in civilization.

In that fashion I passed my spring weekends. After May
Day the crowds along the beaches thinned a little, but then
they thickened again. As June drew near, it was plain that
I must change my beat, which I was ready for anyway, as
the tourist season had begun. I was due to travel.

-

GREEK

SLANDS

II

THE SEASON BEGINS

I began my summer of tourism by taking a cruise on a
chartered yacht with fourteen other Americans who lived
in or near Athens. I shouldn't really call this "tourism,"
perhaps, for a stranger couldn't easily have joined in the
trip was arranged months ahead by people who knew each
other and knew Greece. Yet tourists can take similar trips,
and while on this one I ran into some cousins of mine from
Chicago who were doing just that they and another
couple had flown out and were batting around the islands
in a small boat that they had chartered directly from home,
through a travel agency. They paid more per capita than
we did, and they had less advantage through ignorance
of the language and of local ways in the arguments that
forever come up with one's captain in these cases, but other-
wise it was much the same.

We paid only ten dollars apiece, each day, for everything,
which I think must be the bottom price for yacht excur-
sions in Greece it was reached only through the most
expert shopping for food by our lady shipmates.* Our boat

* But cruising in a caique a native island boat can be cheaper
still, especially if you do your own cooking.

36 GRECIAN CALENDAR

was named the Toscana; she was eighty-five feet long; and
she had normal berths for fourteen plus a sofa, or bench,
on which slept the fifteenth, a pretty Greek- American girl
named Penny Pappas, who in due course fell out of it, in
rough weather, and got a black eye. Our guiding spirit,
or commodore, was also a Greek- American, named Brian
Bojonell; he was the Pan American Airways man in Athens,
a born diplomat and an expert on travel it was he who
got us all together, chartered the boat, and dealt with the
captain on the voyage.

We set sail from the Piraeus on a Friday evening and re-
turned there on a Sunday nine days later, having mean-
while called at the islands of Delos, Mykonos, Icaria, Samos,
Patmos, Kos, Kalymnos, Amorgos, Naxos, Syra, Kea,
Aegina, and one or two others that I can't remember. The
Toscana itself called at the Turkish coast of Asia Minor,
and the passengers then aboard her went to see the ruins
of Ephesus, but I was not with them, having carelessly left
my passport behind. I was marooned on Samos that day
along with the cook, whose papers were likewise defective,
and I had a glorious time walking through the Samian land-
scape and viewing strictly Samian remains. In fact Samos
is the first island worthy of much mention here. Delos and
Mykonos are notable indeed, but I was to spend a month on
the latter, with frequent trips to the former, in midsummer,
and I shall postpone writing about them for later. Icaria,
the third island touched, is a dull one as they go,* and it
was Samos that first really caught my fancy.

The islands of the Aegean seem helter-skelter, but most
of them are classified in groups. The largest group, which

* On our trip we saw only the south side of Icaria, which is straight
and unrelieved, without even a true harbor. But travelers who know
the island's north side praise it highly.

THE SEASON BEGINS 37

spreads right out from Attica, to the southeast, is called the
Cyclades, or "Circulars," because they are seen as lying in
a ring "respectfully," according to a lady guide I know

around Delos, one of their number, which is the sup-
posed birthplace of Apollo. The Cyclades are close together,
and when among them one usually has several in view at
all times. They are the most likely first step in an Aegean
trip, and we both came and went through them. We stopped
there, it happened, but had we gone straight through, the
passage, timing it from the Piraeus, might have taken some
eighteen hours.

Then beyond the Cyclades, to their east, comes a gap
of open water, which takes several more hours to cross,
and beyond that lie the Dodecanese ("Twelve Islands"),
which are near the Turkish coast and which culminate, at
their southern end, in Rhodes. The other well-known is-
lands in the Aegean, apart from these two groups, are usu-
ally thought of as singles: Crete below the Cyclades, Hydra
near the Peloponnesus, and Euboea, Lesbos, Samothrace,
etc. in the north.* Of the singular northern islands Samos
is the southernmost, being right above the Dodecanese and
separated from them not geographically so much as histori-
cally the Italians held the Dodecanese, but not Samos,
for instance, between the two world wars.

Samos's own history is richer than that of many a whole
country. It was the home of Pythagoras, whom we remem-
ber mainly from geometry class, but who was also a great
international sage; he is said to have traveled for decades
in countries like Egypt and Persia, bringing home Eastern

* Actually there is a third main grouping in the Aegean the
Northern Sporades, which lie off Euboea. (The western Greek islands

Corfu, etc. are not counted here, as they are not Aegean, but
Adriatic.)

38 GRECIAN CALENDAR

lore and interpreting it for the West, together with his own
ideas and discoveries, through a large school of philosophy.
In his lifetime Samos also had a famous tyrant, Polycrates,
who made the island a strong power, but who, according
to Herodotus, was much too lucky luck being thought
dangerous in ancient Greece, as arousing the jealousy of the
Gods. Amasis, the king of Egypt, advised Polycrates to
break his luck by throwing away something valuable, so
he threw a ring into the sea, but a few days later it turned
up inside a fish he had been given. Amasis would have noth-
ing to do with him thereafter, predicting that he would
come to a bad end and predicting rightly, for he was
crucified by the Persians.

Samos has had an unusual later history, too it was
wholly depopulated under the Turks, for one thing, then
repopulated with settlers from other parts of Greece. The
story goes that a Turkish officer went hunting on the de-
serted island and was so enchanted by it that he got special
authority for this repopulation from the Sultan. One can
understand his enchantment, for there seems to be a spell
on Samos even now to me it repeatedly called up the
fairyland touches in Shakespeare's lyrics. The Cyclades
and Dodecanese are brown and bare for the most part, but
Samos is green and wooded. It is also a biggish island, thirty
miles long, and one end of it is a real mountain nicely
domed, laced by gorges, and supporting lonely villages on
its upper slopes. One can see all this from afar, and one
really looks at it, for there is no other landscape to distract
the eye.

We approached Samos on a sunny afternoon, most of us
being spread on the Toscancfs deck. The mountain was hazy
blue at first, then greener; the lonely villages were all white;
and we had this prospect for an hour or two. Then we

THE SEASON BEGINS 39

drew near the coast and began running along it, after which
our view changed, of course, and the villages above us
changed, too, appearing and disappearing in the spurs and
gorges. They could be reached only on foot or horseback,
we could see, by tiny-looking mountain trails, and though
in plain view they were the remotest-seeming things im-
aginable. We ran along the coast for a few hours, then at
dusk we tied up in the island's main harbor, which is called
Vathy, or "Deep" (the older part of the town built on
a slope beyond the easy reach of pirates, who used to be
numerous in the Aegean is called Epano Vathy, or "Up-
per Deep").

We all spent the next day in sightseeing and enjoying
ourselves on Samos, and I spent the day afterward too. On
a coastal plain some miles from Vathy there are ruins of
a gigantic sixth-century B.C. temple of Hera, and I went
there on both days. The temple was lovely or its scant
remains were but the thing that fascinated me was the
plain, which at that moment was throbbing with life and
greenery. It was big, flat, and rich. It took me a couple of
hours to cross it, and as I walked I saw people bent and
toiling in the fields almost exactly, I felt, as in the time of
Polycrates. The plain must have been a leading factor in
Samos's wealth and power then another being the timber
on the mountain, which enabled Polycrates to build a fleet.
His capital had been on the plain's inner edge, and the Hera
sanctuary was on its outer one, near a gravel beach where
the waves pounded. Between the two had grown the grain
that had paid, one imagines, for the travels of Pythagoras
and for much of the Hera sanctuary itself, which was one
of the great works of ancient architecture.

Classical Greek civilization really began in the islands
they flowered in the sixth century B.C., whereas Athens

40 GRECIANCALENDAR

flowered in the fifth and few places, one would guess,
flowered more than that very plain.* Of course the plain
was beautiful in itself, without all this dusting off of history.
It had a complex irrigation system, which made it hard to
cross, because the canals were too wide to ford, and one
also couldn't spot them in the distance, to head around them.
One had to ask directions and plan in advance. Besides ir-
rigation, the plain had birds and insects galore; and the grain
on it was just right for early summer, being at full height,
but not yet turning yellow just a perfect, luscious green.
The sun was hot, too so hot that I wore a wet towel on
my head while walking there.

Other things that I noticed especially in my two days on
Samos included the horses, the houses, and the sea-urchins.
The horses were fine and Arab-looking, walking freely with
a long stride, and I suspected that their quality was linked
with the island's nearness to the Asiatic mainland Tur-
key is a little over a mile from Samos, across the channel.
The houses, too, were more in the Turkish style than in
the Greek, thanks to this same nearness, undoubtedly, and

* In this book the word "classical" refers to the Greco-Roman civili-
zation that arose in or before the sixth century B.C. and lasted to the
fourth century A.D., when Christianity replaced its pagan faith. Yet
the word "classical" has a more limited meaning, too, that should be
noted. As used by art historians, for instance, it refers to the Greek
flowering, dominated by Athens, that began in the first half of the
fifth century (after the Persian Wars) and lasted till the late fourth,
when Alexander ushered in the "Hellenistic" age (by unifying the
Greek world and expanding it to Asia and Africa). In this narrower
sense the classical age was preceded by an "archaic" one, around the
sixth century, when Greek arts and letters were coming up fast in
the islands, thanks partly to Asiatic influences. Pythagoras and the
Samian Hera temple belong to that "archaic" period. There is a similar
narrow use of the word "classical" with Rome referring to arts and
letters down through Augustus. But here it takes in all the ancient
high civilization of Europe except for the Minoan and Mycenean eras.

THE SEASON BEGINS 41

thanks also to the availability of lumber; they were mainly
wooden, that is, and had shallow balconies or overhangs in
their facades, whereas the houses on most Greek islands are
of masonry and are more simply cubistic in design.

As for the sea-urchins, I put my hand on one when climb-
ing out of the water at Vathy, and my fingers were sore
for a month thereafter. In effect, if not biologically, a sea-
urchin is like a porcupine or hedgehog. It is an assemblage
of spines or quills whose points break off in one's hand or
foot and fester there. Amateur surgery can't remove the
points without further damage, it seems at least that
available on the Toscana couldn't and my policy was to
leave them alone. They hurt me for a month in a dull way
not enough, for instance, to keep me from using a type-
writer and then they dwindled and disappeared. The
experience taught me to give sea-urchins a wide berth, of
course, and I kept an eye out for them the rest of the sum-
mer, as they are common in Greek waters. They are black-
ish in color, round and spiny in form, and a few inches in
diameter. They cling to submerged rocks along the coast
and rarely move, so far as I know it is hard to see how
they can move, of their own accord. Their weapons are
wholly defensive, but potent, and I don't know what ani-
mals prey on them aside from man. Even the preying by
man seems rather forced a gourmet stunt as the edible
part of an urchin, inside the shell where the spines converge,
is very small.

From Samos we went south into the Dodecanese, travel-
ing in good weather. We had had some rain at Delos and
Mykonos, but that was to be the end of it the Greek
spring showers were nearly over by that time, and the Greek
summer, which is dry, was on us. The Toscana's sails were
up, to catch a following wind, but in the main we were

42 GRECIAN CALENDAR

running on our engine, as we did throughout the voyage.

The captain was in high spirits that morning, and he
moved among us on the deck, joking and showing us things
through his binoculars. He was relieved that the expedition
to Turkey was behind us. Greek-Turkish relations are un-
easy at best, and this happened to be right after the Turkish
coup d'etat of May 1960, when the army there overthrew
the "politicians." The day we had left the Piraeus, Turkey
had sealed her borders off, and at Samos the captain had
refused, on these grounds, to make the promised trip to that
country at all. He had finally been overruled because the
promise had been put in writing, by the chartering agent,
and because we were told in Samos that all was calm again
in Turkey. But he hadn't liked the idea. He had gone sadly
and returned gladly, and now he was feeling fine.

He and we were having one of our rare honeymoons,
indeed, but it didn't last. We were heading for Patmos in
the northern Dodecanese, where Saint John the Divine
wrote, or dictated, the Apocalypse. We neared that island
around noon, whereupon we asked the captain to head for
a certain beach, known to some of us who had visited
Patmos before. When the beach came in sight he looked
at it through his glasses and declared that it was of gravel,
not sand, and that we should try some other place. Yet he
plainly couldn't tell at that distance, so we insisted, and the
beach turned out of course to be sandy, and excellent.
He had wanted, I think, to go straight into the harbor of
Patmos, tie up there, and let us swim off the boat or seek
out a beach on foot, which would have saved him fuel and
effort; and this experience was typical. He was a wily man.
He had a hard life on the Toscana, full of worries and re-
sponsibilities for he had come to own the boat as well as
merely sailing it and he didn't want to make things harder

THE SEASON BEGINS 43

by catering to our whims unnecessarily. His interests were
at variance from ours, in fact; there was argument much
of the time; and I think this is pretty general when for-
eigners go cruising with Greek captains it is as well to
have much of the program laid down, in writing, ahead of
time.

We passengers were disunited, too, with different tastes,
and inclined to drift as the captain willed it. Some of us
wanted to see antiquities. Some wanted to swim and take
it easy. Some wanted to wear fine clothes and seek romance.
Once ashore we were like a herd of buffalo on the plains;
one of us would see a tempting item somewhere and would
wander toward it, and the others would follow; then some-
one else would see an item in another direction, and we
would wander there; and so it would go. There were a few
exceptions to this aimlessness; one lady of our number,
especially, was a determined sightseer, knowledgeable on
ruins, and often insistent that we get our money's worth
in seeing them it was she, I believe, who really made the
captain go to Turkey, for the others didn't care much.

On the whole we took things as they came, and I must
say we had a good time of it. The captain lectured us once
for our poor co-ordination we were going ashore by
launch at the time, very much in driblets, at a village that
had no jetty. He said that being out of step that way was
an American trait, and he may have been talking sense, too,
for he had observed many nationalities. Just before us he
had taken out some Swiss, I think, and later that summer
I saw him, at Mykonos, with a load of Belgians he had
long been booked up for the season, from all directions.

He was a thin man, with a seamed and weatherbeaten
face. The Toscana also had an engineer, short of stature
and dressed usually in a beret and pea-jacket; two deck-

44 GRECIANCALENDAR

hands, bronzed, barefoot, and taciturn; a cook, who was
fairly nondescript; and a cabin-boy or steward, a tall, thin
youth named Antony, who did the work of two men, what
with cleaning the cabins and running food and ice for us
he even served as a deckhand in emergencies.

In the Dodecanese we called at Patmos, Kos, and Kalym-
nos before turning back toward the Cyclades. At Patmos
the important spot, historically, is the grotto where Saint
John is supposed to have had his revelations, but a more
spectacular sight is a Byzantine monastery on the hill above
it. This monastery is old, dating from the eleventh century,
and has outstanding murals, treasures, and manuscripts in
it, comparable to those on Mount Athos furthermore it
can be visited by women, as Mount Athos can't. It stands
amid a white and glistening village, on the hilltop, which
looks almost like a snowfield as one sails toward it.

Kos is a large island with many classical remains, but these
are less noteworthy, on the whole, than others elsewhere
in Greece (they are of special interest to doctors, however,
for Kos was a medical center in antiquity, with mineral
springs; a shrine to Asclepius; and many associations with
Hippocrates, who lived there a huge, old plane tree stands
near the harbor at Kos, and it is claimed that Hippocrates
taught and practised under it) .*

Kalymnos, our third Dodecanese island, is the center of
the Greek sponge trade. It is a bleak spot, with craggy
rocks going up on every side from the port a purely
mineral environment, with as little softness to the land as
one finds in, say, Manhattan. The divers sail out of Kalym-
nos in the spring, going to parts of the Mediterranean or to

* Many fine pieces of Hellenistic sculpture have been found on Kos,
too, and some can be seen in the museum there.

THESEASONBEGINS 45

the Red Sea and beyond, and they come back in the fall,
spending their winter relaxing, celebrating, and working
their sponges over. Their life sounds like a hard one
deep-diving off small boats working out from larger mother-
ships, the latter being scantily supplied with food and water.
Sometimes a diver gets the bends, from going down or com-
ing up too fast, and then he may be paralyzed such crip-
ples can be seen in Kalymnos. Sponges of every sort may
be seen there, too, of course, and purchased, though the
great majority are exported England and West Germany
are the best customers. The sponge trade is in decline now,
because of plastic imitations. If it dies, the human life on
Kalymnos will be hard pressed.*

The islands that one merely passes, in the Aegean, are
nearly as interesting as those one calls at. They are of all
sizes and shapes, but always brown in summer amid the
blue, at least in the Dodecanese and Cyclades. Some of them
are large, low, sprawled, and complex. These can be a
bright sienna, say, in the foreground, then fading off to
a hazy rabbit-brown in the distance. Other islands are little
flat bars. Still others are shaped like turtle-shells, or like
brown thimbles. Often the big ones, even, seem lonely and
deserted; one sees only cliffs there, coming down to the
sea. But usually there is a little white church, at least, glint-
ing off on a peak. Sometimes there are white villages on the
coastal plains, beneath the mountains. The mountains can
be steep. Sometimes they have a jagged or wavy silhouette,
and always they are dry-looking. Often, even if an island

* I bought a hat-sponge on Kalymnos, which has served me well. It
is conical, and I think the organism must have grown upward from
its narrow end, like the outer casing of a cauliflower. After being
gathered it was later trimmed, and it fits me like a neat cap made of
material an inch or so thick. I wet it and wear it when basking or
working in the sun.

46 GRECIAN CALENDAR

is lightly settled, its hills are criss-crossed with stone walls,
and in the afternoon these, with their shadows, look like
black strings laid on the brown. The islands seem almost
beyond counting. Besides the score or so one often hears
about and the few score others that are named on the
charts there are a host of seemingly anonymous frag-
ments, down to little barren rocks. The settled islands were
much used as places of exile in Roman days, incidentally,
and at least a couple are so used today as concentration-
points for Communists or those suspected of Communism.

Each important island has at least one harbor, and often
this has a curved waterfront, the quay itself being faced
with masonry and paved with flags. The paved area goes
back some distance, making an equivalent to the plateia,
or public square, that is thought indispensable to an inland
Greek settlement. The area may be shaded here and there
by plane trees, and at its inland edge there is a row, also
curved, of shops and cafes, the latter having tables and
chairs in front of them. Everything looks at the waterfront,
along which small boats are tied up, often with their sterns
to the shore it is customary for Greek vessels to land by
first dropping an anchor out in the harbor, off the bow, then
spinning around with this as a pivot, and finally backing in.

The Toscana landed thus at many little ports all on
the toy Aegean scale and when she was tied up we pas-
sengers fanned out on the shore to stroll, have a drink, or
do some shopping. Sometimes I went to get a shave, for they
are cheap in the islands ten or fifteen cents apiece and
hot water was hard to come by on the Toscana. If we felt
like walking we could pass through the village behind the
waterfront sometimes a distance of only a few score
yards, which would put us in the outskirts.

A few ports had windmills in their outskirts, with white

THESEASONBEGINS 47

cloth blades that made them look like daisies. There were
always plenty of smaller real flowers in the village gardens,
too hibiscus, bougainvillea, blue morning-glories, olean-
ders; on Kos the oleanders grew as big as trees, and were
even shaped like trees. Nearly all the islands we touched
at grew figs, grapes, olives, and miscellaneous fruit trees
too; some of their more sheltered spots grew oranges and
pomegranates. But trees were not the islands' forte, and as
we pierced into the countryside we saw little but brown
grass and rocks ahead, enlivened here and there by goats
or a donkey there was scant machinery around, for the
machine-age is slow in getting to the islands. If we pressed
on up a hill and there often was a hill behind the port
we might look of? the other side to emptiness: to nothing
but honey-colored slope, that is, running down to the azure
sea.

On clear days, which are the rule in summer, the Aegean
is always an intense blue sometimes many shades of in-
tense blue in a single vista, sometimes one solid shade, like
the bluest of blue paint in a can. At times the water has a
blinding silver sheen on it, from the sun. At others it has
a lot of whitecaps, and then the blue is dark. When calm
the water is surpassing clear, and if one swims on it with
a snorkel-mask, near rocks, one sees jewel-colored fishes lit
by the most brilliant light. If one swims at a beach one also
has a sense of clarity, and I have usually opened my eyes
when under water in the Aegean, though I rarely do it
elsewhere in an ocean. I think (perhaps erroneously) that
the Aegean is less salty than the Atlantic or Pacific it
tastes less salty, besides feeling less so to my eyes, and there
is a good reason for it to be less so, too, in that it forever
receives the great rivers of western Russia, which come
down to it through the Black Sea, the Bosporus, and the

48 GRECIAN CALENDAR

Dardanelles. I have swum in the Black Sea and Bosporus
as well, and have found them strikingly free of salt, and I
look on the Aegean water as part of that progression.

There is another progression, that of air, that affects the
Aegean in the summer. This is felt on the spot as a nearly
constant north wind, which I have been told comes down
from the cool zones of Russia to fill a vacuum created over
the Sahara by hot air rising there. Be that as it may and
the explanation sounds plausible the north wind, called
the meltemi, is a main fact of life on the Aegean. It blows
with few interruptions, and it keeps the islands cool as well
as nagging at the islanders in their pursuits. Its force varies,
and the stronger gales are classified as chair or table winds,
depending on which of those objects they can blow over.
There is even said to be a super-gale, called a bell wind,
which can ring the bells in the island churches, though these
are ordinarily mounted in little tunnel-like vaults, atop the
gable ends, that run from east to west, or across the mel-
temi\ direction.

On the Toscana we encountered what must have been
a table wind when almost a week out, on a Friday. As luck
would have it that was the day we crossed back from
Kalymnos, in the Dodecanese, to Amorgos, in the Cyclades,
a trip of some forty miles through the gap between the two
groups. At first we were in the lee of Kalymnos awhile,
and the waves, though big, were not extraordinary. I was
sitting out on the bow, watching them, when the captain
sent a deckhand out to call me back. From then on we were
in the open sea. The bow was repeatedly under water; the
decks were nearly everywhere awash; and we had great dif-
ficulty in moving about merely to stand erect on the
pitching deck was heavy exercise, and I was stiif from it that

THESEASONBEGINS 49

night. The wind kept up all day. We had a break for lunch,
in the lee of a small island that showed up, and then we
went out and battled through the afternoon again, making
Amorgos at dusk.

While we were in motion the only sheltered spot on deck
was astern and to port of the cabin and the wheelhouse, and
most of us passengers who were not seasick gathered there.
Even there we got salted thoroughly with spray, but it was
a lovely spot to be in. The crew was busy and heroic-
looking, going forward to lash things down, or merely
standing alert while clinging to some support. The captain
was at the wheel, dealing artistically with the big waves,
one by one. The little engineer was down in the engine-
room, beneath our feet. Sometimes he came up to the mouth
of his hatch, right before us, and gazed out mysteriously,
almost like an animal like a woodchuck in its hole at
the waves astern of us. I suspect he wasn't enjoying it much.
Perhaps none of them were enjoying it; they were doing
what they had to do. But to us carefree passengers it was
beautiful and thrilling. The waves dashed on the boat and
raced back along our sides, all foam and water, white and
blue (they were white and blue to my eyes, that is, but since
then I have come to know a young Greek painter, Themos
Mai'pas, who conveys such wild waves uncannily, and he
sees all kinds of colors in them pink, ruby, violet, many
greens and many browns as well) .

On reaching Amorgos we passengers went ashore, for a
drink, and on the solid ground we staggered crazily. We
lay in port there over night, and the ladies hoped for a
longer respite, but the captain took off at dawn without
consulting us, a deed for which he later apologized. He was
anxious to get home. He had dragged his feet on the out-

50 GRECIAN CALENDAR

ward voyage, by and large, but now he was like a horse,
with ears pricked forward, that is headed for its stable; and
we made no really lingering calls thereafter.

On Saturday we had a fair amount of wind, but it was
less than Friday's partly because we were in the Cyclades
by then. That day at noon we stopped briefly at Naxos,
a big and interesting island, with traces of strong Venetian-
Catholic influence in its seaport town. Then at night we lay
at Syra, which is the Cyclades's capital, their main port
economically, and a famous source of loukoumia, the gelati-
nous candy that we call Turkish delight.

On Sunday we merely puttered along, stopping at a
couple of beaches and staying in close range of the Piraeus,
which the captain was bound to make that afternoon, and
did. He had a tight schedule, and he had often been terrified,
I imagine, of being late for the next charter.

After that cruise I went on living in Kifissia its cool-
ness being very welcome now but I came to the city
often. I would come down by a small electric train, and
once in Athens I would head for Constitution Square
Plateia Syntagmatos which is the center of Greek tour-
ist life. "Tourism" was in full blast by then in June
having built up through the spring. In winter the Greek
weather can be stormy, and only stray tourists are about,
random people en route to somewhere else in my ob-
servation many more are seen in Egypt and India then.
Easter is the real start of Greece's season a number of
people come then, and they keep coming, more and more,
as the season wears on. By that June they had changed
the city's aspect, or that of Constitution Square it was
adorned with tourists for the summer, one might say, as
gardens are adorned with flowers. And I myself had become

THE SEASON BEGINS 5!

a tourist-watcher, my focus shifting from the mountain-
sides to them.

At no time are the tourists in Greece as many as those in
France or Italy, say, but they have been increasing fast and
steadily. The Greek government pays much attention to
them, hoping that tourist income will fill ever more of the
deficit in their country's trade balance. Greece is not a rich
producer, and she must buy more goods, in value, than she
sells, a discrepancy covered in the past by things like ship-
ping revenues, American aid, and family remittances from
the hordes of Greeks overseas. None of these incomes is
necessarily stable, and it is thought that a flourishing tour-
ism will counteract any drops in them, as well as fattening
the budget generally. The government woos tourists, there-
fore, and it has a headlong program of building roads, hotels,
etc. to that end. Figures can be had on all aspects of the
phenomenon, but I shall quote only one here I was told
that summer, by someone in our Athens consulate, that
10,500 Americans had entered Greece in July. This figure
had meaning statistically, of course, but it was hard for me
to visualize. I found it easier to sit in Constitution Square,
in June, and observe that the tourists were really swarming
there.

The square is a big one, oblong, and running down a slope
on its longer axis. The Greek Parliament is on its upper
end, but otherwise the place is given over to commerce.
Two of the city's five big cosmopolitan hotels are on the
square, and two more are within a block of it. The big travel
agencies are on it. So are several airline offices, the leading
international bookshop, and four or five cafes of which only
two are native enough to serve Turkish coffee, which the
Greeks themselves drink they often call it "Greek" cof-
fee, out of nationalism, but it is still the good old Middle

52 GRECIAN CALENDAR

Eastern stuff, with grounds in the bottom. (The other cafes
serve only traditional Western coffee which they omi-
nously, but not misleadingly, call "French" coffee and
the strange new drink of Nescafe, which is popular nowa-
days where tourists gather.)

In June the square was dead from two to five in the after-
noons, for the Greeks took a siesta then, and all Athens was
a glaring emptiness. But in the forenoons, and especially
in the evenings, it was lively. In the forenoons tourists were
out doing the errands that cannot be separated from their
form of relaxation they were checking on reservations,
that is, buying souvenirs, mailing postcards, arranging for
trips, and getting into cars or buses to take them. Most of
these activities can be done on the square's north side, along
a stretch of sidewalk on which front, in that order, the
Hotel Grande Bretagne, the King George Hotel, a Greek
cafe, a street intersection, a bookstore, a small curiosity
shop, and the Athens branch of the American Express Com-
pany. From the door of the Grande Bretagne to that of the
American Express is about a hundred yards, and at almost
any midday in June this stretch held dozens of tourists,
either in motion or sitting at sidewalk tables. Often they
carried guide-books or cameras; they wore cool summer
clothing with a foreign look; and they were altogether so
different from Greeks that they could be spotted from afar
by the guides, salesmen, and other sharpers who also held
forth in that territory. Most of these latter wore business
suits and looked like innocent bystanders, but a few bore
the trappings of their trade. The one or two pistachio-nut
vendors in the crowd, for instance, had big baskets on their
arms, these containing many transparent packages of their
wares. The one or two sponge salesmen, yet more spectacu-
lar, carried sponges strung together in two great lumps and

THE SEASON BEGINS 53

hung from their shoulders, so that the entire mass, of man
and merchandise, was wider than it was high. Most of the
salesmen waited fairly motionless on the sidewalk, and the
tourists hurried or sauntered past them, often greeting each
other. The salesmen tried, meanwhile, to waylay them; and
the sun played brilliantly on the busy scene.

In the June evenings the square would be calmer, but no
less crowded. The tourists would be early at the cafes
say seven o'clock then a good deal later the Greeks them-
selves would appear, in force. The Athenians live a double
day, especially in summer. They rise early, work all morn-
ing, have a latish lunch and perhaps a heavy one sub-
side for a few hours, work again in the early evening, then
appear on the street at nine or so, to promenade or sit awhile
till dinner time, which may not be till eleven. Thus they
enjoy the cool of the night they often dine out of doors

while immuring themselves through the day's worst heat.
It is a pleasant system, the fruit of long experience, but it
is a hard one for the tourists, most of whom are Northerners

there are few Italians among them, for instance to
adapt to. No matter how much they may delay in going
to a taverna for dinner, and no matter how much they
may linger there no matter how wildly late, that is, they
may think themselves in rising from the table they usu-
ally meet a stream of Athenians entering as they pass out.

There are, as luck would have it, many good tavernas
near Constitution Square, most of them in the Plaka, the
oldest section of modern Athens, which lies in the half-
mile between the square and the Acropolis. These tavernas
have good Greek food and wine, some Greek popular music
as a rule, and pleasant gardens that are cool in summer.
They are only a fifteen-minute walk, say, from the hotels
where tourists normally stay, and they always have people

54 GRECIANCALENDAR

in them who speak English. Language is not a great factor
with them anyway, for they follow the Greek taverna sys-
tem of letting customers choose their food directly, from
the stove or icebox.

The night-life in and around the square is special. There
are several little night clubs in the area, most of them, how-
ever, being mere clip-joints where lone men are encouraged
to buy drinks, real or fake, for the house girls a truly
clippable man may stay in a joint until it closes, on the
expectation that the girl he is buying for will leave with
him. Such places are inconspicuous holes in the wall, for the
most part, and some of them keep runners out around the
square to rustle up business. After midnight the square gets
more and more deserted, and the crowd thins down to a
few such runners plus a few girls themselves, perhaps, a
policeman or two, and a few late-prowling customers.

As far as more formal, routine night-clubbing is con-
cerned, there is a certain amount of it in Athens, but except
for the so-called bouzoukl establishments and one taverna
specializing in the music of Hadjidakis, the Greek hit king
it is much like night-clubbing anywhere.

One notable set of evening entertainments, though the
theater festival at Epidaurus takes place near Athens in
the early summer, after the start of the tourist season, for
which it is especially designed. In 1959 I had taken in a
couple of plays at Epidaurus, and late the next June I went
to another. I had become still more of a tourist by that time,
as I had been joined by my son Dick and his friend John
Belmont, both of them twenty-one. I wanted to show
Greece to them as well as to myself, and this gave a boost
to my sightseeing. Epidaurus is forty-five miles from Athens
as the crow flies. In classical times it was a sanctuary of

THE SEASON BEGINS 55

Asclepius, which included a theater that was thought out-
standing then and has meanwhile suif ered little damage. In
June and July, when the days are long, the Greek National
Theater Company puts on a few ancient plays there. I had
seen the Antigone of Sophocles and the Frogs of Aristopha-
nes the year before, and this year we saw the Oedipus Rex
of Sophocles.

The three of us went to Epidaurus mainly by sea (another
way to go is wholly by road, which takes a few hours each
way and can be trying on the night return). Our boat, laid
on especially and crammed with festival-goers, left the
Piraeus at three o'clock and took two hours to reach the
coast of the Peloponnesus, near Epidaurus, where we got
off. The boat perhaps it should be called a launch was
fast; it went like a torpedo; and it left a beautiful foamy,
symmetrical, sculptured wake behind it. After landing we
had time for refreshments at the seaport village, then we
were all loaded onto buses ten or twenty of them, very
well organized and carried through the landscape, for
half an hour, to the Asclepius shrine. There we had a chance
for further refreshments I had wine and sandwiches
before going on to the theater, which was a few minutes'
walk from the parking space.

We had reserved places rather high up, and we sat there
on the old stone seats. The evening was soft, and the blue
sky was darkening as we got there. The theater was half
full by then its capacity is fourteen thousand and peo-
ple were still drifting into it, quietly. The structure was
a perfect bowl, or a perfect half-bowl, rather its seats
curved around to fill just over a hundred and eighty de-
grees, and the remainder was left open. Through that space
one saw the scenery of Greece. There was a grove of pines
behind the stage, then some hills covered with a green

56 GRECIAN CALENDAR

scrub, then a few tawny fields in the middle distance, and
finally an almost bare gray ridge of limestone, apparently

against the horizon; its silhouette was sharp in the eve-
ning sky. We were really out in nature. The air was still,
the countryside was still I have heard that donkeys are
removed from the neighborhood while the festival is on
and dusk was falling. The play began, and spotlights were
turned on here and there, but real dark was some distance
off. The round amphitheater converged on the "orchestra,"
a likewise round area, of earth, with the stage behind it,
on which the chorus soon began to move.

For those who don't know Greek the chorus is most
important in these Epidaurus productions. One can read
a play ahead of time and Greek tragedies are short so
that one can follow the action; but still the words, and
their delivery, can hardly fascinate if one doesn't under-
stand them. The chorus, though, is mainly visual, and into
its motions have gone much contemporary Greek thought

how the old Greek choruses moved (if they did move)
is unknown, and the Epidaurus choreography is modern.
The Oedipus chorus was made up of fifteen Theban men,
wearing gowns of a dull green. As the play unwound
they moved almost constantly down on the orchestra
but moved slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly. They
shifted, circled, passed through each other, paused, grouped,
and regrouped; and in their movements, and their voices
too, they reflected the play's moods, of excitement, sad-
ness, or expectancy. They kept changing delicately, like
water with a breeze on it. Sometimes they were in one
group, sometimes two, sometimes more, and they had a
leader who was often apart. They sighed, they stalked,
when the main actors were speaking, and when speaking
themselves they chanted, they almost sang. Meanwhile we

THE SEASON BEGINS 57

were out in nature still. A bat flew near me, and the moun-
tain in the distance kept on changing. At half past eight
it was purple, with the sky above it pink. The amphitheater
itself (which had superb acoustics) fitted naturally into
the bowl of a hill the top row of stone seats, I noticed,
led smoothly and perfectly to the bushy height above them.
The play went on, with Oedipus and Jocasta unraveling
their fates, on the stage, and defying oracles. Tiresias, the
blind seer, was led in by a boy, and he too was defied, and
he left. The chorus kept on moving, and it showed alarm
and awe. It made the play dramatic, and for me it brought
out the religious, ritualistic side as well. But as a ritual it
was neither long nor tedious, and it ended in little over an
hour. Oedipus blinded himself and was led off by his daugh-
ters. Later there was a curtain-call, and then we walked
away through the night. We rolled off in our buses, we
transferred to our boat with great dispatch, we had further
wine and sandwiches in its saloon, and soon after midnight
we were back in Athens.

Sophocles' Antigone, which I had seen the year before,
was much the same in character, and I think this is true of
all the tragedies put on at Epidaurus with allowances
for Aeschylus being more austere than Sophocles, and
Euripides being less so. Some foreign purists in Greece say
that the Epidaurus productions are sentimentalized that
having Oedipus led off by his little daughters, for instance,
which has no textual authority behind it, is too tear-jerking.
I can only say that it jerked no unwarranted tears from me,
and that it seemed in keeping with the Oedipus legend and
with the tragedy's own pitch at its end, one must remem-
ber, Oedipus has just blinded himself, gorily and with thor-
ough textual authority, after which the mere leading off by
daughters seems, to me, a casual detail.

58 GRECIAN CALENDAR

I have also heard the language of the plays criticized by
these same purists. The texts are all translated into modern
demotic Greek, and the purists say that this is done with
a zeal that makes them commonplace at times. I can give
no opinion on that point, but I can say that the plays are
popular with many educated Greeks, and appear to be much
respected by them.

Comedies are more chancy. With a few exceptions the
old Greek comedies we have are by Aristophanes, and his
works can't be given now in their original form. For one
thing they are too obscene by modern standards they
are full of jokes about yellowing one's pants through fear,
and things like that. They are also cluttered with obscure
topical references. Even Plutarch, who lived only five cen-
turies after Aristophanes, said that "if you recite him at a
feast, each guest must have a grammarian beside him to ex-
plain the allusions." For these reasons old comedies have
to be largely rewritten for Epidaurus, which may or may
not turn out well.

I had good luck in that I saw the Frogs. It had enchant-
ing fanciful choruses that of the frogs themselves was
superbly costumed and full of subtle antics. Then the play's
climax, a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, was
delightfully handled though not authentically so, except
in spirit. In the play Sophocles has just died, and Dionysus,
the God of the theater, goes to the underworld to bring
back one of the two other great tragedians, both of whom
are already there. He stages a contest, which Aeschylus
finally wins (Aristophanes, a conservative, abhorred the
likes of Euripides) . At Epidaurus, Euripides was thin, pale,
nervous, dirty, scratchy, and disreputable, while Aeschylus
was more on the lines of General Eisenhower with a white
beard. The two spent a long time lampooning each other's

THE SEASON BEGINS 59

works, and Aeschylus finally broke into a calypso tune, and
did a shimmy, in reciting what he felt was his rival's trashiest
line. It was just a fleeting touch, but it brought down the
house or would have brought down a flimsier one and
to me it seemed a perfect job of modernization. On the other
hand, the Birds of Aristophanes was put on that same year,
in Athens, and is said to have been a flop in many respects

it was immediately closed by the government, among
other things, for being disrespectful to the Orthodox
Church.

There is another entertainment that we went to in June
that is w r orth noting here some Greek folk-dances staged
in an old theater at the Piraeus. Most of them were expertly
done costumes, music, and dancing seemingly perfect
but I felt that this perfection was almost a flaw. The dancers
concerned were virtually a professional troupe, I gathered

who had been doing the same thing, in the Piraeus, for
a long time and I preferred a small section of the pro-
gram that was put on by relative amateurs just in from one
of the islands.

Their performance had more roughness, but also more
vitality and joie de vivre. Later in the summer I saw folk-
dancing in situ in the islands, too, and I liked that still more,
even though there was no fancy dress then, and not much
polish in the steps. The Greek life and landscape have a
coarse and grainy texture much of the time, and if you
smooth it out you court disaster.

Ill

THE BIG LAND TOUR

In Dry Greece the most popular ruins, with tourists, are in
Athens, Delphi, Olympia, and the region of Corinth and
Mycenae. These places are so disposed that one can easily
make a four-day circuit of them by car or bus, and each
year many thousands do so. In June, I joined them, along with
Dick and John Belmont we went on rubberneck buses be-
longing to one of the main Greek tourist outfits.

I should say right now that I am partial to guided tours.
Some friends of mine disdain them, and other people have
done so at least since Cicero's time. But I have found them
the best way to take in antiquities without devoting one's
life to them and becoming a scholar. I don't like visiting
ruins with a guidebook, as it keeps me from looking around
a classic joke about German tourists is that they never ac-
tually see the ruins they visit, because of guidebooks held
pedantically before their eyes. The words and dates that
go with ruins should come through the ears, and that is
what live guides are for. It is true that one occasionally gets
wrong information old wives' tales from some of them,
and that nothing is more deadly than a guide who is stupid
or cynical. But in Greece the stupidity, at least, is at a

THE BIG LAND TOUR 6l

minimum. In some countries the tourist guides are no better
than whining beggars, but in Greece, where nearly every-
one is alert and intelligent, the guides are especially so.

Most of the good ones are women guiding is one of
the few higher Greek callings really open to them. They
bring to it the lovely manners that all Greek women seem
to have, plus a great fluency in languages. Before they are
licensed they must have a schooling in archaeology. Then
as the years pass they learn more about it, and also perfect
their tact in handling the tourists themselves, a job demand-
ing the qualities of a teacher, nurse, mother, diplomat's wife,
and geisha girl. They make fine company, as well as being
instructive.

For conveyance around the big loop of ancient sites you
may use your own car, of course, if you have one. You may
hire a car in Athens, and I did this later in the year it was
a Volkswagen, and with gas and everything it cost less than
a hundred dollars for the circuit. You may also hire a car
with a chauffeur and even with a chauffeur who is a
guide of sorts himself. I know one guide-chauffeur in
Athens, named John Spyrakis, who has a Cadillac sedan and
a series of warm testimonials from Edith Hamilton, Vivien
Leigh, Sir Laurence Olivier, Graham Greene, Igor Stravin-
sky, and others. I have been out with him on an overnight
trip and have found him a charming man with a great feel-
ing for the Greek past, but his foreign languages are so
limited that one cannot learn much from him. It is better to
have a really professional licensed-guide to tell you things.
You can hire such a guide all for yourself, and that is the
best way, but it is cheaper to take a rubberneck bus, which
costs only fifty-five dollars, everything included, for this
particular four-day trip.

Ideally one should stay with the same bus and the same

62 GRECIAN CALENDAR

guide getting to know him or her throughout such a
trip, and that is the way it used to be managed by the com-
panies on the circuit. But in 1960 the particular company
that I chose launched what I call an inferior system a
fact that I didn't realize till I had bought the tickets and we
were on our way. The fault in the system came from ap-
plying mass-production, impersonal, "efficient" methods to
the handling of tourists, a temptation that seems to arise
when those in charge start thinking abstractly in terms of
"tourism" rather than concretely in terms of satisfying peo-
ple. As the tour business has evolved in Greece it has
worked out that several lesser bus-trips, besides the big four-
day one, are available on this main classical circuit. From
Athens, the base for excursions in Greece, you can take a
hasty one-day trip to Delphi or to Corinth and Mycenae,
which are the circuit's two ends. Or you can take two-day
trips to those places, staying overnight and seeing them at
more leisure. In 1959, when visiting Greece with another
son Peter I took two-day trips in both directions and
got a great deal out of them. On the trip to Delphi, espe-
cially, we were guided by a delightful elderly Greek lady
whom we came to know quite well. She took us around
thoroughly in the cool times of day late afternoon and
early morning. She spent the evening with us. And then and
in the bus itself she told us all manner of things. We felt our
time had been excellently spent. But now it was hard to
spend much of the time well, for this company's new sys-
tem sought to combine their four-day tour with their one-
and two-day tours at each end the clients getting on and
off like railway passengers in such a way that "efficiency"
was served, but few customers few four-day customers
at least were really pleased. We kept being rushed to keep
up with one-day people, or left to wait for someone else,

THEBIGLANDTOUR 63

and this took away from what was otherwise a pleasant ex-
perience.

We drove off from Constitution Square at eight on a
Monday morning at quarter past eight, more exactly, be-
cause of the difficulty in rounding all the passengers up and
installing them. Our bus was a "pullman," with adjustable
seats, a public-address system, and blue-tinted windows curv-
ing up over our heads. The dashboard looked, to me, like
the instrument panel on a plane. The guide it was a man
on this first leg of the trip sat up forward beside the
driver. His microphone snaked in and out of a socket just
in front of him, so that he could readily pick it up, say
f-H> H~f into it (<H-<k <-<-(, that is, in Greek), and
begin his talks.

These turned out to be not especially good, as such
things go, for though the guide was a capable man he
seemed to be stale on tourists. Tourists en masse can be
disillusioning. Often they tire easily. They have odd whims.
Many care little for the sights they see, but just want to
say they've seen them. And they ask extraordinary ques-
tions "What are sponges used for?" I heard an old lady
ask a guide last summer. Male guides especially, it seems,
get impatient with this sort of thing and grow frivolous.
As we spun along now, leaving Athens for the country,
this guide pointed out the many olive trees around us,
green in the light-brown grass. "The olive was Athena's
divine gift to Athens," he said. "We use it for everything.
We eat it, we cook with it, and its wood keeps us warm in
winter. In Greece we eat ripe olives as a rule, but in dry
martinis people use green ones. . . ." Then he did some
dated joking about how little vermouth a dry martini should
have.

Later we passed near a bauxite mine, and he began talking

64 GRECIANCALENDAR

about "aluminum" and "aluminium" and the differences be-
tween the English and American languages. "The word
'dame' means quite different things in English and Amer-
ican," he said. "I found that out in London a few years
ago. It was very embarrassing."

These quips, coming over the public-address system,
were interlarded with more serious comments.

A few miles out of Athens we stopped at the Byzantine
church of Daphni, which contains some famous mosaics.
The guide led us off the bus and brought us, like sheep, to
the church's courtyard. "This way, please," he said. "You
are better off in the shade." He got us to a cool spot and
gave a little speech on Daphni's history. In classical times
the place was a shrine of Apollo, he said, but the Huns
under Alaric destroyed it in the fourth century. Later on
mainly in the eleventh century the Byzantine Chris-
tians built their church there. "It was the golden age of the
Byzantines then," he said. "They were feeling so strong.
They were building for eternity."

He went on about the church's later adventures, which
included damage by the Crusaders; abandonment; part-
burial under silt; and eventual disinterment. While he was
talking a middle-aged lady slipped away from our group
and started for the church itself. "Excuse me, Madame,"
the guide called out. "Can we all wait here? Because others
are inside. We must all go in together." She came back
obediently.

The guide was right there were a couple of groups
from other buses in the church, and the space there was
limited. But soon one group came out, and the guide cut
short his speech. "Well, ladies and gentlemen, here we go,"
he said. And he darted inside, with the rest of us following.

It was dark there, after the blazing sun, but still we could

THE BIG LAND TOUR 65

see the mosaics well. They were on the upper walls and
the ceiling, in and under the dome. They had gleaming gold
backgrounds, their colors were brilliant, and their execu-
tion polished; they are considered the finest Byzantine mo-
saics in Greece, indeed, on a par with those at Aghia Sophia
in Istanbul. The guide began talking again, explaining the
schism between the Orthodox and Catholic churches in the
eleventh century. He did this lucidly, in both French and
English he had to say everything in both languages, be-
cause the passengers were mixed. I think his form was better
in the French I am not a good judge of that, but he
seemed more at home in it.

After his general talk he began moving around and dis-
cussing the mosaics individually. One was of the Resurrec-
tion a standard scene in Eastern iconography and he
gave a lively account of how it differed from Western ver-
sions of the same thing. In Western Resurrections, he ex-
plained, Christ is always ascending, but in the Greek ones
he Ascends to set free the old sinners Adam and Eve
and others who are locked in the underworld. This was
clearly shown in the mosaic, and the details of other scenes
the Baptism, Transfiguration, and so on were clear too
when he explained them.

He took us around for a while, then began shepherding
us back to the bus. Several of us strayed off to buy post-
cards or soft drinks en route, and it was some time before
he got us aboard and on our way.

We were heading for Delphi, which is seventy-five miles
west of Athens as the crow flies, but which takes most of a
morning to reach because of twisty mountain roads. We
made only one more stop after Daphni, at a midpoint called
Levadheia, where one can buy little souvlakia spitted
chunks of meat flavored with oregano. We dawdled

66 GRECIANCALENDAR

there awhile, but otherwise we spent the morning on our
bus. The bus was cool, and coolly decorated, in blue and
gray, a contrast to the glare outside. It had a radio, and up
to Levadheia, when a tourist objected, this was playing
soft, sweet music, which also made for a contrast soft
music within and hard landscape without almost nothing
there but rocky hills, with a sparse and sunburned vegeta-
tion. The tourist who objected was a Dutch professor,
whom we came to know later on, and he complained bit-
terly, in French, that the music didn't harmonize with the
paysage.

We pushed on silently into the burning country, dozing
now and then because of its brightness. The guide didn't
talk much. He identified some mountains that we passed
Cithaeron, where Oedipus was exposed as a baby, and Heli-
con, the home of the Muses but otherwise he left us
pretty much alone. I think the bilingual nature of the audi-
ence dampened him at least it worked against spontaneity
in him for whatever he said in English he had to repeat
in French, or vice versa, almost word for word, lest some
of his passengers feel cheated. Later on, at Delphi, a French-
speaking woman attacked him heatedly for saying more in
English than in her language. The charge was groundless,
but that did not abate her fury; and since then other guides,
of more established position, have told me that they will
not go on these bus-trips because the bilingual work is so
trying.

The mountains were rocky, and they grew wilder,
grander, and more rugged as we went along. Toward noon
we came in sight of Parnassus, under which Delphi lies.
It was massive and laced with gorges, some of which, high
up, had snow on them. We reached the mountain's foot,
then ran along its south side for a long time slowly, over

THEBIGLANDTOUR 6j

curving roads and switchbacks till at length we came
to Delphi itself, which hangs above a lovely chasm. The
bus dropped us at the Hotel Delphi for lunch, immediately
after which we were scooped up again and taken to see the
ruins hastily, so that the one-day tourists among us could
get back to Athens. We four-day customers were due to
spend the night in that hotel, but the check-out time was
three p.m., and we couldn't get into our rooms yet.

Our guided tour of Delphi left much to be desired be-
cause it was so rushed. The guide did a brave job talking
rapidly in both languages, and even answering questions if
driven to but he had to leave at half past three, with the
one-day people, and he could only hit the high spots. It
was a poor hour to be seeing things too hot and glary,
with everything looking at its deadest. (It was also an hour,
of course, when most of the Greeks themselves were se-
cluded indoors.) I did little more than tag along on the
tour not absorbing much and I got the guide to ar-
range for another man, a local guide in Delphi, to take the
boys and myself around after five o'clock.

Of all the classical sites in mainland Greece I think Delphi
is the most interesting and beautiful, and when living in
Athens I have urged visiting friends to see it if they could
see nothing else (Athens itself being excepted from this rule,
as visitors go there automatically). Delphi's relation to old
Greek life is easier to grasp than that of other shrines. Many
Greek shrines were places where pilgrims went for formal
worship, apparently, and not much else; and it is hard now
to tell just what this meant to them. But Delphi, besides
having the formal worship, also had the Oracle, to which
questions came from far and wide and were answered; and
in the best period of Greece, at least, the answers were gen-

68 GRECIAN CALENDAR

erally heeded. The Oracle started wars, composed disputes,
and told where colonies should be founded; and it governed
many smaller things as well. Its statements made by a
medium, in a trance, and then interpreted by priests were
often ambiguous and sometimes crookedly reported, be-
cause of bribery, but they closely influenced their world,
almost as much as the pronouncements of Marxism and Ca-
tholicism influence their respective worlds today though
with the difference that they were not codified. They were
the unpredictable voice of the God, Apollo of the wind
blowing where it listeth but they had great practical
effects. These can be studied and learned about there is
a lot on them in Herodotus, for instance and the knowl-
edge helps make Delphi seem alive.

As for the place's beauty, this lies mainly in its site, with
Parnassus towering above it and the deep gorge lying down
below, carpeted with an absolute sea of olive trees over
a million of them, according to the guides. The shrine is
just north of the Corinthian Gulf. Most of its view in that
direction is blocked by a rugged height to its south, but
around one end of this, and far below, an arm of the Gulf
is visible the so-called bay of Itea and it gives the scene
a dash of water to set it off.

Everywhere there is a sense of space. From Delphi itself
one looks across the gorge and sees a footpath zigging and
zagging at a constant pitch, and with sharp and equal
angles in its switchbacks up the facing heights. It looks
almost like a work of mechanical drawing, and one sees it
ever so clearly; but in between are volumes of crystal air.
The crags to Delphi's rear are wild and lovely, too, and the
remains of the shrine itself which include a stadium, a
theater, parts of two temples, and some other buildings
are as enjoyable as any in Greece. They were excavated

THE BIG LAND TOUR 69

early in this century by French archaeologists, after the
modern village of Delphi, which stood on them, had been
removed it is now five or ten minutes' walk away, along
the hillside. There is a good museum at Delphi, too still
being improved as this is written and on every count it
is an excellent place to visit.

We met our guide in front of the museum, and for five
dollars he agreed to take us in hand for a couple of hours.
His card bore the legend "PANAGHIOS GERCUSIS,
Speaker on Delphi," and the phrase was apt. He was a
portly man, of middle height. He wore dark glasses and a
straw hat. He was a compulsive talker, and when he had
seated us on some old chunks of marble he began narrating
at once with wild surmise.

"The primitive people who lived here in the beginning,"
he said, with a rolling brogue, "started to worship the infer-
r-r-rnal beings. They worshipped the earth Goddess. They
worshipped Gaea, who was the same as Isis. They wor-
shipped Rhea, who was also Goddess of the earth. And
Poseidon, the God of springs. He represented humidity!
They worshipped the dark, and moisture, and the full-of-
sickness powers of the earth. The microbes!"

He went on, retelling ancient myths and talking of a
python that supposedly had been at Delphi in those early
days. Then he pointed to the sky. "But in time Apollo, the
God of light, came and killed the python," he said. "That
was the triumph of light over darkness Apollo with his
bright rays destroyed the dark!! The victory symbolized
the downfall, too, of the matriarchal system, which had
prevailed in Greece up to then."

He moved on to the Oracle. "In the historical period the
Oracle lasted exactly one thousand year-r-r-rs," he said.
His brogue was pronounced, and I found out later that he

JO GRECIAN CALENDAR

had got a type of British accent from studying at an Angli-
can school in Jerusalem. He had been brought up there, the
ward of a relative in the Greek Patriarchate, though his fam-
ily home was Crete. He had traveled a good deal, too, be-
fore coming to rest in Delphi. Now he owned some olive
trees in the gorge, which he cared for in the off season; but
speaking on Delphi was his real job. He spoke in splendid
periods, and he waved his arms.

He told how the medium of the Oracle, a woman, used
to sit on a tripod over a cleft in the earth and make cryptic
utterances. At first she was always a young virgin, he said,
but then "something happened with a priest," and there-
after she was a woman over fifty. Her utterances were in-
terpreted by a priestly corps "twenty-four of them, all
philosophers" who came to have great influence.

"They had a peace policy," he said, "and they favored
the unity of Greece. They developed the Amphictyonic
League in Delphi, which was the forerunner of the UN."
He quoted some of the famous oracles, like the one re-
ferring to Athens's wooden wall, which led her to rely on
the fleet that beat the Persians. He recited these oracles,
ringingly, in the ancient words. He furrowed his brow, he
peered at us, he waved a finger, he leaned forward. He was
a natural raconteur. He told us how Apollo had reigned at
Delphi only half the year, yielding it to Dionysus in the
winter. "Dionysus is the God of wine," he said, "and we
drink in the winter. We do it now. It is cold in Delphi then,
and we cannot work. So we stay home with our wine and
worship Dionysus." And he laughed.

During this discourse we had been sitting on old blocks
of marble Dicky on a drum from an Ionic column by
the entrance to the sanctuary, which is at its lower end and
near the modern road and museum. Now we rose and pro

THE BIG LAND TOUR 71

ceeded up the slope, up steps. Delphi was long ago stripped,
by the Byzantines and others, but in its heyday it was full
of statues and other votive offerings, given by people who
wished to thank or please Apollo. "From the sixth century
B.C.," the guide said, "when this place started to flourish, it
gleamed with votive offerings. With gold, brass, bronze, and
shining marble!"

All that was left of these objects now was their back-
ground of weathered stone, but he did a good job of conjur-
ing up the ancient splendor. It was not just showmanship
and talk, either, so far as I could tell, but an outpouring of
pretty solid knowledge. The guide was well versed in
Pausanias and he also went into such matters as the etymol-
ogy of Delphi's name into whether or not it came from
a word meaning dolphin, as many people say (with the ex-
planation that Apollo was brought to the site by a dolphin,
or came in the guise of one himself). The guide was not
dogmatic on such points. "We do not know anything," he
said once. "What do we know? We know nothing." And in
this mood he showed us over the sanctuary, including the
cleft from which the Oracle had spoken, while the heights
across the gorge turned red in the sunset.

We spent that night in the Hotel Delphi, which was a
pleasure. Many new tourist hotels are being built in Greece
now. Some are trite in design and some are good, and of
the good ones the Hotel Delphi is outstanding. The archi-
tect seems to have been under Japanese influence. The bal-
conies are reminiscent of Japan, and so is the layout of the
rooms and corridors. Above all, the close connection be-
tween indoors and out seems Japanese. Thanks to the artful
placing of terraces, balconies, and windows an inmate of
the hotel is not debarred, as in so much Western building,

72 GRECIAN CALENDAR

from communion with the landscape; and this is a boon be-
cause that landscape is so magnificent. You can eat, sleep,
and wake in the hotel, and stay in touch the while with the
rocky heights, the deep gorge, and the gorge's nap of olive
trees.

One would like to say that the food was equally good,
but this is impossible one cannot praise the food in any
first-class hotel I know of on these tourist routes. If one is
on a package tour, as we were now, one gets table d'hote
fare in the hotels, as part of the over-all deal, and this nearly
always consists of bland and listless imitations of the Western
cuisine. One could do that whole big loop of sightseeing
and come away quite knowledgeable on ruins, perhaps, but
unaware that Greeks eat palatable food. One is fed a round
of beef stews, dull beige soups, overdone roasts, and anemic
fish fillets on the theory, no doubt, that such things are the
least common denominator of food that no guest will
object to them very much. To me that diet is associated with
the bureaucratic approach typified by the word "tourism"
the approach that treats wayfarers like statistical units
rather than humans.

A more amusing sign of that approach, too, can be seen
in the same hotel. When we took possession of our rooms
we found big paper seals, saying "STERILIZED" in Eng-
lish, fixed to the covers of the toilet seats. They were im-
pressive, but I happened to know they were meaningless,
because the year before, when staying at that hotel, I had
left my room at the last moment check-out time had
gone out to my bus, then had remembered a book I had
forgotten, and had returned to get it; I had found the maid
and a manservant making the room up hastily, and they had
already put a crisp new "STERILIZED" sign on the toilet.
The more "tourism" gets organized, one imagines, the more
can tourists look forward to such minor insults.

THE BIG LAND TOUR 73

But at that hotel the pleasantness of the surroundings
more than balanced off the nonsense, and besides we could
get good potable wine as one can anywhere in Greece
to liven up the food. Being with the tourists now not
with the shepherds and the fishermen I was often to be
cut off from the free-flowing retsina of my springtime, yet
at several hotels, I found, I could still get house wine in
carafes, and at all I could get labeled wine for prices start-
ing around fifty cents a bottle. Greek wines don't make
connoisseurs rave, but they are recognized as good stuff in
an unpretentious way. They are in the shadow of French
and other European wines, and they concede this by the
shape of their bottles, among other things. Bordeaux-type
wines, both red and white, come in light, relatively square-
shouldered bottles; Burgundy types come in heavier, more
sloping ones; and Rhine wines in slopinger ones still. There
is much variety in all these categories, and no visitor, what-
ever his tastes, need go thirsty. Greece has some good
dessert wines, too, including a delicate muscatel made on
Samos.

The country offers a wide gamut for the serious drinker.
Besides all the wines (and imported liquors, of course, which
are expensive) there is a tasty local beer, a number of local
brandies, and infinite kinds of ouzo, the liquor that is the
common man's cafe drink. The beer, a monopoly, is called
<E>IS or "FIX," after a brewmaster named Fuchs who was
imported to Greece in the nineteenth century, following
her liberation from Turkey, by the Bavarian royal house
that was chosen to rule her then. It is one of the best lagers
made in the Mediterranean region (another being the Dutch
Amstel beer now brewed in Jordan) . The brandies, called
koniak in Greek, are rather special; they taste good to those
who like them, but simultaneously sweet and harsh to those
who don't. The ouzo is a member of the family that includes

74 GRECIANCALENDAR

anisette, absinthe, pernod, raki, and arak. It is distilled, theo-
retically at least, from the leavings in the wine-presses; it
turns white in water; and it has an anise taste. A drink of it
costs five or ten cents in ordinary Greek cafes, but closer to
twenty-five in high-class hotels, where it is not allowed to
undersell gin and whiskey too drastically. Rivers of ouzo
are drunk in Greece, but one also hears some calumny
about it there, perhaps derived from snobbishness.

"I disapprove of ouzo" a Greek friend said to me one
evening last year.

"Why? "I asked.

"It goes to the head/' he answered sternly. Whereupon
he poured himself a huge, mahogany-colored scotch and
soda, though where that was going I did not ask.

Another time a Greek barfly saw me drinking ouzo in a
hotel and lectured me about it with the strange emphasis
that people sometimes display in bars. He too was drinking
scotch, and he had an intent look. He said ouzo was danger-
ous in quantity, though safe if taken only now and then.

"You mean it's all right if one doesn't live on the stuff?"
I asked.

"It's not a question of living on the stuff! " he said furi-
ously. "But simply of not drinking too much of it! ! !"

He added that a surfeit of ouzo had given him internal
spasms. I have downed a fair amount of it, though, and have
found it no more sinister than other hard liquors per-
haps less so, as it is apt to be weaker.

We rose early after our night at Delphi, to catch a ferry
across the Gulf of Corinth. Our numbers were reduced
now, by the defection of the one- and two-day people, and
we were loaded into a half -sized bus a Volkswagen or
something similar. We tourists were fourteen in number.

THE BIG LAND TOUR 75

Besides the boys and myself we had the Dutch professor
and his wife, a French businessman and his wife, two French-
speaking single women (of whom at least one was Swiss),
an elderly Greek-American from Maryland, and a family
group from Chicago consisting of a grandfather, his
daughter, and her two teen-age sons. These last were too
young to enjoy the trip much they seemed to have been
dragged along, and they would sigh, and speak of baseball,
and wish it was all over. The two French-speaking ladies
seemed unhappy, too one was old and not quite up to
the ardors of the trip, and the other it was who had so
angrily accused the guide, the day before, of favoritism to
English. All the rest of us, I should say, were keenly curious.
Except for the Greek-American we had the attitude of
ordinary well-educated Westerners now finally seeing the
things we had heard praised in school. The Greek- American
was different. He had gone to the States early in this cen-
tury, as a poor boy, and had lived a hard life there, like
most Greek-Americans of his vintage. He had worked his
way up in the restaurant business and had finally come to
own a place of his own; but not till this year he was now
well on in his sixties had he had the time or money to
come back to his old country. Like many first-generation
Greek-Americans that one meets back in Greece, he was
both proud of the old country and appreciative of the
United States. He was soft-spoken and patient, and he kept
mainly to himself. The Greece of us others, around which
the tour had been built the Greece of Homer and the
schoolroom busts can have meant but little to him, yet
he seemed always interested and happy to be along. I know
that he was proud, too, of our respect for the Greek culture,
so different from what he must have found as an immigrant.
We had no guide on this leg as part of the general

j6 GRECIAN CALENDAR

efficiency we were to have a stationary guide at Olympia
and not pick up another traveling one till the last day, in
the region of Corinth and Mycenae. We did have a "hostess,"
a young girl who was pleasant, but who lacked the com-
posure, knowledge, and linguistic ability that real guiding
needs, and of course we had a chauffeur a good, tough
professional well able to cope with the mountain roads and
with the spirit of Greek traffic, which is still untamed and
scofflaw. We left the hotel, drove down the steeps through
olive groves to the bay of Itea, and boarded a ferry that
was, I think, an old American landing-craft from the
Second World War. We crossed the Gulf slantwise, going
many miles west as well as south, and the trip took us two
or three hours. In the course of it we met a school of
dolphins, and they played entrancingly around our bow
leaping rhythmically from the water, going in pairs, cross-
ing each other's track, and curvetting everywhere.

The ferry put us down on the Peloponnesus, the lower,
severed part of the Greek peninsula. We still had some dis-
tance to go before Olympia west along the Gulf's south
coast, then south on the Adriatic shore, then inland for a
spurt. It is one of the duller Routes in Greece, by and large,
and our hostess did not enliven it. We crossed about five
streams on the journey, and at each one she inquired its
name from the driver and then relayed it to us. She also
told us what the towns we passed exported, and this in-
variably was wine and olives. Otherwise she let us doze,
which was easy in the heat and brightness, and under the
fatigue of traveling. We dozed and waked. We saw blue
sea with the brown-green land beside it. We saw magpies
flying, black and white. We saw donkeys. We saw olive
trees floating in the tawny glare outside. We saw flashes of
bougainvillea in the towns. Then as the noon-hour passed

THEBIGLANDTOUR 77

we saw shuttered houses locked in the siesta saw people
sleeping on verandahs, too, in the hope of a breeze. Then
about one we made Olympia, where we were fed, allowed
to rest, and told that our guide would come at half past
three.

The guide was a woman this time; she had brown hair
and bright blue eyes, these made brighter still by a figured
blue dress she wore. She was brisk and full of vitality (a
thing that guides need badly, for if a guide wilts, the tourists
do the same) . She was also on her mettle almost hostile
at first in anticipating complaints from us. She seemed
to be the anchorman, so to speak, of this tour system the
one who took the heavy load of it half way through and
I gathered she was used to customers who felt they had
been slighted earlier. "I tell you that you'll have a visit here
that you can't say was done in a hurry," she said with chal-
lenge in her eye, and she gathered us up and swept us off.

She took us first to the museum, which is near the hotel
at Olympia (the latter being a nice old-fashioned one, amid
quiet pines and gardens). The museum contains some out-
standing pieces, including the Hermes of Praxiteles and the
pediment groups from both ends of the Olympian temple
of Zeus. It is hard to get excited over the Hermes, after all
the photographs one has seen of it, but still the quality of
the stone a translucent, almost glowing white marble
is a pleasant surprise, and so is the three-dimensional view
of the statue as one walks around it (it is mounted over
a bed of sand, in case it should topple in an earthquake, but
a wooden gangway is laid on this so one can circulate) .

The pediment sculptures, rather archaic, are among the
least publicized of good Greek statues, and they are all the
more striking for that. One group shows the legend of
Pelops, for whom the Peloponnesus is named, and the other

78 GRECIAN CALENDAR

the attempted abduction of Lapith women by Centaurs at
a wedding feast (the same story as is shown in the Parthenon
metopes at the British Museum) . The Centaurs are full of
life, ruggedness, and primitive purpose, and they are at-
tacking the Lapith women and their protectors with direct
and practical holds and blows. In the center of the pedi-
ment its tallest part stands Apollo, the god of light,
with an arm outstretched, and in the triangle on either side
of him the struggle goes on, gradually working upward as
it comes toward him from the low corners. The guide
pointed out that the higher the contestants' figures rose,
and the nearer they got to Apollo, the more the virtuous
Lapith women seemed to be winning, and she drew a sym-
bolic meaning from the struggle that the Lapiths stood
for the good forces in humanity and the Centaurs the bad;
and that people should, according to the pediment, always
strive to control the Centaur within them. (I have heard
this interpretation from others, too, and it strikingly recalls
the Hindu symbolism of that same inner struggle the
metaphor of the charioteer in the Bhagavad Gita controlling
the wild horses of the senses.)

The guide also ascribed various thoughts to the figures in
the Pelops pediment. These stand in a row, and supposedly
they are waiting to begin a chariot race in which Pelops, ac-
cording to the legend, won his bride by besting her father
through foul play. It was understood that Pelops would be
killed if he lost the race to the girl's father who was king
of the region around Olympia but he secretly bribed
the old man's groom to take the linch-pin out of his chariot
axle, thereby causing it to wreck. Pelops is made to seem
confident in the pediment, according to the guide, and so is
the girl, who knew about the trick. "Look at her," said

THEBIGLANDTOUR 79

the guide. "See how calm she is. She can afford to be, be-
cause she knows that Pelops is coming back." She told us
what words the girl might be saying as they waited there,
and what Pelops might be saying, too. It was rather like
putting balloons in the mouths of figures in a painting, yet
it was stimulating, and I think it made most of the tourists
take more interest even if this was the negative interest
of objection.

The guide rather lent herself to controversy. One room
in the museum held many statues from the Roman period,
and she ran these down unmercifully. "The Romans were
excellent at draperies, copies, and portraits," she said. "They
were great at mass production. They mass produced the
bodies of their statues and then put portrait heads on them.
Sometimes the heads were out of proportion with the rest,
but they didn't seem to mind that."

One tourist in our party took issue with the guide, but she
was able to find examples to prove her point. She was quick
at repartee, and not averse to it. "How often have I been
called a nationalist in this same room," she said with spirit,
as she led us from the Roman things.

By the time we left the museum it was reasonably cool
outside, and she took us to the ruins of the sanctuary it-
self, which unlike Delphi's are on a level space, amid
pine trees. They include the remains of a temple to Zeus,
of one to Hera, and of many other buildings, among them
the old Olympic stadium. The guide got us around these
well, giving full explanations and answering all our ques-
tions, whether in French or English. She was a heroine of
sorts. She drew us along from point to point, always getting
to the next one before we did sometimes she even ran,
and she kept us on our toes. She said she had guided eleven

80 GRECIAN CALENDAR

hundred tourists around Delphi since March fifteenth it
was then the end of June. She was under contract to stay
there, working for our tour company, till mid-October, and
it seemed that they had made an excellent choice no
matter what went wrong for a tourist on the rest of his trip,
it would always be plain that she, at least, meant business.

That evening the boys and I took a dip in the River Al-
pheus cool, swift, and muddy which runs past Olym-
pia, then we had drinks and dinner and went to bed in the
quiet hotel. The next day we were not scheduled to leave
till afternoon, and I spent most of the morning in the sanc-
tuary. As I have indicated, the function of this sanctuary
does not come over so clearly as that of Delphi's, at least to
me. Olympia was sacred pre-eminently to Zeus, he being
the great father-god of the Greeks their Jehovah, per-
haps associated somehow with power as Apollo was with
light (it has been argued that the two later continued in
Christianity as God the Father and God the Son). Zeus's
shrine at Olympia seems to have been fully as international
as common to all the Greek states as was Apollo's at
Delphi, and the various Greeks would put aside their quar-
rels when they gathered for its festivals, among which the
Olympic games were a feature. Olympia had great prestige,
apparently, and majesty and formality. The sanctuary was
as big as a few city blocks. It was laid out on orderly rec-
tangular lines, and these are still perceptible, though blurred
by the confusion in which the masonry has fallen thanks
to earthquakes and other causes through the years. The
place was silted over, additionally, by changes in the Al-
pheus and another river, and around its edges one can now
see earthen banks, ten or twenty feet high, marking the

THE BIG LAND TOUR 8l

depth through which German archaeologists dug down to
the ruins in the nineteenth century. Pine trees were later
planted, and these are tall now, so that the whole site lies
in a grove of them.

That morning, when I visited, the pines were roaring in
a wind, and they gave a welcome shade a broken one, too>
with the sun's brilliance dappled by patches of shadow, all
superimposed on the ruins' pattern. There were wild pink
hollyhocks in the sanctuary, amid the brown grass, and they
nodded in the wind. There was Queen Anne's lace, too,
and other weeds. It was a scene of quiet, underlined by the
sighing of the trees.

Outstanding among the ruins was the temple of Zeus
what was left of it a big raised platform in the precinct's
center. It had been brought down largely by a single earth-
quake, and along one side a row of columns lay like tipped-
over stacks of checkers drum after drum leaning on each
other. The drums were big, the base ones being a foot wider
than I am tall. They were of gray porous stone, with sea-
shells visible in it, and they had a rough texture brought out
by the slanting sun. They lay there in their grayness, amid
the pinkness of the hollyhocks and the toast-color of the
grass.

I wandered among them and then went to the other build-
ings a Hera temple, which was a good deal smaller; the
remains of a workshop once used by Phidias; and so on.
Even toward noon it was cool and pleasant there. The pines
towered above, and once I saw a little owl flying among
them. It must have been young and inexperienced to be out
at all then. It stayed around for several minutes flying
from tree to tree, and resting, then flying on again, softly in
the shadows, until it disappeared.

82 GRECIAN CALENDAR

That afternoon we drove eastward across the Pelopon-
nesus "Pelops's Island" mainly through the region
called Arcadia, which takes up most of its center. Arcadia
is wild and mountainous good guerrilla country and
in history its people have been self-reliant and hard to sub-
due. In ancient times they held out uncommonly well against
the neighboring Spartans, and in the nineteenth century
they were leaders in the anti-Turkish struggle. The road
across Arcadia crawls steeply up and down the mountains,
yet one does not feel shut in, for the views are generally
spacious wide plains or valleys stretching from one's
own to other mountains, these being brown and green in
the distance. The trip took several hours, and we dozed and
chatted in the little bus, the same as had taken us from
Delphi we had come to know each other pretty well by
now.

Toward dusk we reached Nauplion, a port on the east
Peloponnesian coast, where we were to spend the night.
It is an attractive town, with good swimming, interesting
medieval fortifications, and many handsome neo-classical
houses that were built in the first half of the nineteenth
century, when Nauplion was the capital, for a while, of
liberated Greece Athens still being insecure then.

It is not for Nauplion itself that the tour buses stop there,
however, but for several ancient sites in its vicinity. The
next day we set forth to view them, though a bit confusedly
from having to mesh in with one- and two-day tourists
coming out from Athens. To one of the sites, called Tiryns,
we were not actually taken by the organized tour; but the
place is near Nauplion, and the boys and I went there in a
taxi, with the French couple, after breakfast. Then we came
back and joined the others, to be taken up to Mycenae in
a bus. The one-day pullman bus from Athens, with a guide,

THE BIG LAND TOUR 83

was due to meet us there, but it was an hour late because
it had to stop at Corinth on the way. Besides its one- and
two-day tourists, apparently, it had some four-day ones
who were going around the big circuit in a direction op-
posite to ours, and these had to see Corinth then or never,
as it is midway on the Athens-Nauplion trip.

The people controlling our own movements did not
know of this circumstance, so they sent us up an hour early.
It was getting toward noon then, and very hot. Our bus
stopped by some pine trees a good distance from the actual
Mycenae ruins, and we were asked to wait there. We did
wait for a while, sitting under the pines, but then grew
restive. Some of us began wandering around to have a look.
This alarmed the Greek driver of our bus, who had sole
charge and who dreaded losing us as those in charge of
tourists always do. He enlisted the support of our Greek-
American fellow-traveler, who tried to keep us still. But we
were in no mood for this, and some of us answered to the
general effect that we were not cattle and would do as we
pleased. The Greek-American, caught in the middle of this
argument, seemed unhappy. I felt he thought that we were
being rude to his mother-country, or unappreciative of it

or perhaps that his countrymen themselves weren't cut-
ting a good figure.

Any of these feelings would have been natural, but also
unfounded as I saw it. I think one can say that the Greeks

to their vast credit, on the whole are not yet or-
ganization men, and this works against them in big-scale
tourist-shuffling enterprises. Otherwise I would put the
blame for the mess that morning on a single wrong idea,
which anyone might have had the idea that a hitherto
pleasant mode of touring should be streamlined and made
efficient without heed to human values. (I suppose the com-

84 GRECIAN CALENDAR

pany saved money by it, and this might be counted a gain
of sorts, yet real economic necessity cannot be argued, for
at least one other outfit was running four-day tours that
summer, at the same price, in the old well-timed, well-
guided way.)

The bus finally arrived, with a big complement of tourists
and a spunky little female guide. She took us first to a cele-
brated Mycenaean "bee-hive" tomb nearby and then to the
acropolis of Mycenae itself, briefing us at each in the usual
two languages. She didn't have time to say much, though,
or to take us thoroughly over the site; and anyway noon in
summer is a deadly moment to see that place. I prefer to
remember it from a visit I made later, in September. I went
there toward dusk that time, then returned in the evening
and saw it again by moonlight (I stayed overnight in the
neighborhood, at an inn that had once been the home of
Heinrich Schliemann, the archaeologist).

I had a better understanding of Mycenae by then, too,
having just visited Crete and having also looked over the
Mycenaean treasures^ in Athens, at the National Museum.
Thanks to Schliemann, and to archaeologists after him, we
know now that an advanced civilization existed in Greece
from about 1400 to 1150 B.C., long before the so-called
classical period. This older civilization is probably the one
that Homer wrote of before Schliemann, Homer was not
much believed by modern scholars. It is at Mycenae itself
that the greatest finds from the civilization have been made;
and Mycenae also appears to have been its main center (as
witness the fact that Agamemnon, the Mycenaean king,
was leader of the Greeks at Troy). So the name "Myce-
naean" has been given to the period, though many other
Greek towns flourished then as well especially near the

THEBIGLANDTOUR 8j

coasts, for the civilization was maritime. It was derived in
part from the Minoan civilization of Crete, also maritime,
which had blossomed in the centuries just previous; and
many similarities are found between Mycenaean objects
and those unearthed at Cnossos which include rich jew-
elry, for instance, seals, and mural paintings of thin-waisted
youths and women. Archaeologists have been able, in fact,
to date Mycenaean objects by their correspondences with
Minoan ones, much as they earlier dated Minoan ones by
their correspondences with Egyptian. It seems that civilizing
tendencies were spreading northwestward in that second
millennium B.C. from the Nile to Crete and then to Greece
itself.

The Minoan and Mycenaean styles co-existed for some
time in the Aegean, with the former slowly waning and per-
haps being overrun, in the end, by the latter. Two written
languages of the second millennium have been found on
Crete, the older called Linear A and the younger Linear B.
The latter has also been found, in quantity, in Mycenaean
sites on the mainland, and its recent decipherment has shown
it to be Greek. This suggests that Greeks were dominant
at Cnossos early in Linear B's heyday, which began in the
fifteenth century.

Linear A, incidentally, has not yet been deciphered.
Linear B was largely solved in the 1950*8 by a young British
architect, Michael Ventris, who has since died. Though he
found that the words in it were structurally Greek, the char-
acters may have been borrowed from Linear A, which may
or may not have been a local Cretan invention. The whole
subject is still vague, and scholars are working hard on it.
One main scene of their effort is at Pylos in the western
Peloponnesus at the palace of King Nestor, the Homeric

86 GRECIAN CALENDAR

peacemaker where an American archaeologist, Carl Ble-
gen, has made valuable finds including many of the tablets
from which Linear B was deciphered.

After the Mycenaean flowering, Linear B seems to have
dropped from use. Linguistically, at least, there may have
been a Greek dark age from then until the eighth century,
when writing started up again with an alphabet adapted
from the Phoenicians this being the alphabet of classical
literature. The Mycenaean civilization is like a hidden room,
so to speak, lying behind the classical one and now being
slowly opened.

If you have all this in mind you can get more pleasure
from Mycenae. What you see there, aside from the tombs
a remarkable engineering feat, done with huge, precisely
fitted blocks of stone is the acropolis or citadel of the
old presumably Homeric city. This is a strong, brood-
ing place with a massive wall around it, and it sits on a height
near the pass that leads northward, toward Corinth, from
the so-called Plain of Argolis. It overlooks the whole plain,
too, which is not large only about seven miles by nine
but which in the Mycenaean age held two other citadels as
well, those of Tiryns and Argos. The former, which we
had visited earlier on that morning of the tour, is like Myce-
nae in character strong, forbidding, and made of huge
stone blocks (the masonry is known technically as Cy-
clopean, from an old belief that only Cyclopes could have
put it together). The three citadels are but one or two
hours' walk from each other, yet in the Mycenaean age they
often warred. From Mycenae looking down across the
plain to Nauplion, by a blue bay one gets a sweeping
view of these international relations, and their small compass.
Then the bay itself, of course, leads off to the Aegean, over
which came and went the civilizing influences.

THEBIGLANDTOUR 87

Mycenae has another set of associations those involv-
ing the cursed family of Agamemnon that affect some
tourists deeply. According to legend Agamemnon returned
from Troy only to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra
and her lover Aegisthus, his own first cousin. Then the
guilty pair themselves were killed, in revenge, by Clytem-
nestra's son Orestes, at the urging of her daughter Elec-
tra. These deeds, so movingly dramatized by playwrights
through the ages, were presumably done in Mycenae's
citadel some guides will even show you the bathroom
floor where Agamemnon may have expired and many
visitors get an eerie feeling about the place because of this.
Yet the deeds, assuming that they happened, took just a
moment in the whole great history of the place, and I have
always been more impressed with its calmness and im-
pregnability. The last time I saw it, on that moonlit Sep-
tember night, it was quietness itself, sitting so pale and solid
on its hilltop.

When the guide had shown us Mycenae, we boarded the
bus, to return for lunch at Nauplion. We all held reserved
seats, recorded on our tickets, and how we found that the
same ones had been assigned, in many cases, to both one-
and four-day tourists. We got over this mix-up amicably,
however, and in the end I found myself sitting next to a
red-haired Canadian girl, a secretary, who was in Greece
for only a few days, as part of a European tour. She was
confused as to her whereabouts, and as to the route the bus
was following someone had just told her, evidently, that
the trip was a good way to spend a day yet she was also
friendly and intelligent, and I think she was having a good
time. We chatted on till Nauplion. There the boys and I,
old hands by now, managed to sneak in a swim before lunch.

88 GRECIAN CALENDAR

Then we ate, afterwards getting into the bus again and
heading for the sanctuary of Epidaurus, perhaps an hour
to the east.

We three had already been there, a few days earlier, to
the performance in the theater; but that had been in the
evening, and we had seen little else. Epidaurus was actually
the most important shrine, in ancient Greece, of Asclepius,
the God of healing. From all directions Greeks went there
for cures, much as people go to Lourdes today, and the
sanctuary was a big place, with temples, related structures,
and many votive offerings. The theater was an outstanding
feature of the complex, and now the guide took us there to
demonstrate its acoustics. She got us to go part way up in
the tiers of semicircular seats, while she herself stood in the
exact center of the chorus the round space down below
us and dropped a coin, whose jingle we heard clearly.
Then she spoke in a low voice, and we heard that. Then
she began walking toward us, while speaking, and her voice
faded out, as if she were going away. Acoustically the
whole theater seemed to concentrate, perfectly, on that
center point.

Later she took us to the museum, which contains inscrip-
tions about cures as well as votive offerings stone replicas
of diseased or injured members of the body left in the
shrine by thankful patients. (The same thing is done in
Greece today, though with silver replicas more often than
stone, and I was to see much of it in August at a shrine on
the isle of Tinos to see silver plaques with reliefs of arms,
legs, chests, or other members stamped in them, which had
been left as thanks in the church there. And many other
Greek churches contain such offerings.)

The methods of therapy used at Epidaurus are not well
understood now, but they seem to have gone beyond pure

THEBIGLANDTOUR 89

faith healing. There was a large building in the sanctuary,
near the Asclepius temple itself, and it is believed that visit-
ing patients were told to sleep there on their first night and
then report their dreams, which were used in diagnosis. It
is also thought that the temple priests developed into rudi-
mentary doctors as time passed working up herbalism,
and such material cures, in step with the priests at other
Asclepius shrines notably that on Kos, the home of Hip-
pocrates.

There are many mysteries about it all. At Epidaurus there
was an elegant tholos y or round building, of polished marble,
designed in the Corinthian order by the architect who did
the theater. Remains of this building can be seen in the
museum now, and its foundation is intact outside, in the
sanctuary. This foundation has concentric circular walls in
it about man high, as I remember them with narrow
doorways placed in each wall, these out of line in such a
way that the whole cellar is a maze. Another guide once
told me on another occasion that the cellar may have
been used to house the sacred serpents of Asclepius, or
that it may have been for putting patients in, as a form of
shock-treatment. I don't know wliether the statement tells
more about guides or about ancient therapy itself, but at
least it shows there is room for speculation.

We left Epidaurus at five and drove north, past Nauplion
and Mycenae again, to Corinth, a trip of more than an
hour. We were all tired and sticky when we got there, and
besides the one-day tourists had already been over the
place, on the way down, so the guide didn't spend much
time on it. Ancient Corinth was a commercial center, pre-
eminently, exploiting the trade across its isthmus. It also
had a temple of Venus on the heights above it, and I have

90 GRECIAN CALENDAR

heard another guide make much of the prostitutes who held
forth there. This one dwelt on less sensational things.
"Corinth had the most emancipated society in Greece," she
said. "It was a center for merchants and philosophers. Its
people didn't like to fight. They were pacifists. They much
preferred to pray to Venus."

That old Corinth was wiped out by the Romans in 146
B.C.; then later, in 44 B.C., a new city was built there by
order of Julius Caesar. The new one seems to have followed
the old one's spirit in stressing commerce, cosmopolitanism,
and licence; and partly for this reason Saint Paul paid much
attention to it when spreading Christianity to Europe. The
link with Saint Paul undoubtedly is or was a main
drawing-card of Corinth for Westerners. Much of the Ro-
man forum area has been excavated by the American School
of Classical Studies our archaeological outfit in Greece
and the School may work on other parts of the ruins, at
this level, in the future. In 1960, though, the School was dig-
ging in a shallower, Byzantine layer to the forum's side. In
the past these Byzantine layers were often thrown away by
archaeologists who were keen to get down to classical pay-
dirt, but the modern theory, shared by the American School's
director, Henry Robinson, holds that all layers should be
studied carefully before they are discarded.

This latter information did not come from the guide that
day. She merely took us quickly through the forum in the
sunset hour, showing us a few outstanding points of inter-
est, including a Doric temple of Apollo that the Romans
had failed to smash. Then she led us back to the modern
world, where a festive evening had begun. It was the Feast
Day of Saints Peter and Paul or of the Twelve Apostles, I
can't remember which. Crowds were thickening in the
streets and cafes outside the ruins' enclosure. Whole pigs

THE BIG LAND TOUR 91

were being roasted on spits, here and there, over charcoal.
I slipped into a cafe myself, had two quick ouzos to renew
my strength, then found the bus and boarded it. Soon we
were moving through the late June daylight, then through
the dusk, and then the dark when we got to Athens the
night was under way there.

Perhaps I should mention here my second trip around
that circuit, though I didn't make it till late September.
Dicky and John Belmont had left by then, but I had been
joined briefly by a lady cousin, and we took a five- or six-
day tour by private car a new experience for me in
Greece. Motoring is a booming activity there now, thanks
to the tourist fever. A few years ago the Greek road system
was incredibly primitive by American or West European
standards, but now it is being modernized in all directions.
One can also bring one's car more easily to Greece now, for
in the summer of 1960 a ferry service was opened from
Brindisi.

An early touch of fall came just before we made this
trip, with showers bringing clouds and coolness. We set out
for Delphi at lunchtime one day, and in the mountains en
route we found that hundreds or thousands of beehives had
been moved in, to take advantage of some autumn flower-
ing perhaps of heather. We passed the hives beside the
road from time to time rectangular ones, laid out in rigid
order, like rows of houses.

Delphi was beautiful, as always. We stayed there over-
night, then crossed the Gulf of Corinth by ferry the next
afternoon. The second night we spent at Patras, an unin-
spiring (to me) provincial town, then continued around the
Peloponnesus's northwest corner and reached Olympia in
the afternoon.

92 GRECIAN CALENDAR

Along the road we passed a gypsy band. There are many
gypsies in Greece, and one often comes on their camps or
sees them walking in the villages. The camps have tall, po-
lygonal almost conical tents that are nearly white, plus
as a rule a lot of bright-colored bedding and rugs
spread out to air. There are also carts, and donkeys, horses,
and other animals around. This moving train we met had
lots of animals too. People were riding on horse-drawn carts
or on donkeys. They were leading dogs and goats, and carry-
ing chickens and turkeys, and they had the carts piled high
with their ragged, colorful gear. They were strung out for
half a mile or more men, women, and children, most of
them dark, the women in long, outlandish dresses.

At Olympia we stopped only briefly, then we pushed east-
ward in the later afternoon and spent the night at Vitina,
a village in the Arcadian mountains. There is an outfit in
Greece called the Royal National Foundation, which does
peasant uplift among other things, and this has lined up
rooms, for tourists, in private homes in a score of Greek
villages. Vitina is one of them, and we discovered a Founda-
tion house there after a certain amount of inquiry. It had
a Foundation label pasted on its door, though otherwise it
seemed much like the village homes all over Greece where
one may get rooms without institutional help. The family
was pleasant, anyway a sturdy, up-and-coming, rather
pushy lot, whose children were sternly doing homework.
My cousin and I went to a taverna for dinner, then came
back and had a good night's sleep in rooms from which
various children had been dislodged. The next morning we
had breakfast there of tea, bread, and honey; and the whole
stay cost less than a dollar apiece.

We set out early in the morning, and about nine o'clock
we reached Tripolis, the main town of Arcadia, where we

THEBIGLANDTOUR 93

had coffee. Then we left the main tourist route we
doubled back to visit a famous old temple at Bassae, in the
mountains to our southwest. The road to Bassae was a dirt
one, very bumpy (though it is now being surfaced), and
we crawled along it for a couple of hours. The scene was
lonely, and once we passed a stark, forbidding medieval
fortress on a hill. The people we met were solitary or only
in pairs, oif by themselves on the hillsides gathering
wood with a donkey, perhaps, or burning charcoal, or
herding sheep with a dog the sheep-dogs barked and
chased our car.

The temple of Bassae was alone in the wild hills. It was
of gray limestone, like the hills themselves, and it harmo-
nized with them beautifully. It was in good repair compara-
tively, with nearly all its columns standing, and it had a
special nobility in the stark and windswept scene. A few
pink autumn crocuses were growing near it, and sheep bells
were tinkling. The place had a caretaker, still in residence
at the end of the season in a little house nearby, and
we went and talked with him and bought some postcards.
He seemed delighted to see visitors.

That afternoon still detouring from the main route
we made our way down to Sparta, crossing the Taygetus
mountains toward the end of the trip they were green,
steep, spacious, and cut by mighty gorges a fit accom-
paniment to the old Spartan character. In Sparta itself we
didn't get much feel of the ancient people though we
saw the fertile plain on which their rigid society existed -
but on a little peak nearby, called Mistra, we visited some
interesting Byzantine remains. Under medieval conditions
Mistra was an almost impregnable height, and a fragment
of the Byzantine Empire survived there through the twi-
light years even after the fall of Constantinople. The

94 GRECIANCALENDAR

height was densely populated, and a good deal is left of the
old streets and buildings, especially the churches. There
are three churches with good frescoes in them, some of
which show an Italian Renaissance influence that was com-
ing into Greece then and undermining, apparently, the last
vestiges of Byzantine self-confidence. The frescoes in one
church depict such unheard-of things for Byzantine re-
ligious art as secular scenes, bright-colored coffins, and
even donkeys. A guide at Mistra told me, too, that the
Mistra court had been a great center, in its closing period,
of humanist philosophy. So as one stands there one can
feel the moment when Byzantine civilization was fading
out and the modern West beginning.

From Sparta we drove northeast partly on a new road
then being built to the region of Mycenae and Epidaurus.
In June I had seen the antiquities in those places, but I was
glad to see them again and glad, of course, to show them off.
So we had a good look at them, then spent a quiet night at
Mycenae, and drove the next morning back to Athens.

IV

MYKONOS

Mykonos is one brown island in the blue Aegean black-
ish-brown, in many places, from stone outcrops. In sum-
mer its vegetation is arid. Its roads are of dun sand. Its hills
are craggy, and stonewalls are everywhere. Yet despite this
mineral quality its landscape is friendly and well peopled.
Little white houses, often with fig trees near them, are
dotted over it. On the roads you meet islanders again and
again, walking or riding donkeys (the women ride side-
saddle and wear sunbonnets) . The island is not big you
can cross it on foot in three hours. It has an interior village,
Ano Mera, and a seaport town and capital named Mykonos
itself, which is a composition of white houses and narrow,
twisting alleys. In this town too you meet local people, and
also in summer throngs of foreigners, since Mykonos
is the favorite Greek island of vacationers. It is favored espe-
cially by the French and Scandinavians, perhaps aside
from the Greeks themselves but each week hundreds of
Americans, British, and other Europeans swirl on and off
it, too.

In the summer of 1960 I spent a month on Mykonos with
Dicky and John Belmont living in rooms belonging to

96 GRECIANCALENDAR

Apostolos Kousathanas, a seaman who runs the caique, or
small-boat, service to the nearby classical shrine of Delos.
We had two rooms in an upstairs flat it was really the
dower-house of the Kousathanas daughter, Maria, but she
was still unwed, and it was being used for lodgers. The flat
had one other room, and during the month we were there,
from early July to early August, this was occupied by a
series of Americans, Belgians, Swedes, and Athenians, usu-
ally in couples but sometimes in other combinations. In
decor the place was simple indigenous but graceful,
and it was cool and very clean. For our two rooms and the
use of a common bath, plus all our laundry and my break-
fasts the boys went out for theirs we paid five dol-
lars a day. John Belmont is a student of archaeology, and
he often spent his mornings roaming through the land-
scape. Otherwise we all stayed in, reading or writing, till
one o'clock, when we moved off to the waterfront.

We lived in the center of town, and the water was a few
minutes away, along flagstoned alleys between shops and
whitewashed walls. The trip would take us northward, and
as we drew near the water itself we would begin to feel the
meltemly the cool north wind of summertime. It didn't
pierce deep into the alleys themselves, but on the water-
front, which faces north, it bore with all its strength. On
very windy days we would have to struggle through the
last few yards of whichever alley we were traveling. Then
we would burst out; the water ahead would be covered
with whitecaps; and we could be sure that we would lunch
indoors that day. In calmer weather we could lunch on the
flagstones of the esplanade, before one of three tavernas
that did business there; these would have their chairs and
tables out already, under awnings. We would take a table,
then go to the kitchen and order our food from the stove,

MYKONOS 97

in the Greek taverna style. Usually I had moussaka with
bread, wine, and a salad of tomatoes. The boys would have
the same, or something near it, and the meal would cost a
dollar and a half for all.

We would sit there talking, eating, and looking around.
The tourists on the move then might be few. Of those in
residence, some would be at the beaches still, and some
would be coming back from Delos the caiques, which
left for that island at nine in the morning and began the re-
turn at one, took half an hour, an hour, or even longer, de-
pending on the wind. As for new tourists, they would sel-
dom have arrived yet the little liners from the Piraeus
did not come till late in the day, as a rule, and the cruise
boats, which flooded Mykonos with visitors on Fridays,
did not put in till early afternoon. There would be enough
people to take up the taverna tables, and some of the cafe
tables around about; but the rest of the esplanade some
twenty yards wide from shops to water would be an
open glare. This band curved gracefully in a semicircle, one
end running out, as a jetty, into the sea, and the other join-
ing the bulk of land eventually (the town itself was on a
promontory) . The curving row of shops and restaurants
the buildings sparkling white were on the esplanade's
south side, the water on its north. The water was shallow
near the restaurants the Mykonos harbor is not deep
and there was a foreshore there, unpaved, where boats were
beached. Others would be anchored farther out, or tied up
to the jetty.

We wouldn't linger over lunch, but would rise and go
to our afternoon pursuits usually walking to some fairly
distant beach, swimming and napping there, and walking
back again. Mykonos port, though facing north, is on the
island's west side; and a long ridge, running north to south,

98 GRECIAN CALENDAR

stands between it and the interior.* If we came back over
this late enough, the sea would gleam before us in the low
sun, and the white town below would look like phosphorus.
We would go home, take a shower perhaps, call on friends
or rustle our books and papers, and return one by one to
the waterfront toward dinner time. The shadows would be
creeping over the flagstones then, and they would be dra-
matic. The Greek tourists on the island vacationers from
Athens, mainly would be promenading, as is their custom.
Droves of them would be walking back and forth along the
curve, chatting with their side-mates and nodding to those
they passed. The foreign tourists, unless bent on errands,
would often be sedentary at the cafe tables.

I usually reached the waterfront, by myself, around
eight, expecting a rendezvous with the boys. If I got there
first I would sit at a table and demand an ouzo, which would
come eventually slowly, for all the cafes were crowded.
With it would be a tiny saucer of mezedes or Greek hors
d'oeuvres perhaps a couple of ripe olives, perhaps a slice
or two of cucumber or tomato, perhaps some diced octopus
with a sliver of cheese or fragment of a sausage. Sometimes,
too, there would be a piece of bread, no bigger than a
domino. One part of the midget ensemble would have a
toothpick stuck in it, and the whole would be composed
with the greatest care, like a Japanese flower arrangement.
I would sit there, sipping and nibbling, and watching the
red-and-green sunset band to my west. Then soon the boys,
and perhaps some friends, would join me, and we would
have more ouzos, then go to eat.

Early in our stay we dined at the same tavernas, by and
large, as we lunched at, but later we found one in an alley,
ten or twenty yards back from the waterfront, that was still

* More properly, the ridge is the edge of a plateau that makes up
the town's hinterland.

MYKONOS 99

more to our liking. It was run by another member of
the Kousathanas family huge on Mykonos who was
known as Piperia, or Pepper, because of a tendency to put
too much pepper in the food. He was a slight, solemn, hard-
working man, with only one teen-age son to help him run
the place. He had long since curbed the pepper tendency,
but he was not ashamed of its reputation, and he had a big
sign over his door saying "PIPERIA," by which name the
place was known. It was actually a wine-shop, rather than
a taverna. At midday it sold almost no food at all, and in
the evening it concentrated on one main dish. If there had
been a good catch of fish that day of mackerel or red
mullet the customers got that. Otherwise they got tasty
meatballs of Piperia's mixing. In addition one could have
excellent bread and salad and wine, of course and
Piperia's son would go out and buy a melon if one wished.

The wine was stored in big casks, mounted atop man-
high wooden frameworks in the back room against the
walls there and most of the tables were located under
these. The place was warmly lit; it was small; it had a musi-
cian in it now and then; and it was patronized mainly by the
fishermen and other waterfront characters of the island. A
few tourists came to it, but they were not many, and seldom
were they newcomers, for the place was hard to find, and
once found was rather puzzling its ways were not im-
mediately plain, that is, and Piperia spoke no foreign tongue.

The tourists who did come fell in with the spirit of the
place and didn't change it much. This was true of Mykonos
as a whole, indeed, sc far as I could tell. Many foreign
purists in Greece and Greeks as well complain that
Mykonos has been ruined by the tourists, yet I never felt
that. They swarmed there almost, at times, as crowds
swarm in Grand Central Station yet the island seemed to
absorb them. It had a defense in depth. The whole mad

100 GRECIAN CALENDAR

rush milled about on the waterfront with its shops, ta-
vernas, and cafes and many tourists, I imagine, never got
farther than that. Others penetrated to the inner alleys, in
driblets, and they were sopped up there somehow. Those
who stayed in town for long would be transformed. Most
Mykoniats let out rooms, and I believe there were hundreds
even thousands of foreigners staying in these at times,
but they seemed to get Mykonized somehow and not be
obtrusive. As for the rest of the island, few tourists went
beyond the two nearest beaches, the fashionable ones. Al-
most no one got into the real interior, which went its way
unchanged.

After dinner one could have coffee or a drink on the
waterfront, or one could promenade there. If the meltemi
was strong, the waves would be leaping up blackly, with
bright lights reflected on them. The esplanade would be
crowded, and if an inter-island boat a small liner was
coming or going the people would be thickest near the
jetty. Lots of Mykoniats would be there along with the
outlanders the women watching quietly, as at a movie,
and the men busying around to carry baggage or find
roomers. The harbor was so shallow that the liners couldn't
tie up there, as they do at many islands.* They anchored
outside, and the passengers came ashore in launches
launch after launch of them in the peak evenings.

The biggest landing operation, though, was that on Fri-
day afternoons, when two or three cruise boats the

* In 1961 a new deep-water jetty was finished at Mykonos, and now
most liners do tie up there they pleurizein, in the Greek phrase
i.e., they "pleurize" or bring their ribs alongside. This changes the
style of travel a good deal, and other things are changing it too. For
instance a big, fast new boat, the Delos, came into the Aegean trade
in 1961, serving as a cruise boat and a liner as well. It cuts down the
travel time to Mykonos and other islands, and it makes Wet Greece
seem smaller.

MYKONOS 101

iSy the Aigion, and perhaps the Kriti would ap-
pear outside the harbor. They would be finishing a five-day
conducted tour of the Aegean, and at Mykonos they would
let their passengers ashore several hundred of them to
spend the afternoon and evening as they chose, before re-
turning to the Piraeus in the night. They would start coming
ashore right after our lunchtime an endless chain of
launches bringing them, discharging them, and hurrying
back. Each launch would have two dozen passengers, more
or less, packed in and sitting meek and mild. There would
be old women, pretty girls in bright dresses, and men in
shirts and shorts most carrying bathing-suits, many carry-
ing cameras, and some even suitcases, with a view to stay-
ing awhile. On the jetty they would be met by little boys
with handbills advertising in Greek, French, and English
an outdoor restaurant on the town's south edge. The
English version of these read as follows:

DANCING RESTAURANT GREEN
GARDEN "FABRICA"

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.

During your stay in the wonderful and sunshine Mykonos.
You are invited just five minutes away from the site of Megali
ammos beach.

Where you may into a nice and attractive environment
and with unmagined lowest, prices to taste the famous Greek
Kitchen. Serving you meals and all kind drinks on which time
will entertain you a famous Athenian jazz band orchestra
which entertainment will last until very morning.

NOTE: The Restaurant serves at noon time meal and drinks.
at usual Restaurant prices, under garden's tree dewiness.

This charming picture would not appeal to the tourists
at that moment, for they would have just been fed on their
boats. Most of them would be heading for a beach, and
after that for shopping. The merchants would be ready for

102 GRECIAN CALENDAR

them, on the waterfront and back in the town itself. There
were many regular shops along the esplanade, and on Fri-
days there were many hawkers, too, with stalls. These
would have their wares out sandals, espadrilles, shirts,
sweaters, knitted jackets, skirts, scarves, bags, gourds,
sponges, conches, dresses, straw hats, cloth hats, tarn
o'shanters, bedspreads even dolls, ship-models, and toy
windmills. The clothes and fabrics, especially, would be
conspicuous, for Mykonos is a weaving center. They would
be hung, in their bright colors, above the stalls and on the
shopfronts, and the meltemi would make them flap and
stir. The waves would beat on the jetty meanwhile; the sun
would gleam on the white buildings; and the tourists would
surge across the waterfront and disappear.

Toward evening they would be back again, greatly thick-
ening the crowd. In their bright-colored cruising clothes
diverse, fantastic, and now enriched by Mykonos additions
they would seem, in the lamp-lit dusk, like a circus
spectacle; one would half -wait for the band to strike up and
the elephants to come padding on. Then after dinner they
would get on their launches and depart. Their coming and
going changed the island's population in quantity, and also
a little bit in quality, for the cruise tourists seemed to be
slightly richer and slightly less sophisticated than the long-
term ones less able to find their way around, that is, and
more dependent on travel agencies and organization.

Among the long-run tourists, as has been said, the French
and Scandinavians were prominent. Mykonos is well known
in France, one gathers in part, no doubt, because French
archaeologists, working out of there, have done the excava-
tions on Delos. The Scandinavians come to Greece because
it is so different from their own land they keep on com-
ing, too, far into the sunny fall. Why they should concen-

MYKONOS 103

trate on Mykonos I do not know, but my impression
without statistics to back it up is that they do so, very
much. Some German tourists come to the island, but not
many (it seems) in proportion to those elsewhere in Greece.
The richer Germans like more pretentious places, appar-
ently, and the poorer avoid even the modest outlay that
Mykonos entails. Many German students come to Greece
in the summer with knapsacks and supplies of food. They
hike, sleep out of doors, and have a healthy time of it for
next to nothing. A favorite place of theirs is Mount Athos,
a peninsula studded with Orthodox monasteries, where they
can walk about and take advantage of monastic hospitality
a five-day limit was recently put on foreigners' visits to
Mount Athos, and one hears that this was mainly a defense
against these guests.

A number of British visitors come to Mykonos, too, of
course, but not enough to put their stamp on it deeply
and the same goes for Belgians, Dutch, Swiss, Canadians,
and so on. Americans come in great numbers especially
on the cruise boats and they do Americanize the place
somewhat. I have heard the cry of "Hiya, cowboy!" on
the waterfront. One also finds much indirect American in-
fluence there. I remember especially, on the jetty, a French
male tourist in a pair of French-made blue-jeans. They had
zippers across both hip pockets, which Dicky and John
Belmont thought very strange. A few American beatniks
are to be seen on the island, wearing their rigid uniform
they and the Mykoniat fishermen are the only ones who
walk barefoot on the esplanade. There are many other
youthful visitors, too, and that is one of the nice things
about Mykonos. Students from all nations come there, lead
a healthy life, and mob around together, conversing seri-
ously.

104 GRECIAN CALENDAR

Many Greeks come to the island Athenians of large or
modest means. Some have summer houses there, on the ridge
above the town. They are different from most of the local
people more chic, more city-slicker and are looked on
pretty much as foreigners. I heard one Athenian complain
that summer, in fact, that the Mykoniats spoke to him in
English. Now and then some of the richest men in Greece
the real big-bourgeois, in the Onassis-Niarchos class
come in on yachts, which may tie up at the jetty for a day
or two. The yachts of such people, like their merchant
ships, are apt to fly the Liberian or Panamanian flag, which
is a device for evading their country's regulations, but is not,
apparently, resented by other Greeks. Two or three times
that summer I saw a handsome blue yacht at the jetty with
the Liberian flag on it this is like our own, but with one
star instead of fifty. I remarked on it to a Greek acquaint-
ance, and he nodded. "Yes," he answered matter-of-factly.
"If a boat in these waters has the Liberian flag that means
it's Greek."

Not all the fashionable people on Mykonos are outsiders,
of course. There are rich old families on the island whose
members know Athens, and perhaps western Europe, well.
These have their own relations with the outside world, and
with few exceptions they keep clear of the Northern in-
vaders.

Northerners have been drawn to the Mediterranean since
the dawn of history. In ancient times they came as barbarian
attackers. In the Middle Ages they came as "Crusaders,"
Viking seamen, or adventurers about to join the Varangian
guard of the Byzantine emperor. They couldn't stay away,
and now they come as tourists. They bring money into
Greece, and in return they get unwonted things like wine,

MYKONOS 105

sunshine, and a non-puritan environment. The Greeks are
used to them to their slowness, introversion, hard drink-
ing, and other non-Hellenic ways. Greeks can talk and
think faster than almost any Northerner, and one gets the
impression that they are rather amused by us, though they
politely conceal this from all but other Greeks. The amuse-
ment need not hurt the Northerners especially. That spring
on Mount Athos a Greek monk had told me how he and
his fellows had made fun, during the war, of some Germans
stationed on the coast there, to spy on shipping. "They
loved to drink," he said. "We used to give them lots of
raki, and they would get drunk, and we would watch them
and laugh to ourselves." I listened to the monk attentively,
yet I suspected that the Germans had enjoyed the game at
least as much as he had.

The Northern tourists, most of whom come to Greece
for brief excursions, have less chance to study the natives
than vice versa. But I know one Norwegian who has lived
on Mykonos for some time, and he has begun developing
theories. He finds his neighbors very sane, for one thing,
by Northern standards. "I don't know what mental prob-
lems these extroverted Greeks can have," he said to me
during the summer, "unless it's going out and getting lost
in space." He fell silent for a while. "They are all hysterics,"
he went on. "A Greek would have to be treated for extreme
phlegmaticness if he weren't hysterical." Then he fell silent
again. Northerners are always falling silent.

The North-South differences are as interesting, perhaps,
as those between Orient and Occident, and Mykonos is one
of the world's best spots to watch them in. The Northerners
wander blissfully on the waterfront sun-battered, with
burned and drawn faces, and bleached and stringy hair. The
Greeks smile cordially to them, but keep within the shade.

106 GRECIAN CALENDAR

The coarse brown sand on Mykonos gives the island good
beaches, here and there, on all its coasts. The ones we went
to most often were about an hour's walk away. We would
leave the port after lunch and climb the hinterland plateau.
Once there we would proceed either by a sandy road, wide
enough for an auto Mykonos has a dozen motor vehicles
now, including taxis, trucks, and motorcycles or by one
of countless narrow lanes, between stone walls, that run
about the landscape. The island is so endowed with rocks
that their disposal is a problem, and for untold ages they
have been stacked up in walls with these lanes between
them; the lanes are often paved with rocks, too sometimes
with bare expanses of the living rock, sometimes with steps
built in. They take a lot of knowing, for they wander un-
predictably, and the walls are often too high for one to
look over (they are also flimsy very thin and hard to
climb without pulling down). A lane that seems to head
north will eventually take you west, and so on. Yet the trip
is always pleasant, wherever it goes; and in a month's time
you can memorize the routes you want to use.

Besides turning, the lanes struggle up and down little hills.
The Aegean islands are continuations, by and large, of the
mountain ranges in Dry Greece, but their relief that of
Mykonos especially seems to be less sharp. Interior My-
konos looks a good deal like the Tibetan Plateau sepia-
colored, bare, bright-lit, and rolling, though often punctu-
ated by smallish crags. It has a Tibetan peacefulness, too,
and simplicity. Aside from the steady, cool north wind there
is little agitation on it, and the people go about their business
in a slow, time-tested way. When we first went to Mykonos,
in early July, they were still threshing the spring harvest.
They did this on round stone floors, placed out in the fields.
They laid the wheat out on the floors, to the depth of a foot

MYKONOS IO7

or two, then drove animals around and around on it to dash
the grain off. They used a strange melange of animals
cows, mules, and donkeys indiscriminately to do this job.

Other animals one met on the island aside from cats,
which were plentiful in the town included dogs, pigs,
sheep, and goats. The dogs would be at the farmhouses,
often ready to bark as one passed by. The pigs would not be
seen from afar as a rule; they would be near the houses, and
behind stone walls; yet I was told that nearly every Myko-
niat family had one; and the island is famous for its sausages.
The sheep and goats would be in the little fields, surrounded
by the high stone walls, and the goats, at least, would often
be hobbled in addition. Sometimes children would be
watching the animals children abounded in the country-
side, peering over the walls or playing near the small, stone
whitewashed houses.

The fields themselves were dead-looking by the time we
got there with dry dirt in them or old brown grass and
stubble.* More lively were the fig trees, the vineyards, the
melon patches, and the watered gardens, which grew fine
eggplants and tomatoes then. The figs and grapes came into
season while we were on the island; by custom, both are
supposed to be eaten on August first in Greece, and that
morning Mrs. Kousathanas brought us heaping plates of
them. The melons began in July, and they came from Delos
as well as Mykonos both islands have good sandy soil.
Both grew little round watermelons (a North American
contribution, I think, in the last analysis), along with dif-
ferent kinds of what we call the Persian melon, the same
as are found in Central Asia, clear across to northwest China

* I later stayed on Mykonos in the winter, and it was very different
stormy, rainy, gushy, and green. But the next summer it was brown
all over again.

I08 GRECIAN CALENDAR

each oasis having its own variety. In Greece these melons
are called peponia (watermelons are karpouzia), and on
Mykonos they came in all shapes from round to almost
needle-pointed. Inside they ranged from white to nearly
red, and they were sweet and deliciously refreshing. They
were never, to my knowledge, eaten with a spoon. When in
the open people merely slashed them, with a knife, into
new-moon slivers and ate these with their hands. In the
more formal restaurants the melons came in moon-slices,
too, for eating with a knife and fork, and at Piperia's the
meat was cut into small pieces and served in one big dish,
with forks supplied to everyone at the table. Salads and even
fish at Piperia's were often eaten in the same communal
way it is, in fact, a strong custom in Greece, and it makes
for conviviality there, as it does in China.

The melon patches were apt to be far from houses and
subject to raiding by birds. One patch that we used to walk
through had an old man with a shotgun hanging around it
sometimes. The place was on sandy soil just inland from
our favorite northern beach we went through the melons,
then over a rise of sand dunes, then down onto the beach
itself, which stretched in a handsome crescent for hundreds
of yards. It lay along a bay that faced exactly north out-
side this the blue sea went unbroken to the horizon; and the
meltemi, in sweeping down over that space, developed lots
of force. There was always wind and motion on the water.
On arriving we would change and swim awhile, then come
out and sleep on the beach I for an hour or so, the boys
perhaps for less. Then we would take another dip, dress, and
start for home. The beach was usually deserted, and it was
peaceful to doze there, with the soft and rhythmic wave-
beat in your ears. But if the meltemi was very strong, the
sand would blow and sting us, and we learned on windy

MYKONOS 109

days to leave that beach alone and go to another, on the
island's south side, that we knew. This had a high bluff
behind it and was always calm. It had a stretch of rocky
coast beside it, too, where we could swim with a mask and
investigate the weeds and fishes a continuation, under
water, of the Mykonos landscape, with fantastic variations:
lush greenery and sparkling fauna.

The south coast had three or four beaches, in fact, that
we used to walk to, and one of these had two reed shanties
where you could get refreshments. The first day I went
there I happened to be alone. I came to the nearer shanty,
which was the size of a one-car garage and had a peasant
girl standing by it. She beckoned to me shyly, and we agreed
that I would change my clothes in the place it was bare
except for a shelf, and a bench and table resting on the sand.
I took a dip, came out and napped in the sun, took another
dip, and finally returned to the shanty. No one was there;
but some flowers, a bunch of grapes, a bottle of ouzo, and
a pitcher of water had been laid out on the table. I made the
most of this surprise, then on leaving I found the girl and
gave her ten drachmas a little over thirty cents which
seemed to please her a lot. After that I went back often, with
or without the boys. We found that the hut belonged to a
peasant family who lived just behind it amid some hedges
and gardens; and later in our stay, on a Sunday, we got them
to make lunch for us and two friends. This was served under
a fig tree in the garden, with inadequate furniture and table-
ware, but with much spirit. We had some chicken soup; the
chicken itself; some eggs and sausages; a salad of tomatoes,
cheese, and olives; and at the end some figs and grapes
all washed down by plenty of retsina. When sated, we
moved back to the beach and beach-house, for swimming,
napping, and more festivities through the afternoon. We

110 GRECIAN CALENDAR

gave the family a hundred drachmas that day ($3.33), and
they tried hard to give us back some change.

Through all these scenes the meltemi kept on playing
through nearly all, that is, for we sometimes had a day or
two of calm. These would be dead and listless, like the
sinister spells of wind sirocco, khamsin, Fohn, and so on
that afflict some other countries. I would go through my
usual motions during them, but would feel, almost, that
life had been suspended. Then the breeze would begin
again, getting stronger and stronger. The water would come
to life, and air would cool, and the island would be a para-
dise once more.

Mykonos is famous for its weaving, but its masonry, too,
is a fine popular art. The raw materials are everywhere and
the people use them naturally. They make good scarecrows
out of rocks building up statues and then clothing them
and they put their stonewalls down and up with great
abandon. The walls are often thin and lacy, so that you can
see the sky through them, and feel the breeze; and in line
with this they are treated almost as plastic matter, rather
than fixed institutions. The gateway to a field may be closed
not by bars or a gate, but simply by more stone wall if
a man is putting animals in such a field, he merely tears this
gap open, then fills it up again.

Walls are dismantled for other reasons, too. One evening
the boys and I went with Greek friends and others to a
paneghyri, or saint's-day festival, at a little church in the
open country. We found dozens of people there singing,
dancing, and feasting in bright lamplight and those not in
motion were sitting on stools made from rocks. The food
and drink were on tables made from rocks as well, and we
found that all this material had come from a big wall near-by

M YKONOS III

more of it came soon, indeed, to make some stools for us.

Subtlety gets into the simplest Mykoniat stonework. The
lanes on the island often cross bare stretches of the living
rock. This seems natural, and you walk along them thinking
you are on pure Mother Earth. But soon you notice that
steps have been cut in here and there. Then you see that
other rocks have been added, to make more steps or fill in
holes though sometimes you can't be sure they didn't
grow there. Then in time without being able to say just
when you find yourself on full-rigged steps or flagstones.
It is as if masonry were meant just to touch things up, and
not to be a formal business as in other countries.

Often the Mykoniat stonewalls are elaborated, in that
spirit, by the insertion of stiles. A stile can be made by
putting a long stone in a wall so that its ends stick out on
either side, making steps, and this is often done or if the
wall is high, two or three stones may be inserted, in echelon,
making flights of steps. The stile is often mortared, for
security the wall as a whole being made dry. It can also
be whitewashed for emphasis, and for spotting from afar.
Whitewashing is, in fact, a main part of the mason's bag
of tricks on Mykonos. Stone well-heads by the lanes and
the troughs beside them, for watering animals are often
whitewashed. Flagstones are whitewashed, too, but in a
special way usually the cracks alone, with an inch or two
on either side of them, are whitened the white is in a
network, that is, with the central portions of the stones left
bare, like holes. But the edges of an alley the outside foot,
or half a foot, adjoining the bottoms of the house walls
are often whitewashed solid. In this way whitewash comes
to indicate domesticity, and around some houses it is delib-
erately used for that. These are ones built not on man-made
foundations but on the big rock ledges that are common in

112 GRECIAN CALENDAR

the landscape, and the whitewash signifies much as does
a lawn or flower-garden that those particular regions are
civilized. Sometimes the areas even have networks white-
washed on them, as if pretending there are flagstones there.

Virtually all the houses in Mykonos town are white-
washed. This gives brilliant reflected light in the sunny day-
time it is like a snow-scene as you walk around.* The
bright-lit alleys are narrow so narrow that you are in
trouble if you meet a mule or donkey there with panniers.
They also twist bewilderingly; and there were parts of the
town that I never, in my whole month's stay, could figure
out. All this crookedness baffles the wind, which may be a
reason for its prevalence the inner streets are calm on the
wildest day. I have also heard that the baffling of pirates, who
used to he common in the Aegean, was an aim of the layout.
If so, the purpose must have been achieved a stranger
rushing into town would soon find himself going in circles
or running forever into dead ends, these cunningly over-
looked from the rooftops. At times the streets are almost like
practical jokes certain through-streets are made to seem
like dead ends, as you look down them; and one alley gets so
narrow, as it goes along, that you must turn sideways to
pass through it.

Many Mykonos houses have separate flats, with outer
stairways, for their upper story. I have heard that this results
from the Greek marriage system that originally the
houses had only one story, but that the owners later built
the upper flats for their daughters' dowries. This was ex-
actly the function, anyway, of the flat we lived in it had
come to Apostolos Kousathanas with his wife; and in time,

* James Burke, the Life photographer, reports that his light-meter
reading on the Mykonos waterfront is the highest he has known higher
even than those in the Arabian desert.

M YKONOS 113

presumably, it would leave him with his daughter. I don't
know when it was built, but it was a delightful place. A
flight of stone steps led up from the street to a little entry
terrace in front of it. The steps' vertical surfaces were
whitewashed, and its horizontal ones the treads were
of bare pale marble. The stairway was irregular in design,
and seemed like much of the island's masonry to war-
rant the name of sculpture. The flat had another terrace at
its back, too, where a bathroom had recently been installed.
There were some marble slabs in the threshhold leading to
this terrace, and one of them was an old carved relief
Byzantine, I suppose of flowers, which the builders must
have found somewhere. The rooms and hall inside were
plastered, high-ceilinged, and cool. I lived in what was
originally the kitchen, on the north end, and some of the
basic fittings were still there. Under the window was a sink
that had been hewn from a single piece of marble. Its sur-
faces were roughly plane on the top and inside, but the
underneath had been left more rugged hardly dressed at
all. The sink was a rich off-white in color, and pleasant to
the touch; and to have it there w^s like having a statue in
the room. The stove was a dainty little creation of brown
tiles, set waist high in a wall, atop another big thick slab
of marble. The room's floor was of tiles, too black-and-
white checkered, cool and smooth. The plaster walls were
whitewashed, with a blue tone, and the wooden trim was
cream colored. The boys' room normally the bedroom
anyway was more elegant still. The flat was not at all
grand just part of a fisherman's dowry but it was done
with an exquisite taste that I related to the Mykoniat genius
for stonework.

Much could be written about the more formal archi-
tecture of Mykonos. There are over three hundred and

114 GRECIAN CALENDAR

fifty small churches on the island, though the population is
only four thousand. Many of these are votive off erings
thanks for being saved from a shipwreck or other danger.
Only a few are used for services. The bulk of them are
associated with particular families, and many have tombs in
them; the bones of dead Mykoniats are often disinterred
after three years and entombed, permanently, in the family
church walls. A few of the churches have elaborate icons
and carvings, and even original over-all designs, but most are
simple little whitewashed affairs, with vaulted red roofs,
that dot the landscape along with the simple houses. (One
of them, the so-called Church of the Cat, is no bigger than
a dog kennel it was built by a sailor, I have heard, who
made a vow of a church when shipwrecked near Gibraltar,
but who used up nearly all his money while getting back
from there.)

Flat stones, built up together almost like card-houses, and
then whitewashed, are used to embellish some of the
Mykonos chimney pots, and they are also used, with great
inventiveness, to adorn the tops of big stone dovecotes that
abound on the island. These structures, the story goes, were
made in older times for carrier pigeons, which the Mykoniat
sea-captains would take on their ships for sending messages
home. They are as big, sometimes, as the island's smaller
houses, and in form they resemble the square type of Gothic
tower the one with four pinnacles arising from its cor-
ners. On some dovecotes these pinnacles, and the whole
upper structures, are done with flat stones put together in
lace-like wedding-cake fantasy, and they add a lot to the
island's masonic charm.

These frills aside, the virtue of the Mykoniat architecture
lies in its simple, solid, cubistic, Pueblo-Indian, white-sur-
faced masses. The architecture on Mykonos and some of the

MYKONOS 115

other Cyclades was much studied by Le Corbusier between
the two wars, and through him it has had much influence on
modern design. Besides being closely related to the Mykonos
landscape, therefore, it is related to the modern Western
style, which may help explain why visitors are so much at
home with it. Good modern buildings, in turn, should come
naturally to Mykonos in its present vogue. Some visitors
have, in fact, recently built houses, on the heights above the
town, that try to combine a Mykoniat appearance with
modern luxury. These are not, so far, especially distin-
guished. The most interesting work in that line (I think)
is a new tourist hotel that was opened that summer in the
town's south fringes, overlooking the sea. It consists of
several rectangular two-story blocks made of Mykonos
stone, unwhitewashed, but with broad white-painted bands
smart and gleaming around the buildings' tops. These
bands suggest the glisten of the town; the natural stone
suggests the island; and in scale and shape the blocks go
well with the cubistic architecture around them. I don't
know what the inside of that hotel is like it opened just
as I left but its outside seems a case of good modern
design, and it certainly fits its background. It is a happy
offshoot of the tourist boom.

The origins of this Mykoniat architecture are dim, but
they must go far back. The island was probably inhabited
four thousand years ago John Belmont, in his searches,
found remains of Bronze- or Stone-Age settlements on it.
There are few references to Mykonos in classical times, and
presumably it was not important then. But Delos, only a
couple of miles away, was very important, and thickly
settled; and in the remains there, which we visited several
times, one can see many foreshadowings of Mykonos. This

Il6 GRECIAN CALENDAR

is true especially of a Roman-sponsored city that flourished
on Delos around the second century B.C. Much of it has
been uncovered by the French archaeologists, and one can
see that its inhabitants built good stone houses on the Myko-
nos scale. The city's streets were the size of the present
Mykonos alleys, too, and the shops were like the smaller
Mykonos shops, with living quarters attached. Then many
Delian buildings had cisterns under them, as buildings do
now on Mykonos (for water is scarce on both islands), and
the round stone cistern-heads with grooves worn in
them by ropes look about the same in both places. There
was a rope-grooved cistern-head on our back upper terrace,
through which Mrs. Kousathanas and Maria used to haul up
water for the bathroom, and I think it would have seemed
quite familiar to a Roman Delian.

That Roman city was prodigious. It had over a hundred
thousand inhabitants, and it covered much of the island,
which is only three miles long. It flourished for a century
or two, being promoted by the Romans as a rival to Rhodes,
which they did not favor. They made it a free port, and it
became an entrepot in the East Mediterranean trade
goods being transshipped there between Asia and Greece
and Rome. Huge amounts of grain and slaves, especially,
were dealt in; and a rich international populace lived there
a wealth of jewelry and other luxury goods has been
turned up in the excavations. Temples of Syrian and Egyp-
tian gods were built, and the tiny spot of land became a
center of cultural interchange (the temple of the Egyptian
god Serapis was built beside a little ravine called the Inopus
River, which was supposed, in mythology, to be a contin-
uation of the Nile the lizards on Delos were supposed to
be Nile crocodiles, which had shrunk in their long, con-
stricted trip from home).

MYKONOS 117

This Roman-period boom was not Delos's first time as a
world center. As the supposed birthplace of Apollo, it was
earlier the religious, cultural, and political hub of the Aegean
civilization, and it was important in the shift of that civili-
zation's leadership to Athens in the fifth century B.C. From
prehistoric times it was one of the greatest shrines in the
Greek world. It had such prestige that delegations from
rival islands could get together on it and discuss their prob-
lems in an atmosphere of religious truce the nearest
equivalent, then, to our atmosphere of international law.
From this background the Delian League, an early attempt
at a United Nations, developed.* At first, in the seventh and
sixth centuries, the Delian association was an island affair,
led much of the time by Naxos, a large member of the
Cyclades lying to the southeast. Then in the fifth century
the Athenians came to dominate it, Pericles eventually
removing the Delian League's rich treasury to Athens itself,
and investing it in his building program on the Acropolis.
After that Delos became less important until the Roman
boom though it still had many gifts and ceremonies lav-
ished on it.

The Roman flowering ended, essentially, in 86 B.C., when
the island was sacked by the Asiatic invader Mithradates.
The place has been in decline ever since, and now there are
only a few small houses on it, plus the ruins, a museum, and
a tourist pavilion. The ruins are said to be the most extensive
in Greece. Those of the earlier flowering the Apollo
sanctuary are on a big level space near the sea. There are
acres of remains there, including a few fine pieces of archaic
sculpture a row of guardian lions, especially, and the

* Guides and others liken both the Delian League and the Amphicty-
onic League at Delphi to early UNs and in both cases they seem
justified.

Il8 GRECIAN CALENDAR

torso of a vast Apollo statue erected by the Naxians this
last is of rough-surfaced marble, warm and creamy in the
sunlight, and it stands up before the blue sea.

The Roman city the excavated part lies near the
sanctuary on a hillside; and this in turn leads up to a little
peak, 368 feet high, which dominates the island and which
in very ancient times had shrines of Zeus and Athena on it.
From it one gets a splendid view in all directions. Round
about lie various of the honey-colored Cyclades Syra,
Tinos, Mykonos, Naxos, Paros, and a very near one called
Reneia or Big Delos. Short of these, on a calm day, one can
look right down into the sea and distinguish the different
kinds of bottom there sand, rocks, or seaweed in var-
ious colors of clear blue. On windy days the scene is more
exciting. There is a strait between Delos and Reneia, and
the driven water comes through this like rapids roaring
and dashing on the rocks. Then on the shore is the rippling
brown grass, mixed with poppies, thistles, and other weeds;
and inside this are the pale gray ruins the forest of old
columns of the sanctuary.

I usually went to Delos on my Sunday mornings. The
caiques went there sometimes in the afternoons, by special
arrangement, but they preferred the mornings because the
meltemi would be lighter then. Yet even coming back at
midday against the wind could be hard at times. Then
the boats would toss about, and follow a crooked course
in the lee of shores; and the passengers who stayed on deck
would be drenched with spray. Usually there were two
caiques in the fleet, though there could be more Apos-
tolos Kousathanas, our landlord, seemed to be the over-all
admiral and business manager of the operation, rather than
the skipper of any particular boat.

MYKONOS 119

The boat I usually traveled on, the Margarita, had a big
friendly captain, and his pretty daughter was his engineer.
One could look down the hatch of the little engine-room
and see her bending over the pistons. She had long glisten-
ing black tresses and a curvesome body clad in a rough blue
shirt and denim slacks. Her feet were bare and her toenails
painted, and an occasional black oil spot on her feet would
go with these delightfully. In idle moments she might come
on deck and play maternally with some passenger's child.
But when the going got rough she would be down below
again, her tender hand on the throttle.

The Mykoniats were friendly, even by Greek standards,
and they always had a good word when you met them. In
the morning in Greece one may say kaVvmera "good
day" and later on kaVespera "good evening." In be-
tween these, or at any time and whether on meeting or
parting one may say chairete "be happy" or even
chair e, which is "be happy" in the familiar singular. In a
more boisterous mood one may say yiasu! "good health"
or yiahara! "health and happiness." And then one may
say adio for good-by. Mykoniat women, I found, leaned
toward chairete , and I usually said that to them myself. Men
riding on donkeys were apt to say yiasu!, and I often said it
to them in anticipation, but then they might say something
else.

Different islands seem to have different usages. On Samos,
where I walked a good deal earlier in the summer, nearly
everyone of whatever class seemed to say yiasu!,
heartily, and on Rhodes, where I walked later on, they
seemed to prefer kafimera. The great Mykoniat peculiarity
was to say adio on meeting as well as on parting I suppose

120 GRECIAN CALENDAR

they got this from the analogy of chairete. Whatever they
said, anyway, they said it with bonhomie, and it made the
pleasant sandy roads still pleasanter.

Several Mykoniats spoke English, and of this number
some were retired first-generation Greek-Americans, who
had been in the States long enough to have green passports
and social-security pensions our social-security checks
can make a man a prince on a Greek island. The spot in the
United States where most of these Mykoniats had lived was
Joliet, Illinois I suppose one of them had gone there early
in the game and had been followed by a train of friends and
relatives. I remember Joliet, from boyhood newspapers, as
the site of the Illinois state prison, where the Chicago gang-
sters would be put, yet to Mykonos it was the very heart of
the New World. New York was well known, too, several
Mykoniats having been there as merchant seamen. These
people with experience of America like to talk about it,
and did so enthusiastically.

When you got to know the Mykoniats, they would offer
you a glass of wine, in Piperia's, or a piece of melon as you
were walking. They were hospitable. At the evening
paneghyri that I have mentioned, they gave us wine and
fruit and also sprigs of basil to smell the Greeks love
aromatic herbs, and they pass them around at parties like
refreshments. That was on the eve of Saint Panteleimon's
day. We walked to the festival by dark with our Greek
friends, taking perhaps an hour on a road and then a winding
lane going by feel and starlight. The people danced
circular Greek dances that night swaying, skipping, and
leaping with steps and music that seemed Asiatic to my
untutored senses. There was a second paneghyri of Saint
Panteleimon, too, held the next day at a big house in the
island's interior, which had once been a monastery and had

MYKONOS 121

a richly decorated old church inside it. The boys and I
stopped there on the way back from swimming. The house
was three stories high and had a terrace and battlements at
the top, like a fortress. It had a central courtyard onto which
the church opened, and this was crowded with festive peo-
ple when we got there. Two or three pairs of musicians
were playing, in turn, and two groups of islanders were
dancing expertly. Men were selling ouzo and soft drinks at
a couple of improvised bars. The church, a small one, was
all decked out, and people were jammed inside it, as in the
courtyard moving slowly through the rituals of worship
and merry-making. After half an hour we walked on back
to Mykonos town, and along the way we kept meeting
people, all dressed up, still going to the festival I suppose
it lasted far into the evening.

The musicians at these feasts seemed mostly to be ama-
teur. One lived near our lodgings, and we used to hear him
and got to know him a little. His name was Michaelis, and
he was a builder by trade reputed to be the best on the
island. Every evening after work he would come home and
start immediately without even getting the plaster off
him to play a bagpipe, while his teen-age son beat a drum
to accompany him. We would hear him across the back
yards, and in time we took to dropping in on him. He was a
fine-looking man, with wide, strong hands, a wide, strong,
craggy face, and a dome of a head above it. His bagpipe
was made from a simple goatskin, its openings all stitched up
except for the front legs, one of which held a mouthpiece
and the other a short bamboo, with finger holes, leading
to a cow's-horn amplifier. A broomstraw was kept stuck in
this horn, to make some sort of refinement in the tone, and
from time to time Michaelis also poured ouzo into the top
finger-hole. He tried to explain the purpose of this to me

122 GRECIAN CALENDAR

once, but my Greek wasn't half good enough, and anyway
he wanted to get back to playing.

I can't say what the mass of islanders thought about the
tourists. They must have been rather bewildered by us. If
they disliked us they were too polite to show it, and anyway
they all profited from our being there. I got a line on this
from two good informants. One was Vienoula Kousathanas,
who ran a weaving shop, well back in the town, with the
help of her daughters and several women of the neighbor-
hood. In her teens she had been taken to Great Britain for a
few years by a godmother, so she spoke good English, and
she was a wise and talented woman into the bargain. She
herself had benefited a lot from the influx; she did fabrics
in subtle, sophisticated colors, and incoming tourists beat a
path to her I suppose she was the best-known weaver in
all Greece. Her shop was a cheerful place, and the boys and
I used to hang around there, talking with her and her
daughters especially with the eldest, Annouso, who was a
great beauty and an artist like her mother.

Vienoula did not personally like the changes that modern
times had brought to Mykonos, and she told us that she had
not gone to the waterfront in five years. "Sometimes I go
to a house near there, where my godfather lives," she said.
"But when I do I go by a back alley, which avoids the water-
front itself. Visitors ask me what restaurants there are good,
and I can't tell them. I cook myself, and I don't eat at
restaurants." But she added that nearly everyone in the
town was making extra money by renting rooms. "It used
to be that only the best houses here were rented," she said.
"But now the poorest rooms of the farmers are."

Later Annouso told us that everyone on Mykonos had
work now. "Everyone who wants it, that is," she added.

MYKONOS 123

"We are very lucky. We are much better off than we used
to be. And better off than the people on most other islands

now."

My second informant was Costa Kampanis, the son of an
old Mykoniat family, who had long worked on the main-
land, as an official of the Bank of Greece, but who was now
retired to his boyhood home. He was a convivial man, and
at midday could usually be found in front of his pet cafe.
He was, in fact, a prominent sight on the waterfront, and a
picturesque one, with a red and handsome face crowned by
a large Mykoniat tarn o'shanter. Tourists were always guess-
ing that he was a French painter, but he was a pure Myko-
niat, descended on both sides from the family of Mado
Mavroyeni, the local heroine of the Liberation War against
the Turks her statue graced the landward end of the
waterfront's crescent, outside the Paralos Bar, which was the
plush one for foreigners.

Kampanis's house lay a few yards inland, between this
statue and the cafes. It had been built in 1739, and among
other things it had part of an old mast for a ceiling-beam
above the living-room. He told me this was a Mykoniat
custom.

"In past centuries," he said, "the people of this island
were great sailors. They sailed all through the Mediterra-
nean and the Black Sea. Sometimes a mast would break, and
if so they would usually replace it along the Russian coast,
where they went to pick up grain and where timber was
plentiful. Then they would sail back down through the
Aegean, en route to another port. They might not be able
to stop off at Mykonos itself, but the captain might still want
to send his wife a greeting. So he would burn her name on a
piece of the old mast and drop it overboard somewhere
north of the island. With luck it would wash down on the

124 GRECIAN CALENDAR

northern coast, and whoever found it was duty bound to
bring it to her. Later it would be put up in the house. The
women lived a lonely life then, you see. They were also
more important in the island's affairs than the men were,
because the latter were away so much. The children, the
houses, and the pieces of land were referred to by the wife's
name, not the husband's."

In time Kampanis told me about many other things, too,
including the island's economic ups and downs. Its best
times, he said, had been in the period of Venetian dominance
over the Cyclades (which ended in 1714). Its worst had
been in the German occupation in the Second World War.

"People were not allowed to fish then," he explained,
"because if a boat went out it might slip away to Asia. Trade
between the islands was forbidden, too, so the people could
not get things they needed, like olive oil. There was a bad
famine. Many died on Mykonos, and the town was almost
deserted. People went inland and lived on farms, if they
could."

After the war things had been much better, he continued,
but even so the Mykoniats had been poor until the tourist
boom had started, a few years back.

"For myself," Kampanis said, "I don't like the changes
since the war. Taxis have come, and motorcycles with side-
cars, and I don't like to see them. But I must admit that
everyone lives better now. In the old days if you saw a man
with meat you knew it was Christmas or Easter. But now
people have it every day. Children used to get only one
piece of bread, some olive oil, and one fresh tomato. That
would be their meal. But now they really eat, and they are
much more lively. So why complain? I like to see the
tourists come. They're good for us."

V

THE SEASON CONTINUES

In August I went on a purely native outing in Greece a
pilgrimage to the festival, or paneghyri, of the Virgin Mary
on the island of Tinos. Tinos is one of the Cyclades, in the
Aegean not far from Mykonos, and the shrine there is a
great healing center the Lourdes, it is often called, of
the Orthodox world. Each year tens of thousands of Greeks,
mainly poor ones, go there for the festival, which is on
August fifteenth. I had heard of this huge gathering, unique
in the Greek travel system, and Dicky and I John Bel-
mont had left by then decided to go, though we under-
stood we might have to sleep in the streets.

Wishing to make the trip somewhat in pilgrimage style,
we packed two knapsacks, borrowed a couple of blankets
from the Cecil Hotel in Kifissia, where we were staying
again, and set out on foot for Raphina, the little port on
Attica's east coast. Most of the boats for Tinos, as for other
Aegean islands, leave from the Piraeus, but a couple of
small, bush-league ones sail from Raphina in that direction
especially as August fifteenth draws near on a more
direct and midget course. This touches a few ports on the
midway islands of Euboea and Andros, and it is nearly

126 GRECIAN CALENDAR

straight and only seventy miles long. The traffic on it is a
miniature counterpart of that on the Aegean as a whole
just as the Aegean traffic, in turn, is a miniature of that on
the Mediterranean.

We weren't sure what connections we could make, so we
started three or four days before the festival was due. We
got up early, taking advantage of the coolness, and spent five
or six hours walking to Raphina itself traveling through
scenes that I knew from the spring and winter, but that
were different now. The vineyards, especially which had
once been arrays of bare pruned stumps, and then of gushing
tendrils were now mature, with heavy clusters of pale
grapes. We picked some along the way, and they were
juicy and refreshing. We made Raphina at one o'clock. We
had planned to rest, swim, and spend the night there, but
we found a little passenger bpat, the Rena, waiting at the
jetty to set out in our direction. (She had once been Scandi-
navian, I judged later by the language on her instruments
a Danish inter-island boat, perhaps, or a Norwegian coaster
but now she was relegated to this secondary Aegean
trade.) She planned to go as far as Batsi, a port on the south
of Andros, where we were told we could spend the night
and catch another ride, to Tinos itself, the next day. So we
got a first-class cabin, then ate a lunch of sorts and took a
nap, as the Rena headed out to sea.

Euboea, Andros, and Tinos are in a line- a partly
sunken mountain range, I suppose that runs southeast
from the Greek mainland. We traveled down their south-
west shores and thus were largely screened from the
meltemi, but this shelter stopped for a while in the gap
between Euboea and Andros. There we tossed a good deal,
amid whitecaps we felt the cool wind and saw rainbows
in the spray. That gap is on the main route between Gi-

THE SEASON CONTINUES 127

braltar and the Dardanelles; and much Turkish, and espe-
cially Russian, traffic goes through it. Now we saw a couple
of big hulks in the distance a white one gleaming to our
northeast and a dark, shadowy one to our southwest, against
the lowering sun. But soon we had crossed the gap and were
in the lee of Andros. We ran along the hilly shore. The
Rena, being small, stayed close in, so we could see a good
deal on an intimate scale. It is always fun to sail along those
coasts as it is fun to walk beside a shoreline though
the Aegean islands repeat themselves a lot. Now, as we sat
on the deck, we were faced with steep brown hillsides, and
groves of silver olive trees, above the blue water a sight
I had seen before that summer, and more than once.

We put in at one port, Gavrion, on Andros, and soon
after that came to another, Batsi, which was our terminus.
These ports, too, repeated themselves, and repeated a gen-
eral Aegean theme, being built upward from curved water-
fronts and looking with their tiers of bright little houses
much like stage sets. We found a simple hotel at Batsi
behind the little esplanade with its cafe tables and stayed
there till the following afternoon. Like Gavrion and like
Karystos, a Euboean port we had called at earlier Batsi
was a fishing village heavily frequented, now in August, by
summer people out from Athens. They were all Greeks, so
far as I saw not a foreigner in the lot and they were
mostly mothers and children, plus a few husbands on vaca-
tion (it was a Friday then, still not the week-end). This
summer population seemed much the same as one would
find, say, in a sleepy, inexpensive Maine fishing village. All
morning we watched the children in their innocence
swimming, learning how to row, admiring the fishermen,
asking about the catch, and starting on excursions. Then at
lunchtime we could imagine them hanging up their bathing

128 GRECIAN CALENDAR

suits and tracking sand into the rented rooms children of
urban Athenians putting down roots in nature for a while,
just as children of New Yorkers might. The life differed
from the American model, though, in a few respects. There
was a siesta in the early afternoon, when the crescent of
beach by the town was bare and dead in its brightness. There
was also more playing of cards and backgammon in
public, at the cafes, than one would see in Maine. The
Greeks adore these games, and when relaxing at their resorts
will sit at them for hours.

At mid-afternoon that second day we boarded another
little passenger boat, the Moschanthe, and at quarter to seven
we made Tinos. As we pulled into the harbor we met a
string of night-fishing dories going out on tow five of
them behind a launch, each with one fisherman amidships
and two big lamps in the stern. They would stay out all
night long, their lights twinkling in the darkness, and now
they bounced freely and gaily as they went. Tinos was al-
ready crowded, though the paneghyri was scheduled only
for the third day following. We couldn't find a room, but
we happened on an old fisherman, named Yiannis Koulis,
who said he had a beached caique where we could sleep, at
a total cost of one hundred drachmas, or a little over three
dollars, till the festival was over. We took him up, invested
twenty-five cents more in a clay water- jug, and installed
ourselves. Caiques are the great native craft of the Aegean.
They are broad, wooden, and buoyant; they come in all
sizes and colors; and they mostly have engines now, along
with their sails. This one was small, and it was beached at
the edge of town, beside a breakwater. We spread our
blankets on the two short bunks in its little fo'castle, and
till the festival's end we lived there we swam off the

THE SEASON CONTINUES 129

breakwater, we basked and dried our laundry on the deck,
and we went often into town for meals and observations.
The crowd that finally showed up for the paneghyri was
put at fifty thousand by some observers, and I suppose it was
half that anyway. Everyone came on boats, of course. These
converged from all directions, and I was told that normal
shipping on the Aegean was disarranged for those few days.
Early in the game I saw one little dark and rusty boat come
in, listing extravagantly with leaning passengers; it dis-
charged many of them, then backed out and hurried on
with the remainder; and I learned it had come down from
Salonika, in North Greece, en route to the Piraeus, and was
making a fast detour for some pilgrim business. Other boats
got completely off their routes, and one of them the
swift Aigion of the Typaldos Lines was seen, when the
great day dawned, to be running back and forth to the
Piraeus like a ferry. Tinos has a lot of docking space by
Aegean standards rectangular, too, and up-to-date and
ships were constantly coming and going there, and whis-
tling.

Of the passengers who got off, only a small minority were
men. "There are mostly women here," a young Greek said
to me one afternoon. "The husbands stay behind in Athens
or the Piraeus, and have a good time." If men appeared, they
were apt to be accompanying women a son with a devout
mother, for example. Some women were fulfilling vows.
Some came off their boats on hands and knees, and con-
tinued that way for hundreds of yards, up a stone or con-
crete street, till they reached the church of the Virgin itself.
I saw one woman proceeding thus with a small boy astride
her, like a jockey. I saw invalids a hunchback girl on the
arm of another woman, for instance, and a blind man on the
arm of someone else. Many had plainly come in hopes of a

130 GRECIAN CALENDAR

cure, but the vast majority were there, it seemed, for just
the vague holiness of the occasion, and the getting together.
Mass paneghyria have taken place for thousands of years in
Greece and Asia Minor, and this one at Tinos is the greatest
of them all today. It has special significance for the Aegean
it is the great Aegean fair, so to speak, much as the
festivals at Delos must have been in classical times. To me it
was also like an old-time Fourth of July in the States a
really old-time one, when we too were poor. I saw grand-
mothers washing naked babies at the waterside; and the
breakwater by our caique was crowded, in the noontimes,
like Coney Island especially as the meltemi failed then,
for a day or two, and the scene grew hot.

The bulk of the pilgrims had no roofs to sleep under, and
they gathered mainly in the compound around the church.
It was paved in pebble mosaic, on which they spread rugs
and blankets. Soon these touched each other, edge to edge,
so the place was covered entirely; and at night the sleeping
bodies fitted beside each other like puzzle pieces. By day
the same bodies sat and ate on the same patches. I saw a
woman preparing a mess of sea-urchins on her blanket, and
I saw another with a live chicken tethered there. Still others
had jugs of wine and baskets of fruit or vegetables. Many
were fasting, to some extent, till the big day itself, for which
they were keeping these provisions ready. Meanwhile hawk-
ers circulated among them, selling nougat, turkish delight,
pistachio nuts, and rolls.

The provisioning of the island for those few days, a huge
job, was done efficiently, but also exploitatively and rather
inartistically without much grace or flavor by certain
of the Tinians, a race whom many other Greeks denounce
as pilgrim-bleeders. I didn't study the logistics much, but I
kept running into them. The restaurants grew terribly

THE SEASON CONTINUES 131

crowded as time passed; then certain kinds of food ran out,
though others lasted. Just about all the restaurants seemed to
have squids for sale till near the very end, though they are
smallish creatures that must be gathered separately from
different places. Veal and lamb, on the other hand, seemed
to run out early.* Watermelons were in good supply, for
caiques loaded with them came and tied up at the quays.
Flour was well stocked, too, but the baking of it seemed to
be a strain on the next-to-last day I stopped in at a
bakery, and three or four men were kneading dough grog-
gily there, as if about to drop.

Much was sold besides food, of course, even profane
things like cloth and shoes which helped us to see how
shrines, in classical days, had so often given birth to markets.
As for sacred objects, there was a good traffic in beads,
candles, cheap icons, and the silver replicas of body mem-
bers that are used as votive offerings. Many of the candles,
also for offerings, were taller than a man. These things were
sold in stalls, for the most part, along the main street climb-
ing to the church. That stretch was lined by hawkers and
beggars, many of them invalids crippled sellers of can-
dles, for instance, and blind musicians.

The meltemi rose again, strongly, on the night before the
festival. It tore at our caique tore at everything and
chilled the air. It also livened things, and that morning there
were wild waves, whitecaps, and brightness in the harbor.
The flags on land and on the ships were flapping brilliantly
and ships kept coming in, in the early morning, to tie up
at the jetty and await the homeward flood of pilgrims. They
whistled and their flags flew, and by the end ten or a dozen
of them were lying there the Aigion, the Marilena, the

*Veal and lamb are taboo in Orthodox fasting, whereas many sea-
foods are not. This alone may account for the apparent imbalance.

132 GRECIAN CALENDAR

Elli Toyia, the Rena, the Stella, the Moschanthe, the Glares,
the Aikaterini, the Myrtidiotissa, others the dainty, some-
times rusty, queens of the Aegean.

Meanwhile the crowd surged on the esplanade and up and
down the streets. They surged till halfway through the
morning; then police began to hold them still and rope off
places. A square was roped off on the esplanade itself, and
officials began to gather there, together with a navy band
and a boy-scout one. I found a place on one of the ships
on its upper deck overlooking this square, but I saw only
the esplanade itself; I could not look far up the two streets
toward the church, though these had been roped off, too,
for a procession. I stood and watched the crowd. The Greek
Prime Minister, Constantinos Caramanlis, was scheduled to
come, and soon he did come riding through the harbor
on a launch and the whistles blew. He landed. Then the
procession itself came on a supposedly miraculous icon,
in a litter, accompanied by vested priests. Higher up the hill
I later learned from Dicky, who was there the icon
had been carried over a line of sick people, who were lying
in the street. It was a moving sight, he said, but I missed it.
I only saw the icon with its priests come down to the clear-
ing. Then there were services and chanting, and some band
music and a little speaking. Then the ceremony was over.
The Prime Minister sailed off, amid flags and whistles. The
crowd began to melt, and the ships to load and pull away.
And we were with them.

After that excursion I based at the Cecil for a further
spell, while Dicky did some traveling on his own. Kifissia,
as a hill resort, was going full blast then. In the winter I had
seen it nearly deserted, then in the spring it had begun to fill,
and now its season was at the peak. The Cecil was jammed
with Greeks from Athens, and even a few from Egypt (in

THE SEASON CONTINUES 133

former years there had been many such, but now, with the
Nasser regime, the Egyptian Greeks are poorer; many have
left, and those who remain have trouble getting their money
out). The Kifissia nights were sweet and cool, unlike the
nights of Athens; and the place was a fairyland in the eve-
nings, with its bright-lit taverns and cafes. It had rustling
aspens and babbling irrigation channels, which ran uncov-
ered next the streets. I used to walk by these, and their sound
gave a feel of Central Asia, where the towns too have aspens,
and poplars, and ditches running open I used to think,
perhaps incorrectly, that this effect was a sign of Turkish
influence on Greece. Another Kifissia treat I used to think
rather Turkish was the prevalence there of horse-drawn
carriages, waiting by the parks to take the guests on calls or
joyrides. Those carriages and their drivers were a dying
race, I fear. They had only two good summer months of
business to balance against a long, thin winter, and they were
up against taxis, buses, and all that. Yet still they were hang-
ing on, and waiting in long lines beneath the trees. I loved
the smell of the horses as I passed, and I liked to talk with
the drivers, haltingly, in my bad Greek and their bad
English.

Some of the Kifissia tavernas were excellent, and I went
especially to a new one, which had opened the winter before
and was very popular. It had a cool garden with gravel in it,
and whitewashed tree-trunks, and canaries singing high in
cages. I used to go early in the evening and order simple
dishes pilaphi, for instance, the garnished rice that is an-
other hint of Central Asia of the polao or pilaff that is
served all through that region.

Sometimes not often I would tour the cafes that
were near the Cecil; I would sample the ouzos there, and
compare their prices, their sizes, and their accompanying
hors d'oeuvres, which varied markedly from place to place.

X 34 GRECIAN CALENDAR

But usually I would have dinner in the Cecil and go to bed.
I would dine about eight-thirty, which is very early for
Greece. My only companions then, on the dining-terrace
behind the hotel, were apt to be little children and their
governesses or perhaps a couple of old ladies would be
taking a peripato, or stroll, there, on the theory, I suppose,
that meal-time hadn't begun at all. Some of the governesses
were British, teaching the Queen's tongue to little Greeks,
along with their conception of table manners. I have met
several of these British girls around in Greece; they are
pretty and adventurous, as a rule not at all like old-style
nannies and they must be paid well.

The adult Greeks at the Cecil, in the summer throng,
were well dressed, inactive, and often pretty elderly. They
played cards, drank little cups of coffee, and talked. They
dined late and enjoyed the coolness.

I went to Athens often, usually on the train, which was
clean and pleasant. I saw friends there and did errands and
a little sight-seeing. The Acropolis is not much fun to visit
in the daytime in the summer it is hot and glary then
but under a full moon it is wonderful. The tones of the
marble are perfect in the moonlight, and so are the sharp
lines of the architecture. On the four nights closest to the
moon's fullness the Acropolis is open till midnight, and
hordes of people go there then. They wander slowly by the
Parthenon and Erechtheion, thinking their thoughts. The
women in the crowd are apt to take their shoes off, I have
noticed, and wander silently. The stone of the Acropolis
itself has strange old corrugations and cuttings in it, but its
surface is smooth and shiny, and in the moon it gleams. The
visitors steal about there, avoiding one another, till twelve
o'clock approaches, when the guards sound bells and whis-
tles to get them out.

On other nights the Acropolis is used for a Son et Lumlere

THE SEASON CONTINUES 135

performance, of the kind that is common now in western
Europe especially, I understand, among the chateaux of
the Loire. Changing searchlights, in warm pastel colors, are
played on the old temples, while paying customers watch
from a nearby hill, the Pnyx, and listen to a sound track
in Greek, French, or English with musical accompani-
ment. The sound track is corny in the extreme, but the lights
have the merit of showing off the great old architecture in
unexpected ways. Of course non-paying tourists may enjoy
it, too, from different parts of the city. Thanks to search-
lights, the Acropolis points Athens up by night now, as well
as day.

In August a so-called Festival of Athens was in progress,
too. It was held in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a Roman-
period theater that stands beside the Acropolis; and it of-
fered a series of orchestral music, old Greek plays, and some
more modern plays with a Greek background, like the
Phedre of Racine. I saw the Iphigeneia in Tauris of Euripi-
des there. It was splendidly staged like the other old
Greek plays I had seen earlier at Epidaurus but this
theater, being in the Roman style, seemed less appropriate
than the one at Epidaurus. Instead of moving in a big full
circle of space, as at Epidaurus, the chorus was cramped
into a smaller semi-circle, facing a stage of hard, imposing
stone on a level with their heads. They danced and chanted
nicely, but they seemed less blended with the main action
than in the proper Greek theater. The influence of modern
Athens kept intruding on this performance, too, whereas
those at Epidaurus had been lost in nature. The stage was
backed by a very high, crumbly old buff wall, with a
rhythmic Italian pattern of windows, doors, arches, and
niches in it; this gave some protection, yet traffic noise came
through it nonetheless.

Of course the theater was right in Athens more con-

136 GRECIAN CALENDAR

venient than Epidaurus and that was a boon. It was also a
boon for me at least to have life and action put into
the old structure. That summer too, in September, I saw
some inter-Balkan games in the Athenian stadium. This is
the old stadium long and narrow of the classical city.
It was enlarged in Roman times but not changed in form

by the same Herodes Atticus who built the Odeon. Then
it was recently fixed up again, in 1896, so that the first
modern Olympic games could be held in it. It is normally a
rather fierce eyeful of white marble, but when I went to
these Balkan games it was early evening the place was
full of flags, color, athletes, and a cheering crowd. I didn't
really follow who was winning Greek, Yugoslav, Turk,
etc. but I loved the warmth and heartbeat of it.

Late in August I flew for a week-end to the island of
Rhodes, together with some Greek and American friends
who had a plane at their disposal. The course to Rhodes
slants down southeastward, across the Aegean the trip is
short, and we flew it low. I had a fine chance to look down
on islands that I had previously been studying at sea-level

on Mykonos, Delos, Tinos, Naxos, Amorgos, Patmos,
Kos, Kalymnos, and others. They seemed rather stark and
wrinkled from the air, and definitely more eroded more
peneplaned, in the technical word than do the dry-land
mountains of which they are a continuation. I can't give a
reason for this, unless they have been deprived much longer
of their forest cover or perhaps have a different history
of sea erosion. They did look bare, anyway, and they were
a sort of reddish brown a red-fox color as they lay
there in the dark blue sea.

On Rhodes our party stayed at a resort called the Mira
Mare, which was interesting and where we had a good time

THE SEASON CONTINUES 137

together, though it was not a spot I would have chosen on
my own. It was purely a beach resort, a place to rest and
get away from it all. It occupied a strip of shoreline self-
contained, and cut off from the rest of Rhodes by a high
fence, thus making it a compound where one could stay for
days, or even weeks, without venturing out. The resort had
been first established by the Italians, I think, when they con-
trolled Rhodes before the Second World War, but had re-
cently been much expanded, and this process was still going
on a chambermaid told me that the Mira Mare had had
fewer than a hundred beds the year before, but now had
two hundred and fifty.

The beds were in cabanas, for the most part, one of which
I had all to myself. It had a bathroom and a smallish terrace,
besides its spacious bedroom. It lay back from the beach,
behind a row of other cabanas, and it was connected with
these, and with cabanas to the right and left, where my
friends were staying, by open paths. The beach itself was
gravelly poor, in that respect, by Greek standards but
it was a pleasant place to nap and dip, and nap again. The
compound had a big restaurant, dance-floor, bar, shops, and
so on, along with a couple of subsidiary cafes, a swimming-
pool, and a public-address system. It was heavily patronized
by German tourists of the richer sort, but also had a sprin-
kling of other nationalities. It has been used by movie actors,
too staying there when making films on Rhodes.*

(There are several other such beach resorts in Greece,
though I paid little attention to them in my travels, as they
were cut off from the Greek life I was interested in. There

* Two American films, Surprise Package and The Guns of Navarone,
were made on Rhodes in 1959 and 1960, and their companies stayed at
the Mira Mare en bloc. These included Anthony Quinn, Gregory Peck,
Yul Brynner, and others.

138 GRECIAN CALENDAR

is another posh one, called Astiria, on the coast near Athens
a bit too near the Athens airport where one may go
to swim or may rent a cabana to live in if forehanded; the
waiting-list is long there. This and the Mira Mare are for the
fairly rich, but there are many others for the less so, these
being patronized especially by young people, secretaries and
so on, from all over northwest Europe they come and
have a cheap, restful, sunny vacation in them before return-
ing to their foggy homelands. I dropped in on one such
place, Kyllini, during the summer. It was way over on the
west side of the Peloponnesus, looking off toward Italy, and
could be reached by rail or by a long road through some
moors it was very isolated. I was shown a little bungalow
there, for two people, with a toilet and shower, that cost
only four dollars a day, per person, with full board. There
were also cheaper bungalows and tents, plus a common
open-air restaurant and cafe, plus things like bamboo
benches, here and there, under pines. The manager said that
the place's capacity is three hundred and fifty, and that it
does a good business with Greeks, other Europeans, and
some Canadians and Americans. These last, though, I think,
are likely to be people stationed in Athens, not long-range
tourists. The long-range ones, as a rule, come to sample all
of Greece's attractions, not just the sun and sea, however
lovely.)

On the Sunday morning of that week-end I left the Mira
Mare and took a long walk through the nearby countryside.
Rhodes seemed quite different from the other islands that I
knew. It had a good deal of vegetation, for one thing,
though this was dry and almost smoldering now it was
tawny in the sun. The landscape seemed more developed
as to roads, water mains, etc. than some other Greek ones

THE SEASON CONTINUES 139

I knew, and I wondered if this might reflect Italian influ-
ence; the Fascists made a show-place out of Rhodes, I have
gathered. The vegetation seemed relatively southern-looking
it had date-palms in it, which I had never seen in Attica
or the Cyclades.* I imagined, too, that the people looked
more dark and supine more Eastern than the mainland
Greeks, but this may have been a subjective feeling on my
part, for I was mindful that Rhodes had been especially open
to Middle Eastern, and even African, contacts through the
ages.

At noon I stopped and had a watermelon in a cafe run by
a Turk the first Turk I had ever spoken with in Greece.
Turks were evacuated from most of the country in the early
'twenties, after a catastrophic Greco-Turkish war, but not
from Rhodes, because the Italians held it then; and there are
still some left there, though they are dwindling. This man's
manner and language in talking with another Turk
seemed harsher, somehow, than that of the Greeks to whom
I was accustomed. But again my feeling may have been
subjective. I walked all that morning, anyway, indulging
my fancies, then went back to the Mira Mare and to hiberna-
tion on the beach. And on Monday morning we flew back
to Athens.

On September first I moved into the city; Dicky returned
from his travels then; and another son, Chris, aged twenty-
three, came to join us briefly from Iran, where he was study-
ing. I had taken a little flat in Athens for the rest of the year,
and it was a pleasant place; but it was crowded by the three
of us and also hot in that weather, so I rented a Volkswagen
and we took short excursions in the daytime. We went

* I am told that dates grow on the island of Aegina, near Athens.

140 GRECIAN CALENDAR

usually to the beaches of Attica either to the southern
ones, near Athens, which were crowded, or to the eastern
ones, looking off toward Asia, which were not.

We swam, loafed, ate at tavernas, and saw the country.
We also visited some ruins, notably those at Eleusis and
Sounion, which were within an hour's drive. Eleusis is linked
with the wheat Goddess Demeter, whose daughter Perseph-
one was kidnapped by Hades, but was later allowed to make
seasonal returns from the underworld the legend has
overtones of vegetable immortality, of life rising again and
again from the earth. Eleusis was the scene of the Eleusinian
mysteries, into which the adult men of Greece, and later of
Rome, were initiated. Alas for us today, the mysteries were
well kept; even the copious travel-writer Pausanias an
initiate refrained from writing about the sanctuary's
buildings, which are said to have been screened from public
view by a high wall. It is generally thought that initiates
were assured of immortality, in some dramatic way, by
representations of the Demeter myth the experience
seems to have had a great effect on many of them, and to
have been a factor in the morale of ancient times. One can-
not get much appreciation of this by visiting the ruins now,
but at least the site is a pleasant one, near the seaside
ancient even as classical sites go and with a nice little
museum on a height there.

During Byzantine times, Christians made a great effort to
deface the shrine and rob it of prestige. This was a common
occurrence in Greece pagan shrines were often vandal-
ized by Christians, or attempts were made to rechannel the
forces there by building a church on the site. But at Eleusis
the work went especially far. Whole massive structures were
pulled down flat, and Byzantine crosses were carved on
many individual stones.

THE SEASON CONTINUES 14!

Sounion is southeast of Athens, on the very point of Attica

the cape that looks out at the Cyclades. There are two
old sanctuaries of Athena and Poseidon there, the lat-
ter being the most visited now because of its situation. It
stands right on the headland, which is high the simple
ruins of a fine chaste Doric temple, looking out magnifi-
cently above the water. It is best seen in a fair amount of
solitude, but the time we went there late one afternoon

it w r as crowded with tourists, three or four busloads of
them. There happened, that day, to be a weird, spectacular
cherry-red sunset over the island of Aegina twenty-five
miles to Sounion's west and the tourists were lining up
with cameras, like a firing-squad, to shoot it. At least they
seemed to be enjoying the place, in every way gazing out
to sea and studying, and fondling, the old marble of the
temple. People pat old temple marble. They run their hands
along it and then slap it. It is sculpture, and it cries out to
be touched.

In that period the three of us went also for a week-end to
the island of Hydra, just off the Peloponnesian east coast.
Next to Mykonos it is the most popular with foreign tourists
of all the smaller Greek islands. Hydra invites comparison
with Mykonos, too, and I a Mykonos fan saw it
mainly in that way. Hydra has the advantage of being
handier to Athens three hours' boat travel as against, say,
seven for Mykonos and this can be important. Its seaport
also has a remarkable appeal for the eye. It is the quintes-
sence of all the better Aegean ports a high, spectacular
amphitheater of town spreading upward from a rounded
harbor like a mosaic of houses on a screen around the
viewer. Some of the houses are exceptionally big and ele-
gant, too. They were built by Hydriot ship-owners who

142 GRECIAN CALENDAR

made huge fortunes, before 1815, by running the blockade
imposed by Britain on Napoleon they would take sup-
plies from elsewhere in the Mediterranean, or the Black Sea,
and run them to Spain, or the south of France, at a big
profit. Later they sacrificed nearly all these gains on behalf
of the Greek War of Independence in which Hydriot
shipping played a crucial role but meanwhile they had
built the houses, and these remain. They are spacious and
well proportioned, with big rooms and terraces. They have
wooden ceilings, with molding-patterns in relief, and some
still have fine furniture and fittings. Others have been given
up as homes, because of modern economics one is now a
government hostel for artists but whether homes or not,
they still remain there and adorn the town, which must be
one of the handsomest on earth.

Aside from these points, I think Mykonos is a more en-
joyable place. Hydra has no decent beaches, for one thing,
and this is a real drawback, though swimming off the rocks
can be fun, of course. Nor has it a gentle countryside for
walking, like that of Mykonos. It is steep, rocky, and for-
bidding one must either walk along its shoreline, on a
rigid course, or clamber up the heights, and both these ways
can pall. More important still is the temper of the people
on Mykonos they are cordial, but on Hydra they are gruff,
though they will consent to say hello.

A Greek lady on Hydra once tried to explain their at-
titude to me. "You see, they are Albanians here," she said.
"Many Albanians came down to Greece in the past few
centuries, and they settled Hydra and some other regions,
like the rural parts of Attica, that were thinly populated
then. Albanians are famous for being aloof with foreigners.
Their attitude is just opposite to the Greek one, which is
what you find on Mykonos."

THE SEASON CONTINUES 143

"What villages in Attica are especially Albanian?" I
asked.

"Most of them. There are some exceptions, but nearly all
are that."

"But I've walked through many of them, and they're
friendly."

"Ah, yes, but they've been under lots of Athenian influ-
ence, you see, and the people have learned Greek manners.
The people on Hydra have been isolated, and they've
stayed the same."

Be all that as it may, local attitudes needn't matter much,
really, to casual visitors, and anyway it is certainly better to
see Hydra as Hydra, not in my fashion as a negative
of Mykonos. Many painters and writers live happily there.
Hadjikyriakos Ghika, the best-known painter in Greece, is
an Hydriot native and works there busily, as do others.
Chris, Dicky, and I had two delightful evenings in the cafes
there, too, consorting with all kinds of people aside from
Greek artists and intellectuals, I remember especially three
foreign writers: an Australian, a Swede, and an American
Negro. The Australian, George Johnston, has lived on
Hydra for several years now, and he and his wife have both
written prolifically there she has written a book about
Hydra itself called Peel Me a Lotus, which seems a good
tag-line for this whole foreign occupation of the islands.

VI

THE BIG SEA TOUR

I first saw Lena Politis in circumstances that suggested I
thought an old Greek slave-market. With Chris, Dicky,
and scores of other tourists I was standing in a saloon of
the S.S. Aigion (nee the Princess Alice in Glasgow around
1900). It was a Monday evening in September; we had just
embarked on an Aegean cruise that would last till Saturday
morning; and the "cruise-manager" was giving an intro-
ductory talk to the English-speaking tourists the French-
and German-speakers would come later. The manager was
a small thin man, with hollow cheeks, who might have
come from a George Price cartoon when he went ashore,
later on, he always wore a big white solar topee, an item of
dress that has otherwise almost disappeared from European
heads. He gave his talk, then said he would introduce our
guide, and Lena stepped forward. She had brown hair and
blue eyes. She bowed, and we looked at her (I thought) as
buyers might have looked at some new offering in the
Delos market around 100 B.C. She didn't say much then
she just smiled wistfully and I wasn't greatly impressed
by her. Nor did the session last long. Class was dismissed,
and we pupils hurried up to the bar for an ouzo before
dinner.

THE BIG SEA TOUR 145

The next morning, when we stepped ashore at the Cretan
port of Herakleion, Lena was wearing a blue straw hat, a
red-and-white striped cotton jersey, a blue summer skirt,
and a pair of blue espadrilles. It was a simple outfit, but
workmanlike and attractive. We passengers one or two
hundred of us left the jetty together in a fleet of buses,
these taking us a few miles into the countryside and then
dumping us, in a big open space, outside the old Minoan
Palace of Cnossos. At that stage the guides sorted us out,
standing apart like shepherds and calling to us. "English-
speaking group this way," Lena called out, "English-speak-
ing group this way." And she waved a piece of paper to
catch our eyes.

The French-speaking guide, standing in another spot,
was old and rather distinguished-looking, though I came to
find her pedantic as I eavesdropped on her, in snatches,
during the next few days. The German-speaking guide was
young, apple-cheeked, and forceful. Lena was calm. She
got us around her like ducklings, then led us to a shady
place and briefed us on the Minoan civilization on how
it had flourished in the second millennium B.C., how it had
borrowed a good deal from Egypt, how the mainland
Greeks had probably come to dominate it, and how it had
ended suddenly and mysteriously around 1400 because
of foreign invasion, she was inclined to think, though she
did not press this view on us. She was detached and un-
dogmatic, and it was clear from the outset that she knew
her stuff . Perhaps she exaggerated the evidence for Greek
dominance in Crete, but then all Greek guides seem chau-
vinistic about their past. Otherwise she gave a straight story,
and a well-organized one. She spoke quietly and with hu-
mor, and she had a secret smile.

Later she took us to the Palace of King Minos itself. It

146 GRECIAN CALENDAR

is a big rambling place, much restored by the late Sir
Arthur Evans, the rich and brilliant Englishman who exca-
vated it who discovered the Minoan civilization, really,
for the modern world. Evans caused walls to be rebuilt,
colors to be reapplied, and murals to be repainted, all in an
effort to recapture the old Palace's appearance he used
cement beams, painted yellow with a grain pattern, to rep-
resent the ancient, vanished wooden ones. Restoration is a
controversial thing in Greece even when expertly done
and I have heard archaeologists call Cnossos a Disney-
land. I didn't mind it, though I like my ruins compre-
hensible and Lena didn't seem to either.

"There has been criticism of Sir Arthur's work," she
said. "Some like it and some don't. But at least it was done
carefully. The reconstruction of the murals was a hard job,
especially. They were built up from tiny fragments, on the
basis of Sir Arthur's knowledge, by a gifted young artist
who worked with him. The artist also went by the look of
the murals when they were first excavated. The material
was crumbly, and much of it turned to dust when the air
got at it, so he studied it fast, in that brief moment, and
reproduced what he saw."

We began walking through the Palace, as restored. It
had red walls, often, and many pillars, these being red,
black, or white in color, and tapering outward as they rose.

"We don't know why they were this shape/' Lena said.
"Perhaps the form came from trees, originally, placed up-
side down so the roots wouldn't sprout. Or perhaps the
builders made them narrow at the bottom so there would
be more space there, at the human level, for people to move
around."

The murals had the same colors, predominantly red,
black, and white as the pillars, along with a good deal of

THEBIGSEATOUR 147

blue. What we saw now, on the Palace walls, were copies
pure and simple the reconstructed originals being in
the museum at Herakleion. The paintings showed Cretan
youths and women, the former being red of skin like
the traditional idea of American Indians and narrow-
waisted, perhaps because of girdles that they wore. The
women were also thin-waisted, paler than these men, and
elegantly dressed and coifed, but with their breasts entirely
bare. "The decolletage was very daring," Lena said dis-
creetly she turned out to be a master of such under-
statement.

Pictures of bulls a motif that seems to permeate Cnos-
sos recurred in the murals. One showed a scene of the
"bull-dance," which has puzzled and fascinated the experts
since it was found. In the mural a young male athlete was
somersaulting through the horns of a bull which was
charging straight at him and then bouncing off its back
into the arms of a girl assistant. Certain toreadors and
American bulldoggers, Lena said, have called this stunt al-
most impossible, yet scholars believe that it was regularly
practised at Cnossos. Many think that Spanish bull-fighting
is descended from it. Some think, too, that the legend of
Theseus slaying the Minotaur arose from it, and this later
theory has been woven into the novel The King Must Die,
where readers may find a speculative explanation of the
whole thing.

We kept on going through the Palace, with the Aigion's
French-speaking group a little behind us. The place had
many chambers, on different levels, plus big underground
storerooms. It had a grand stairway still intact without
much restoration that went around and around a light-
well and must have been an engineering triumph for its
time. The Palace was ingeniously planned, too, with a view

148 GRECIAN CALENDAR

to coolness in certain important rooms, these being built
low down in the structure far from the sunny roofs
but with good light and ventilation contrived for them.
There was also a throne-room with a reconstruction of
the first throne of Europe, Lena said and a royal bath-
room containing, apparently, a flush toilet.

Lena dwelt on these marvels a good deal partly, I
think, out of pride in the Minoans, who were so nearly
Greek, and partly, perhaps, because Greek guides are
taught, in their training, to stress engineering wonders and
big achievements when talking to Americans. No guide has
ever confessed this to me, but I have been told by other
Greeks that it is so. With French tourists according to
these informants guides are supposed to dwell on aes-
thetic or spiritual things, with Germans they are supposed
to give minutely detailed facts, and with Americans they
are supposed to bring out the bigger-and-better aspects of
antiquity. I don't think Lena was at all mechanical in apply-
ing such rules, though. She had a feeling for the old civiliza-
tion. One of our group commented on the small scale of
the Palace rooms they were small, by modern standards
of monumentality and Lena questioned why they should
have been especially grand or luxurious. She did this tact-
fully, though; she was always tactful. There was a bump-
tious old Englishman in our group who liked to air his
views on things, and Lena complimented him on his knowl-
edge and drew him out. She was like a hostess.

After doing the Palace we stopped in a nearby tourist
pavilion to have soft drinks and rest awhile, then we got
into buses again and returned to Herakleion, to the museum
there. Once inside it we faced a bad traffic situation as there
was another cruise boat, with three or four language groups,

THEBIGSEATOUR 149

on hand besides our own. Each guide had to keep her flock
apart from the others which involved a good deal of
waiting and even so the halls resounded, somewhat, with
conflicting commentaries. They were not too loud, though,
and the museum itself is one of the best in Greece in the
whole Mediterranean, for that matter with a fine collec-
tion intelligently, though simply, displayed, and showing
the extant works of the Minoan civilization.

That civilization was maritime, rich, and cosmopolitan,
and it had links with older ones to the south and east, espe-
cially that of Egypt. It also had periods when luxury
even decadence prevailed, so that jewelry, cosmetics, and
other aspects of high fashion were much developed. Case
after case in the museum was full of the results, and Lena
discoursed on them with relish, as she did on the elegant,
gossipy women's court manners shown in the murals this
appreciation of the very urbane is one more reason, I think,
why women make better guides than men in Greece.

Of course the museum was by no means a strictly fem-
inine affair. It had superb metal- work, in cups and bowls;
superb pottery; and superb painting especially. This last
much of it on the pottery was light, sketchy, impression-
istic, and full of nature. It seems true that the Minoan arts
were closely tied up with Egypt, but this painting lacked
the ponderous quality that one associates with most Egyp-
tian work except for the light, gay things that were done
under the heretic King Ikhnaton. Lightness and gaiety were
the keynote, one might say, of Minoan painting, with its
ducks and doves and porpoises and octopuses and flowers.
The Minoan culture, as preserved in that museum, was an
exquisite bloom, and it was the beginning, so far as we can
tell, of sophisticated art in Europe.

150 GRECIAN CALENDAR

We all went back to the Aigion for lunch, then in the
afternoon many of us went by bus to Phaestos, another
Minoan site near Crete's south coast. In general this was
much like Cnossos except that it hadn't been restored
and the trip down was like other late-summer trips in
Greece through tawny valleys, albeit lovely ones. The
trip was long, too, and we didn't get back to the boat till
late afternoon. We went aboard at once, the boat cast off,
and we set out for Rhodes our next day's landfall the
minute we were all accounted for.

A numbered "landing-card"' a sort of tag had been
assigned to each of us at the voyage's start. On going ashore
we were supposed to take the tags with us, and on coming
back we were supposed to hang them up on numbered
hooks on a board. The cards symbolized us they almost
'were us. Where we went they went, and by looking at the
gaps on the board the cruise-manager could tell, theoreti-
cally, just which of us were still astray. We were highly
organized we had to be, I suppose, for our survival as a
group and each of us had a sixteen-page booklet with
minute instructions on our stops and other activities even
instructions on the instructions: e.g. "Will you please read
tomorrow's program tonight, before going to bed! as we
disembark early tomorrow morning."

The boys and I shared a four-bed cabin, and we sat to-
gether in the dining-room with a young Dane, two middle-
aged Italian ladies, and a Jewish brother and sister who lived,
respectively, in England and Israel, and who had joined in
Greece for a holiday. They had been born in Germany, but
their family had left there before Hitler came to power.
Now the sister, a widow, was an Israeli social worker, and
the brother was a London accountant. He was also a keen
student of the Bible New and Old Testaments alike

THE BIG SEA TOUR

and a delightful man to talk with. The sister was interesting,
too, as was the young Dane. The latter had been an official,
for a couple of years, in Greenland, and he had much to say
about that strange outpost of Norse empire with its Eskimos
and deep ice. The Italian ladies were pleasant, but I had a
language problem with them, and they also seemed un-alert
placid and bourgeois by temperament.

The cruise had drawn a mixed lot of people. Early in the
game we fell in with a couple of delightful Englishmen
one was an estate manager and the other a teacher at London
University who had read a great deal about the Mediter-
ranean, who had lived in other parts of it, and who were
keen, in a well-informed way, about everything we saw.
There was also a young, very blonde Dutch girl, with a pig-
tail and amber eyes; a forceful, interesting White Russian
woman from New York; a Siamese diplomat's wife and her
mother; a French bride with a lovely figure who hovered,
in a bikini, near the ship's tiny swimming-pool; and a Holly-
wood-type American who wore a cigar and several cameras
and who was accompanied by a painted, rather pretty,
languid blonde, several inches taller than himself, in flow-
ered slacks she looked like a chorus girl, and she seldom
left the boat for anything but shopping. These were among
the more conspicuous passengers, and there were also many
inert, less interesting ones to make a background for them.

There were not, alas, many young people on the Aigion,
though the boys learned that there was an oversupply of
young French girls, ironically, on the Kriti, a sister-ship
that sailed along on our same schedule. Three ships were on
this schedule, in fact the Aigion and the Kriti, of the
Typaldos Lines, and the Semiramis, which was operated,
though not owned, by the Greek government tourist office.
The Kriti carried the overflow of the Aigion and was sub-

152 GRECIAN CALENDAR

sidiary to it, though it kept apart and had its own guides,
including an Italian-speaking one. It seemed natural for these
two ships to be going around the islands neck and neck, but
it was puzzling that the Semiramis should be with them.
Even one cruise ship, if well filled, can swamp the shore
facilities of a small island, yet week after week that summer
the Aigion and Semiramis with or without the Kriti
made the circuit more or less together.

The circuit consisted of Crete on Tuesday, after a full
night's sail from the Piraeus; then Rhodes on Wednesday,
after another full night's sail; then Kos and Patmos on
Thursday, each after a short run; then Delos and Mykonos
on Friday, followed by a night trip back to the start. In be-
tween Rhodes and Kos the Aigion added Halicarnassus, or
Budrum, a small port on the Turkish mainland, though per-
haps she did this largely to show that she was faster than
the Semiramis.

There seemed to be a good deal of rivalry between the
two. "The Semiramis is smaller than the Aigion" Lena once
remarked to a few of us. "They say, too, that the food is not
so good." She shrugged noncommittally. "But I don't really
know," she added.

Actually I had traveled on the Semiramis too I had
taken a cruise on her in 1959, with still a third son, Peter. I
had found her a more enjoyable boat than the Aigion, but
had found her guiding service inferior to Lena's. As to food,
I don't think either had much to boast of except at lunch-
time, when they both served fair hors d'oeuvres dinner
on each was the usual imitation West European fare. Both
stayed late at Rhodes and Mykonos, however, so one might
dine there, and the faster Aigion stayed late at Patmos, too.
The prices of the two boats were competitive from

THE BIG SEA TOUR 153

roughly fifty dollars a passage up to something a good deal
higher, if one had a de luxe cabin.

We made Rhodes at breakfast-time on Wednesday the
town of Rhodes, that is, on the north end of the island of
that name and we tied up in the little harbor there. The
town's core is a medieval settlement, built by the Crusaders,
which has walls and battlements of porous buff stone. A big
wall with a couple of gates stands right over the quays, in
fact, and soon we were walking toward this in the wake of
Lena, who that morning wore a lilac dress, with a lilac scarf
on her head. She got us into the town and into the shade
and briefed us on the island's complex history. She
quoted Pindar on how Rhodes had been born of the love
between Helios, the Sun God, and the nymph Rhoda. Then
she went into the story of Greek domination over the island,
from Mycenean times down to Alexander the Great, after
which it had became a battleground of influence between
Alexander's Macedonian and Egyptian Ptolemaic suc-
cessors. It was in this Hellenistic period that the Colossus
had been built.

"In 303 B.C. Demetrios the Besieger, a Macedonian, tried
to take the city," Lena said. "He used all kinds of siege
machinery against the walls, but the people held out. Finally
he gave up and went away, and out of respect for the city's
courage he left the siege machines behind him, as a present.
The Rhodians sold them, and with the proceeds they built
the Colossus. It was a hundred and five feet tall and was a
statue of Helios, with metal rays coming out of its head.
Later it was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Oracle of
Delphi said it should not be rebuilt. So it lay here till the
sixth century A.D., when the Arabs took it away."

154 GRECIAN CALENDAR

The Arabs and the Byzantine Empire had had a long
struggle over Rhodes, which had been interrupted by the
Crusaders' arrival. The Knights of Saint John, corning in
1 300, had dug in especially well they had kept hostels on
the island for pilgrims and others en route to the Holy Land.
This regime had lasted till the conquest of Rhodes, in 1521,
by Suleiman the Magnificent, after which it had been Turk-
ish until 1912, when the Italians had got it, yielding it
finally to Greece in 1948.

Part of the Crusader establishment has been turned into a
museum mainly for classical sculpture and Lena took
us through this now. Then she led us on to another medieval
structure, the old Palace of the Grand Master of the
Knights of Saint John which the Italians had restored,
and fixed up considerably, during their occupation it had
been the headquarters of Cesare di Vecchi, the Fascist gov-
ernor of the Dodecanese. We found the palace spacious
with many large halls but half a dozen other flocks of
tourists were also there, which involved us in some backing
and filling, with guides calling out to one another, in Greek,
so as to co-ordinate our movements.

The floors of several rooms had mosaics on them, and we
were instructed not to step on these, but to pass around on
the narrow spaces framing them. They were old work, Lena
said, done just before or just after the time of Christ, and
they had been collected by the Italians in the Dodecanese,
especially Kos.

"It is a great pity," she added. "The mosaics were trans-
ported here by experts and installed at much expense. Yet if
the Italians were still here they would be wearing them out
in a few decades, because they used these halls as reception
rooms, with people walking through them all the time. Of
course the mosaics were made to be walked on, but not by

THE BIG SEA TOUR 155

hard modern shoes. We would like to put them back on
Kos, but it isn't easy."

We continued along, and presently she caught one of our
number stepping on a mosaic. "Hello!" she said. "Why
don't you look where you are going? You should look
down, not up."

This restrained us all awhile, but soon we were treading
carelessly again. Lena had her troubles with us. There was
an unpleasant young woman in our group who often found
something to fuss about. Now in our progress we paused
near an antique chest. "Can one sit on this thing?" the
woman asked provocatively, "or is it forbidden?" "It's for-
bidden," Lena said, "but do sit." Whereupon the woman
sat.

Some of the palace rooms had grandiose Fascist murals in
them, which, like so many other works of that pretentious
era, are now falling apart the paint looks moldy in spots,
and it is peeling, or the plaster is cracking. Nor do the
murals seem to have been much good to start with rather
they were hack jobs, devoted to the Fascist ideology. In one
room we saw murals of the bread-making process the
reaping of grain, the baking of dough, etc. that senten-
tiously glorified the dignity of labor. "They remind one of
the Dopolavoro idea," Lena said simply. Another mural
showed a peasant feast at a long table, looking rather like
the Last Supper; and the figures in the middle, she told us,
were those of di Vecchi and his wife. They looked incredi-
bly egotistical there, in 1960, and one wondered if they
hadn't in the 'thirties, too.

Lena called attention to the poor quality of the work, but
with her usual understatement "The wall paintings are
not of the best," she said, which was putting it mildly. The
palace had a lot of lush furniture in it, too. We paused in

156 GRECIAN CALENDAR

one room that contained, among other things, an ornate,
pompous Venetian-glass chandelier. "Look at this," said
Lena quietly. "Murano glass, Napoleon III furniture, and
a mosaic on the floor from Kos. It's not in very good taste,
is it?"

The Greek government, she told us, is planning soon to
remove some of the murals and more atrocious fittings, but
one wonders if that will happen. It must be tempting to
leave things just as they are, as a commentary, or last word,
on the Italian occupation the Greeks must have been
horribly galled in the 'thirties, with the Fascists strutting in
the Dodecanese and talking of Mare Nostrum.

That afternoon many of the Aigion's passengers took a
bus-trip to Lindos, a port on Rhodes's southeast coast, but I
went off on foot by myself, for a swim and a stroll through
the town. Rhodes has a number of Turks still living in the
medieval city, and I wanted to see them and their quarter
there were four or five mosques there, for one thing, whose
domes and minarets enhanced the skyline. I found a couple
of them open, but the others were locked and seemed dis-
used. I walked in the quarter for some time, on cobbled
streets between houses that had harem windows in them
little screened balconies where women could sit without
their veils, but still in Islamic modesty, and peer at the street
life.

That evening I wandered through the town on my own
again the boys being off on a party with some other pas-
sengers. I found two nice little cafes that were run by Turks
one belonged to a man named Moustapha, according to
its sign, and the other to an Achrnet. Both served good
souvlakla spitted meat chunks good ouzo which the
Turks would call rako and good imported beer of several

THEBIGSEATOUR 157

kinds instead of the invariable Fix of the Cyclades and
Athens (for the Dodecanese are allowed free trade, to soften
their new membership in the Greek economy). Moustapha's
cafe was especially pleasant, with tables in the open under a
gnarled old plane tree, and with the cook standing there too,
beside a smoky charcoal grill. The souvlakia were served
with parsley and onion-shreds, and little heaps of salt. The
cook-smoke billowed up into the plane tree which in
Asia would have been called a chinar, I suppose and off
to one side a musician played Greek or Turkish songs on the
harmonium.

The next day, early, we called at Budrum. Under its old
name, Halicarnassus, it had been one of the famous Greek
cities of Asia Minor. The original Mausoleum the tomb
of the ruler Mausolus had been there, and Lena led us
to a height above the town and told us about it. The Mauso-
leum had been one of the Seven Wonders of the World,
so she asked us like children on a quiz program what
the others had been; and between us, with childish pride, we
finally answered her. She also told us the story of Artemisia,
who had been queen of Halicarnassus during the Persian
wars.

"Artemisia, like all the Greeks of Asia Minor then, was a
subject of Xerxes," Lena said, "and she personally com-
manded a ship on the Persian side of the battle of Salamis.
But when the battle was going against the Persians, and
Artemisia was hard pressed according to Herodotus
she suddenly pretended to be on the Greek side, and rammed
and sank another ship of Xerxes'. This induced the Greeks
to leave her alone, and it also did her no harm with Xerxes
himself, for he was watching from far off and couldn't see

158 GRECIAN CALENDAR

well. He thought he saw her ramming a Greek ship, and he
turned and said to one of his lieutenants: 'Our men have be-
haved like women today, and our women like men.' "

Except for Lena's commentary, on this and other subjects,
there was little to be learned there of the ancient city for
the remains have nearly all disappeared and we soon
broke up and descended to the modern town. We got some
good Turkish tea there black tea, sugared, in small glasses
and some of the passengers found a camel or two to
photograph, but it was not a place that I enjoyed much. It
seemed dead and run down after the Greek spots we had
been visiting. There are wonderful things to see in Turkey,
of course, but modern town and city life, in my experience,
are not among them. What I got mainly at Budrum was a
feeling that I had crossed the line sharply into Asia from
the West into the East. It is a feeling I have got often in
Greece and its neighborhood and got from the past there,
too, as well as the present. The Trojan Wars were between
Europe and Asia. So were the Persian Wars; and Herodotus,
their spellbinding historian, has made the differences be-
tween Greeks and Asiatics seem enormous indeed, the
later West's discrimination against Asiatics seems to have
been conditioned by him. Thanks to him, in no small part,
a Westerner feels that he is going off an edge of some sort
when he reaches Asia, and I had that feeling now, in
Budrum. I wasn't courting it especially, and I was happy
when a launch came and took me back to the Aigion.

Later that morning we stopped at Kos, which I had visited
before and shall not dwell on. Then we got back on the ship
and steamed toward Patmos. We had lunch aboard, and
after it I spent much time on the boat-deck sunbathing,
dipping in the little pool there, and watching the brown
Dodecanese float by. We made Patmos at tea-time, and

THE BIG SEA TOUR 159

shortly before that Lena gave us English-speakers a briefing
in the bar; she explained that the island's monastery and
the Grotto of the Apocalypse there were too small for
our group to maneuver in, especially as all the other lan-
guage groups, from the Aigion, Kriti, and S emir amis, would
be there, too.

The Kriti and Aigion landed at much the same time, it
turned out, with the Semiramls well behind us. The monas-
tery of Patnios is on a hill, and a vast number of donkeys
and small mules were waiting to take passengers up there. I
walked up myself part way on a secondary path and
as I went along I began to hear, in the offing, the whoops
and yells of the muleteers and donkeymen, as they fell to
urging on their now laden animals. "Yea! " they kept crying.
"Yea! Yea!", and they shooshed and clucked and whistled
in the distance.

Soon my path curved around and joined theirs, and they
made a lively sight. Passengers in all kinds of brilliant
plumage red hats, blue shirts, yellow trousers and
sitting astride their little animals, were going upward in a
steady stream along a narrow, cobbled road, with Patmian
men and boys, switch in hand, egging them on. I joined the
parade myself, and found that many riders were feeling
silly on their mounts, over which they had scant control.
Some of the bigger ones were feeling ashamed, too, at weigh-
ing down such tiny creatures. They joked about it self-
consciously, though really they needn't have worried the
fattest men there weighed less than other loads I've seen put
on Greek donkeys.

Finally, as fast as the switches could drive them, they
reached the village at the top, where they dismounted amid
hawkers selling souvenirs including lace doilies in a fish
shape, which are a Patmian specialty. The muleteers didn't

l6o GRECIAN CALENDAR

tarry there, however not at all for they saw the
Seimramis in the harbor down below. They seized the
bridles of their animals and hurried down the road again
whooshing and shouting "Yea!", and brushing past the later
upcomers of our party. It all made an active, swirly scene,
much like a round-up.

The sights at Patmos 'were crowded that day, and I had
seen them before, so I shan't describe them now. Nor shall I
say much about Delos, to which we devoted the next morn-
ing. Lena was in top form at that famous sanctuary. She had
endeared herself to all of us by now. "One thing nice about
our guide," I heard an old lady say on Dclos, "is that she
always finds a shady place to talk to us in." Another pas-
senger, an Englishman, remarked on how quickly she got
around. "I t! Jnk she's identical twins," he said, gazing at her
fondly. "I could have sworn she was back there a second
ago." And he pointed far to our rear.

Lena too was more familiar with us now, and jocular.
"There's a special tourist step," she said. "Have you noticed
it? The feet are very heavy." She walked a few paces, pick-
ing her feet up and putting them down again slowly. Mean-
while, between the pleasantries, she took us around au-
thoritatively and tactfully saying "very probably," for
instance, when someone volunteered an absurd explanation
for something she had already made quite clear.

Her English was good, though not like a native's. She told
us how the ancient Athenians had "purified" Delos how
they had removed all corpses from the island and decreed
that no one else should die or be born there. "All the
moribunds and all the pregnant women were transported to
Reneia," she said, pointing to the island just across the chan-
nel.

Ten flocks of tourists from the three boats landed
on Delos that day, but the site is so spacious that it wasn't

THE BIG SEA TOUR l6l

overcrowded. Later in the morning I left our party and
climbed the little Delian acropolis. Looking down, I saw
files of tourists moving among the ruins like columns of ants.
They weren't black, of course, like ant-columns, but multi-
colored, with blue predominating. In the heat and brightness
of those islands, blue is a favorite color with nearly every-
one; you always see it there; and it is, not surprisingly, the
Greek national color as well sky blue along with white.
I stood looking down awhile on the blue-specked ant bri-
gades, then I descended and rejoined Lena. She had come
to the end of her tour and was giving advice on how to
photograph the famous Delos lions ancient statues lined
up, in a row, beside the sanctuary. "I think," she said, "that
one of the best places to take them is from under that lion"

she pointed "from between its legs. Then you can get
the others, too, and they will be framed by the first
one."

Our camera-wielders dispersed to try this, then in time we
all drifted back to the Aigion, and it set sail. We stopped
at Mykonos that afternoon. The boys jumped ship there, to
stay for a few more days, and I returned to Athens.

Other group cruises, varying in length from half a day up
to several, are available on the Aegean in summer, and one
may also take a Black Sea cruise from the Piraeus I did
that myself in 1959, along with my third son, Peter. Our
boat, though Greek the Hermes of the Potamianos Lines

had begun its cruise from an Italian port, and it carried
French passengers almost exclusively, for the enterprise had
been booked in Paris. Only half a dozen of us boarded at the
Piraeus. We left there late one night, made the Dardanelles
the next afternoon, and went up through the Bosporus early
on the second morning, just as dawn came on. It is a lovely
waterway, and that was a lovely time to see it with a

l62 GRECIAN CALENDAR

series of vague mosques, fortresses, and other mysterious
buildings silhouetted on the shores.

In the Black Sea we stopped, as I remember it, at Odessa,
Yalta, Sochi, Sokoumi, and Batum. Except for Odessa and
Batum these are all watering places, so we had a chance to
see Russians on holidays. They seemed poor for the most
part, and they were jammed into big communal hostels
belonging to labor unions and the like one felt, on look-
ing at these hostels, that bedding and personal effects were
actually bulging from their windows. As buildings they
were crude and pretentious, too, but the people we met in
the streets were plain and friendly, and interested in Amer-
ica.

I didn't see any of the luxurious villas that are said to exist
in the Crimea, but this was not because my movements were
restricted. I was allowed to walk as far as I could in the day
or half-day we spent in each port, and sometimes I took ad-
vantage of this. I walked through lovely farms and pine-clad
hills behind Yalta, and in all the towns Peter and I walked
the crowded esplanades a lot.

Of course we didn't learn much of substance about Russia
in so brief a visit, but we did get a glimpse of it, and the trip
helped to fill out our view of the old Greek spheres of cul-
tural influence the Black Sea was colonized by Greeks in
ancient times, and Orthodox Christianity went up through
there on its way to Russia.*

* Recently in the nineteenth century many Greek communities
existed in the Black Sea ports. Mykoniats lived together in Rostov and
other Russian cities rather as they now live in Joliet, 111. They engaged
in commerce and shipping. The Greeks are not strong around the
Black Sea now, but traditionally that region is a part of their world.
The Turkish Black Sea ports Trebizond, etc. have also been Greek
through most of history, though their Greek populations left after
the troubles of the 1920'$.

THE BIG SEA TOUR 163

Our fellow passengers were almost as strange and inter-
esting, furthermore, as the natives ashore. I know little of
French society and my command of the language is too
poor to pick up subtleties in that field so I can't say what
shades of the French community were with us. There were
ten or twenty French- Armenians, for certain, who got off
at Batum with the intent of traveling by rail through their
old motherland and then back, again by rail, to West
Europe. There were several enthusiastic leftists aboard, too,
I gathered. But many of the passengers seemed to be well-
off, respectable middle-class folk. Peter and I sat at a table
with, among others, a wine-grower from near Bordeaux and
his wife and sister-in-law; and from their conversation one
wondered why they had ever left home. Those two ladies
were soignee in their dress, and so were many other of the
women passengers. We also had a fashion show in the
course of the voyage, and charades that were staged with
elaborate costumes brought along for the purpose.

The passengers were scornful, on the whole, of alien food
whether Greek or Russian and the cruise had a special
French steward and French chef along, to see that the Greek
staff did nothing barbarous. I don't wholly understand the
motives of French tourists in the Mediterranean except,
of course, for real intellectuals or people just wanting a nice
cheap, sunny vacation. American tourists often have a mo-
tive of duty when visiting Greece from childhood up the
place stands for civilization, or education, to us; and when
we finally get to it we are resolved on some good con-
scientious field-work. But the French don't seem to be that
way, perhaps because their own civilization seems so perfect
to them at least these on the Hermes weren't. They
seemed to look on the cruise, rather, as a new means of kill-
ing time. Anyway, we had a pleasant week or ten days

1 64 GRECIANCALENDAR

with them, and then peeled off at Istanbul, or Constanti-
nople, on the return trip.*

Many tours, of course, treat Greece as an incident in a
larger schedule even a round-the-world one and I
sometimes, in my year there, crossed paths with these. One
striking example was the so-called International School of
America, a party of students who were circumnavigating
the globe, by plane, with a staff of four or five teachers to
instruct them at their stops in each of which they stayed
for a week or two. Another example I ran into was a version
of Swan's Hellenic Cruises, which are run from England
and which cover various parts of the Mediterranean basin
under scholarly guidance. The one I met up with came
through Greece in September, and it was due to stop later at
Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Yugoslavia (with optional
side-trips, by air, to Syria and Jordan) . It had as guides
if that word is exalted enough Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the
archaeologist; Sir Maurice Bowra, the classical scholar; Sir
John Wolf enden, also a classical scholar and the Vice-Chnn-
cellor of Reading University; Sir Harry Luke, an expert on
Cyprus; Mr. Stuart Perowne, an expert on Palestine; and at
least two other experts on the past, namely Canon Guy
Pentreath and the Reverend Lawrence Waddy.

I had some friends on the cruise, whom I met in Athens,

* Istanbul was called Byzantium when founded as a Greek colony,
by the Megarians, about 657 B.C. It was called Constantinople after
Constantine made it his capital in A.D. 330. And now the Turks, who
entered in 1453, call it Istanbul, though that name too is basically
Greek it comes from the phrase stin polin, meaning "into the city."
Greeks still like to say "Constantinople," but the Turks stand fast on
"Istanbul," and it is a bone of contention between the two peoples.
When among Greeks in Greece a Westerner is apt to say Constanti-
nople, and when among Turks or when visiting the place he will
normally say Istanbul.

THE BIG SEA TOUR 165

and they told me about a full course of lectures given aboard
by these scholars, not to mention a big supply of reading-
matter dispensed; and I believe that this and other cruises of
the same organization it puts on four a year are prob-
ably the best things of their kind available to the average
man. I went down to meet this particular cruise at the
Piraeus and then accompanied its passengers in one of
eleven buses back to the Athenian Acropolis. The pas-
sengers were very British looking, and they were dressed in
smart casual garb of all varieties shorts, slacks, suits;
shoes, sneakers, sandals; etc. Most of them had sweaters, for
the day was cool, and I even saw a couple of shooting-sticks
among them.

My bus was the last of the procession, and when I finally
reached the Propylea, the entrance structure of the Acrop-
olis, I found one scholar, Canon Guy Pentreath, just launch-
ing on a talk about it about how, for instance, the struc-
ture had been hard to build because of the slope there, and
how the architect had solved this by using both Doric and
Ionic columns in the design (Ionic columns are tall and
slender, relatively speaking, while Doric ones are short and
thick) .

The Canon finished; we went, as next directed, to the
Parthenon's south side; and there we found Sir Mortimer
Wheeler awaiting us on the steps. He was tall and thin, with
curly gray hair, a gray moustache, a pipe, a brown pork-
pie hat, a gray suit, and brown suede shoes. "A charming
lady of our party," he began, "said to me on the boat: 'I
suppose you love looking at ruins.' I answered: c No, Mad-
ame, I hate looking at ruins, whether archaeological or
human.' "

Sir Mortimer turned out to be a showy speaker, with a
gift for theater. "The Parthenon can best be described as

l66 GRECIAN CALENDAR

petrified intelligence," he said. "There is intelligence in
every line of it." The Greek mind had been essentially
mathematical, he continued, and the Parthenon had a wealth
of mathematical subtleties in it, which gave it life. He men-
tioned a few of them the columns leaning slightly in-
ward; the corner columns being closer together than the
others; and the pedestal the steps on which he was stand-
ing being convex curving to a slight rise at the build-
ing's center.

"Of course the Parthenon is now only a broken frame,"
he continued, "from which the picture has all but dis-
appeared." He mentioned the big statue of Athena that had
once been in it, and the vanished reliefs the frieze and
metopes that had adorned it. "Most of that frieze is in
another place," he said delicately he was referring, as
everyone there knew, to the British Museum "and it owes
its preservation to that fact." He began talking about the
reliefs the so-called Elgin Marbles, which Lord Elgin re-
moved from Athens around 1800. "When you go back," he
said, "if you go to a certain museum you will see good
things, and less good, in that frieze." He advised his hearers
to discriminate. "As Hellenists we are apt to be snobs," he
said flatteringly. "There is nothing wrong in that, and not
all classical things are good."

Then he spoke disparagingly of another temple, the so-
called Theseion, which one can see from the Acropolis
it had none of the Parthenon's virtues, in his opinion and
also of a very different building near it: the Stoa of Attalus,
a restoration of an old market-building, done by American
archaeologists a few years ago and used as a museum. "The
Stoa was rebuilt by my old friend Homer Thompson," Sir
Mortimer said. "He did a good job of it. But 'why? What

THE BIG SEA TOUR 167

was the use, with such a dull building?" * Sir Mortimer
shrugged elaborately and made a face. He was an actor.

After he finished, the party broke up for a while and was
shown details of the architecture and shown statues in
the Acropolis Museum by a number of Greek guides
who were on hand, partly, I gathered, because the law for-
bids tours within the country that are conducted wholly by
foreigners. The day was cool and cloudy unusual for
Athens in September and the wind blew up little, gritty
sandstorms from time to time, while the guides, each with
a small train of tourists, ranged thoroughly over the Acrop-
olis's flat top.

One lady guide I overheard seemed to resent Sir Mortimer
a little. I saw her pointing over the Acropolis escarpment.
"That is the Theseion," she said, "which Sir Mortimer
Wheeler doesn't seern to like, and that is the restoration of
the Stoa of Attains, which also doesn't seem to appeal to
Sir Mortimer." She spoke in a dead-pan way, yet I felt she
was making a subtle Greek reprisal against what she took
as Northern condescension also, of course, the subject of
the Elgin Marbles is apt to get Greek backs up. But Greek
humor was much more in evidence. "Mind your hats," I
heard another lady guide say near the breezy parapet.
"Please don't consecrate any of your hats to the Goddess
Athena." And the tourists with her laughed.

After a while Sir Maurice Bowra took over, speaking
about the Greek theater. He had planned to do so in the
actual Theater of Dionysus, which the Acropolis looks
down on, but it happened to be closed that day because

* One reason why: countless old Greek temples remain to us, but
there are few structures, apart from the Stoa, that show the setting of
ancient business life (and see page 175).

l68 GRECIAN CALENDAR

of some labor trouble and he gave his talk on the height
instead. He was a stocky, ruddy, middle-aged, energetic-
looking man, wearing a beige sweater and smoking cig-
arettes. He stood up on a boulder and gave a strong and
authoritative-sounding talk. He spoke of the limited re-
sources of the Greek playwrights they had only four
main actors to work with, for instance, and these all male
and he told how such disadvantages had been compensated
for, to some degree, by masks, elaborate clothes, high heels,
and other devices. "But everything really depended," he
said, "on the gestures and the saying of the words." Then
he spoke of the particular theater down below us. "This
Theater of Dionysus was the father of all the others/' he
said. "It was much the most important theater in Greece/'
And he went into details of its construction. "That screen
down there," he said, "was probably put up by Nero, when
Nero himself performed." He said other things, too, but I
had a date then in the city, and I had to leave.

VII

ATHENS

After September, when my children and visiting friends had
left Greece when the "season" was pretty much over I
settled down to enjoy Athens and examine it more closely.
My flat had a terrace and was in the section called Ilissia,
half an hour's walk from the city's heart. Like most of
Athens, that section was undergoing change with new
apartment-houses shooting up between old mansions and old
hovels yet even so it was quiet. The Athenian air is calm
in October. The sky is blue then and the colors bright,
and in the outskirts you can hear a dog bark half a mile
away. My terrace had all this tranquility, and it was a fine
place for writing, reading, or just basking it was paved in
terrazzo with a marble surround, and it faced southeast, so
it got the sun from early morning until tea-time.

It also looked right oat at, and lay parallel with, Mount
Hymettus, which is a great Athenian landmark. Besides
getting honey from Hymettus, the ancients foretold the
weather by observing the clouds above it, and they loved
the sequence of pink and mauve tones it assumes in the late
afternoon in the hour when Socrates, according to Plato,
drank his hemlock. The mountain is long and nearly hori-

IJO GRECIAN CALENDAR

zontal, and its silhouette took up most of my horizon its
ridgeline being three or four miles away, through the crystal
air. It was made of nearly solid rock limestone and marble
with a light sprinkling of dirt and a coat of scrubby vege-
tation, on which the bees did their feeding; a plant that
looked like heather was blooming on the mountain in
October, and if I walked there I would find each clump of it
abuzz.

When I waked in the morning, Hymettus would be
green and sharp of outline, with the sun rising, in the blue
sky, from its northeast end. By noon the sun would be high
above the other end shining on a host of dust particles to
make a haze through which the mountain would seem gray.
By mid-afternoon that phase would be over, with the sun
getting around on my side to make the mountain green
again; and finally that would also pass, toward sunset, and
the rose tones would begin Hymettus was long, spare,
simple, uninhabited, and nearly unforested, yet is was al-
ways fun to watch.

It was fun to walk on, too, and many Athenians did that
of a Sunday. They gathered mysterious herbs and flowers
there with the Greek love of nature and what grows in
it. One Sunday evening in October I came down the moun-
tain homeward bound, at dusk. The city lights below me
had been coming on white streetlights and, in certain
sections, many-colored neons. The city itself was dark, and
getting darker by the minute, yet the Aegean off to my
left beyond the Piraeus was still blue. In the gloom, as
I descended, I saw a woman bending over a live-oak thicket
picking acorns. She looked old and heavy, and she had a sack
with her. I walked on, in the gathering blackness, and soon
a man overtook me on the path. He too looked old, but thin
and genteel. He had a beret and musette bag, and was strid-

ATHENS 171

ing down the slope with flowers in his hand. He walked on,
and I lost him in the nightfall I had all I could do to
grope my own way home then.

On weekdays I would walk not on the mountain but into
the city, going there for dinner, or for a late lunch, if I
could bear to leave my terrace. The streets would be sunny
then, and my way would lead through residential districts,
some of them quite new proceeding up a rise and then
dropping to the region of Constitution Square.

I would do one or two errands there cash a check, say,
or buy a book then have lunch in a taverna; and after-
wards I might walk around and see things. I might visit the
Acropolis, which I could reach by walking through the
Plaka, the oldest part of town. Athens is a big city, and it
was far from small in ancient times, but in between it
shrank. After the triumph of Christianity it was frowned on
as a holdout of paganism in A.D. 529 the Byzantine Em-
peror Justinian closed down the Athenian philosophy
schools, which had persisted until then. Later the city
dwindled to a provincial town, being less important than
other Greek centers in the Byzantine era much less im-
portant than Salonika, for instance, in the north. Under the
Turks, who entered in 1465, it declined still further, and it
was little more than a village in the eighteenth century,
when West Europeans began visiting it again, and sketching
and describing it.

Its revival dates from 1834, when it was made the new
nation's capital, and began its furious modern growth.
Despite its great age it now often seems more like an Ameri-
can city than a European one, because it is so lacking in
the impediments to growth like walls, old houses, and
narrow twisting streets of a real medieval town. To the
extent that such things exist in Athens they exist mainly in

172 GRECIAN CALENDAR

the Plaka, which lies under the Acropolis to its northeast

and has always been inhabited, apparently, since classical
times. The oldest still-extant buildings in the Plaka little
stone-and-plaster houses left from the Turkish period are
on the lower skirts of the Acropolis itself on the slopes
of detritus that fall away from the cliffs. They can be
reached by steps and narrow alleys, and they are much like
the stone houses on some Greek islands. They are fun to
wander among the people in them don't seem to mind
strangers, and the alleys are high enough to have a good
view of the city.

Just below that part, where the Plaka starts leveling off,
one finds houses built soon after Athens became the capital,
when people were converging there from other liberated
regions. These houses, by and large, are in a neo-classical
style rather like that of the Greek Revival buildings in
some cities of northeastern America. They are chaste and
graceful; they are apt to be painted in subdued earth colors;
and they use many details taken straight from ancient
models they often have "palmette" finial tiles along their
eaves, for instance, like those on classical temples. Many old
Athenian houses look not at the street, but inward, onto
courtyards and green gardens, where cats forever come and
go. Such houses are being shouldered aside now, by apart-
ment buildings and other modern structures, yet they still
do dominate the Plaka, and they make it a lovely place for
strolling in the autumn clarity.

From the Plaka one can look straight up at the Acropolis

one sees a rugged, overhanging gray-brown cliff with
a masonry wall atop it. That part is much too steep to climb,
and to get up one must go clear around to the other end
the western where a winding flagstone path ascends to
the Propylea, the sanctuary's entrance gate. The buildings

ATHENS 173

on the Acropolis the Propylea, Parthenon, Erechtheion,
and Temple of Athena Nike exceed most visitors' ex-
pectations at nearly any time, but on fall afternoons they
are at their best. The marble they are made of, from Mount
Pentelicon, was nearly white when quarried in the Periclean
era, but it has taken on a brownish-yellow, golden, creamy
tone with age. It has a trace of iron in it that slowly oxidizes
to make the change. Pericles and his architects knew nothing
of this, presumably they must have thought their temples,
except where painted, would stay white yet they could
hardly complain now if they saw them. The stones with
eastern exposure, on the whole, have weathered the most.
In patches vague ones, thanks to the subtleties of wind,
sun, and the marble itself the Parthenon's east end has
turned almost the color of butterscotch. Elsewhere the
building is paler, and in some places, where the action has
been slow, it has scarcely departed from its native snowy
(or vanilla ice-cream) color. But all in all its tone is warm,
and the golden autumn sunshine brings this out. The
autumn stillness surrounds the Acropolis, too a plateau
high above the city and from it one looks at the neigh-
boring mountains and looks far to sea. The sun in autumn
sets out beyond the sea, and beyond the distant Pelopon-
nesian mainland. It gleams off the water and makes the old
stones blaze, then drops away in silence.

The other classical sites of Athens they are relatively
minor can be seen from the Acropolis and can be visited
from it on foot. The city's museums are farther flung, on
the whole, though one of them is on the Acropolis itself
and another is just below it, to the north. Athens is a good
museum city, but that side of its life is not organized quite as
New Yorkers, or even as West Europeans, might expect.

174 GRECIAN CALENDAR

When one gets to the Eastern Mediterranean one finds, as
a rule, that the contents of the museums get ever more in-
teresting, and their housing ever more primitive. There is
one great exception to this rule the museum in the Jordan
side of Jerusalem, which has a superb plant, financed by the
Rockefellers, but relatively little in it because the inhabitants
of Palestine have not gone in much for graven images. The
rule is well exemplified, though, in Cairo, where the chief
museum has a spectacular collection of statuary and of
smaller things, like Tutankhamen's jewelry, all jammed to-
gether as in a warehouse. Athens comes between these ex-
tremes. The Greeks have little money to spend, so they must
do without the latest tricks of lighting and showcase design,
yet they also have an intelligence, and an appreciation of
their past, that helps them make a little go very far.

The city's principal museum, the National Museum of
Archaeology, is devoted wholly to ancient things, chosen
and arranged on artistic, or art-historical, lines (as opposed,
say, to social-historical ones). It has especially outstanding
collections of painted pottery, of ancient Mycenean treas-
ures, and above all of sculpture of sculpture in all the
technical categories of "archaic" (down into the fifth cen-
tury B.C.), "classical" (fifth and fourth centuries), "Hellen-
istic" (third, second, and first) and "Roman" (from then
till the start of Byzantine times, in A.D. 323). Innumerable
statues were carved in Greece all through these periods
through the well-known cycle of the primitive, the ripe,
and the decadent and many of the best have been col-
lected in the National Museum. They are still being col-
lected, too, as excavations proceed; and the National
despite the tons of Greek statues carted off to Europe in the
past is undoubtedly the world's leading museum of an-
cient Western art.

ATHENS 175

The Acropolis Museum, which is on that eminence itself,
is similar in emphasis to the National, but more limited in
material it is a small establishment, devoted to things
found right on the site. It too has much fine sculpture,
mainly "archaic" and "classical" it has the best collec-
tion, outside the British Museum, of reliefs from the Acrop-
olis temples.

Besides these two, Athens has in the Stoa of Attalus
which stands beside the ancient Agora, or city market-place,
at the foot of the Acropolis's north slope an antiquities
museum with a different bias. The Agora has been ex-
cavated in the past few decades by American archaeologists
under the banner of the American School of Classical
Studies and a museum in the Stoa now displays the best
of what they have found. As the Agora was the center of
old Athenian business and politics, and as many people lived
in and around it too, the museum has a mine of evidence on
how the old Athenians managed their affairs: how they
cooked, drank, and kept their persons, and also how they
voted, adhered to standard weights and measures, and even
ostracized the fellow Athenians they thought too popular
(there is a sizable collection in the Stoa of ostraka, the
pottery chips on which citizens wrote the names of those
they would ostracize, and in some cases these show signs of
mass-production an equivalent, perhaps, to ballot-box
stuffing) .

Aside from its ancient collections pre-Christian almost
entirely Athens has two leading museums, the Byzantine
and the Benaki, devoted to later periods. The Byzantine
housed surprisingly, but charmingly, in a Florentine-style
villa has a wealth of icons, carvings, fabrics, and church
jewelry that help, along with Athens's many old churches,
to make the city a center of Byzantine study the equal, in

176 GRECIAN CALENDAR

that regard, of Ravenna, Mount Athos, Salonika, or Con-
stantinople. The Benaki Museum, named for a rich Greek
family that created it, has many fine Byzantine items too,
plus a big collection of more secular medieval and modern
objets d'art and handicraft things. It is a good general
museum of post-classical Greek works.

Tourists are surprised, sometimes, to find that Athens has
no museum of painting. Plans are afoot to establish one, but
the question of what will go into it is a puzzle. The ancient
Greeks made paintings as good as their statues, to judge
from what the ancient writers said but little remains of
these except for "murals and what was done on pottery.
Greek Byzantine painting, again, is interesting in the ex-
treme, but it is so religious that it calls for separate display.
Of pre-modern Greek secular painters, only El Greco has
left much of note, and there is some question whether he
shouldn't be called generally Mediterranean or even
Italian or Spanish rather than Greek. Then finally Greek
modern painting, however good, is hardly more than an off-
shoot of French painting it has never developed initiative
of its own. Instead of the Renaissance the Greeks got the
Turks, and this rather put them out of the European move-
ment. It is an oddity of their cultural history that gets ex-
pressed along with other aspects of the same thing in
the Athenian museum set-up.

Museums, archaeology, and the tourist business all seek, in
their ways, to explore the past and convey it to modern hu-
mans. This activity is going strong in Greece now, and the
style in which it is conducted has local peculiarities, thanks
to history and other factors.

Archaeology in Greece is close to the humanities, for one
thing. In North America and the Pacific it is close to the
social sciences, especially anthropology. The archaeologists

ATHENS 177

there, like the anthropologists, are exploring primitive folk-
ways. If such archaeologists visit Greece, for one reason or
another, they find themselves in a strange world where their
colleagues seem mainly interested in the aesthetic quality of
sculpture or in tracking down some literary reference
this bias gives archaeology in Greece, some think, an ivory-
tower quality.

Then the tendencies of the different nations who have
been digging in Greece have made themselves felt. In the
nineteenth century, when archaeology was becoming a rage
in the Christian world, Greece was a weak, newly liberated
country that had to let her big neighbors dig her soil up for
her. The French, the British, the Germans, and the Ameri-
cans did this, among others. The French dug up two of the
greatest classical sanctuaries, at Delos and Delphi both
sacred to Apollo and in exploring the material there, and
describing it, they indulged a bias toward the spiritual and
aesthetic side that may have reinforced the ivory-tower
quality mentioned above. The Germans dug up Olympia
and many other places, and in their handling of the material
they indulged a pedantry that sometimes discolored it
the light Greek touch in art and letters does not lend itself
to solemn analysis, though it has gotten much of that in the
past hundred years. The British and Americans didn't color
their results so much, perhaps they concentrated on pro-
ducing them and did so in considerable volume. There is
a modern British specialty in archaeology very strict
partial digging up of sites, by trenches or pits, with the re-
mainder left scrupulously intact around these, for later
digging or merely for showing the stratigraphy (the rela-
tionship of the ancient layers of occupation) . This method
has had great success in the Middle East and in Roman
Britain itself, but it hasn't caught on in Greece, where

iy8 GRECIAN CALENDAR

some archaeologists, at least, believe in peeling whole layers
off their sites and where the clues from stratigraphy are
reinforced, also, by those from the ancient writers. Literary
sources are vital to classical archaeology in Greece, and the
good archaeologist there is a well-read man. Some important
Middle Eastern sites, on the other hand, have no literature
at all to go with them.

Greek archaeologists themselves are taking over more and
more now, as the twentieth century unfolds foreign
ways of doing things may count less in their country, in
the future, than Greek ones. Even an expert, perhaps, would
have a hard time defining the emergent Greek style in
archaeology, but there are a couple of things that can be said
about it. For one thing, Greece is still a poor country and
cannot lavish vast sums on excavations any more than it
can on museums her archaeologists must choose their
sites carefully; read the ancient writers a lot; dig in a small
way; and keep a lookout for the chance finds that come
with road-building and other non-scholarly earth move-
ment.

Secondly, Greek archaeologists are better fitted than
foreign ones to study their own ancient literature ancient
Greek differs a lot from the modern, but it is taught rigor-
ously in the Greek schools, and Greeks are gifted linguists
anyway. It seems likely, therefore, that archaeology in
Greece will continue and enhance its literary bias as time
goes on; that its marriage with the humanities will prosper;
and that this will make itself felt increasingly in the mu-
seums and the tourist life. Tourists who linger on in Greece,
going to museums and contemplating the past, may find
themselves still more involved with considerations of art
and poetry.

ATHENS 179

I didn't go deep into such things in my fall in Athens I
only sensed them vaguely from the outside. Actually I was
doing many other things besides museum-going, one being
a continued pursuit of the Greek countryside, with which
I was still infatuated. On most of the Sundays in October
and early November I walked over Mount Hymettus to
the Mesoghia, the "Center of the Earth," the rich farming
plain that lies between there and the sea I had already
come to know it a little in the spring. I walked up to a pass
in Hymettus's northern end, which took two hours from
my flat, and then down the other side, which took one hour
till I reached the first Mesoghian town. As I looked down
from the pass, the Mesoghia was a big expanse of earth
now tawny, now reddish-brown sometimes running flat
for miles, sometimes billowing up into hills. There was a
verdant sheen on the plain from its vineyards their grapes
just harvested, in September and the place was spotted,
too, with olive orchards. Here and there dark cypresses
grew beside some little church, and here and there some
village had pines and fruit trees near it. But there were no
forests the plain had been cleared and cultivated for
three or four thousand years, at least. It ran eastward, from
Hymettus, for ten miles or so, then curled up into some
rolling hills, beyond which lay the blue Aegean. North-
ward, to my left, the sea faded off to the big island of
Euboea, which was a hazy olive green in those days. But
out ahead it merely lay there drowsily blue in the warm
sun, beneath white clouds.

I would gaze at this view awhile, then descend the moun-
tain and walk on the plain, stopping for lunch at one of the
towns there they all still seemed ancient, but at the same
time bustling, prosperous, and full of vitality. I would order

l8o GRECIAN CALENDAR

specialties of the region retslna and charcoal-broiled lamb
chops, together with bread and a salad of some sort and
these would come in large quantity, and fine quality, at a
cost much lower than in Athens. After lunch I would con-
tinue walking till the early dusk, when I would end up at
another town and catch a bus back to the city.

The weather all this time was gorgeous for my purpose
warm and sunny and I would feel hot and burned in
the noontimes. But by November it began getting bad for
the farmers, who expected the rains to begin and who com-
plained of drought. The dust grew thick in the Mesoghia.
It lay like red-brown flour on the fields and cart-tracks. It
went down a few inches, and below that the ground was
hard, so the farmers couldn't plow. I didn't see how they
could have planted, either, at least to much effect I didn't
see how the seeds could have sprouted in that dryness. The
olives didn't develop right, either, somehow; they are sup-
posed to be harvested in the fall shaken off and they
need some rain, it seems, to make them leave the trees easily.
These problems were apparent as I walked on the thirsty
plain, and I began hearing about them too even in Athens
everyone was talking of them. I heard also that the drought
on the islands was severe that on some the peasants were
slaughtering their young stock for lack of grass. And I
heard often that people were praying for rain.

The rains did begin late in November weeks behind
time, but copious once they started, so the farmers soon
caught up. After that we often had clear days, but the fall
was not the same again we didn't recapture the endless
old still, sunny magic. I also broke my routine about then
with a small program of traveling. I had seen almost nothing
of North Greece, and I wished to make a couple of trips
there before the year was out. I embarked on the first of

ATHENS l8l

them a bus- jaunt to the Pindus mountains, in Greece's
northwest at the end of November in company with a
friend named Raoul Cohen-Faure, a writer (he was bent on
extended travels, it so happened, and I planned merely to
accompany him for the first few days).

We left Athens early on a Tuesday morning, having re-
served front seats in a bus bound for Trikkala, a town on
the plain of Thessaly, a hundred and fifty miles to the north.
We drove out first through Boeotia, a province that borders
on Attica Athens's own province to the north and
west, and that was often at war with it in classical times.
The heavy rains had been on for only a few days, yet we
could see the results already. We drove through rolling
hilly country, and the earth there was now colored different
shades of chocolate. Most of the land was rocky not
arable but there were small fields here and there. Some
were being plowed as we drove by, and in others the bright-
green wheat was already showing.

We passed through Thebes, the Boeotian capital the
scene of the Oedipus legend then traveled along a big
plain named Copias, which is fertile anyway, being arti-
ficially irrigated a reclaimed lake. The poplars and aspens
by the road there were turning yellow, and yellow leaves
lay on the wet ground.

We went on, and soon began climbing into hills. They
were wild and craggy the hills that make the historical
barrier between North Greece and the Athens region
the pass of Thermopylae, where Leonidas held the Persians,
is at their eastern end, where they join the coast.

We didn't go near Thermopylae, but several miles inland
from it. The road climbed up between airy crags, and
looked down on deep valleys. There was gnarled limestone
all around us, with jags everywhere, and peaks like trun-

182 GRECIAN CALENDAR

cated cones. There was green grass in the valleys, and oak
trees, changing color, on the slopes. We went on through
this country, twisting and turning, then came to some cliffs
and made our way down them to a flat plain.

At noon we reached a town there, Lamia, and stopped
awhile Raoul and I had lunch in a taverna. Afterwards we
went through more mountains smaller ones and got
into the plain of Thessaly itself. It is the main breadbasket of
Greece, and it is huge by the standards of that country
it stretches away dead flat interminably. It was green and
moist then, with farmers plowing on it and shepherds graz-
ing sheep. We drove along a straight black asphalt road,
with the blue sky reflected in it.

We got to Trikkala, our bus's terminal, around three in
the afternoon, then changed to another, more local bus, to
travel for an additional half hour. We were headed for a
town called Kalambaka on the plain's northwest edge,
where a pass comes down onto it from the Pindus. The
town has some famous old monasteries behind it, which are
set on pinnacles and are called the Meteora, or "Airy
Places," and we planned to visit them.

We had the pinnacles in view all the way from Trikkala.
They were made of limestone and weirdly shaped (like
other limestone pinnacles I have seen in South China,
around Kweilin, and in the Baie d' Along of Indochina).
They were a blue-gray in the moist afternoon light, they
stood up high and mysterious, and they had deep clefts be-
tween them. We drove straight at them, trying to puzzle
out their formation, but not succeeding well.

Kalambaka, a little provincial town or village, even
lay at their feet. The pinnacles rose straight behind it, and
their tops, when we reached the place, looked almost like
clouds above us. We couldn't tell much about their layout

ATHENS 183

from below nor much about the monasteries on them
so we shouldered our baggage at once and set out to climb
them (it was latish in the afternoon now, but a near-full
moon was due). We took a still more local bus around to
the pinnacles' side, then began walking up between them
intermittently on paths and on an asphalt road accord-
ing to directions we got from shepherds and others along
the way. There were several pinnacles, it turned out, stand-
ing free from a bluff behind them and looking rather like
stalagmites. We climbed up, along rocky paths, and soon
began glimpsing the monasteries, of which five or six are
now in existence, though there used to be many more
each was on a pinnacle of its own, like the mushroom castles
that one used to see in fairy-tale illustrations. A few cen-
turies ago (we learned the next morning) all the monasteries
had used this isolation for defense against bandits. They had
been approachable only by ladders, or drawbridges, or
ropes hauled up on winches, all of which could retreat in
times of danger, to make the sites well-nigh impregnable
and also, of course, to add to their monastic seclusion, for
each had been, in theory, like a colony of pillar-saints.
Those days were ended now there were permanent
bridges leading out to the pinnacles, and permanent, if
tenuous-looking, stairways carved upward in the rock
sometimes showing on the face, and sometimes disappearing
into tunnels. The monasteries seemed run down and nearly
deserted, too, and the new asphalt road that served them
plainly for the benefit of tourists detracted from their
mystery.

We reached the bluff -top that lay behind the pinnacles
and walked along it, examining the monasteries in the twi-
light. We were heading for one of them, the farthest, which
we had heard had a hostel for visitors, but as we drew

1 84 GRECIANCALENDAR

near it a monk came out and shouted, across the intervening
chasm, that the place was closed for the season. So we
turned and walked back down to Kalambaka in the moon-
light.

We found a little hotel there, had dinner and a good
night's sleep, and the next day attacked the pinnacles again.
The monasteries themselves, we found, were not too in-
teresting they were demoralized, with only a handful of
beggarly monks in them; and their icons, though sometimes
good, seemed less so than many elsewhere in Greece. Ac-
tually the monasteries gave one a bad feeling, of institutions
petered out and turned to parasitism. But as landscape they
were well worth seeing the closest realization on earth,
perhaps, of the mushroom-castle dream.

Kalambaka was pleasant, too. It had a true mountain feel-
ing cold mud and damp air in the streets at night cold
winds coming down from the heights. While walking back
to it that first evening we picked up fine village scents
of corn roasting, pine wood burning, and all the animal
smells of cows, horses, donkeys, and their stables. The
bus station, where we spent some time, was in a region
on the edge of town that was dominated by old tires, coffee
shops, mud, primitiveness, and general dirt. It reminded
me, nostalgically, of bus-station precincts on the edges of
Chinese and Indian towns. Such places seem all to be the
same, essentially, and one imagines that they are descended
straight from the caravanserai life that prevailed until a few
decades ago.

That afternoon we got into another bus we had the
front seat again and started up through the mountains.
We were traveling on a dirt road now, and heading for
what I believe is the highest road-pass in Greece, atop the
main Pindus ridge. That is the divide that separates eastern

ATHENS 185

Greece from western. It is the country where the Greeks
stopped the Italians in the Second World War the Ital-
ians were more numerous and better armed, but the Greeks
stopped them in the Pindus and threw them back into
Albania.

As we went up the first valley, the afternoon sun shone
brilliantly on a forest of plane trees there, which were turn-
ing, almost like maples. The trees were golden and the grass
around was green. We kept on going, up and up, as sunset
came, then darkness. We passed lonely stone villages beside
the soft brown road. We rose higher and higher, and it got
colder, but before we reached the pass itself we entered a
cloud or a fog, as it seemed. The driver kept stopping,
and an assistant of his a boy kept getting out to wipe
the windshield. He would also adjust the carburetor for the
altitude, and adjust the lights to get under the fog. We
groped our way along. There were some chickens in the
bus's rear, and they clucked, and the peasant passengers
shouted commonplaces to each other. We puttered along
this way, crossing the pass at some point, then finally de-
scended from the cloud and saw bright lights far below us,
to the left. They came from Metsovo, a mountain town
where we would spend the night.

We had an introduction to a hostel there, which was part
of a museum run by the Tositsa Foundation, a philanthropy
of the family with which Evangelos Averoff -Tositsa, the
Greek Foreign Minister, was connected. The museum's
caretaker met our bus and took us there, and the place was
like an oasis in those chilly heights. The museum was de-
signed to show the old life of the region, and the hostel
was furnished accordingly. Our room had natural pine
paneling, unvarnished, and heavy pewter-colored hardware.
On the walls hung bright carpets tapestries, more strictly,

l86 GRECIAN CALENDAR

for traditional Greek rugs have no pile with the colors
red, green, and black predominating. There was a semi-
circular white-plastered fireplace with a rug, again, hung
around its mantel and also a narrow upright stove, which
the caretaker now stoked with pine chunks and made hot.
We went out for dinner in the town noting, among
other things, that cordwood was stacked high in the streets
then we came back and had a snug, warm sleep.

The next morning we gazed out the window at a ragged
mountain landscape, with light-green fields below dark pine-
woods on the facing slope. Beneath us the town fell away,
and what we looked down on were rough slate roofs on
the houses, and rough stone walks between them, giving an
over-all gray, and grainy, and rugged effect.

We had breakfast in our room, then the caretaker led us
off to the museum. It was a reconstruction of an old Tositsa
house, baronial in style, from the centuries before the
Greco-Turkish war of the 1820'$. It was a small fortress,
largely self-contained, and I guessed it was like many es-
tablishments of the lower Balkans in the Turkish period
we were in Greece politically, of course, but geographically
we seemed more to be in the Balkan wilds we seemed
worlds away from Athens and the Aegean. The house's
ground flood had a stable in it, with thick stone walls and
little barred windows. That story had a ceiled courtyard,
too, with a running fountain; also store-rooms with oil and
wine casks; and arms and saddlery. On the floor above were
kitchens and other store-rooms capable, our guide said, of
holding a November-to-April food supply for the whole
house. A good deal of this supply was stocked now re-
alistically cheese, garlic, herbs, and grain in bins. Shelves
held heaps of oregano and of an herb the Greeks call moun-
tain tea, which they boil and drink. Elsewhere the house had

ATHENS

a big sewing-room, where the women could comb wool,
and spin and weave and make the family clothes. There was
much handsome wood-carving in the place, which is typical
of mountain Greece there were wooden bins, churns,
water-tanks, chests, cabinets, and balustrades, all nicely
worked and wooden ceilings with molding patterns in
relief.

There was fine brass and copper-work too, and signs of
Turkish influence in this and the other crafts. The bedrooms
had low tables, at which one could sit on the floor in the
Asiatic style. They had broad sleeping platforms, with rug-
covered cushions ranged around their edges. Two reception
rooms had big rugs on the floors in reds, blacks, blues,
and greens, with touches of yellow and orange. And these
and other rooms had museum displays of old Greek moun-
tain costumes of evzone skirts, long stockings, pompon
shoes, and so forth.

Later that morning we were shown Foundation works
elsewhere in Metsovo, including schools, a hospital, a lumber
mill, and especially a dairying and cheese-making enterprise.
The Foundation was out to raise the standard of living in
those mountains, and it had imported Jersey and Brown
Swiss cattle, which it was crossbreeding and interbreeding
with the local varieties sending good calves out to chosen
families for foundation stock. It was also trying to replace
the sheep's-milk cheeses of the region with more sophis-
ticated cow's-milk ones it had built a cheese factory for
this purpose and had sent two youths to Italy for training.
These things were all explained to us as the Foundation's
director showed us around in Italian, which Raoul knew
well. They spoke a lot of Italian in that western part of
Greece.

Meanwhile, and later, we looked round Metsovo. The

l88 GRECIAN CALENDAR

scenery there was Alpine, with snowy peaks in the distance,
against the blue sky. Before lunch we walked out to one
edge of the town, along a slope. The air was clear there,
and we saw a crooked, silver river far below us. A cold
wind blew behind us, and all around were straight pines
with their shadows. We heard mule-bells approaching; and
far in the distance, on the slopes there, we saw a trail wind-
ing off into the mountains.

That afternoon we left Metsovo, again by bus and again
in the front seat, en route to lannina, the capital of that
whole mountain region, which is called the Epirus. We had
a baby on the bus this time, in a cradle, and again we had
peasants shouting amiably. We drove through further moun-
tains and through two valleys. In the latter we saw Vlach
shepherds, wild mountain tribesmen, with their flocks and
great big dogs they come down to those lowlands every
winter, we were told, from the heights off toward Albania.

We drove on, and just before dusk we descended on
lannina itself, a misty walled town beside a lake we
stayed there a couple of nights and then parted, I flying
back to Athens and Raoul continuing by bus to the Greek
west coast. On the morning of our day there we went out
to Dodona, a nearby classical site an old shrine of Zeus
with a famous oracle, which had expressed itself through the
rustling of oak leaves. The sanctuary was in a big valley,
with a high bare mountain to its west. There were ruins of a
temple there, and of a Byzantine basilica, and of a classical
theater that had been excavated and partly restored. There
still were oak trees, too, standing noncommittally now, with
their leaves half -gone in the autumn.

We walked in lannina a lot. It had been Turkish up to
1913, and it still had much Turkish architecture in it, in-
cluding two mosques one of them now a museum

ATHENS 189

overlooking the city wall. The lake was big, and calm as a
mirror; it had an island on it, with monasteries, and it was
said to contain many carp and perch, as well as eels. I took
in much of this, but my thoughts were turning to Athens,
and I didn't mind leaving the next morning. I had a good
flight down, the first half of it along the Pindus mountains'
western edge. From the plane I looked on wild, steep hill-
sides closely terraced. I looked from above on the razor edge
of cliffs, and into deep gorges, with streams there on their
gravel bottoms. The sky was wet and ragged on that morn-
ing, and there was lots of green now in the mountains.

Back in Athens it was winter. We still got sunny days,
and they were clearer than ever, with the dust washed from
the sky by rain. But in between we had big storms. I could
spot them in advance by watching Hymettus much as
the ancients used to do, I suppose. The main clear-weather
wind of Athens it is related to the meltemi, and blows
all summer and much of the fall is from the north. Then
as winter comes the blow is more and more from the south-
east. The wind comes from the Aegean from the Cyc-
lades all laden with rain. It blows against Sounion, the
southeast point of Attica, then comes across the land to the
Mesoghia and to Hymettus. From Hymettus's northwest
side my side and the city's the change is first seen as
clouds peeping over the ridge. They may be small and
white, especially in the early fall, then as the storms grow
serious they get darker and bigger. When the winter is
really on they loom and lower there, and they move fast,
northward. When the clouds are racing on Hymettus you
can expect no settled clarity it is only when that wind
dies down, and a sure one from the north sets in after
some uncertainty that you can count on sun.

190 GRECIAN CALENDAR

The rain rains hard at times. From my terrace I could
watch it hit a nearby apartment-house, blowing up from the
south. It would hit the tall side of the building all at once,
in a gust, and then the water would bounce and crash
down like a waterfall. My terrace wasn't much fun in
that weather, but the top of Hymettus could be fun if I
went up there. If I stood in the pass the mountainsides
would come and go in the mist, like something sensed
vaguely in a Chinese painting.

Athenian life was deep indoors now. The passing tourists
were long gone with a few exceptions though that
didn't mean that all foreigners were gone, for there is a year-
round population of Western expatriates in Athens. Lovers
of the past and haters of modernity are drawn to
Greece. So are the sexually unorthodox, for the place has
always been tolerant of that. So are beatniks, miscellaneous
escapists, and quite a few serious writers and painters. So
are do-gooders, archaeologists, and sensitive people of means
who merely like the atmosphere. The Athenian foreign
colony is numbered in the thousands. Some of its members
are precious annoyingly cultist about unspoiled Greek
islands but others make stimulating company. The colony
is divided into many subsections, which have their own rela-
tions with each other and with the Greeks on the border-
line they intermarry a lot with the latter and blur with them
almost wholly, for the Greek people are among the most
cosmopolitan on earth, welcoming strangers and going
abroad in droves to live among them.

Greek foreign relations on the personal scale are ramified
beyond description. It would take a whole book to write
about the Greek-Americans alone, and there are lots of
them in Athens now not the old, poor first-generation
ones so much (if these return to Greece, they are apt to go

ATHENS 191

to their native villages), but the young, Americanized
second-generation ones, who are on hand with their
knowledge of American ways and the Greek language
to serve as middlemen in the present close relationship of
our countries. These second-generation Greeks have been
through the fierce American melting-pot, which insists that
its products forsake their ancient culture. So while many of
them appreciate Greece, others are apt to be down on
various of its customs on the dowry system, the close
family ties, the ways of the Orthodox priesthood even,
perhaps, on the retsina and the olive-oil cooking. Not for
them the cult of unspoiled islands but the complaint,
rather, that Athens has no television. They can make a
better living in Athens at the moment than they could in
Providence or Chicago, but they miss the Coca-Cola, none-
theless. Their presence adds still more spice to the old-world
capital (and there are other spices in it, too numerous to
mention the bitter return, for instance, of so many Alex-
andrian Greeks, repelled by Egypt's nationalism) .

The winter entertainments offered by Athens, with a few
exceptions, are not unique mostly they are theaters,
movies, concerts, art exhibits, night clubs, and the like on
Western lines and sometimes of only provincial Western
quality. One great exception is the eating and drinking in
tavernas, and another is the so-called bouzouki music a
modern form coming right from the people, much as our
jazz has done, or the Calypso and Latin dances of the
Caribbean. The origins of bouzouki music are not clear.
Some say it came over from Turkey when the Greek dias-
pora returned from there in the 1920*5. Others say it grew
up entirely in Athens and the Piraeus. Its sound is no clue
to this riddle, so far as I can tell it sounds both Greek
and Asiatic and probably would in any case. Its name

I9 2 GRECIAN CALENDAR

comes from its leading instrument, the bouzouki, which is
like a mandolin with an extra-brilliant tone because, I
have been told, of sympathetic strings. A bouzouki en-
semble has two or more of these bouzoukia plus some other
stringed instruments a piano is often included and
perhaps an accordion and a set of drums. The players sit in
a row or in tiers and play with a serious mien, like the
jazz masters at Eddie Condon's in New York. Usually one
bouzoukist is a sort of soloist and improvises cadenzas while
the others follow the art is wide open to improvisation,
in both words and music, and it carries a lot of current folk-
lore with it.*

Bouzouki joints are spotted here and there in the Athenian
suburbs several are on Phaleron Bay down near the
Piraeus. They run very late at night or in the early morn-
ing, rather, and they are brilliant in sound, appearance, and
everything else even in broken glass, for in many of them
the customers may throw tumblers around if they will foot
the bill. A big place will have a special bouzouki singer

* It is "neo-folkloric," I have been told by an Athenian musicologist.
He says neo-folkloric music is common now in many parts of the
globe Asia, Africa, South America, etc. being born of the action
of Western music brought by the radio and phonograph on native
styles. Bouzouki music has both native Greek and Western elements
in it, he explains, plus the Turkish; the word bouzouki is Turkish,
he has informed me, and so is the instrument. Bouzouki artists, like
other neo-folkloric minstrels Leadbelly is an example often dwell
on themes of crime and prison life. The composer Manolis Hadjidakis
uses the bouzouki style, but raises it to an unusual degree of artistry,
in the opinion of experts Hadjidakis is esteemed in Greece for his
highbrow, as well as his popular, works. His music for the film Never
on Sunday is still being sung around the world now. It is also sung
and played in remote corners of the Greek mountains and islands,
where it functions almost interchangeably at dances, etc. with the
old folk music.

ATHENS

or two a man, say, and a sexy girl and there is also
much dancing by the clientele, solo and otherwise, on tradi-
tional Greek lines. The whole business is very Greek, very
gay, and altogether enjoyable, and I took in some of that,
too, as the winter set in.

Otherwise I was quiet, feeling the hibernation urge. I
went through most of December that way, and for Christ-
mas I withdrew to Kifissia, planning to embark from there
on my second northern trip to the 1 norther this time

without wholly returning to the city. The Christmas
part was very pleasant. I stayed in the Cecil, my old home

being cared for by the servants whom I liked so and
I walked in the community and called on friends. I stayed
through Christmas and through Boxing Day, and on the
morning of the twenty-seventh I departed in the pitch
dark, before seven o'clock in dripping drizzly weather.

I left from the Larissa Station in Athens's northern out-
skirts. The day had lightened somewhat by the time our
train a short, fast diesel automotrice pulled out. We
went through suburbs paved with slimy mud past in-
numerable of the little white houses, all helter-skelter, that
Greeks are building around their capital. Mud paths lay be-
tween them, gleaming dully under the gray sky.

We reached the countryside, the northern Athenian plain,
and there passed fig trees gray and bare again and the
grapevines, too, again were stumps. The mountains by the
plain Pentelicon and Parnis were wrapped in clouds.

We went on northward, and the landscape was fog-
bound for much of the day visible for only a mile or
so though sometimes greasy clouds were lifting, or mists
were running up and down a hillside. Wet flocks of sheep
stood near the track, and wet shepherds in their winter

194 GRECIAN CALENDAR

hooded capes. The plain of Thessaly was soggy, and green
with the new wheat the sky was gray and dark, but the
ground was the brightest green imaginable.

We passed through mountains after that, and through the
wild and cragbound Vale of Tempe like a magnified
Japanese garden which is a famous sight of Greece. Later
we broke out and were in open country again watching
the stone railway stations fly by, and watching the sodden
huts and sheepfolds. The human and animal worlds looked
miserable that day, but the vegetable one looked joyous
half submerged, but brighter and fresher than ever.

We reached Salonika in mid-afternoon. It was still rain-
ing, and I went to a hotel there, planning to lie over a day
and see the city it is the second largest in Greece, the
capital of Macedonia and the north. In the morning the
weather cleared Salonika has a famous harbor, and its
water was calm then, and bright blue, with snowy moun-
tains behind it. There are two Salonikas, really a new
city on the harborside and an older, Turkish one on the
heights above it. The new part is laid out carefully, with
tall buildings, broad streets, and monumental vistas, while
the old has cobbled alleys wandering up its hillside, penned
in by Turkish-style houses these built as usual with lots
of wood, and balconies, and irregularities (the house where
Kemal Ataturk was born a few decades before the Turks
lost the city in 1912 is in that section; it is painted a
deep red, a mulberry or salamander color). Salonika, like
Athens, is having a building boom, and new apartment-
houses of eight or ten stories are slashing into the old
Turkish part. The city has many Byzantine churches, too,
and I visited some of them, but the day was so pleasant that
I spent more time in walking.

ATHENS 195

At first the sun was pale and wintry, but by midday it was
almost hot I had lunch outside a taverna on the water-
front, and it was delightful. Salonika is a famous place for
eating. Its specialty is mussels fried in batter, but it also goes
in for other meat and seafood dishes. Its tavernas lean more
to red wine, almost, than to the white retsina of Attica and
the islands (their open red wine, served in carafes, is ex-
cellent, and they don't seem to let it get vinegary).

The morning after Salonika I pushed on, again by train,
for Alexandroupolis, a so-called city named after Alexander
the Great, which is the last real town in Greece in the
panhandle of far northeastern Thrace before you reach
Turkey on the way to Istanbul. Greek friends had not en-
couraged me about Alexandroupolis, or what I would find
there, but I wanted to see it anyway, and have a look at
Thrace, to round my year out.

We set off early in the morning again, and the day was
gray, though not too rainy. We started norward and then
turned east, running not far from the Yugoslav, and later the
Bulgarian, frontier. There were lakes up in that country,
and also mountains, of course, and fresh green fields and
poplars. We went under snowy heights that lost themselves
in the clouds, and we saw dark bare fruit trees in the fields.

I was in an automotrice again a swift, de luxe means
of travel theoretically, though the non-de-luxe qualities of
Thrace had altered this (apparently few rich Greeks go on
that line unless they have to) . I was in a first-class section,
having bought a ticket for it out of curiosity. I think I
held the only such ticket on the train, yet still the section,
which had twenty-four seats, was full much of the time.
People swarmed into it at the stations, and the manage-
ment had long despaired, apparently, of stopping them

196 GRECIAN CALENDAR

weathered old peasants would sit next to me, gazing through
unaccustomed glass at their countryside, which was raw,
and crude, and mountainous, and bosky.

Much of the time we went along narrow valleys, with the
gray clouds pressing down on them. Brown rivers surged
along beside us. I had been reading of Thrace in Herodotus
and Thucydides. In the Persian wars Xerxes, according to
Herodotus, had taken his huge, motley Afro-Asian army
through there they often drank the rivers dry, he said
and I could almost feel their morale sinking in those moun-
tains. Then in the Peloponnesian War according to Thu-
cydides the Athenians and Spartans had fought in-
terminably over the Greek colonies in Thrace; it had seemed
a dismal, distant contest as he described it like a struggle
now for Patagonia and as I gazed I could see why. Later
Alexander the Great, of course, had used Thrace, along
with Macedonia, as a base in his mighty effort to unify the
West and East; what I felt about that, as we rolled along,
was that if he could tame Thrace he could have tamed al-
most anything.

We went on into afternoon, and the dead-gray sky per-
sisted. Sometimes there were green cabbages in the fields,
and always there were brown and wintry hillsides. Many
Turks are left in Thrace they were exempted from the
exchange-of-populations agreement of the early 'twenties
and now we saw signs of them from time to time. In one
town, Xanthi, we saw half a dozen mosques, with their
white pointed minarets. It was easy to feel that we were
leaving Christendom.

In the afternoon the ride took all the daytime I
was approached by a furtive, portly Greek. He had trouble
talking with me, for he knew no foreign language, and my
own Greek was badly limited, but he had something he

ATHENS

wanted desperately to say. He kept drawing sketches to ex-
plain himself, but he hid them cagily if he thought someone
was looking. It turned out, finally, that he had old coins
to sell which was against the law, according to him
and he said he would bring them to my hotel in the morn-
ing, for he, too, was bound for Alexandroupolis, and lived
there. He helped me find the hotel, indeed, when we ar-
rived it was a clean little place, and warm enough, but
primitive.

The town was primitive, too. Good food it seemed to
have good seafood especially, for it was on the north
shore of the Aegean yet wander as I might I saw nothing
in the shops but garish things as if to dazzle the back-
woodsmen that must have come from Athens or Salonika.
Alexandroupolis seemed to produce nothing itself unless
one counted vitality. The people in the streets looked rugged
and unrefined, and the whole place seemed typical of a
frontier outpost, which it was. The Greeks seemed to be
emphasizing it as that, in fact as a punctuation mark at
their country's end for they had endowed the town with
a little airfield, and snappy harbor installations, and nobler
public buildings than seemed really warranted.

I glimpsed these things a little walking, for instance,
on the grand and lonely esplanade but I didn't delve into
them. Toward noon I went back and received the hot-coin
merchant. He mysteriously unveiled two coins with the
head of Philip of Macedon looking like an Indian in a
war-bonnet and a few more of Alexander himself, but I
did no buying. I looked at the wares respectfully, then
changed the subject. Later I wandered some more in Alex-
ander's City. Then I caught a small plane out of it, and that
was the end of my year's investigations.

EPITOME OF GREEK HISTORY

The earliest known high civilization in Greece was the Minoan,
on Crete, which flourished in the second millennium B.C. and ended
around 1400. It was succeeded by the Mycenean, which fell around
1150, yielding to a dark age.

Classical Greek civilization emerged a few centuries later. By the
sixth century B.C. Greek arts and letters were in full swing, espe-
cially in Ionia (Greek Asia and the east Aegean islands) Sappho
and Pythagoras were among the early lights there. The expanding
Persian empire encroached on that Ionian side of the Greek world,
though; the Athenians led the other Greeks in aiding resistance;
and finally the Persians resolved to cross into Europe and punish
Athens. Their first expedition was stopped at Marathon in 490 B.C.;
their second was stopped at Salamis in 480 and conclusively wiped
out at Plataea in 479; and after that Europe was safe.

Athens had led the Greeks, essentially, in these wars, and after-
ward she led them in the arts of peace through much of the fifth
century. It was in that century that Pericles governed, Socrates
taught, the great tragedies were written, and the Parthenon,
Erechtheion, Propylea, and Temple of Athena Nike were built on
the Athenian Acropolis. In 431, however, Athens got embroiled
with Sparta in the Great Peloponnesian War, which lasted till 404

200 EPITONE OF GREEK HISTORY

and left her exhausted. Long, ruinous struggles followed between
the various Greek states Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, Arcadia,
Boeotia, Euboea, Argos, Elis, Thessaly, Macedonia, etc. till their
unification by Philip and Alexander of Macedon in the latter part
of the fourth century.

Alexander spread Greek rule to Asia and Africa, but on his
death (323 B.C.) his Hellenistic Empire fell apart into warring states.
The growing power of Rome was soon felt in that struggle; she
destroyed Corinth in 146 B.C. and for centuries afterward was mis-
tress in the Greek region.

Meanwhile Christianity appeared, began superseding paganism,
and in 323 A.D. was embraced by Constantine, who made Constanti-
nople the capital of his Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. This
empire was Roman at first, but became Greek in language and out-
look the Orthodox faith was its religion. It lasted eleven centuries,
though its rule was checkered Arabs, Crusaders, and others held
parts of Greece for long periods of its life.

In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks, who controlled Greece
till 1821, again with local exceptions.

In 1821 the Greek War of Liberation began. It took long to com-
plete the Turks still held much of modern Greece in 1912. The
new Greek government, dating from 1832, has been European in
outlook and style generally a monarchy. Greece fought a dis-
astrous war with Turkey in 1919-23, followed by an exchange of
populations. In the Second World War she went through a harsh
occupation by the Italians and Germans. Then came two Com-
munist insurrections, the second ending in 1949. They have been
followed by an era of co-operation with NATO and the West
especially with the U.S., which became heavily involved in Greek
affairs by the Truman Doctrine of 1947.

INDEX OF PLACES MENTIONED

Adriatic Sea, 5, 7, 37f.n., 76

Aegean Sea, 7, 8, 9, 17, 3 6ff, 85,
86, loof.n., 101, 106, 136,
141, 144^ 161, 170, 189,
197

Aegina, 7, 36, 139, 141

Aghios Andreas, 30

Aigaleos, Mount, 17, 1 8

Albania, 5, 185, 188

Alexandroupolis, 195^

Amorgos, 36, 48, 49, 136

Andros, i2$ff

Arcadia, 82, 92

Argolis, Plain of, 86

Argos, 86

Asia Minor, 36

Astiria, 138

Athens is mentioned repeatedly
in this book. The more sub-
stantial accounts are on
5 off,

Athens, Acropolis, 14, 17, 18, 53,
117, i34#, 165^, ijiff;
museums, 84, 173^; the
Plaka, 53, 171-2
Athos, Mount, 21, 44
Attica, 13^, 37, 140, 142-3

Bassae, 93
Batsi, i26ff
Batum, 162
Black Sea, 47, i6iff
Boeotia, 181
Bosporus, 47, 161
Brindisi, 3-4, 91
Budrum, 152, 157^
Bulgaria, 195
Byzantium, i64f.n.

Cephalonia, 6
Cithaeron, Mount, 66
Cnossos, 85, 145$
Constantinople, 164

202 INDEX

Copias, Plain of, 181 lannina, 188-9

Corfu, 5, 12, 3yf.n. Icaria, 36

Corinth, 5, 60, 62, 83, 86, 89^ Ilissia, 169^

Corinth Canal, 7-8 Istanbul, 164, 195

Corinth, Gulf of, 7, 12, 68, 74^, Itea, Bay of, 68, 76

91 Ithaca, 6
Crete, 12, 37, 84, 85, 145^, 152

Crimea, 162 Kalambaka, 182^

Cyclades, 37^, 116, iiyflF, 124, Kalymnos, 36, 44-5, 48, 136

I2 5ff> i3 6 ff, i5 2 > i53ff? l8 9 Karystos, 127

Kea, 36

Daphni, 64-5 Kifissia, 8ff, 50, 125, i 3 2/f, 193

Dardanelles, 48, 127, 161 Kos > 1 6 > 44 47, 89, 136, 152, 154

Delos, 36, 37, 41, 96, 97, u 5 flF, K 7 llini > '38

130, 136, 152, 160-66

Delphi, 60, 62, 6 5 ff, 91, n 7 f.n., Lamia ' l82

153 Lesbos, 37

Dodecanese Islands, 37 ff Levadheia, 65-6

Dodona, 188 Lindos, 156

Lycabettus, 18

Eleusis. 140 \M i

\T * Macedonia, 194

pano at y, 39 Marathon, 14, 17, 19, 28, 29,

^ ph f SUS ' 36 Mesoghia, 28, , 79 /f, 189

Epidaurus, 54 ff, 88ff, I35 MeteL,

Epirus, 1 88 Ayf '

TT . ^ Metsovo,

Euboea, 37, 125^ , ,.

J/ ' ^^ Mistra, 93

Mycenae, 27, 60, 62, 82/f

Gavrion, 127 Mykonos, 36, 41, 43, 95 f, 136,

152
Halicarnassus, 152, 157^

Helicon, Mount, 66 Nauplion, 82, 86

Herakleion, 145^ Naxos, 36, 50, 117, 136
Hydra, 37, i 4 if

Hymettus, Mount, 12, 16, 17, 28, Odessa, 162

, iSyff Olympia, 60, 77/7, 91, 92

INDEX

Parnassus, Mount, 66, 68
Parnis, Mount, 16-18
Paros, 118
Patmos, 36, 42, 44, 136, 152,

Patras, 91

Peloponnesus, 12, 37, 55, j6ff,

9 iff, 138

Pentelicon, Mount, 9, i^ff
Phaestos, 150
Pindus, 1 8 iff
Piraeus, 8, 17, 18, 25, 30, 36, 37,

42, 50, 55, 59, 97, 101, 125,

129, 192
Pylos, 85

Raphina, 24^, 125-6

Reneia, 118

Rhodes, 37, 116, 136^, 152, 153^

Salonika, 129, 171, 194-5
Samos, 36^, 73
Samothrace, 37
Sochi, 162
Sokoumi, 162
Sounion, 140-41, 189
Sparta, 5, 93

20 3

Sporades, Northern, 37f.n.
Stamata, 31-2
Syra, 36, 50, 118

Taygetus, 93

Tempe, Vale of, 194

Thebes, 181

Thermopylae, 181

Thessaloniki (see Salonika)

Thessaly, iSiff, 194

Thrace, 195^

Tinos, 88, 118, 125^, 136

Tiryns, 82, 86

Tourko Limani, 25

Trebizond, i62f.n.

Trikkala, iSiff

Tripolis, 92

Turkey, 40, 42, 43, 157^, 195

Vathy, 39
Vitina, 92
Vrana, 31

Xanthi, 196

Yalta, 162
Yugoslavia, 3, 195