The Near East: Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople — Edition Insights

ear which, in his palace at Spalato, he spent the last eight years of his life, cultivating his garden, seeking after philosophy, and, let us hope, repenting of his bitter persecution of the Christians. From the hill, on the site of the Basilica Urbana, I saw one of those frigid and almost terrible lemon sunsets which come with the wind of the dead. I stayed till night despite the intense cold, till the fragments of the city, scattered far over the sloping ground above the riviera of the Sette Castelli, and creeping up to the solitary dwelling-house built by Professor Bulic of old Roman stones, took on sad and unnatural pallors in the darkness, till lonely columns stood up like watching specters, and fragments of wall were like specters crouching. For a long while the lemon hue persisted in the western sky, and the voice of the wind rose with the night, crying among the burial-places.

A few hours' voyage on a splendid ship, and you step ashore at Gravosa, the port for Ragusa, the most popular place in Dalmatia, and in many ways the most attractive. For it is embowered in woods and gardens; contains remarkable old buildings; is girdled about by tremendous fortress walls, and by forts perched on bastions of rock overlooking the sea and the isle of Lacroma, where Richard Cœur de Lion touched land and founded a monastery; is thoroughly and deliciously medieval, yet full of Slav and Austrian life; possesses a railway-station, many well-built villas, and a good hotel, and is surrounded by delightful country. Perhaps in all Dalmatia Ragusa is the best center from which to take long walks and make expeditions. It is cheery, cozy, and wonderful at the same time. The terrific walls of the fortresses do not appal or overwhelm, for all about them cluster the gardens. Ivy climbs over the archways. In what was once a moat the grass grows thickly, the flowers bloom, and many trees give shade. This is a medieval paradise, and its inhabitants have reason to rejoice in it and to say there is no place like it.

Though small, it is intricate. At every moment one is surprised by some unexpected view, by some marvel of masonry, militant or ecclesiastical; by a fountain or a statue, an old doorway, a courtyard, a campanile, an exquisite façade, with arches and lovely columns, balconies and carved window-frames; by cloisters, a strange alley ending in flights of steps, which lead to a mountain from which a fort looks down; by a secret harbor, or a secret garden, or a little magical grove nestling beneath a protecting wall which dates from the Middle Ages, when Ragusa was a proud republic.

Was Burne-Jones ever in Ragusa? It is like one of the little enchanted towns he loved to paint in the backgrounds of his pictures. Was William Morris ever there? It is like a city in one of his poems. It is full of churches, and their towers are full of bells. Monks and priests pass perpetually through the narrow streets with smartly dressed Austrian soldiers. And military music, the triumph of bugles and trumpets, the beat and rattle of drums, joins with the drowsy sound of church organs, and the old voices of clocks chiming the hours, to make the symphony of Ragusa. Men and women from the Breno Valley, from Canali the golden, where oaks grow among the rocks, and the autumn vineyards are a wonder forever to haunt the memory, from Melada and the Stag Islands, from the Ombla and Herzegovina, pass all day down "the Stradone," stroll in the Brsalje, a piazza with mulberry-trees overlooking the sea, talk by the Amerling fountain, or sit on the wall by Porta Pille under the statue of San Biagio, the patron saint of the town. And each one is in a picturesque, perhaps even a brilliant, costume. The men often wear long chains, and carry handsomely chased weapons and long, elaborate pipes. Some have sheepskins flung jauntily over their shoulders, and bright-red caps. The women wear golden ornaments, embroidered jackets, and marvelous aprons almost like prayer-rugs, handsome pins, pleated head-dresses, bright-colored handkerchiefs or tiny caps, coins hanging on chains over their thickly growing hair.

The chief hotels, the villas, and the railway-station, where a row of victorias is drawn up,--for this is no Zara, but a city which believes that it "moves with the times,"--lie among roses, oleanders, single rhododendrons, trees, and masses of luxuriant vegetation outside Porta Pille. As soon as you have passed beneath San Biagio and descended the hill, you are in a bright, medieval world, in the heart of one of the most original and fascinating little cities that exists in Europe.

On the left of the Stradone, the chief street and the newest, between two and three hundred years old, at right angles to it, shadowed by tall and ancient houses, tiny alleys, ending in steep flights of steps, lead up toward the mountain. On the flat to its right is a happy maze of alleys, clean, strange, old, yet never sad. A delicious cheerfulness reigns in Ragusa. From the dimness of venerable doorways smiling faces look forth. They lean down from carved stone balconies. Gay voices chatter at the foot of frowning walls, huge bastions, mighty watch-towers; before the statue of Roland, near the Dogana which has a loggia and Gothic windows; by the fine and massive Onofrio fountain, which for over four hundred and seventy years has given water to the inhabitants; among the doves by Porta Place, which leads to the harbor. The wide, but intimate, Stradone toward noon and evening is thronged with cheerful and neatly dressed citizens, strolling to and fro in the soft air between the delicious little shops full of fine rugs, weapons, chains, and filigree ornaments.

Opposite the fountain of Onofrio are the church, monastery, and cloisters of the Franciscans, with a courtyard and an old pharmacy containing some wonderful vases. At the east end of the Stradone, away to the right, are the church of San Biagio, the cathedral, and the Palazzo dei Rettori. On the other side of the street are the military hospital and the church of the Jesuits. Not far away is the Dominican monastery.

Of these the most remarkable is the rector's palace. But the cloisters of the Franciscans are beautiful and hold an extraordinary charm and peace. The rector's palace is a noble Renaissance building, with a courtyard containing a very handsome staircase, and with a really splendid fifteenth-century colonnade fronting the piazza. The carving of the capitals of the columns is wonderfully effective. Three are said to be inferior to the remaining four, which were the work of an architect of Naples, Onofrio. But all are remarkable. The little winged boys have a tenderness and liveliness, a softness and activity, which are quite exquisite. The windows of Venetian Gothic are beautiful; and the whole effect of this façade, with its carved doorway, the round arches, richly dark, with notes of white, the two tiers of stone seats raised one above the other, and the double rows of windows, square and arched, in the shadow of the colonnade, is absolutely noble.

The cathedral is not very interesting, and the "Assumption" over the high altar, though attributed to Titian, cannot be by him. Much more attractive is a copy of the Madonna della Sedia of Raphael. The treasury contains some remarkable jewels and silver and many relics.

In the Dominican church there is a genuine Titian, and there are some very curious and interesting pictures by Nicolo Ragusano, a painter of Ragusa who lived in the fifteenth century. The cloisters contain a white well-head, guarded by graceful columns, orange-trees, and flowers, above which peer the small windows of the monks. But if one had to be a monk in Ragusa, surely it would be wise to cast in your lot with the Franciscans at the other end of the street, whose Romanesque fourteenth-century cloisters with octagonal columns are quite beautiful and in excellent preservation. The capitals of the columns are carved with animals. Palms flourish there, and roses. Above, a terrace, with a wonderful balustrade--a series of tiny arches resting on tiny columns, a sort of stone echo of the arches and columns below,--runs all round the court. The peace is profound, but not sad. As one lingers there one can understand, indeed one can scarcely help understanding, the very peculiar charm which must often attach to the monkish life.

Ragusa contains some nine thousand inhabitants. One of them remarked that eight hundred of these were ecclesiastics. And he was unsympathetic enough to add, "E molto troppo!" Perhaps his statement was untrue. But certainly the ways of Ragusa swarm with religious. Nevertheless,--one thinks of Rome, with its crowds of priests and its crowds of free-thinkers,--the inhabitants of Ragusa seem to be very devout. In almost all of the many churches, at all times of the day, people may be found praying, meditating, telling their beads, worshiping at shrines of the saints.

Around Ragusa there are many beautiful walks, on Lacroma, on Lapad by Gravosa, on Monte Sergio, on Monte Petka. A really superb drive is the expedition to Castelnuovo in the Bocche di Cattaro, along the Dalmatian riviera, which is as fine as almost any part of the French riviera, and which is still wild and natural, not yet turned into a vanity-box. Those who take this glorious drive will cross the frontier into Herzegovina, and, best of all, they will pass by the wonderful vineyards of Canali, which roll in waves of gold to the very feet of a chain of naked and savage mountains.

The voyage from Ragusa to Cattaro is one of the finest in Europe. The entrance into the bocche, the journey through them, and the arrival at Cattaro, hidden away like some precious thing that must not be revealed to the dull gaze of the ordinary world, almost, but mercifully not quite, under the giant shadow of the Black Mountain, make for the voyager what comes to seem at length a deliberately planned, and triumphantly carried out, scenic crescendo, which closes in sheer magic.

The coast of Dalmatia is guarded by chains of islands and is pierced by many long and narrow inlets. During the voyage from Triest or Fiume to the extreme south of the country, the ship, often for many hours, seems to be traveling over a series of lakes. Rarely does she emerge into open water. But between Gravosa and the bocche there is open sea. Nature has not neglected to make her preparations. She gives you the stretch of open sea as a contrast to what is coming. And just when you are beginning to feel its monotony, the prow of the vessel veers to the left, seems to be sensitively searching for some unseen opening in the rugged coast. She finds that opening between Punta d'Ostro and Punta d'Arza, leaving the little isle of Rondoni, with its round, yellow fort, on the right and the open sea behind.

The mountains which guard the bocche are nearly six thousand feet high, bare, cruelly precipitous, in color a peculiar, almost ashy, gray. When you are at a long distance from them they seem to descend sheer into the water; but as you draw nearer over the waveless sea, you find that along their bases runs a strip of beautiful fertile country, green, thickly wooded in many places, with gay little villages set among radiant gardens, with a white highroad, along which peasants are passing. There is Castelnuovo on its hill among leafy groves, with its old, narrow fortress on the rock fought for by Turks and Venetians; near by is Zelenika; and there another large fortress, with the Austrian flag above it. The sensitive prow of the ship veers again, this time to the southeast, where the ash-gray precipices surely hold the sea forever in check. But the ship knows better. The Canale di Kumbur shows itself, leading to the splendid Bay of Teodo surreptitiously observed from afar by the mountains of Montenegro. If you held your breath and listened, might you not hear the boom of guns by the lake of Scutari? All sense of being at sea fades from you as the ship penetrates ever more deeply into the secret recesses of the mountains. This is like superb lake scenery, austere, grand, almost terrible, and yet radiant. Nature is even coquettish on this perfect morning of autumn, for in these remoter regions she has cast a swathe of the lightest and whitest possible mist, like one of those scarfs of Tunis, over the cultivated land which edges the precipices. As the ship draws near, the mist seems to disperse in a sparkle of gold, revealing intimate beauties, full of charming detail: a little Byzantine church with a pale-green cupola, a priest in a sunny garden leaning over a creeper-covered wall, white horses trotting briskly along a curly, white road, soldiers marching through a village with a faint beat of drums, children perhaps going to school through a riot of green. But the mist is ever there in the distance, part of the spirit of autumn.

Do not miss the tiny twin islands with their two little churches. One of them, Santa Maria dello Scalpello, is a place of pilgrimage. Old, gray, minute yet dignified, with its few tall cypresses about it, it so completely covers the island that you see only a church with cypresses apparently floating upon the water. Now there is a scatter of ivory-white birds on the steel-colored surface, a glint of powder-blue on the ridges made by the ship. Marvelous harmonies of pearl color, gray, and blue, with here and there faint dashes of primrose-yellow, make magic in the distance before you. This is really an enchanted place, home of a peace that seems touched with eternity. And the ship creeps on, as if fearing perhaps to disturb it, farther and farther into places more secret still, and of a peace even more profound, till the pearl color and the gray, with their hints of yellow and blue, begin to give way to another dominion. The last bay has been gained. The secret of Cattaro is to be at length revealed. Through the wondrous delicacies of the now rather suggested than actually seen mist, and above them, dawns a marvelous pageant of autumn, which bears a curiously exact resemblance to one of Turner's superb visions.

It is like a dream, but a dream of ardor and power, in which browns, reds, russets, greens, and many shades of gold and of yellow march together from the circle of the waters through climbing valleys to the mountains, which here at last give pause to the sea. And bells are ringing in this great, this triumphant dream. And now surely faint outlines are becoming visible, as of turrets and cupolas striving to break in glory through the mist. The fires of autumn glow more fiercely, like a furnace fanned. Trails of smoke show here and there. Mist, smoke, and fire--it is like a grand conflagration. The turrets reveal themselves as great groups of trees. But the smoke rises from household fires; the cupolas are cupolas of churches; and the bells are the bells of Cattaro, calling from this vale of enchantment to the cannon which are thundering before Scutari beyond the mountains of Montenegro.

What Greece is like in spring, I do not know, when rains have fallen, and round Athens the country is green, when the white dust perhaps does not whirl through Constitution Square and over the garden about the Zappeion, when the intensity of the sun is not fierce on the road to the bare Acropolis, and the guardians of the Parthenon, in their long coats the color of a dervish's hat, do not fall asleep in the patches of shade cast on the hot ground by Doric columns. I was there at the end of the summer, and many said to me, "You should come in spring, when it is green."

Greece must be very different then, but can it be much more beautiful?

Disembark at the Piræus at dawn, take a carriage, and drive by Phalerum, the bathing-place of the Athenians, to Athens at the end of the summer, and though for just six months no rain has fallen, you will enter a bath of dew. The road is dry and dusty, but there is no wind, and the dust lies still. The atmosphere is marvelously clear, as it is, say, at Ismailia in the early morning. The Hellenes, when they are talking quite naturally, if they speak of Europe, always speak of it as a continent in which Greece is not included. They talk of "going to Europe." They say to the English stranger, "You come to us fresh from Europe." And as you drive toward Athens you understand.

This country is part of the East, although the Greeks were the people who saved Europe from being dominated by the races of Asia. All about you--you have not yet reached Phalerum--you see country that looks like the beginning of a desert, that holds a fascination of the desert. The few trees stand up like carved things. The small, Eastern-looking houses, many of them with flat roofs, earth-colored, white, or tinted with mauve and pale colors, scattered casually and apparently without any plan over the absolutely bare and tawny ground, look from a distance as if they, too, were carved, as if they were actually a part of the substance of their environment, not imposed upon it by an outside force. The moving figure of a man, wearing the white fustanella, has the strange beauty of an Arab moving alone in the vast sands. And yet there is something here that is certainly not of Europe, but that is not wholly of the East--something very delicate, very pure, very sensitive, very individual, free from the Eastern drowsiness, from the heavy Eastern perfume which disposes the soul of man to inertia.

It is the exquisite, vital, one might almost say intellectual, freshness of Greece which, between Europe and Asia, preserves its eternal dewdrops--those dewdrops which still make it the land of the early morning.

Your carriage turns to the right, and in a moment you are driving along the shore of a sea without wave or even ripple. In the distance, across the purple water, is the calm mountain of the island of Ægina. Over there, along the curve of the sandy bay, are the clustering houses of old Phalerum. This is new Phalerum, with its wooden bath-houses, its one great hotel, its kiosks and cafés, its shadeless plage, deserted now except for one old gentleman who, like almost every Greek all over the country, is at this moment reading a newspaper in the sun.

Is there any special charm in new Phalerum, bare of trees, a little cockney of aspect, any exceptional beauty in this bay? When you have bathed there a few times, when you have walked along the shore in the quiet evening, breathing the exquisite air, when you have dined in a café of old Phalerum built out into the sea, and come back by boat through the silver of a moon to the little tram station whence you return to Athens, you will probably find that there is. And from what other bay can you see the temple of the Parthenon as you see it from the bay of Phalerum?

You have your first vision of it now, as you look away from the sea, lifted very high on its great rock of the Acropolis as on a throne. Though far off, nevertheless its majesty is essentially the same, casts the same tremendous influence upon you here as it does when you stand at the very feet of its mighty columns. At once you know, not because of the legend of greatness attaching to it, or because of the historical associations clinging about it, but simply because of the feeling in your own soul roused by its white silhouette in this morning hour, that the soul of Greece--eternal majesty, supreme greatness, divine calm, and that remoteness from which, perhaps, no perfect thing, either God-made or, because of God's breath in him, man-made, is wholly exempt--is lifted high before you under the cloudless heaven of dawn.

You may even realize at once and forever, as you send on your carriage and stand for a while quite alone on the sands, gazing, that to you the soul of Greece must always seem to be Doric. From afar the Doric conquers.