Studies of Travel: Greece — Reading Companion

ly yesterday the tower of the Dukes of Athens was standing. Its stern and heavy mass well broke the horizontal lines of the Greek architecture, and gave to the whole group somewhat of that outline which the hill of Laon has, and which the hill of Athens has not. But the tower was late; it was barbarous; it did not belong to the two or three favoured ages; it was a reminder of times which the exclusive votaries of those two or three favoured ages would fain wipe out from the records of mankind. Mr. Mahaffy, indeed, who cannot distinguish between the taking of Constantinople in 1204 and the taking of Athens in 1687, believed that Morosini had found time to build this massive tower during the few weeks of his occupation. Mr. Mahaffy, who looks on the Akropolis as so sacred that it was a sin to bombard it, even to drive the Turks out of it--who seems to think freedom and national being something of less moment than the preservation of this or that statue or column--calls for its destruction in his text and crows over its completed destruction in a note. Of this piece of wanton barbarism Dr. Schliemann must bear the blame. Who, if any, were his Greek accomplices, we have forborne to ask. But the tower is gone; a most striking memorial of one age in the history of Athens has been swept away, under the paltry pretext that inscriptions might be found among its materials. By a righteous Nemesis, when the destroyers had finished their work of havoc, they found nothing to reward them.

We can conceive nothing more paltry, nothing more narrow, nothing more opposed to the true spirit of scholarship, than these attempts to wipe out the history of any age. So far from destroying the ducal tower, we would have kept the Turkish minaret. For the Parthenôn, already the temple of heathendom and of two forms of Christianity, became in the end the temple of Islam. A mosque had of course its minaret. Its lower part is still there in the form of a staircase, but the characteristic upper part has vanished. We know not how it vanished, whether through wanton destruction or in one of the sieges in the seventeenth or the nineteenth century. In any case, we should have been well pleased to see both minaret and tower breaking the outline, and speaking of days which have been, but which have passed away. Greece is free; the rule both of the Frank and of the Turk is gone; but that is no reason why the memorials of either Frank or Turk should be swept away. A higher national feeling would keep them carefully as trophies of victory. At all events, let not men, calling themselves scholars, lend themselves to such deeds of wanton destruction. The name of Morosini is unfairly held up to execration because an accident of warfare, which he could not control, made him the destroyer of the Parthenôn. A far heavier blame rests on those who were the deliberate destroyers of the ducal tower. On them indeed may well fall the words of withering scorn in which Byron so well couples the destroying names of Eratostratos and Elgin.

Athens Below the Akropolis.

The main characteristic of modern Athens, and one of its chief points of contrast with Rome, is that whatever is not very old is so very new. But the visitor is apt at once to press this characteristic further than strict truth warrants, and to draw a more strongly marked geographical limit between old and new than strict truth warrants either. At first sight we are apt to fancy that everything that is old stands above, and that everything that is new lies below. The fact that the greatest work of all, the temple of Olympian Zeus, happens to lie below, hardly makes a practical exception. By the loss of so many of its columns it has ceased to be in appearance the greatest work of all, and, what is more to the point, it has practically ceased to be part of the city. It lies outside and alone, apart both from the Akropolis and the modern city. It joins indeed to make one of the best and most familiar views of the Akropolis, but it joins only as a foreground to a distant object. To take Mr. Mahaffy’s illustration, it has come to stand to the Akropolis as Hoar Abbey stands to the Rock of Cashel. On another side, the Thêseion, in its absolute perfection as it is seen in any general view, stands as a kind of intermediate link between the upper and the lower region. Otherwise the impression given by the general view of Athens is that the old things are all above, as, with one or two exceptions which need not be dwelled on, the new things undoubtedly are below. The Akropolis seems to throw out the hill of the Mouseion with the monument of Philopappos as a kind of outwork; and, if we take in objects which cannot be seen at the first glance, the most remarkable and venerable objects, the remains of the ancient walls, the tombs cut in the rock, the seats of the Pnyx, the steps on the hill of Arês, all lie on the upper ground. Against these, setting aside very recent diggings, the low city seems to have nothing to set, except a mass of modern and ugly houses and one modern house bigger and uglier than the rest.

This impression is not untrue as regards the general aspect of the city, but it breaks down when we come to examine things somewhat more in detail. There is more of antiquity in the modern city of Athens than one thinks at first sight; still the comparative rarity of ancient remains, and the strong contrast between such as there are and the modern buildings, form a distinct feature in the character of Athens, as distinguished from cities which present to us an unbroken series of monuments from the earlier times to the latest. Again, it is true that, of such ancient remains as there are, the greater part seem, as it were, to shelter themselves under the shadow of the Akropolis, and but few of them belong to the most brilliant times of Athenian history. The Thêseion, standing as a link between the upper and the lower city, has a position of its own. The most perfect of existing Greek temples, it might alone make the fortune of Athens as a place of artistic pilgrimage, even were there nothing else there to see. In the general view it seems to be absolutely perfect. The one small change which it has undergone reminds us at once of a living page of history and of the folly of those who labour in vain to wipe out history. The temple, like its greater fellow on the Akropolis, became a church, but in its new character it still kept a certain appropriate remembrance of its older use. As the house of the Virgin still remained the house of the Virgin, so the house of the warrior hero remained, as the church of St. George, the house of a warrior saint. If, as some say, the older dedication was really not to Thêseus but to Hêraklês, the parallel is in no way weakened, but rather strengthened. Thêseus indeed overthrew the Marathonian bull; but Hêraklês and St. George were alike victorious over dragons. To fit the building for its new use, no change seems to have been needed, beyond taking down two columns of the inner range of the eastern front to make room for the apse of the converted basilica. The caprice of a generation back took away the apse without restoring the columns, and so left the building in a state which would seem incomplete in the eyes of either its heathen or its Christian patrons. Thêseus might ask for his columns; George might ask for his apse; and the common robber of both would be hard put to for an answer. Now, as one of the many detached museums of Athens, the Thêseion contains a collection of sculptures, inscriptions, and architectural fragments, pre-eminent among which is the archaic statue wrought by Aristiôn, which looks so unpleasantly like a specimen of barbaric art. Still, why may we not hold that in sculpture, as in so many other things, likeness does not prove direct connexion, but merely analogy of stage? At all events, Assyria never made anything better than the work of Aristiôn, while Athens went on and grew from the stage of Aristiôn into the stage of Pheidias.

Before the diggings in the Kerameikos which have brought to light such choice sculptures, as well as a large part of the city wall and the Dipylon gate, the Thêseion stood almost alone as a representative of the great days of Athens on ground lower than the Akropolis and the hills which front it. The theatre of Dionysos and the other buildings which have been dug out from the side of the hill are rather part of the Akropolis itself. The temple of Olympian Zeus, and its feeble companion, the Arch of Hadrian, stand apart and make a feeble company by themselves. In that part, however, of the modern city which lies nearest under the Akropolis, we still have a collection of remains of later Greek and Roman times, while such of the Byzantine churches as are left scattered here and there through the city form a study of surprising interest in their own class. All the world knows the monument of Lysikratês and the later _hôrologion_ of Andronikos Kyrrhestês, better known as the Temple of the Eight Winds. Perhaps all the world does not know the singular way in which they were adapted to the uses of rival creeds, how Franciscan friars found a home under the graceful Corinthian finial of Lysikratês, while howling dervishes quartered themselves under the pagan symbols of Andronikos. We mourn as we look at the graceful toy of Lysikratês, the parent of a whole class of structures at St. Remi and Igel--is it sacrilege to add Northampton, Geddington, and Waltham? Genuine Greek Corinthian capitals are so rare that it is sad to see that not one is altogether perfect.

The _hôrologion_ of Andronikos--if it is lawful to speak so freely of anything built at Athens before the Christian era--has never struck us as anything specially graceful, but it is one of the links which directly connect the ancient and the modern city. It stands at what we may call the ancient end of one of the great modern streets, one which seems to represent an ancient street and which from this monument bears the name of Aiolos. But the quarter where the _hôrologion_ stands is one of the quarters where these later and lesser antiquities stand thickest on the ground. Not far off is the _Stoa_ of Hadrian, where the Imperial architect, forsaking the fashion of his own day, tries, like our modern architects, to call up the forms of a past time, and reproduces the ancient Doric, of course in its slenderer form. But this whole quarter is full of remains of one kind and another. The bazaar is in every sense a link to past times; an ancient wall fences it in, and the sight within, so unlike the European streets of the more polished quarters, reminds us that Athens once was an Eastern city. Various scraps lie around us; here are two little forsaken churches side by side forming in a manner one building; the cupola of one is half broken down, and its bell-gable, its κωδωνοστάσιον, is perched on a neighbouring colonnade. Not far off are two buildings, works of intrusive powers and intrusive architecture, both of which form part of the history of the city, and of which the one ought to be preserved as carefully as the other. No one is likely to propose to destroy the colonnade of Roman Corinthian work because its capitals are not of the same types as the capitals of Lysikratês. But it is equally needful to keep the one mosque which remains from Turkish Athens, a building whose style stands to that of the Byzantine churches in somewhat the same relation in which the Roman colonnades stand to the true Grecian. The mosque stands applied to some military purpose. A worthier use for it, a better badge of triumph and deliverance, would have been to make it a memorial church for some of the heroes of the War of Independence. In the same quarter, drawing near to the Thêseion, are the remains of the _gymnasion_ of Ptolemy, where a crowd of inscriptions of various dates tempt us to spell them out, till we light on one which contains the name of the wife of Hêrôdês of Marathôn. His theatre is on the other side of the Akropolis, forming part, like the elder theatre, of the Akropolis itself. But it is in the quarter to the north of the Akropolis, the quarter of the new _agorê_, in which the visitor to Athens finds more than elsewhere the opportunity for the process so delightful in the old cities of Gaul and Germany, and Italy, the process of prowling hither and thither, and lighting on some fragment of antiquity--the more varied date of style the better--at every quarter. The Akropolis is too carefully cleared of all that is new; the modern city keeps too little that is old; here, in this quarter of Athens, old and new are mingled together in that way which gives to the inquirer the full interest of discovery.

But, among the later antiquities of Athens, it is the churches which claim the highest place. To the traveller from the West they have a special interest. As no other city of his pilgrimage gives him the same store of buildings of pagan Greek architecture, so there is no other which gives him such a store of buildings of the second--the Christian-Greek architecture. Nor is their interest any the less because of the small size of the modern Athenian churches. There is not only nothing to rival St. Sophia, St. Vital, or St. Mark; there is nothing to rival even their own neighbour at Daphnê. The Eastern Church, like the ancient Church of Ireland, seems always to have been better pleased to build a crowd of small churches rather than a single one on the scale of the great minsters of Western Europe. One cause of this peculiarity doubtless was the use of a single altar in the Eastern rite, which suggested the building of several distinct churches in cases where a Western architect would rather have built a single large church with several chapels. Athens, therefore, is full of small churches, the survivors, we fear, of a larger number, some of which perished in the laying out of the modern city. A crowd of them cling, as it were, to the roots of the Akropolis, in the region of the bazaar and of the monument of Andronikos. The eye soon gets used to, but it does not get tired of, their little cupolas and apses, which always add a pleasing feature to the corners where they are found, though none of them rival either the stateliness or the picturesque effect of the churches of the West. A few are of greater size and of higher architectural character, and one, without being of greater size, is one of the greatest curiosities in Christendom. This is the metropolitan church of Athens, surely the smallest church out of _Scotia_--we seek for a word which shall take in both Cashel and St. Andrew’s--that ever was designed for metropolitan or cathedral rank. It looks like a toy; it has been wittily said that it seems meant to receive the throne of the Boy Bishop. But it has the thorough Byzantine air; it has the apse, the cupola of the Athenian form, the heads of the windows cutting into the cupola--a form which stands to such cupolas as we have seen at Corfu and Daphnê in the same relation in which a German apse or tower with many gabled sides stands to an apse or tower of the more usual form. The church, small as it is, is rich, covered with plates of sculpture, some of which at least are ancient fragments used up again.