by David Brewer
Kóstas Kostís has also tried to show if the weather was the main influence on harvests, and therefore prices, by tabulating references to the weather against references to high grain prices and to famine. Kostís readily admits that the effort is doomed; the references depend on what happened to be recorded and whether that record survived, and it is often unclear exactly what the weather was, what region is being described, and what is meant by ‘high price’ or ‘famine’. All the same there is much of interest in these tabulations.
The commonest references are to food shortages and high prices in, surprisingly, the town of Thessalonika and the region of Thessaly. These should have been two of the richest places in Greece, Thessalonika because of its thriving port, and Thessaly from its huge production of wheat. Nevertheless in both these places either food shortage or high prices or both are reported in roughly one year in five of the eighteenth century. Sometimes these are directly related to the arrival of the Turkish army, marching to Hungary in 1686, on its way to the Peloponnese to drive out the Venetians in 1715, or to suppress the Orlov revolt in 1770. The other and more persistent food shortages can probably be attributed to Constantinople’s constant demand for grain.
Thessalonika suffered not only from food crises but from other afflictions, notably fires and diseases. Thessalonika was apparently in a uniquely favourable location: it fronted a fine harbour, and was on the Via Egnatia, the main road running west from Constantinople. As a result it was the most prosperous town in Greece, but a further consequence was that it suffered most from all the tribulations that affected towns. Because it was on the Via Egnatia Turkish armies regularly passed through it. Because its largely wooden houses were closely crammed together there were frequent fires, which continued to be a hazard into the twentieth century. The last serious one, known as the Great Fire, raged over a weekend in August 1917, destroying nearly half the town and the houses of 80,000 people. The effects would have been even worse if the British, French and Italian troops stationed there – the derided Gardeners of Salonika – had not helped to fight the flames and look after the homeless.
The crews of ships, which entered Thessalonika’s thriving harbour from all over the Mediterranean, brought diseases with them, especially bubonic plague and its variants, haemorrhagic and pneumonic plague. Thessalonika faced the same predicament as other great Mediterranean ports: in Venice in 1575–7 plague reportedly killed 50,000 people, at least a quarter of the population, and in Marseille in 1581 plague left only 5,000 alive, while in the eighteenth century Smyrna suffered 55 plague years and Constantinople 65. In some centuries Thessalonika was more fortunate, but only relatively so, with plague one year in three. One of the worst was in 1740, when it was recorded that ‘Christians died at the rate of 14 a day, as many as 147 Turks perished on one day, and the Jewish death rate was 31 persons daily. In all, the dead numbered 1,337 Christians – that is, those whom the priest buried – 2,239 Turks, and 1,935 Jews.’1
We have a first-hand account of the Thessalonika plague of 1724 from a Ukrainian political exile, Pylyp Orlyk, who was living there at the time. At the first sign of plague he tried to leave the town for the country, but as an émigré he needed official permission to go, which was steadily refused for several days before the English consul intervened. Orlyk, with a party of English merchants – only the rich could afford to flee – eventually settled in the village of Galátista, some 25 miles south-east of Thessalonika on the road leading to Mt Athos, though the villagers were naturally very reluctant to accept them. Back in Thessalonika later in the year Orlyk was alarmed to discover that the coat made for him just before he left, and which he had worn all summer, was the work of a Jewish tailor already suffering from the plague symptom of swelling in the armpit. ‘He could hardly finish his job’, wrote Orlyk, ‘for the pain which tormented him, and as soon as he got back home he laid down on his bed. When I asked them today why they hadn’t told me, these heathens answered that if I had known about it, I wouldn’t have wanted the coat.’2 One feels for the Jewish tailor in his predicament, struggling to finish what he knows is his last garment and to leave a little extra money for his family – yet aware that by doing so he is handing a potential death sentence to the wearer.
Some of the diseases affecting Thessalonika were epidemic – plague, cholera, typhus – and others were endemic: scabies, leprosy and malaria. There was a dangerous breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes in the pits of stagnant water just west of Thessalonika’s town walls, on the flat area where the main railway station now stands, and malaria was particularly prevalent in Yannitsá some 30 miles west of Thessalonika. Malaria was still a menace to the troops of the Gardeners of Salonika. There were over 30,000 cases in 1916 and nearly double that figure in 1918. Necessity being the mother of invention, the scale of the problem led to a breakthrough in cure. Two whole troop divisions, full of malaria, were brought back from Thessalonika to Dieppe and given quinine doses systematically rather than intermittently as before. Almost all the men were cured and were again, as it was chillingly recorded, ‘fit for the front’.
Malaria has been present in Greece since classical times, and endemic from about 400 BC. There was a severe outbreak in Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian war. It was at this time that Hippocrates noticed the connection between malaria and marshes, and malaria was called marsh fever, as it still is in Greece in the term elonosía. In the sixteenth century Cyprus had such a bad reputation for malaria that ships’ captains taking pilgrims to the Holy Land had to agree not to put in there for more than three days. Malaria seems also to have been prevalent in Crete, not only from the marsh-dwelling mosquito but also from a variant that lives in mountain streams.
The first systematic study of malaria in Greece was made in 1827 by John MacCulloch, who improbably combined a career as an army surgeon with becoming an authority on the geology of Scotland. His book Malaria also covered Italy, France and Spain. He described what he believed were the symptoms of malaria: yellow skin that pits on pressure, flaccid hair and scanty beard, enlarged spleen and premature ageing. He also noted the effects on behaviour: the apathy of those affected, who ‘seeking solitude, shunning society and amusements alike, without affections, without interest in any thing, make no exertions to better their condition: not even to avoid the sources of danger which surround them, or to take the most common precautions that are pointed out’.3
MacCulloch believed that this apathy led to every sort of reprehensible behaviour and he did not hesitate to moralise about it: ‘Not to dwell on this disgusting picture,’ he wrote,
I must content myself with naming abortion, infanticide, universal libertinism, drunkenness, want of religion, gross superstitions, as the leading features: besides which, it is further said that while murders are common, a large proportion of the cases are those of premeditated and cautious assassination, by poison or otherwise: all the vices, says my authority, being of a mean and not of a bold character.4
But MacCulloch could be more sympathetic, and indeed poetic, in describing areas where malaria prevails:
The fairest portions are a prey to this invisible enemy, its fragrant breezes are poison, the dews of its summer evenings are death. The banks of its refreshing streams, its rich and flowery meadows, the borders of its glassy lakes, the luxuriant plains of its overflowing agriculture, the valley where its aromatic shrubs regale the eye and perfume the air, these are the chosen seats of this plague, the throne of Malaria. Death here walks hand in hand with the sources of life, sparing none: the labourer reaps his harvest but to die, or he wanders amid the luxuriance of vegetation and wealth, the ghost of man, a sufferer from his cradle to his impending grave: aged even in childhood, and laying down in misery that life which was but one disease.5
Malaria continued to be endemic in Greece until long after MacCulloch’s day. In 1905 the Greek Anti-Malaria League was formed. This body for the first time started to collect national data on the prevalence of the disease, previously estimated
only from scattered hospital records and general mortality tables. In 1907 the league, quoting MacCulloch extensively, appealed to the government for action to drain the marshes and control the supply of quinine, previously much adulterated, and a measure establishing a government monopoly of quinine was passed within a year. As one of the league’s supporters had said, the Greek peasant valued quinine as highly as he did bread.
Until the discovery of quinine the cures for malaria, as for virtually all diseases, were those prescribed by tradition. One remedy was the so-called Lemnian earth, said to be ‘an infallible cure of all agues taken in the beginning of the fit with water, and drank so two or three times’. Its extraction from the ground was witnessed by Galen, the prolific medical writer of the second century AD, and the French traveller Carlier de Pinon heard about it when his ship passed Lémnos in the 1570s, though he did not actually land on the island. Several camel loads, he wrote, are extracted on one day of the year, packaged into small pieces and sent to the Sultan, who makes presents of it to ambassadors and foreign princes. ‘These pieces are round, the thickness of a finger, and the size of a double ducat, of a mingled greyish colour, verging slightly on pink.’ It was already being copied: ‘It proves its worth daily, unless the substance sold by the apothecaries of Constantinople and other places is used: these people have nothing but what is counterfeit, and even sell clay from Armenia as if it were from Lemnos.’6
A century later Dr John Covel visited Lémnos and witnessed the extraction, of which he gives more details. On the edge of an extinct volcano, he says, a little clear spring washes down ‘a kind of milky bogge’. The sediment, which is ‘soft and unctuous’, is taken out on only one day a year, the feast of Christ the Saviour in August, with a priest present to say the liturgy. When partially hardened it is made into small tablets, each stamped with the seal of Lémnos, hence its alternative name of terra sigillata or sealed earth. As well as curing all agues, says Covel, ‘Their women drink it to hasten childbirth, and to stop the fluxes that are extraordinary, and they count it an excellent counter-poyson, and have got a story that no vessel made of it will hold poison, but immediately splinter in a thousand pieces.’7
One can see in all this some canny marketing. The cure-all claims for Lemnian earth increased demand, and the restrictions on extracting it increased the price. The Lemnian seal guaranteed that it was genuine, and the association with Christ the Saviour could only enhance its curative reputation. In the early years of Turkish occupation it was reserved for the Sultan, but later production must have increased or the counterfeiters, eager as always to exploit a luxury brand, must have become even more active. Hence it became widely available not only in Constantinople but also in Europe as a whole, where it has been described as the universal European panacea. It was still used medicinally on Lémnos in the early twentieth century but now seems to have disappeared, and with it a colourful piece of historic folklore.
In the Greek towns a sufferer from disease might be treated by a doctor with some medical training, and Cretan and Jewish graduates of the Padua medical school were often found, though even in the late nineteenth century there were still many unlicensed doctors and pharmacists. Even doctors who were trained and licensed could be unreliable. In the 1820s during the war of independence the American philhellene doctor Samuel Gridley Howe had to prevent a Greek doctor from making a huge incision to cure what was only a bruise.
In the countryside the only recourse was to traditional folk medicine. For the centuries we are considering there are scattered and anecdotal references to these traditional methods, but the most coherent accounts come from the systematic studies of Greek rural life first undertaken in the 1950s. One might well ask if such recent researchers give a true picture of earlier times, but the answer is almost certainly yes. Two of these sociologists, Richard and Eva Blum, who studied the healing, health and related beliefs of rural Greeks, state categorically that ‘there is no major orientation or set of assumptions about life, death or the supernatural which cannot be found to have ancient antecedents,’8 and they regularly noted parallels between medical practices recorded in antiquity and what they found in their own day. Unless one assumes that ancient beliefs and practices died out at some stage and later returned in the same form – which is highly improbable, especially in communities without written records – it is reasonable to conclude that the traditions continued unbroken from antiquity to our own times, and were a persistent and often dominant factor in the lives of ordinary people.
Richard and Eva Blum produced two outstanding studies of Greek rural life in the 1950s and 1960s, concentrating on health and healing. They worked in an area – whose exact location they scrupulously protected – not far from the sea and opposite Évia. They studied two villages and a group of families of local Sarakatsani, shepherds regularly moving their flocks between the mountains in summer and the plains in winter. A third study of equal value by John Campbell is of the Sarakatsani of the region north of Iánnina. The southern Sarakatsani studied by the Blums had migrated from the north only a few generations earlier, and the two accounts of them are naturally very similar.
What did the villagers believe were the causes of disease? Their answers take us back into the past. There were basically six types of cause mentioned, any of which might be regarded as the origin of a particular disease:
•
Natural, such as living conditions or diet;
•
Emotions, such as frustration or unrequited love;
•
Occult influences, such as omens or dreams;
•
Human magic, whether or not intentional. A look from an Evil Eye can do harm without the possessor of the Eye knowing it. Sorcery or witchcraft, by contrast, inflicts harm intentionally;
•
Natural magic, for example from the sun, the moon, fire, animals such as snakes, or smells;
•
Supernatural beings: God or the Devil, saints, ghosts, or other strange and frightening creatures.
Only for the first of these, illness from natural causes, was the cure in any way scientific and it was recognised that better hygiene might be the answer. One villager said: ‘People are more vulnerable to illness if they don’t wash, if they are dirty. Some don’t keep their house or body clean; they eat all kinds of dirty things – foods that are unwashed, or old, or otherwise soiled.’9 Many natural products were also thought to be helpful. Some were used alone, such as olive oil, honey, garlic or oleander leaves with which the sufferer was rubbed all over. Others were applied in seemingly bizarre combinations. There was a cream made of beans, olive oil and soap, used to cure abscesses. Even more strange was ‘mouse oil’, for cuts and earache: ‘What I do is to take baby mice caught when still hairless and blind, put them in a bottle of olive oil and leave them in that oil for at least one year in the sun. The longer it stays there in the sun the better. If you use it for cuts you stir it, for ears you do not. It is called “balsamo” and it stinks.’10
Even these treatments, perceived as medicinal, were usually applied in some ritual setting, and rituals were involved in countering all diseases, whatever their cause. The rituals involved incantations, often accompanied by prescribed gestures. Some were simple: ‘When as children we had pimples with pus, the old women told us to tread on the cloth which was used to clean the oven and say the words, “Let the pimple disappear as this cloth will disappear.” We always threw the cloth away.’11
Much more elaborate was the incantation used to cure several afflictions: the effects of the Evil Eye, a stomach complaint known as the wandering navel, and heart disease. This formula runs to some 200 words, and invokes birds, honey, milk, Christ, St Peter and St Paul, and a crooked man on a crooked road with a crooked basket. Other magical procedures involved amulets, which might contain gunshot to keep away supernatural beings, a blue stone to ward off the Evil Eye, or incense, bread or herbs. Numbers were also important elements of the prevention or cu
re of illness. ‘A charm to prevent miscarriages was made with forty coins, begged in forty homes, and blessed by forty liturgies.’12 Seven blessings and prayers were used against sorcery; diabetes was cured by eating herring intestines for three days.
The folk healers who conducted these procedures were usually local wise women, though some were men and some were outside the village, even as far off as Athens. One folk healer particularly respected and liked by the Blums was Maria. She lived in the village, understood suffering as she had lost three children of her own, accepted no fee and used science, magic and religion sometimes simultaneously. By contrast priests were only rarely called on to conduct healing prayers or exorcisms. This was in part because at this time they lived in the main village of the region, rarely visiting the other villages and expecting a gratuity when they did so. It is likely that priests had a much larger role as healers in the past, when they lived among their parishioners and in many ways shared their lives.
An outsider might dismiss the folk healing methods as irrational superstition, and the country people who followed them as victims of trickery, but that would be too easy. First, the principles of folk medicine were based on a coherent and complex view of the world. This view was most fully expressed by the Sarakatsani, wanderers whose living conditions were primitive and who had been wholly illiterate until a few generations earlier, but – or perhaps as a result – were found particularly friendly, communicative and articulate. They believed firmly in God. John Campbell wrote: ‘I have met no Sarakatsanos who doubts the existence of God. Such a question seems to them unintelligent. A man takes out his watch and asks, “Somebody made this watch, is it possible that nobody made the world?”’13 God provides everything, from giving a man children to sending rain to make the grass grow. The sheep itself is a sacred animal, and is sacrificed at important church festivals. But God also judges and punishes the sins that interrupt communion with God. This communion can be maintained or restored through symbolic acts. These include, besides ritual animal sacrifices, taking part in church services, prayers for the intercession of the Mother of God or the saints, and regularly making the sign of the cross in daily life in recognition of Christ – ‘Christ is our brother,’ the Sarakatsani say.14