***
After a month or so in Athens the Byron entourage set off on a clockwise tour of Attica, the province in which Athens sits, and after a week or so Andreas, Gillian and the writer set off after them as best we could. The first piece of advice is never rent a thing called a Hyundai Getz; the only thing it getz is on your nerves, and the only thing you getz is a pain in the back and a numb bum.
For both tours the first stop is the Pendeli Monastery, twenty miles north-east of Athens. In olden days the mountain on which the monastery rests, Mount Pentelicus, was famous for its springs and forests but the mountain also holds most of the marble with which ancient Athens was built and this has led to its southern slopes having been dramatically disfigured. Mining is now illegal, but Andreas assures us it still goes on at night.
The monastery is famously prosperous because it claimed land ownership for the northern slopes of Mount Pentelicus, and after independence the government honoured the land titles. The slopes are now covered in houses stretching down to the north-eastern suburbs. Although no one could argue that the area around the monastery is the paradise now that it once was, and certainly must still have been in Byron’s time, the monastery and its own grounds are wonderfully serene and peaceful.
The monastery is just about open to visitors, and one wanders freely into a ground floor Orthodox bookstore and out again into the cloisters. Some monasteries have become tourist stop-offs - bad luck on the monks who chose to live their lives in seclusion but find themselves as tourist attractions - but this one, as worthy as any of a visit, has escaped. The Byzantine chapel in the central courtyard is an octagonal gallery of the darkest icons and fiercely gruesome martyrdoms, all haloed by the most elaborate chandelier we have seen.
There is a considerable building project here and interestingly none of the monks is taking part, all the work being done by outside contractors. The writer has attended ashrams in India as well as several meditation retreats in England, and an integral part of the practice is manual work. The idea is not just to save money by doing the work internally, but as a spiritual exercise in placing consciousness on what is happening in real time right in front of one, otherwise known as here and now. But here and now there are no monks, and when Andreas asks why they are not working he is told ‘oh, they are resting.’ There is not much sign of the modern world: where the Byron visitors would have tied up their horses is an early seventies Datsun Cherry, in what was once bright red but is now day-old smudged lipstick. Outside all is taking its lead from the monks and resting, and even the plentiful bird song seems like unnecessary agitation.
After a lunch of fried eggs the Byron tour left for Marathon. While Hobhouse fretted about trying to find the scene of the famous battlefield where the heavily outnumbered Ancient Greeks heroically defeated the Persians in 490 bc, Byron became overwhelmed by the poignancy of the scene. He later told Trelawny that while Hobhouse’had a greed for legendary lore, topography, inscriptions, pottering with map and compass at the foot of Pindus, Parnes and Parnassus to ascertain the site of some ancient temple or city. I rode my mule up them. They had haunted my dreams from boyhood: the pines, eagles, vultures and owls were descended from those Themistocles and Alexander had seen, and were not degenerated like the humans. I gazed at the stars and ruminated; took no notes, asked no questions.’ Later, remembering the scene in Don Juan he wrote some of his most famous lines:
The mountains look on Marathon-
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free.
Marathon now stirs no such passion, even in one wanting passion to be stirred. The plain of Marathon is a heavily developed coastal strip and actually reminds the writer of the other Marathon, the capital of the Florida Keys. This could be a case of reverse symbiosis, the first example of a European town copying its American namesake. Nothing here is more than twenty years old, whereas Marathon in Florida was certainly around in the time of the film Key Largo, and must have pre-dated Key West. Both Marathons are coastal, both have two lane highways running for several miles through them, both have service roads and stores running along the highway, both have revolving ads on stilts above factory stores and square car parks, and both have exposed overhead electric and phone lines. One doesn’t need to ask with which town either Marathon is twinned. One wonders what the archaeologists are going to make of this mysterious aberration in two thousand years time.
But salvation is at hand for lovers of the sublime, for at the end of Attica, twenty miles but twenty eons from the tawdriness of Marathon, lies Cape Colonna and the magnificent Temple of Poseidon at Sounion. Byron arrived here one day after his twenty- second birthday. In the evening he saw the sunset dance through the columns and his horse reached the peak as the sun set over the dark green islands opposite leaving the sea as pink as the horizon. In the splendour of this setting he walked over the very stones where Plato had held his conversations, carved his name in the very temple above the ledge from where King Aegeus leapt to his death.
Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep
Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep
There, swan-like, let me sing and die.
That is from Don Juan, and from The Giaour:
Fair clime, where every season smiles
Benignant, o’er those blessed isles,
Which, seen from far Colonna’s height,
Make glad the heart that hails the sight,
And lend to loneliness delight.
Because it is two or more hours outside Athens, the Temple of Poseidon receives far fewer visitors than the sites in the city. Because it is a fair climb up from the car park base camp to the temple itself even fewer go all the way, the less energetic or more corpulent preferring to let their telephoto lenses do the work. Once there, and again the suggestion is to be there as late as possible, one senses the temple to be rather plaintive in its old age, as though it has said to Poseidon, the god of the sea: I have done my best, I was drawn by the best architect, I was made of the best marble, I was founded on the highest cape, I was host to the best philosophers, but your sea is still as young and strong and wilful as ever. It was impertinent of a mere mortal to reach for your immortality, and now I slowly decay back into the marble dust from which I arose.
They spent another month in Athens retracing old footsteps. Byron was becoming restless; he had ‘done’ Athens, at least the polite Athens, which is all he could do with Hobhouse in tow. He had been excited by the Ali Pasha adventure, and wanted to be closer to the diplomatic world - perhaps with an eye on Destiny - the real one in a centre of power, with ambassadors and sultans, not consuls and primates which was all provincial Athens had to offer. In Athens everything revolved around Constantinople, and to Constantinople, with its added prospect of fresh conquests, he was drawn like to a magnet. They had heard on the grapevine that Robert Adair, the British ambassador in Constantinople, was to be sent home, and that a frigate was on its way to collect him. The frigate would have to wait for its firman or travel authorisation in Smyrna - now Izmir. If they could reach Smyrna, they could reach Constantinople, and on a Royal Navy warship, complete with uniformed midshipmen, and on a diplomatic mission. In Piraeus they found the HMS Pylades sloop-of-war under Captain Ferguson, itself on a courier diplomatic mission to Smyrna. Hobhouse hastily made the arrangements for the entourage to join her, and within the week they had gone.
But first they had to say goodbye to the Macris, especially Byron had to say goodbye to Theresa. Two nights before leaving Hobhouse wrote that ‘Theresa 12 years old brought here to be Deflowered, but Byron would not.’ Byron later wrote to Hobhouse that ‘the old woman Theresa’s mother was mad enough to think I was going to marry the girl’ and yet in a journal he wrote that ‘I was near bringing Theresa away but the mother
asked 30,000 piastres!’ But life did not work out too badly for Theresa. As the Maid of Athens she had the fame of being the subject of ‘the most romantic poem by the most romantic poet’, and on a more mundane level she lived to 85 years, having married another Englishman, James Black, who presumably stumped up the 30,000 piastres, but who also presumably fell short in the poetry department.
Byron wrote that ‘I like the Greeks, who are plausible rascals, with all the Turkish vices but without their courage. Athens is a place which I think I prefer to any I have seen.’ He would return, and so will we.
Chapter Thirteen
FROM SMYRNA TO CONSTANTINOPLE, SEARCHING FOR HECTOR AND LEANDER
6 MARCH - 13 MAY 1810 | 1-19 JUNE 2009
At the time of Byron’s visit to the seat of Ottoman power Smyrna was the commercial capital of the empire, and Constantinoplethe political capital; a similar situation to which Istanbul and Ankara find themselves in today. Smyrna, now called Izmir, had for millennia the benefit of being situated in one of the great natural Mediterranean harbours, while to reach Constantinople - as we shall see - entailed a tiresome and unreliable sail through the Dardanelles against wind and current. Smyrna, with Mediterranean traders to its west and Arabic traders to its east, had been the principal port of what was for eight thousand years and until fairly recently called Asia Minor. Byron and Hobhouse would have noticed, and we do today, the Genoese forts atop each of the islands that act as stepping-stones on the approach to the Bay of Izmir.
The voyage from Piraeus on the sloop-of-war HMS Pylades took only four days; Byron’s luck with the fickle Mediterranean weather, and this was in March, held once more. Apart from Hobhouse and Fletcher his entourage was now steady at the two devoted Albanian guards, Vassily and Dervish Tahiri, and Andreas Zantakis, the Greek translator Byron had collected in Patras. For new company they had an interesting fellow passenger in Dr. Francis Darwin, whose father had written The Botanic Garden and whose nephew, Charles, was to write The Origin of Species. The voyage was uneventful except for the flogging, which Hobhouse noted laconically: ‘A man flogged for stealing. Three dozen. Not as bad as I thought.’ Well, yes.
The evidence suggests that the entrance to Izmir has become far more painstaking over the centuries due to movement of the seabed caused by earthquakes, and by silting caused by damming and deforestation ashore. As they approached the port, weaving between the shallows, Dr. Darwin suggested it would all soon be silted up entirely, and if the current port of Izmir had not made constant efforts at dredging channels to keep the port alive, Darwin’s prediction would surely have been correct.
We settle in the centre of the bay off the town quay, about half a mile south of where the Pylades anchored. It is not a happy scene. The water is the colour of school dinners, either the Brown Windsor soup with congealed fat floating on top, or the coffee-flavoured blancmange that wobbled its way down hungry young throats. To make matters worse, the sea, even in the inner harbour, is a juvenile mass of delinquent waves stirred up by the speedboat-ferries which form the best part of public transport along the shore. Occasionally some soup splashes over the coamings onto the cockpit sole, or onto the captain and first mate if caught unawares.
If the crew is less than enamoured with the quay at Izmir, Vasco da Gama is even less so. She is not a happy lady, demanding frequent hose downs, and as we have a mutually dependent relationship I am only too happy to oblige. We look after each other, and she knows that I know that she is not quite as inanimate as some might think; in fact she can be, and often is, a bit of a madam. For instance, she definitely prefers lying to starboard tack rather than port tack because she knows it gives her the right of way. Actually she’s got a bit of a fixation about right of way, even getting a bit huffy when having to change course to avoid undisciplined supertankers. She occasionally likes a bit of rough - as it were - and enjoys showing her skirt to pursuers. In particular she likes being bought presents, the recent clothes washing machine being a particular delight, but no trinket from a chandlery goes unappreciated. Unlike Johnny Cash she has even forgiven me for giving her a boy’s name, but as I said to her the other day ‘at least it’s not Agamemnon.’ Her humour has become rather droll of late, but then again as she said to me ‘better droll than gallows.’
Smyrna then was easily the least attractive place on the Grand Tour, as is Izmir on the re-Tour. The Byron party stayed with Francis Werry, the English consul, and his wife on the north shore in an area where the Christians were confined. Hobhouse was ‘surprised at the excellence of Werry’s house - a long, narrow house, like the gallery and chambers of an inn. It has no breadth, but everything is English and comfortable.’ The area is now known as Alsancak, but all traces of its Frankish times have long since been destroyed by one of the forms of pestilence - fire, war or earthquakes - that since time began have set up base camp along the Aeolian shore.
The best one can do to recapture Smyrna in Byron’s day is visit the Ahmet Pristina City Archive and Museum. The city’s tag line is ‘we are 8500 years old’ and indeed they are (the Archaeological Museum’s version of ‘up to date’ is 1700 years ago). The illustrations show a narrow strip of two-storey houses along the paved quay, mosques less numerous than churches would have been further west, the Genoese fort still sitting proudly on the northern hill, camels as beasts of burden, no women, dogs scavenging, slaves scampering, ships along the quay where Vasco was being stroppy, and grandees on horseback under parasols. The guide mentions ‘earthquakes’ and shakes his down-turned hand as we pass along the museum from period to period; there have been seven hundred, from the catastrophic to the tremulous, since 1900 alone. A panel shows the cataclysmic onslaught of Izmir’s quakes and tremors that have run the Richter scale a merry dance over the centuries.
’Well,’ one thinks stepping out into the dazzling and humid smog ’you just cannot trust an earthquake to destroy only that which needs destroying.’ It is quite the most unattractive place, a sort of Asian Minor version of Nuneaton, a monument to how unsettling concrete can be if left to run amok.
For purposes of damage limitation when the next ‘quake quakes each building is limited to eight storeys, and as if in defiance of such defeatist talk each building sports the rightist of right angles wherever it can like jaws jutting out looking for a fight. Architects have downed beauty and become Concrete Cost Control Consultants. Even the minarets on the mosques are bare concrete. Because the flat coastal strip is quite narrow many of the new houses have been built on the steep hills of the suburbs. To live there must be a calculated risk,like farming under Etna, and is surely the only place where property prices fall as the hill rises. These suburbs don’t just sprawl gradually as elsewhere but endlessly replicate themselves like amoebae in a Petri dish.
Byron found himself at his lowest ebb in Smyrna. He was betwixt and between himself. No news had reached him from England for over a year, and so he felt cut off both from the gossip of his London circle and news of his affairs from Hanson. He missed the sociability and classical resonance of Athens, and was now in the land of its oppressors with even fewer Frankish families to mingle amongst, and all of those only involved in trade. In Athens the Christians and Muslims were equally numbered and rubbed along after a fashion, but here he was cut off from contact with the Turks,confined to the quarter on the northern shore. He brooded that it was one thing to forsake the emotional bonds with Athens for the stimulation of its capital Constantinople, another to be stuck in the disease-ridden backwater of Smyrna with the prospect of a long moody summer ahead.
Worse still he had no way of knowing how long he would be marooned there. The HMS Salsette, a 36-gun frigate sent to collect the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Sir Robert Adair, had already been in Smyrna harbour for over a month waiting for its firman - its travel pass - from the Porte. She was commanded by Captain Bathurst, whom Byron found a bit rough and ready; but both Byron and Bathurst were to die for the
cause of Greek independence - in Bathurst’s, by then Admiral Bathurst’s, case one of the few British casualties at the decisive naval battle of Navarino.
All agreed the firman could take weeks, months, as the Porte would not allow more than four Frankish ships - and only one from each Christian nation - at a time through the Dardanelles. He must have felt he could not even eat properly, as then and now the diet makes no allowances for vegetarians, an affliction Byron shared with the writer, and the squelchy cakes have limited appeal after the first two weeks. At least he had his work for diversion, and he completed canto II of Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage late in March 1810.
As a further diversion Hobhouse organised a side trip to Ephesus, site of the Greek and Roman capitals of Asia Minor and the Temple of Artemis; the latter being one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The trip was not a success. Hobhouse become ill, and Byron was out of sorts with the world at large. As we have already seen at Delphi and will soon see again at Troy, they visited the site at Ephesus before the major archaeological expeditions had uncovered them and there was precious little to see. Byron wrote that ‘The temple (of Artemis) has almost perished, and St. Paul [actually it was St. John] need not trouble himself to epistolize with the current brood of Ephesians who have converted a large church built entirely of marble into a mosque.’ In fact he must have seen another ruin he assumed was the Temple of Artemis, as all of it was still underground and would be for a further fifty years.
Ephesus is now back to being a wonder to behold, and the Temple of Artemis and the sleeping place of her Seven Sleepers nearby - the setting for the Comedy of Errors - at least imaginable in its fuller glory. The ruins are sensitively displayed and, wherever possible, accessible, an example the authorities at Athens should follow. The nearest modern town, Selçuk, is a half-camel half-tractor sort of place. Byron took a greater impression from the frogs and the storks and the jackals than from the ruins. The frogs are still in full croak in the ditch if you walk the kilometre from the station to the Temple of Artemis, and the storks have actually set up a nest on top of the one remaining pillar. The jackals have been somewhat domesticated, and their relatives roam around Smyrna at night, patrolling the alleys and lanes in packs.
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