"Alas! The woes of Thessaly! It is again pouring with rain..."

Sorry about all these notes. While writing this blog I happened also to be researching for an article about prominent travellers in Greece and got quite carried away.

It once occurred to me that some academic publications seem to consist of a volume of footnotes and references which equals or even exceeds that of the actual main text. The logical extension of this would be a book containing just one letter or character – or, even better, nothing at all, not unlike John Cage's compostion 4'33" (four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence) – with footnotes and bibliographical references, which in turn require voluminous explanations, further qualified by sub-sub-notes, and so on (listed numerically, alphabetically, alphanumerically, with a forest of dingbats and asterisks, etc) ... until the subtexts branch off and spiral into infinity, in a way which would send even Jorge Luis Borges around the bend. At some point pendantry would sublimate into mysticism.

1. Metéora (Greek, Μετέωρα). The Greek word metéoron (μετέωρον) is today used to mean suspended, hanging, dangling, floating in the air; oros means mountain. Meteora has been variously translated as suspended rocks, rocks in the air, floating mountains, etc.

The name of the town Kalambaka (Greek, Καλαμπάκα), is from the old Turkish Kalé Bak, meaning "strong fortress"; although it has been suggested that it also signified strong rock or pinnacle, rather like the German "Berg" (mountain) and "Burg" (castle) derive from the same root. Thessaly was occupied by Ottoman Turkey from 1395 until 1881, when it became part of modern Greece following the Treaty of Berlin (1878).

The name is also transliterated as Kalabáka or Kalampaka; μπ is equivalent to MP (as in μπύρα for beer), since there is no single letter for B in modern Greek, βήτα (Beta) being prounounced "veeta".

In ancient times it was the city of Aiginion, and from at least the 10th century AD it was the Byzantine fortified bishop's seat Stagoi (Στάγοι, "the saints").

Kastraki (Καστρακί), the name of the neighbouring village, is Greek, meaning literally "little castle".

2. Edward Lear, Journals of a landscape painter in Greece and Albania.
R. Bentley, London, 1851.

Edward Lear (1812-1888), English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, particularly famous for his nonsense poetry and limericks. See some nonsense by and about Edward Lear at The Cheshire Cat Blog, 7 October 2010.

He was a prolific artist with considerable skill as a draughtsman and colourist. Today his vivid ornithological and landscape drawings, watercolours and paintings sell for high prices. However, during his lifetime he had difficulties selling his pictures and was often in debt, despite having taught drawing to Queen Victoria for a short time and commissions from the Zoological Society, the Earl of Derby and other wealthy patrons. With the support of influential friends he was able to travel widely through Europe, the Middle East, India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Books resulting from these journeys proved more popular.

In the late 1840s, when Lear travelled though Greece and Albania, the region was not quite as dangerous as it had been when Byron, Cockerell et al passed through (see note 4 below), but still a daunting prospect for any mortal. Never a physically robust man, Lear suffered from short-sightedness, epilepsy, asthma, bronchitis and had caught malaria as well as being injured by a fall from a horse on an earlier visit to Greece. On his return in 1848, at the beginning of of these journals, he had to flee from a cholera epidemic in Thessaloniki and made the courageous decision to travel alone (i.e. with a local dragoman as guide, servant and translator, but without the company of fellow northern Europeans) through this wild terra incognita, as he did again on his 1849 trip, which included the visit to Meteora.

See also:

A Blog of Bosh, dedicated to Edward Lear,
nonsense literature and more:

3. Dr Henry Holland, Travels in the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia, etc. during the years 1812 and 1813, Chapter XI. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, London, 1815.

Dr Henry Holland (1788-1873), born in Knutsford, Cheshire, was related to Josiah Wedgwood, Charles Darwin and Elizabeth Gaskell. He rose to become consultant physician to six prime ministers, Physician Extraordinary to King William IV and Queen Victoria, Physician in Ordinary to Prince Albert, president of the Royal Institution of Great Britain and was created a baronet in 1853. He wrote a number of books, essays, articles and poems on several subjects, particularly his two main passions, medicine and travel.

Like all educated gentlemen of his day, Holland had received a thorough grounding in the classics and drawing, and like most of those who made the grand tour around the Mediterranean, it sometimes seems as if he rode through Greece with the tome of an ancient geographer in one hand (conjecturing on the possible connection between some eroded blocks of marble strewn over a rural hillside and an ambiguous passage from Strabo) and a pencil in the other. Presumably one of his locally-hired servants held his horse's reins for him and another his sketch book.

Typical also of such literary travellers is the enthusiasm with which they regale us with copious quotations from Homer, Strabo, Livy, Pausanias et al in Greek and Latin (plus the occasional exclamation in French, Italian, Turkish or Albanian), without entertaining the slightest suspicion that any reader would require a translation. I have often wondered about the grip on reality possessed by authors of "popular" books about Greek history which they litter with untranslated quotations in Greek; did it not occur to them that if the reader was capable of understanding these pearls of ancient wisdom they would hardly need to read such a book? Έτσι είναι η ζωή‏ (c'est la vie).

As a physician and man of science (the word scientist was yet to be invented), Holland's interests went beyond the discovery of ancient ruins: he was one of the first modern travellers to attempt a scientific survey of Greece, studying the history, geography, topography, mineralogy, botany, ethnicity as well as the political, social, economic and medical conditions in the places he visited. At that time, before the paradigma-shattering discoveries of the geologist William Smith (ironically Smith completed his famous geological map of part of Great Britain in 1815, the same year as Holland's book was published), Charles Darwin and Heinrich Schliemann, there were more questions than answers concerning natural and human history. His researches were also limited by how long he was able to spend in any location while travelling on horseback between the relative safety of one town, village or khan (roadside inn) and the next; dallying or camping out in the countryside was not an option in an age of robber clans.

His rather old-fashioned writing style – even compared with some of his contemporaries – though noble and poetic, did not lend itself well to methodological description, for example of complex topographical features such as the Meteora. Modern descriptive narrative was still in its infancy. Colonel William Martin Leake, who published his The topography of Athens six years later, and Travels in Northern Greece in 1835, presumably learned from the failings of Holland and others in this respect. Leake's military experience as an artillery surveyor and instructor must have taught him to produce concise and accurate (if somewhat dry) reporting, and his works on Greece were long considered standards for topographers, historians, archaeologists and travellers; Osbert Lancaster (see below) referred to him as "the ever-admirable Colonel Leake".

Holland modestly omitted from his book accounts of places and subjects which he considered had already been covered by other writers, as well as much of the data he had collected on medical matters (perhaps to the great relief of his editor and publishers). He had also managed to lose many of his sketches, maps and notes during a ferry crossing in northern Greece. What he did manage to save and publish remains a fascinating account of extraordinary journeys and a treasure trove for researchers in many fields.

Despite his more scientific approach, he was by no means an objective observer and often betrays his northern European prejudices. The forms and practices of the Greek Orthodox Church in general and monasticism in particular were anathema to him as a native of Protestant England. It would take until the 1830s before Robert Curzon (1810-1873, from 1870 the 14th Baron Zouche) made a somewhat deeper investigation into Orthodox monasteries, including Meteora (published in Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, John Murray, London 1849), although a major motive for his visits to these establishments was to acquire their old manuscripts.

Here are a few further extracts from Holland's account of his visit to Meteora, which demonstrate his charming style, his love of nature and his disdain for monasticism:

"Long before we reached the town of Kalabaka, our attention was engaged by the distant view of the extraordinary rocks of the Meteora, which give to the vicinity of this place a character perfectly unique to the eye, and not less remarkable in the reality of the scene."

"When we approached this spot, the evening was already far advanced, but the setting sun still threw a gleam of light on the summits of these rocky pyramids, and shewed us the outline of several Greek monasteries in this extraordinary situation, and seeming as if entirely separated from the reach of the world below. For the delusion might have been extended to the moral character of these institutions, and the fancy might have framed to itself a purer form of religion amidst this insulated magnificence of nature, than when contaminated by a worldly intercourse and admixture. How completely this is delusion, it requires but a hasty reference to the present and past history of monastic worship, sufficiently to prove. It is the splendour of nature alone, which is seen in the rocks of Meteora; and the light of the sun lingering on their heights, shews only those monuments of mingled vanity and superstition, which have arisen from the devices of selfish policy, or of mistaken religion."

"The monks whom vanity or superstition condemned to an abode in this place, might once perhaps have obtained something of that fame, which Simeon Stylites purchased for himself by a similar, yet more exalted degree of religious inflictions. But these days and opinions are gone by, and the wretched devotee of Meteora now procures little more than the pity or contempt of the world, upon which he looks down from his solitary and comfortless dwelling."

Holland on his visit to the monastery of Agios Stephanos:

4. Thomas Smart Hughes (1786-1847), Travels in Sicily, Greece, and Albania, Volume I, Chapter XVII. J. Mawman, London, 1820.

The quotation about Meteora by Charles Robert Cockerell is from a letter he wrote in Livadia, 9 February 1814, to Thomas Smart Hughes and Robert Townley Parker in Ioannina.

During the winter of 1813-1814 Cockerell travelled with Hughes, Parker and others from Athens, through central Greece to Epirus, in northwestern Greece. He returned alone to Athens via Meteora (30-31 January) and Thessaly in January-February 1814, writing the letter on his journey.

Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863), English architect, archaeologist and great-great-great nephew of the diarist Samuel Pepys. He made his grand tour (peregrinatio academica) 1810-1817, travelling through Italy, Turkey, Greece and southern Albania (Epirus, today part of Greece). He was fortunate - or rather, well-connected - enough to get a free passage from Plymouth to Constantinople (Istanbul) as a king's messenger, taking dispatches to the British ambassador there. The aged ship hired by the government for what turned out to be an adventurous voyage was called The Black Joke.

* The pencil drawing of Cockerell (right) was made by the French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres some time after the two met in Rome in the summer of 1816, as the former was returning to England from Greece.

Like many grand tourers of his day - well-to-do young gentlemen from northern Europe - he felt it a kind of patriotic duty to dabble in a bit of amateur archaeology. He got lucky, and along wih fellow architect John Foster of Liverpool, Carl Haller von Hallerstein, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, Jakob Linckh, Peter Oluf Brøndsted and others, dug up and sold parts of the ancient Greek temples at Aegina (1811) and Bassae (1811-1812). Such exploits made him a hero to the European intelligentsia, but a thief and a vandal among Greeks who view his removal of the Aegina and Bassae marbles as despicable as Lord Elgin's "plunder" of the Parthenon (see Edwin Drood's Column, 21 June 2011).

By chance, as Cockerell, Foster, Haller and Linckh were sailing for the first time to Aegina from Athens in April 1811, they came alongside the Royal Navy ship which was carrying not only part of Elgin's booty but also Lord Byron, who was leaving Athens for Malta, and they went aboard for a farewell glass of port wine with him.

See further information about Cockerell and the "Bassae marbles" on the Niobe page in the MFP People section.

Travelling around the eastern Mediterranean in the early 19th century was a perilous business: apart from the dangers of the elements, inept ships' captains, poor horses and bad or non-existent roads, war with Napoleon was still going on, as well as that between Russia and Turkey; and travellers were prey to French privateers and pirates by sea, and on land to robber bands, corrupt or ignorant officials and other species of rogues, as well as malaria, cholera and the plague, to say nothing of mosquitos, fleas and packs of dogs. Accounts of the adventurous journeys of Cockerell and others are replete with tales of derring-do, involving kidnappings, robberies, stand-offs, sabres and pistols. Some of Cockerell's own accounts can be found in Hughes' book and:

Fop the dog

From his journal we learn that Cockerell travelled from England with his Skye terrier, Fop. This seems a rather eccentric or capricious thing to do, rather like the Belgian cartoon character Tin Tin travelling around the big, bad world with his white wire fox terrier Snowy (a.k.a. Milou).

[ Meteora trivia: the rocks of Meteora were used as a setting for the 1961 French live-action film Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d'Or (Tin Tin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece). ]

Sailing from Constantinople to Athens, Cockerell stopped off on the island of Andros, where "Fop, my dog, fell into a well and was rescued with great difficulty. One of the peasants, who had never seen anything like a Skye terrier before, when he saw him pulled out took him for a fiend or a goblin, and crossed himself devoutly."

When he left Athens for Crete (he had intended to visit Egypt but ended up visiting Anatolia, Malta and Sicily), he left Fop behind with a servant called Nicolo, who travelled with Brønsted and Linkh in December 1811 to the island of Zea, where it seems the dog it was who died. "Pauvre Fope".

6. Osbert Lancaster, Classical Landscape with Figures. John Murray, London, 1947.

Sir Osbert Lancaster CBE (1908-1986), English cartoonist, stage designer, architectural historian, art critic, travel writer and dandy. He had a great affection for Greece, at least certain parts and aspects of it, and in Classical Landscape with Figures he presents fascinating sketches of the country, its people, history and particularly its art and architecture in an intelligent, witty and entertaining way. His atmospheric cartoon-style line drawings, some with flat colour washes, illustrate his narratives admirably, and today evoke the kind of nostalgia for a long-lost Greece as it was in the 1940s that the sketches and watercolours by the 19th century Grand Tourers did for the armchair travellers of Lancaster's generation.

Like his predecessors, his eye was mainly drawn to Classical and Byzantine edifices and ruins, and though he also diverted his attention to the modern and even more obscure epochs such as that of the medieval Frankish knights, he had little interest in Ottoman architecture and was generally of the opinion that the Turks contributed little to the country during 400 years of occupation. He does, however, mention in passing (and from a distance) his admiration for a couple of mosques. He is to be applauded for pointedly refusing to dismiss particular periods or styles as "degenerate", as many previous literary travellers had felt obliged to do.

His book contains several caveats and satirical criticisms concerning the Greek social, cultural and political landscape of his day. He even introduces a new word into the English language: "praxicopomatic", which he defines as being "from the adjectival form of the modern Greek word for coup d'etat, meaning liable to coups d'etat and used exclusively for generals and admirals". Although his neologism never seems to have caught on, it certainly indicates the prevalence of a phenomenon which he saw as symptomatic of Greece's political state: "In these circumstances the coup d'etat becomes an accepted constitutional device and is usually attended with far less bloodshed than a general election."

Lancaster's very British upper middle-class background coloured his judgement not only in aesthetic but also political matters. During the Second World War he was given a relatively cushy job in the press censorship bureau (did he have to censor cartoons or potentially subversive art criticism?), and in 1944 the Foreign Office sent him as a press attaché to the British Embassy in Athens – after the Germans had been driven out. Greek left-wing factions, whose resistance forces had fought the Axis occupiers and helped the allies open an extra front, expected to receive a lion's share in the post-war government. British prime minister Churchill and the United States (from 1945 under President Truman), fearing that Greece would become a communist state in the thrall of Stalin, were determined to keep them out of power, and left-wing demonstrations in Athens were brutally repressed. A violent uprising or "revolution" flared up, with left-wing partisans controlling parts of the city and fighting British paratroops backed by the Royal Air Force. The uprising was put down but led to a bloody civil war (1946-1949) and three decades of political oppression by the western-backed right-wing.

Lancaster made quite a point of his contempt of the left-wing, and this book contains passages condemning them, telling tales of the "bloodthirstiness" of "ruthless" Communist leaders, who he accuses of war atrocities. His is a very narrow, disingenuous or misinformed picture of events which took place during terrible, chaotic times, as the Greeks fought first the Germans, Italians and Bulgarians and then each other. It may be that a definitive – or at least satisfactorily unpartisan – political history of Greece during the mid 20th century has yet to be written; but it is clear that terrible atrocities were commited by both left and right wing forces during World War II and the Greek Civil War, to say nothing of the horrors inflicted by the Axis authorities, including reprisal massacres and the deportation and murder of Greek Jews. The Brtitish and Americans provided the right-wing coalition with superior armaments, including warplanes which used napalm as a weapon for the first time. Not exactly cricket, Mr Lancaster. When the left were defeated, many of those survivors who had not escaped into exile were imprisoned, tortured and executed. Such horrors, albeit on a lesser scale, continued until the collapse of the military junta in 1974. We shall never know, of course, whether the left-wing forces would have been any more humane or just had they been victorious.

Another odd note in Lancaster's book is his undisguised admiration of the pre-war fascist dictator General Ioannis Metaxas (1871-1941) who seized power in 1936 and died in 1941, just before the Germans invaded. Metaxas is mentioned seven times, while Themistocles and Alexander the Great only merit three references each, and Aristophanes, Praxiteles and Sophocles none at all. Two of these mentions concern the general's road building schemes, one of which, the road over the Pindos mountains from Kalambaka (here we are back at Meteora), he claimed "is probably the finest piece of engineering in Greece. Completed just before the war by General Metaxas, to whose skill and foresight in military matters not only Greece but all the united nations owe a debt which ideological fashion makes them cravenly loath to acknowldege..." Lancaster does not tell us whether the dictator made the trains run on time, or elaborate on what he calls "those totalitarian gestures which so excited the wrath of foreign anti-fascists", but does relate that he banned the hubble bubble because he considered it to be "un-Greek".

This catalogue of political incorrectness and the general tenor of this book makes one wonder why it was written and published at that particular time. Ostensibly it is a travel book written for educated British readers (the cosy Betjemanesque references to Bournemouth, Derbyshire and Wembley), who at the time of its publication in 1947, when post-war austerity in the United Kingdom meant money was tight and rationing and foreign currency restrictions were still in force, and the Hellenes were embroiled in a bitter civil war, were very unlikely to be able to visit Greece, "a country which", as Lancaster himself writes, "world events seem all too likely to put out of bounds for an indefinite period". There is more of a hint of propagandizing in this work, and although one cannot accuse him of being an official apologist for Churchill's foreign policy or the Truman Doctrine, despite his wartime functions, he does confess in his introduction that one of his motives in writing the book was: "... the presumptuous idea that as a great deal of nonsense, most of it ill-informed and much of it wilfully predjudiced, has recently been written about Greece, a fresh attempt to provide a picture, even one so personal and specialised as this, of a country with which, as the latest development of American foreign policy has forcefully demonstrated, our own future is so intimately bound up, might not be untimely".

Perhaps the kind of propaganda Lancaster was personally more interested in was the diffusion of optimism sorely sought after by Britons recovering from the trauma and privations of war. Most had never been beyond their island's shores, apart from on military or colonial service, and a country like Greece, familiar only from school books, museum visits and news media, was an exotic and distant planet. At the time of this book's publication, Lancaster had only spent 18 months in Greece, and that mainly in the company of Athenian politicians and officials (despite allusions to long nights slumming it in shady Piraeus bars frequented by musicians and prostitutes), but he was a shrewd observer, a quick learner, well-read and able to communicate with considerable charm and wit. His well-written and designed volume, with its splendid illustrations, helped make Greece for its readers into a real place, with real people, not merely a collection of outdoor ruins and Pausanian itineraries. It would have been just the medicine for a teacher in Tenby or a clerk in Clerkenwell dreaming of a three-egg omelette made with real eggs, a new non-utilitarian armchair or a peep at the Parthenon.

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