The indigo the current grape

The climate, the continuous blaze of the sun, the long months of complete drought, the dusty plains and dry water-courses, the aloes, the date palms, the cotton, the indigo, the current-grape, the jackal, the cha- maeleon, and the small crocodile — even the camel which has been seen in use — are Eastern and Southern rather than European. When we land in Greece, we find ourselves in the middle of the week before last, that is to say, they still use the Calendar of the Eastern Church, and are twelve days behind us in Europe. And in A.D. 1900 this will have become thirteen days, for in the West we shall omit that leap-year and gain another day. In Greece they talk of the post coming in from Europe, which it only does when a ship arrives, and they speak of European things, in the sense of foreign. In spite of the conventional statements of the geographers, Greece is not in Europe; but a half-. way house between Europe and Asia.

Another important fact, which the geographers ignore, is this — that Greece is an island for any practical purpose — or rather an interminable string of islands scattered along the Eastern Mediterranean over a space of sea that may measure some 500 miles, both north and south, east and west. The maps may show Greece as a prolongation of the Balkan Peninsula; but it would not be practicable for an ordinary traveller to reach Greece except by sea. Athens, though it is a capital city of Europe, cannot be reached by the continental railways.

The train will carry us direct from Calais to the furthest extremities of the Spanish, Italian, Austrian, Russian, and even Turkish dominions in Europe. But railways do not reach in the Balkan Peninsula south of Salonica, in Turkey. The Romans and the Turks had roads into Greece proper; but it is now unsafe, very fatiguing, and costly, to travel by land from Salonica to Athens, and nobody does so. Hence, practically, socially, politically, and economically speaking, Greece is an island, a vast cluster of islands placed in the Egean Sea, very far East and very far South. Athens lies east of Poland and of Hungary. The whole of Greece lies south of Naples and Taranto; and Crete lies south of the Algerian coast and of any point of Europe bulgaria trips.

Greece by sea

We must go to Greece by sea: and the sea voyage is most instructive. There is a long, lonely, restless stretch of sea, some 400 miles broad between the coast of Sicily and sight of the mountains of Attica. When the vast pinnacle of Aetna, with its trailing pennon of smoke, a pinnacle which hour after hour seems to rise in the sky, at last fades out of sight in the west, a long reach of unbroken sea has to be ploughed. Long before we sight the mountains of Taygetus or the headlands of Taenarum or Malea, between which lies the vale of ‘Hollow Lacedaemon,’ one has come to realise that we have left Europe far behind and are entering on the land of the rising sun. The old saw ran — ‘ When you have passed Cape Malea, make your will and say farewell to your kindred.’ That is no longer necessary or even prudent. But by the time that we have rounded Cape Malea and are steering north-east instead of south-east, it breaks upon us that we have left Europe some distance behind us.

Whatever geographers may pretend, there is not any such country as Greece—and there never was. There is no definitely marked portion of Europe inhabited by a people politically and socially one, with national traditions and habits. There is not now, and there never has been in ancient or in modern times. If we take a list of the illustrious Greeks of antiquity, we shall find that far the larger part of them belonged not to continental Greece proper, but to Greek communities spread out over the world from the coast of Spain to the banks of the Euphrates, from the Euxine to the coast of Africa.