Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 16

of excitement, yes, but as it turned out in search of enlightenment too, a journey which for me brought me to the very meaning of life itself.

When I looked at the sailors I saw such an array of nationalities just from the different styles of clothes they wore – light-skinned fair-haired men from the ports of the Adriatic, from Illyria and Dalmatia, dressed in colourful striped pantaloons and white smocks; dark-eyed Romans from Ostia, looking so austere in their black shirts and trousers; swarthy Arabs with pointed beards from the cities of Phoenicia and from the far-off Nile wearing rough, toe-length gallabiyahs. And there was a real mixture of languages – Latin was the language of the empire and spoken with varying degrees of competence. But Greek was our language and at least in Patara it was the language everyone used to conduct business. We had our own local dialect which was soft and colourful by comparison to the coarse shouts of the deck hands from the east. And then there were the men from the deserts of Arabia, who spoke together so quickly in a totally unintelligible guttural patois I sometimes wondered how they had learned such a difficult tongue. But when they spoke in Greek, which they had to do to make themselves understood, it was not especially good Greek; it was rather slow and strongly accented.

To me, my city seemed such a crossroads of goods in those days. You could see all the different cargoes being piled

THE JOURNEY