Читать книгу Around the Black Sea - William Eleroy Curtis - Страница 3

Table of Contents

There are several lines of steamers on the Black Sea, sailing under the Turkish, Greek, Russian, German, French, Austrian, and Italian flags. The steamers of the North German Lloyd Company, which sail from Genoa and Naples, through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, are best, but they visit only the ports on the northern coast. The Austrian Lloyd steamers, which come from Trieste, are second best, and we were fortunate in obtaining cabins on the Euterpe, which is old-fashioned, but comfortable. The captain is an Italian of Trieste, who speaks English well, as do two of the under officers; the steward is thoughtful and attentive and the cook is beyond criticism.

The passengers were a perfect babel, representing all the races and speaking all the tongues of the East, with several Europeans mixed in, each wearing his own peculiar costume. There were Turks of all kinds and all classes and all ages wearing fezzes of red felt; there were Persians, wearing fezzes of black lamb’s-wool; Albanians with fezzes of white felt, and Jews with turbans and long robes, such as they used to wear in the days of the Scriptures. We had several Turkish army officers to amuse us, and one big, blue-eyed general, who looked like a philanthropist, but is said to be a fiend of a fighter. There were English, German, and French tourists and rug buyers on their way to Persia and Turkestan; a very fat Austrian woman who was going to visit her son, consul at Batoum, and several Russians who had been visiting Paris and the Riviera and were on their way back to their homes in the Caucasus.

We had five different kinds of clergymen—Mohammedan mullahs, wearing long robes and red fezzes with white turbans wound around them, Greek and Armenian priests, who are difficult to distinguish, and three Capuchin monks. One of them was a venerable old gentleman with a patriarchal beard, and one was a mere boy who smoked cigarettes incessantly—and a cigarette does not fit in well with the hood and robe of a monk. The Capuchins have several monasteries in Asia Minor, and maintain schools and do parish work in several of the cities along the coast, where there are communities of Roman Catholics.

There were several Armenians in frock suits of broadcloth, low-cut vests, and snowy shirt bosoms, like those affected by lawyers in Mississippi and Arkansas, and one howling dervish. He did not look a bit as you would expect, but was a jaunty fellow in a fancy shirt of black cotton with white spots, without a collar, and an ordinary sack suit of gray European clothes over which he wore his distinctive coat of camel’s hair with wide sleeves and facings and trimmings of broad black braid, and on his shaven head a fez of gray wool with a wide band of black around it. He carried a dainty cane and whirled it around in his fingers like a dandy when he promenaded the deck. He was a presumptuous young dervish, for he endeavoured to enjoy the privileges of first-class passengers on a third-class ticket, which the deck steward would not permit. And when he did not go back to his proper place, after being told to do so, he was rudely elbowed down the stairs. It was not a respectful way to treat a saint in embryo, which howling dervishes are supposed to be, but I suppose the deck steward had his orders, and perhaps he was accustomed to dealing with such men.

Most of the Turks in the first-class cabin did not come to the table, because they will not eat Christian food for fear that lard or some other extract of the despised pig was used in its preparation. They took their meals in their state-rooms, with their wives and children, where they made their own coffee over spirit lamps and drank water from red earthen jugs which they had filled at the sacred fountains before leaving Constantinople. The women did not leave their cabins until they reached their destination, when they climbed blindly down the gangways into the row-boats, with veils drawn closely over their faces and their bodies enveloped in large shawls.

Several Persians in the first cabin came to their meals regularly, and brought their appetites with them. The Koran applies to them the same as it does to the Turks, but those gentlemen were not so pious as they should be. And I noticed that none of the Mohammedan passengers, except the mullahs and one general, said their prayers when the time came. The general was very devout. He wore a long, light-gray overcoat, reaching to his heels, which he kept so closely buttoned that we wondered if he had anything under it, and, like all military men over here, Russians, Austrians, and Turks, he never put aside his sword, not even when he spread his prayer rug on the deck and turned his face toward Mecca to pray.

The other first-class Mohammedan passengers paid no attention whatever to the hours for devotions, which gave me a disagreeable shock, because I have always understood that a Moslem is so conscientious that he will say his prayers five times a day at the proper moment, no matter what he happens to be doing or where he happens to be.

Many of the third-class passengers, who are compelled to sleep on the open deck, performed their duties regularly. They spread their prayer rugs carefully down in the first open place they could find, and, turning their eyes toward Mecca, went through with the genuflections which are a part of the Mohammedan ritual, and cried in loud voices that there is no God but Allah. Several of the private soldiers, and we had a large number on board, said their prayers regularly, regardless of their surroundings, but the majority of them did not and probably not more than one out of five of the Moslem passengers paid any attention to the hours of prayer.

Two of the mullahs in the first-class end of the ship had handsomely bound books from which they read aloud, as is their custom. Turkish students always study aloud. When you are riding along through country villages in the East you can locate the school-houses by the murmur of the voices of the pupils learning their lessons. If you go into a mosque that is used for educational purposes you can always find groups of students squatting on the floor, rocking their bodies back and forth with a motion as regular as that of a rocking chair, and repeating the lines of their lessons in loud voices.

I once asked a Mohammedan teacher in a Syrian mosque why this is done. He explained that people understand that which they learn through their ears better than that which they learn through their eyes. In the second place, he said, when a person studies aloud the mind is kept upon the subject intently and is not so apt to wander; thirdly, a person who is studying aloud is not so apt to go to sleep as when he reads to himself—and the danger of falling asleep is the reason for the rocking motion of the body which all students practise when they are at their books.

On the forward deck, where the anchor winch is, was camped a group of Persians. Some of them were merchants of Constantinople and other cities on their way to their native country to buy rugs and other goods; others were faithful Mohammedans returning from pilgrimages to Mecca. They were dignified, thoughtful persons with dreamy eyes and intensely black beards, and two or three old men had made themselves supremely ridiculous by the use of henna, which gives hair a bright scarlet hue. It reminded me of What’s-His-Name in “Alice in Wonderland,” who suggested that it would be awfully funny if everybody would dye his whiskers green.

“And hide our heads behind our fans

So they cannot be seen.”

Others had their finger nails stained scarlet with the same stuff, which gives a startling effect.

On the other side of the deck from the Armenians was a nest of their hereditary enemies, Kurds—tall, robust, brown fellows, with snub noses, small, fierce eyes and garments that are indescribable because of the variety of cut and colour. They lay around smoking cigarettes in the most indolent manner, each having what looked like an old-fashioned quilted comfortable for a mattress and an embroidered bag for a pillow.

The most interesting of all were the Lazis, from Lazistan, short, broad-shouldered, muscular chaps, most of whom brought their wives and children with them and camped amidship on the open deck like a lot of gypsies. The women were entirely concealed in shawls of cotton or silk that cover the head as well as the body, and they squatted in groups in the same place all day long, scarcely moving a muscle except when their husbands were hungry, and then they would dig down into a bag and produce a loaf of bread, a dried fish, a few onions, and other simple forms of food.

There were several babies scattered about promiscuously in bright-coloured wrappings, and a number of children under ten years old. Some of them had dainty features and lovely eyes, and a better behaved lot of children you never saw. We did not hear one of them cry during the entire voyage. They lay in their clumsy, queer-looking cradles, made by rude carpenters, without the slightest attention, as self-satisfied as if they had been millionaires smothered in luxury.

One night the peasants from Lazistan gave an interesting performance. The music was furnished by an ordinary bagpipe with three stops, which emitted a mournful and monotonous refrain, but with perfect time, and the dancers kept step to it very much after the manner of the North American Indian. They placed a child in the centre, a dozen or so of them clasped hands in a circle, alternately spreading out as far as their arms would reach and then coming together in a bunch, and in the meantime stamping their feet, bowing the knees, and bending the upper part of the body forward. Sometimes they would stoop to a squatting posture and hop along on one side and then on the other; then they would raise their arms as high as they could reach, revolving all the time to the left. It was a graceful movement and rather fascinating, and they seemed to enjoy it.

The third-class passengers who occupy the open deck, make themselves as comfortable as possible with big bundles of rugs and blankets and pillows, which they spread out wherever the boatswain will let them. They gave us a continuous performance abounding in life and a gorgeous riot of colour, entirely unconscious of their odd ways, their artistic poses, and the entertainment they were furnishing to the foreigners who could look down upon them from the afterdeck. The captain told me that there were doubtless thirty different races among the passengers upon that ship—Turks, Tartars, Mongols, Arabs, Armenians, Albanians, Circassians, Georgians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Lazis, Slavs, Syrians, Turkomans, Bokharoits, Wallachs, and Persians of various clans, which can be detected one from another by experts, because of the way they wear their clothes. Everybody except the women wore brilliant colours, and they were shut off from observation as much as possible by blankets pinned to the canvas awning so as to make screens.

Turks are very democratic. Islam recognizes no caste; there is no aristocracy or nobility or any divisions among the Turks except on an official basis and the inferiors show great respect to those who are above them. The ordinary Turkish peasant is good-natured, honest, sober, patient, frugal, industrious, and capable of great endurance. He is not fanatical, but is kindly disposed toward everybody. His hospitality is unbounded and the exercise of charity is one of his greatest pleasures. Two ragged fellows came up to the first-class deck one day, bringing a wash basin of graniteware painted a bright blue, which they passed around, asking contributions for the benefit of a sick man with five children who was lying helpless on the open deck and ought to be given shelter below in the second-class cabin, which he had no money to pay for. I noticed that everybody chipped in something, from the glittering general to the tatterdemalions who lay sprawled upon their blankets in the shady places.

Every third-class passenger had a basket of provisions and a jug of water, and an old man fixed himself a place in the corner, where he set up a samovar and made coffee to sell. He did a good business, too. His little brass pot was always in motion, because Turks are inveterate coffee drinkers and want a cup of that beverage every few minutes. The old coffee seller was a picture—a Turk from Samsoun, a good-natured old fellow with a wrinkled face, a curly beard, a white turban, and a smile like that of our President, which won’t come off.

Coffee peddler on our steamer

A Turk of Trebizard

The beauties of the Bosphorus have often been described, and probably no sheet of water of corresponding length is so highly decorated by nature and by man. There are a dozen splendid palaces, some of the most imposing residences in all the world, sitting on the very edge of the water at the foot of the hills which enclose the Bosphorus. The Dolma Bactche Palace, now occupied by the sultan, is perhaps the finest, and near it is another equally famous, the Cherigan Palace, which was occupied by the Turkish Parliament until it was burned in February, 1910. The roofless walls, stained with smoke, and the hollow windows now stand mute, unable to testify in their own defence and solve the mystery whether the calamity was due to arson or accident. It is generally assumed that the fire was started by incendiaries, for it seemed to break out in several places at the same time, and burned so fiercely as to suggest inflammables. However, there is no definite knowledge on the subject. It occurred in the night, the watchmen were asleep or absent, there were no police in the neighbourhood, and one of the most exquisite gems of architecture in existence was a hideous skeleton of marble before an attempt to save it could be organized.

The possible motive of an incendiary was to destroy a mass of documents discovered in the Yildiz Kiosk after the forcible evacuation of Abdul Hamid. His archives, official and personal, filled fifty carts and were hauled away to some unknown place, where they were being sorted over by a parliamentary commission, and already extraordinary discoveries had been made concerning the treachery and hypocrisy of prominent men. There has been and still is a determination on the part of certain personages, whose reputations will be ruined, to prevent the publication of these papers, and there have been several stormy debates in the Chamber of Deputies on the subject. Lacking other explanations, it has been assumed that the Cherigan Palace was set on fire for the purpose of destroying these private papers of the ex-sultan, although it was a useless sacrifice. The documents were not there. Few people knew where they were, except the commission which was engaged in classifying them.

Cherigan Palace stood on the shore of the Bosphorus about two miles from the bridge which connects Galata and Stamboul, and it was the most attractive and artistic of all the many buildings which give that water course its fame. It was built about sixty years ago by Abdul Aziz, who was sultan from 1861 to 1876, and was the best ruler Turkey has known for centuries. He intended it for his own residence, lived there for twelve years, and died there in a most tragic manner, June 17, 1876. There his son, Murad V, was allowed to reign for a few months, until he was deposed by a conspiracy which placed Abdul Hamid, the late sultan, in power, and the latter kept his elder brother a prisoner within its beautiful walls for several years, until he, too, was taken off in a mysterious way—some believe by suicide and some by violence. However, no prison was ever more artistic in design or expensive in construction. It was entirely of marble, inside and out, and the interior was remarkable for the richness of the carvings and of the hangings and upholstery and for the beauty of the mural decorations. When the Parliament was organized, Cherigan Palace seemed to be the most convenient building for its sessions. The Senate sat in the state dining-room, and the Chamber of Deputies in the ballroom, which were easily fitted up for the purpose.

There are several hotels on the Bosphorus, which are occupied during the summer, and all of the great nations, except the United States, have handsome residences for their embassies in a water suburb known as Therapia. The Russian embassy is the last and looks directly up the narrow throat which leads from the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. Both sides of this passage are guarded by heavy earthworks against a Russian invasion. Turkey fears no other nation and Russia cannot reach her southern coast by sea without going through Turkish waters. This situation has exasperated every Russian since Peter the Great, who is supposed to have left a will in which he admonished his successors never to rest until they have added the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn to the Russian Empire.

Robert College, an American institution which has turned out some of the best men in the East, and an old Byzantine castle which dates back many centuries, are the most conspicuous objects on the European side, and near them is a sightly location where Dr. Mary Patrick has erected new buildings for the American College for Girls, with funds contributed by friends in the United States. Her former buildings in Scutari were not half big enough, since the constitution was adopted, to accommodate the young Turkish women who want an education.

The first town of importance, sailing eastward from Constantinople along the southern coast of the Black Sea, is the ancient City of Samsoun, founded by the Greeks more than two thousand five hundred years ago, and always of consequence commercially. It has a splendid location, sloping gradually upward from the sea, but like many people, as well as towns, does not fulfil the expectations excited by its appearance from a distance. There is a big hospital for soldiers upon a slight eminence back of the town; several minarets show where the mosques are; the five domes of a Greek church glisten in the sun; several imposing business blocks and residences line up well along the seashore and give a brave appearance to the place: but when you land, you are disappointed to find the streets narrow and dirty, with a mixture of smells arising from unknown sources, wretched pavements, and mangy dogs lying around in the sun scratching themselves in a way that is more suggestive than comfortable. Scratching is sometimes contagious.

But the narrow streets are interesting, and the market place, with a circular fountain and an ancient mosque, offers one of the quaintest and most picturesque Oriental scenes you could imagine. In the foreground a butter dealer in an indescribable costume of more colours than Joseph could possibly have had in his coat, was ladling greasy-looking stuff from a great tub with a wooden spoon and, on his scales, he used stones for weights. The vegetables and oranges were fine. Onions and garlic could be felt in the air, both in the raw material and in the finished form of odours. Turks are largely vegetarians. Vegetables, fruits, and soups made of grain are the chief articles of their diet. We were told that Samsoun is a great place for apples, so much so that the bears come down in droves from the mountains back of the town when the fruit is ripe and rob the orchards. We tried some of the apples which the peasants sell by weight in the market place, and found them dry and tasteless, but I don’t think they were to blame. No apples are good in May.

There is a café every few yards on every street, where it seemed as if the entire male population were sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. We saw a few nargiles—those long-tubed water pipes which are generally associated with cross-legged Turks—in Constantinople, but did not find one anywhere else. I suppose they are out of style, for all the Turks that we met were smoking cigarettes instead.

Quantities of licorice root are shipped from Samsoun. It grows wild in the mountains. The quality, as well as the value, might be improved by cultivation, but such a thing has never been attempted on a large scale. The sheep upon the mountain sides furnish cargoes of wool, and the cattle we saw grazing in large herds add many hides, but tobacco is the chief article of export from Samsoun, and a boy who voluntarily attached himself to our party and followed us along, chattering as he went, told us that a large establishment surrounded by a high wall belonged to Americans.

How a Turkish lad, who presumably had never been out of his native place, could have identified us as Americans is remarkable, for in Oriental countries, even in China and Japan, the natives are seldom able to distinguish between Uncle Sam and John Bull; but, nevertheless, we acted on the welcome information and soon found three fellow-countrymen representing the American Tobacco Company purely for the purpose of buying cigarette material, and, in 1909, they shipped $397,000 in tobacco from that port alone. There are several other buyers for the American market, but they come and go with the season.

The tobacco produced around Samsoun is light of colour, and of fine flavour, especially suited for cigarettes. There is a great difference in the quality according to the care and cultivation, and the Americans have persuaded a few of the farmers to improve their methods and implements. They told me that twice the present crop might be produced from the same area if half the care and skill were expended upon it that the Cuban planters give to their tobacco. Samsoun expects to be the northern terminus of one of the railways which have been authorized by the Turkish Parliament.

If you will look on your map you will notice that Asia Minor is that part of Turkey which projects into the Mediterranean on the Asiatic side, an almost square peninsula about three hundred miles each way. It is bounded on the north by the Black Sea, on the east by Armenia and Kurdistan, on the south by Syria and the Mediterranean and on the west by the Ægean Sea. The western portion of Asia Minor is called Anatolia. It is densely settled by Turkish farmers who cultivate the ground in a primitive, awkward way, but do not realize more than half the value of their labour; first, because of their primitive tools and instruments and their imperfect cultivation, and, second, because there are no transportation facilities by which they can send their produce to market. There are two railways running into the interior from the Mediterranean coast, furnishing communication for about 10 per cent. of the population. Throughout 90 per cent. of Asia Minor the only way of travelling is on the back of a horse or a donkey and the only facility for moving freight is by caravans of camels, which are slow and very expensive. For these reasons the inhabitants depend to a great extent upon their own resources. They make everything they wear except cotton fabrics and have very little to ship away.

Almost directly south of Samsoun, about a hundred miles, is the Marsovan station of the American Board, first occupied in 1852, and for fifty-eight years the headquarters of missionary work, not only for that important city, but for a wide reach of country, including Samsoun, Amasia, and other important towns. The work has naturally been built up by a process of growth. Little day schools, teaching reading, writing, and spelling in the vernacular, have developed into two great institutions: Anatolia College, with its extensive buildings devoted to the collegiate training of young men, and the Girls’ High and Boarding School, an institution quite by itself, giving nearly the same complete course of study that is given to the young men.

These two schools have ample grounds and are both adding gradually to their large plants. The college for young men will soon have $30,000 worth of new buildings, which amount will erect about eight times as much as in the United States. The girls’ school has completely outgrown its large plant, completed only a few years ago, and is adding substantial new buildings.

The college for boys has in a peculiar way taken hold upon southern Russia. Three or four years ago Russian students began to come across the Black Sea, and have doubled in number every year since. It was feared at first that they might be unruly and disorderly, or perhaps revolutionary in their tendencies, but, quite contrary to expectations, they have proved to be among the most steady, earnest, able students the college has had. Like Robert College, at Constantinople, Anatolia has Greek, Mohammedan, and Armenian students. Greeks are not found in colleges east of Marsovan, to any extent.

The college has also, as a part of its organization, a large medical department with extensive hospitals and a nurses’ training school under the direction of two efficient American physicians, Dr. Jesse K. Marden and Dr. Alden R. Hoover, assisted by a large native medical staff.

Patients come to the hospital at Marsovan from a wide area of country and it is reaching not only the Armenians but the Mohammedan classes. The medical service has an unmeasured influence upon the people of the country and makes an impression which no other form of missionary work can possibly do. The people know when they are ill and want medicines, but they are not often aware when they are ignorant and need educating or are morally in need of spiritual uplift. When they meet with severe accidents, as so frequently occurs in that country, or when they are racked by disease, they quickly learn that relief can be found at the mission hospital at Marsovan, and some means of reaching there is devised. They often go on a rude cart, sometimes upon the back of some animal, or, if they live upon a possible road, in a Turkish araba or hooded “carry-all.” They find their way to the hospital and there receive the kind treatment which belongs to every hospital, but especially to the missionary hospital in a non-Christian land. After treatment, they return to their homes full of enthusiasm and gratitude for what they have seen and received.

In addition to the institutions already mentioned, which have separate buildings, there is a theological school for training native college graduates for direct evangelistic work among their countrymen. This school will soon have a separate building, having hitherto been considered a part of the college to which it was attached. The importance of this work has now reached a stage where it demands a separate home and possibly separate management.

Industrial work is an important adjunct to the college. It was started as a means of self-help, to enable students who could not pay their tuition or board to earn a part of it by manual labour, and American machinery and tools were introduced for cabinet work according to modern methods. This has proved so popular that it was necessary to make a rule that no boy should take the mechanical courses alone, without taking some of the regular courses in the college or the preparatory school. Many fathers were so anxious to have their sons learn to use tools and machinery and to make things, that they brought them to the college and asked that they be admitted simply for mechanical instruction. While the school has not been wholly self-supporting, the students have been able to earn a large part of the cost of their education and have received instruction that could not have been given them in any other way.

This kind of training is especially important in Turkey, where the idea has prevailed, and still prevails to no small extent, that when a man is educated he must not do anything that looks like manual labour. Unfortunately this delusion is not confined to Turkey. The mechanical department is calculated to take that fallacy out of the minds of young men, making them see that manual labour is no disgrace and that even a scholar may do things with his hands. Turkey must come to the idea that a scholar of the highest type may be a civil engineer, who will be required to do outdoor work. The industrial school at Marsovan is but a preparatory step to the larger comprehensions of the dignity of labour, while at the same time, it trains the students who come within its influence in mechanical exactness. There is much of value, missionaries have learned, as well as educators in America, in training a boy to do something that is worth while in a mechanical way.

As a part of the medical work, it has been necessary for the American missionaries to establish dispensaries where cases can be treated temporarily, and especially where medicines can be provided for outside patients. It is so difficult to get pure drugs at regular Turkish drug stores that it has been necessary for all the American hospitals in the country to establish and maintain their own dispensaries. Their supplies, bought at wholesale, are sent out from the mission headquarters in Boston, and, therefore, are reliable in every way. Many native pharmacists are being properly trained. These dispensaries often prove almost as valuable for the lives and health of the people as the hospitals, and are regarded as a necessary adjunct of every hospital.

At Marsovan, to carry on this work in all departments, there are nineteen Americans: four ordained missionaries and their wives, three laymen, two physicians, and six single women, all college graduates, and nearly all having taken from three to five years of post-graduate work. Connected with them, and working with them in every way, are at least twenty-five times this number of trained native Christian leaders, many of whom are graduates of the college or other American institutions. Some have studied in Europe after taking a course in the college at Marsovan. Upon the American staff, with the native associates, also rests the responsibility of supervising native evangelistic work in a wide field. Tours of inspection are taken by the missionaries from time to time, thus keeping them familiar with what is going on, so that they may devote their energies at the centre to the demands of the work outside.

As an illustration of the way in which educational institutions grow, Anatolia College is an admirable example. The germ which produced this great institution, now with more than three hundred students and several departments, was a little school in the corner of a stable in the city of Marsovan in charge of Dr. C.C. Tracy. The stable filled the greater part of the building, and in one of the corners, on a platform of earth raised a foot or so above the common level of the mud floor, and protected by a light rail, was the school. Less than a dozen children there took their first lessons in learning to read. At the start, in common intelligence, they were but little in advance of the animals that occupied the rest of the room. No one could have detected in that humble beginning the germ of an institution that now covers several acres in buildings and campus just outside the large and flourishing city of Marsovan, filled with bright young men from all parts of Anatolia, from along the entire southern shore of the Black Sea, and even from Russia, on the northern coast—studying for academic degrees in preparation for positions of influence and leadership in the new Turkish Empire.

This little stable school became a high school in 1886, and a full-grown college a few years later. It now has a faculty of twenty-three professors, fourteen of whom are natives of the country and eight have taken post-graduate courses to prepare themselves for their work. They have degrees from the New College at Edinburgh, the University of Berlin, the University of Athens, the Imperial Law School at Constantinople, the Royal Conservatory of Music at Stuttgart and the Academy at Paris.

Anatolia College has sent out 224 graduates, of whom 207 are now living. Fifty-two are engaged in teaching, forty-eight are practising medicine, and eighty-six are in business. In addition to these graduates, several thousand other young men have for a time studied in the institution and for various reasons have been compelled to leave without completing the course. These have, however, gone out armed with a new power which this college has given them, and many are doing signal service within and without the Turkish Empire. Not long since, in a mixed gathering of Turks and Christians in Marsovan, profound thanks were expressed by Mohammedan leaders for this institution and what it has done to disseminate ideas of liberty, for the emancipation of women, and for the general welfare.

Among the students in the college, who come from about half of the twenty-nine provinces of the Ottoman Empire, are also found natives of Greece, Albania, Egypt, and, as has already been stated, Russia. The courses of study are similar to the usual college courses in the United States, with the exception that more emphasis is put upon the living languages than upon the dead.

Coasting along the south shore of the Black Sea, we were sailing through a land of fable, and our steamer touched at some scene of Greek mythology two or three times every day. At every port where we stopped to discharge or take on cargo we were surrounded by fleets of queer-looking boats with high-pointed prows and sterns, like the gondolas of Venice and the ancient galleys of the Greeks. There is always an exciting scramble when the gangway is lowered, and the barefooted boatmen climb over each other to get on board to solicit the patronage of the passengers. Their costumes, their cries, their gesticulations, and the confusion they create make it hard to believe that they are the descendants of gods and demi-gods, the heroes of the poems and the fables and legends we read in Greek mythology. The coast is bordered with a continuous range of magnificent mountains, rising gradually from the sea, clothed with forests on the upper heights and usually a strip of cultivated land along the coast. The successive ranges, rising one above the other, culminate in snow-capped peaks in the far background. The lower slopes and the coast line are dotted with villages embowered in oak, chestnut, beech, walnut, and hazel trees and masses of lilac, rhododendrons, azaleas, myrtles, orange groves, and orchards of quince and cherry trees, which are all in blossom in April and May and make a charming picture.

The steamer stops usually from one to five hours, which is long enough to see everything that is interesting and gave us a good idea of northern Turkey, which, by the way, is very different from what I expected in many respects. Indeed it is necessary for every one who goes there to revise his preconceived ideas of Turkish life and character; but the way we had to fight with the boatmen and the hackmen, who refused in almost every case to accept the fares agreed upon before starting, shows that the successors of Castor and Pollux, Theseus, Diana, and the other demi-gods have degenerated from the classic days. It seemed almost incredible that we were actually visiting the playgrounds of the gods. The imagination of the ancient Greeks peopled that beautiful coast with supernatural beings, who were the heroes of their fables and their songs, and there was a mixture of history in them all.

The Argonauts, you will remember, sailed from Thessaly to Colchis under command of Jason, to fetch a golden fleece, which was suspended from an oak tree in a grove, guarded day and night by a ferocious dragon. Jason built a ship of fifty oars, called the Argo, after the name of the designer, who was instructed by the goddess Minerva.

Jason was accompanied upon this expedition by several of the greatest heroes of Greek fable, including Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Theseus, and others, who were called the Argonauts, after the name of the ship. They met with surprising adventures, and when they arrived at their destination the king of Colchis promised to give up the golden fleece provided Jason would yoke together two fire-breathing oxen and sow the teeth of the dragon which had not been used by Cadmus at Thebes. Meantime Medea, the daughter of the king, fell in love with the captain of the Argonauts, and, when he promised to marry her, showed him how to put to sleep the dragon that guarded the golden fleece, and how to protect himself against the flames that came from the nostrils of those terrible steers. Jason did the stunt, to use a classic phrase, married the girl, and sailed away with the treasure. After wandering about the coast of the Black Sea and threading the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, the Argonauts at length arrived at Thessaly and told the story of their adventures.

It is believed that the fable of the Argonauts was founded upon a commercial expedition which wealthy merchants of Thessaly sent out to explore the coast of the Black Sea, twelve or fifteen hundred years before the Christian era, and the remains of the colonies they founded may still be found along the shores of Asia Minor. This expedition was followed by many Greeks from Miletus and other places who built a fringe of cities and towns on every bay and island along the coast. And their fleets carried on a commerce quite as important as that of to-day. All historic interest in the Black Sea centres around those colonies, which brought with them the culture that distinguished the Greek from the barbarian of those days. Situated on carefully selected sites, which the traveller can still identify, these colonies became the profitable markets where the products of Asia and those of Europe changed hands.

But the Argonauts were not the only characters of mythology that may be met with up there. The city of Eregli, the first port at which the steamer touches after leaving the Bosphorus and entering the Black Sea, stands on the site of Heraclea, a famous town founded by Hercules in prehistoric days; and in a garden north of the town is the cavern called Acherusia, through which he is supposed to have descended to the infernal regions to encounter Cerberus, according to the story. Near this cave are the ruins of a Roman aqueduct and of two temples which have been converted into churches, and on the mountain side are coal mines that were worked by the ancient Greek colonists before the dawn of history. Fuel was obtained from them, also, for the European battleships during the Crimean war. These mines are said to contain an excellent quality of steam and gas coal, but have never been developed because the Turkish government, for some reason or another, has not permitted it.

A poisonous honey made in the neighbourhood of Heraclea, according to Pliny the historian, is supposed to have been derived from yellow azaleas and purple rhododendrons, which abound on the hillsides in that neighbourhood. Even now the farmers cannot keep bees, because the honey they produce invariably makes people ill.

A little farther up the coast, the village of Bartan, known in ancient times as Parthenius, according to Greek fables was the home of Artemis, or the goddess Diana, as she is better known, who hunted deer and more harmful creatures among the forests upon the mountain sides and bathed in the waters of the river that comes bubbling down into the sea. Those who do not believe this story can find proof in nearly every picture gallery of Europe, for acres of canvas have been covered with paintings of Diana, the divine huntress, and her achievements in forest and field.

The next village, Amastris, was the birthplace of the wife of Darius, the great Persian king, and Dionysius, the Roman tyrant, and in a gossippy letter to the emperor Trajan Pliny describes Amastris as “a handsome city.” It continued to be a port of importance as late as the ninth century. The Venetians and the Genoese occupied it in turn in the Middle Ages several times. The site of the ancient city is now occupied by an insignificant village, and the only reminder of the power and prosperity associated with its past are the ruins of a citadel, an aqueduct, and fortifications.

The port of Sinub is the ancient Sinope, the mother colony founded by Autolycus, a companion of Hercules, and the most important of all the Greek colonies on the Euxine or Black Sea. Here the cynic philosopher, Diogenes, was born. It was also the birthplace of Mithridates the Great, who ruled Asia Minor and all the country surrounding it several hundred years before Christ. During the time of Pericles, Sinope was the strongest and most important of all the colonies of Greece, having the only safe harbour on the southern coast. It was the terminus of the royal road which extended from the Persian Gulf through Mesopotamia, following the valley of the Euphrates to the shores of the Black Sea. Sinub is surrounded by high-wooded mountains which were occupied by the fabled Amazons, and upon the island called Adasi, there was a temple to Mars erected by and presided over by two Amazonian queens.

One of the stories connected with Sinub, which, however, I do not vouch for, is that Mithridates, the Greek emperor, put his wives and sisters to death with his own hands in the palace whose ruins we saw one morning to prevent their falling into the hands of Lucullus and his Roman invaders.

There is much to see in all these little towns in the way of ruins, but the difficulty is that nobody can tell you anything about them. They are not esteemed by the people and no archæologist has ever undertaken to investigate them. They represent successive civilizations, first Greek, then Roman, then Persian and Venetian, and, finally, the Byzantine periods of occupation and culture, each of which was founded upon the fragments of those which preceded it. No country has had so much history, but it is impossible to fix dates or circumstances. Asia Minor and that coast have been in the midst of the current of events from the beginning of things. Every great conqueror has occupied that country in turn, down to the final invasion of the Turks, whose supremacy was established in the fifteenth century and has been maintained ever since.

It was difficult to adjust ourselves to the realization that the little towns where we went ashore as the steamer stopped are the same that were occupied by Alexander the Great, by Cyrus, Darius and Timour the Tartar, and it is asserted that there are traces of every one of them there. But those communities have seen many changes since. That coast has been a thoroughfare for conquerors, because of its geographical position—a battle field for many, but the abiding place of none.