UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
The Two Cities
By ANTHONY KERR (Trinity College, Cambridge) THE old unwalled city of Sparta still glistens white beneath the Laconian sun. It is a garden city, with every house set in an orchard of lemons and olives, as it was in the days of Xenophon and perhaps of Lycurgus. It is a clean city, white- \■ashed as most towns are in southern Greece—and indeed anywhere in Greece—and free from the usual smells of the Mediterranean. It is also a prosperous place ; for Athens will always require its oranges, its lemons, its olives and above all its grapes. Unlike the centres of commerce and industry, it is immune from the effects of economic depression ; not depending on a single fruit-crop, it would ,need very bad luck with tr4e diseases to be ruined. The prosperity of Sparta is reflected in the way the people dress. If you see any barefooted children, you may depend on it they had shoes to take off. It is reflected also in the almost complete absence of American advertising. Sparta did not require Marshall Aid to recover from the war, and therefore has not been obliged to put up with its-inevitable concomitants, the huge Marshall Aid posters in every café, reminding the people of what the Americans have done for them, and the advertisements for R.C.A. Radio and Singer Sewing-Machines, sprawled in two-foot letters on the sides of houses or on walls specially constructed for that purpose on the more lonely stretches of the trans-Arcadian road.
You will never see in Sparta, as in other Mediterranean towns, a vast population lounging in cafés or otherwise busy with doing nothing and talking about politics. The Spartans always seem to be doing something, even if it is only showing tourists around their ruins—and refusing all gratuities—or dashing on their smart German bicycles to the swimming-pool—thirty yards by ten of dark green Eurotas water amid, dark green surroundings of bamboos, olive-trees and evergreen oaks. The piscina is to the Spartans what the café is to most Greeks—though they also have their cafés. Little boys do highly spectacular dives from a twelve-foot board into opaque water of uncertain depth. Actually it is seven foot deep— but one could not tell by looking at it—which makes the little boys seem far more heroic than they deserve credit for. The young men arrive, swim half a length and back again, dive once or twice, talk and sip coffee, dive in again, and so continue until they make up their minds to race one another back to town on their Bismarcks. The older men swim less and sip more coffee ; their cycles tend to be slower and heavier. Sparta is by far the most cycle-conscious town in Greece—the only one which compares in that respect to those of Northern Europe.
In the evening, after the sun has set on the curving high ridge of Taygetus, and after the day's work and swimming are over and done, the more substantial inhabitants gather around the tables of the restaurant, just by the palmy town square, and there they remain eating and drinking slowly and soberly until midnight and after, enjoying the mild, clean summer air and the breeze blowing gently down the vale. I found their evening habits most convenient, forI arrived starved and exhausted, after a hundred-mile ride from Epidaurus and a harrowing three-thousand-foot descent by night on a badly surfaced road, and issued into the square at half-past- eleven, somewhat surprised to find myself there, and still more surprised to find them still eating and drint- ;lig. I sat down beside a journalist and a taverner, ordered myself a meal, made conversa- tion with them in French, and then discovered that the journalist had paid for my dinner and that the taverner was about to offer me a night's hospitality. Such are the people of the Peloponnese,
and such, above all, are the Spartans. I I left Sparta with the impression—which I share with others— that it ought to be a capital. It seems destined by Nature for a great future—with a lovely setting of mountains and orchards, a fertile soil, second to none in Greece, an industrious people, who are also the best soldiers in the land, and, abtive all, a great tradition of loyalty and service to the common weal, which is far from dying, as anyone will realise who observes how well the town
is kept. And yet it is so provincial, and rules but one valley—the fairest of them no doubt, but still only one among many.
In contrast with Sparta, Salonica lives almost wholly by industry and trade—mainly the latter. In appearance it is more Italian than Greek, and in many ways resembles Genoa. Like the city of the Dorias, it is all length and very little depth ; it also has its opulent suburbs to the east, while the proletariat crowd into the western quarters and the slopes behind the centre. Like Genoa, too, it has paved streets and is kept free from smells—except those of the sea, which adds not a little to its charm. But it is older than Genoa ; it has magnificent Roman walls and a triumphal arch, and its nascent Christian congregation received two Epistles from St. Paul.
Salonica is built around a magnificent waterfront and a broad but rather dull main street with many hotels and some excellent restaurants. The front stretches from the customs house to the White Tower—a round keep formerly called the Tower of Blood, as the Turks executed their prisoners there—a mile and a half by thirty yards. It is lined by consulates and shipping agencies, with rows of flags overhanging the pavement and by hundreds of fishing- boats and launches. In the evening it is closed to traffic, and all Thessalonians who can get there walk up and down slowly from the customs house to the Tower, backwards and forwards, escorting their young ladies, to the accompaniment of gramophone records from a music-launch which cruises up and down with them. While their elders carry on thus, the boys of Salonica hop on to the boats and trawlers and climb up and down the rigging, jumping from rope to rope and boat to boat, as they have been doing for eighty or ninety generations since Salonica was founded.
The hinterland of Salonica is a dull, rolling plain, rising gradually, towards the Jugoslav and Bulgarian frontiers, some fifty miles away by road. This country is fertile and receives more water than most parts of Greece ; but the people look poorer or perhaps less anxious to keep up appearances. The last Greek village is Evzoni, set between the apple orchards and the open fields. So few people cross the border that the customs and passport-control offices are normally closed, their respective incumbents being assiduous devotees of the Magazin—the café-grocery around which the life of Evzoni, as of most small Greek villages, is centred. In the even- ing, after the Home Guards have mustered and taken post, the Macedonian dogs bark at one another across the border, the moon is reflected in the silver Vardar, and beyond it shine the lights of, Djevdjelia, where the people speak the Slav language and obey Marshal Tito ; and those of Evzoni can look wistfully on the market- town but three miles away which they see every night and which most of them will never visit—the town where they might have a hen for a bar of chocolate and discard their oldest'shoes for a cow.
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