CRETE, A YEAR AGO.* So long as the Ottoman flag
flies over the island, the political future of Crete will be " a matter of schemes and conjecture," says Mr. Edwardes, who doubts whether the people of that charming but restless country would be much better off if the problem of its destiny were solved by its annexation to the Kingdom of Greece. He does not commit himself to a desire that the proposal of the cession of Crete to Great Britain, which was mooted before the Crimean War, should be revived ; but there is a hint of his wishes in the pains which he has taken to put before ne such a record against the rulers of the Cretans as justifies him in saying that while human nature continues to be human, the wrongs so continuously inflicted by them are not likely to be forgiven. His statement of the account between the Christians and the Turks is preceded by the following passage :—
" To the majority of the Cretans themselves, it seems the moat
• letters from Crete Written during the Spring of 1886. By Charles Edwardes. London Bentley and Bon,
obvious thing in the world that they should revert to the King of the Hellenee so soon as they have slipped off the loose chains of the Sultan. France openly backs them in this assumption, and the political agents from Athens have dinned it into their ears until they have accepted it as their inevitable lot. But the simple•natured Cretans have no real conception of what would come upon them with such a change of suzerainty. They are fatally susceptible to rhetoric, and listen too ingenuously to the rhetorical Athenians, who profess such hot and generous eagerness to enlarge the bounds of the kingdom of Greece,—seemingly unaware that the maladministration of a small territory affords no reasonable claim to the administration of a larger. It is well for Crete that certain of the wiser and more philosophical Cretans are content to leave the settlement of the question to time. Why should they not, to the very last moment, enjoy the unique pleasure of attracting the sympathies of every enlightened European, and the consciousness all the while that in every essential particular they are happier than they can hope to be when there is no Sultan at Constantinople?"
This is a sensible, if a somewhat cynical view ; but the author adds :—" The day is not to the philosophers, and so we may at any hour look for the outbreak, upon one pretext or another, of the last of the long list of insurrections for which unhappy Crete has been famous daring these latter centuries."
In the meantime, it is pleasant and useful to learn from so intelligent and liberal.minded an observer as Mr. Edwardes what sort of place Crete is, so that when the problem of its destiny— in whose solution it is to be hoped that England will be con- cerned merely as a looker-on—comes into the field of active politics, it may have its legitimate interest for us.
Whether custom can ever conquer the disgust inspired by the unavoidable eight of cruelty to animals, is a question for the individual traveller : he who cannot answer it in the affirmative had better not go to Crete, for the so-called Christians are fiendishly cruel, and "the goodness of the Turks is merely passive." In order to enjoy the book, the reader must try to forget the evidence of this detestable characteristic of the Cretans which he is necessarily obliged to record.
One lands from the .Egean at Canes., the Turkish capital. Seen from the sea, this must be one of the most beautiful places in the world, with its tall green and ochre houses, relics of the great days of 'Venice, its white domes and minarets, its encircling ridge of hills only two or three thousand feet high, and beyond them, ten miles away, its magnificent outer setting of the White Mountains, eight thousand feet in height. Con- fusion of tongues is a difficulty to be faced from the outset ; the Cretan Greek is intelligible only to the sharper intellects among tile Hellenes. Jews abound in this Moslem city, and there is a tribe of Arabs just outside the gates, which are kept by Turkish soldiers. The latter challenged Mr. Edwardes, but his Arab guide had the countersign, a part of the routine of Canon life. The Arabs, men and women, are dressed precisely as they would be in their native deserts. "There is also," says the author, "a colony of Bedouins, who, according to report, would make nothing of tearing an inquisitive European to pieces and throwing him to the chickens, so uncivilised are they." The picturesque bustle and movement, the Babel of speech, and the variety of colour which are characteristics of the East, are always to be found in the vicinity of the fountains. Conspicuous amid the crowd are the Cretans proper, a fine, ewalwart race, with independence in their eyes, and far more manly than the Greeks of the mainland, who come over to instruct them in the elements of conduct. The miseries of installing himself at Khalepa, in the country parts beyond Canea (the town is to be religiously avoided), where no provision is ever made for foreign occupation, and " a good Cretan would as soon receive a box of explosives into his house as an Englishman," are narrated in an entertaining style by the author, whom we follow with interest to his final settlement in a white house on a hill, belonging to a mason and his family, who " do " for him, and reside on the other side of the well common to both establishments. Except, perhaps, a Spanish- American posada, this is probably the least-furnished dwelling recorded in chronicles of travel ; but it was a charming abode, nevertheless, and the mason and his boys, Giorgio, Michaelis, and Demetri, were delightful people, honest, friendly, sincere, and picturesque. A shopping-scene, in which everything had to be explained and bargained for in pantomime, is very comic. The first part of Mr. Edwardes's experiences ends with a capital picture. He has previously observed that there is no means of fastening any of the doors :—
" Yon would be surprised to know how many arrangements and rearrangements the few and simple necessaries of life which I have purchased have undergone. My lessors ran back and forwards between the two homes to see what I am doing, and to
recount their experiences. I am supplying them with much innocent merriment. As it is a little chilly I have ordered a fire, which is brought in a large red earthen pot, the fuel being olive-twigs ; and, having eaten my frugal sapper of boiled eggs and bread, with /Sleety of native wine, I am now writing with the firepot on one side, a strong draught from the three windows which command me when I sit at table, my two candles flanking a nosegay of blue and crimson flowers gathered by Demetri for the stranger, and with the ghostly, mono- tonous croak of an owl coming tome every now and then from the very window-sill of my establishment. Save for the whistling of the wind the stillness is solemn, and it is made the more so by the view of the White Mountains, a row of silver peaks against the dark ground of night for the moon is shining upon their thick covering of snow."
The English visitor, who was promptly denounced as a spy of the British Government to the Governor-General of Crete, Saran Pasha (an unintentional service which procured for him the friendship of that amiable and frivolous official), made many descents from this eyrie in the hills, and studied Cauca, Soda, and the surrounding country at his abundant leisure. In the Governor's secretary, a Greek gentleman of high attainments, he found a valuable acquaintance, who gave him access to a choice library, a valuable collection of antiquities, and a vast and varied amount of archaeological and legendic lore. Mr. Edwardes has made excellent use of these opportunities ; it is difficult to say whether his work is more interesting when it deals with the past of "this poor harassed island," as he calls Crete, or when it relates the author's every-day observation of its present condition. Kindly and sympathetic, bright and un- pretending, he sees the good and the evil alike, and his graphic power is considerable. Although his hankering after Crete for the English is a little too evident—he constantly dwells upon what " we " should have, and be sure to do, " in case "—there is no suggestive exaggeration in his statements of Turkish misrule, and to the Venetian period of Cretan history he does plain justice. He tells some stories of Moslem barbarity and Christian retaliation which we advise the reader to pass over; it would have been better had he left them untold in a volume intended for general reading. The details of the last and moat sanguinary of the Cretan insurrections, chiefly taken from the narrative of Mr. Stillman, an American who lived through several months of that insurrection in a state of siege at the hands of the Moslems, are horrifying. The tactics of the Kilkenny cats by which the Sultan kept his hold upon the wretched island, which he was advised to abandon by every Ambassador at Constanti- nople except the British (who doubtless thought England could get it at less cost from the Turks than from the Greeks), were hideously cruel ; but the result of the strife which ended only in 1869, as it is to be contemplated now, is one not to be despised, in this day of essentially small mercies to subjugated nationali- ties :—"For the living Cretans who stayed in Crete, the war did its work. Since 1869, there has been no tyranny, nor any semblance of tyranny, in the land ; and the Cretans now enjoy as easy and respectable a government as any other community in the wide world. Their wish—nay, longing—to turn out the Turks is unreasonable in the extreme, but it is natural." No political tyranny, it is true ; but there is social tyranny, accord- ing to the author's own showing, and presumptive impunity on the part of the Turks, or else how are the habitual seclusion of the Christian women, and their terror at the approach of a stranger of which Mr. Edwardes bad no convincing an example in his own person to be explained ?
Several delightful descriptions of scenery and the natural productions of the island enliven the book. Among these, a word-picture of Western Crete, the mountains, and the sea, as the author saw them from the broken steeps of Abirotiri, after he had passed through the enchanting outskirts of Khalepa, is especially remarkable. " The scene," the author says, " will live is my memory till I die ;" and we think none of his readers will forget the pages in which he tells them how Mount Ida solidified itself in the grey mist and revealed its majestic presence, and endeavours to describe a prospect than which, be feels assured, "there can be none more entrancing within the compass of our globe." Mr. Edwardes visited the great Cretan monasteries— to whose beneficent action upon the general welfare be bears unstinted testimony—under very favourable circumstances, having had access to a Consoler report upon those institutions at present among the unprinted MSS. of the Foreign Office. And as he also had exceptional facilities for acquiring in- formation respecting the trade and commercial relations of the island, the chapters devoted to these subjects are equally interesting and authentic. We follow him with even greater pleasure into the mountainous country, to the "glorious land"
of Kissamos, and read with avidity his glowing description of the Shphakiots, those men of the White Mountains of whom a Venetian statesman wrote, in 1586,—" What gives them their superiority in courage is, in combination with their temperament, and the nature of their country, the conviction that they are descended from the Romans." The home of this noble race was inaccessible to the author, the mountain-passes being choked with snow ; and he regretted this the more, as the most lovely of the Cretan maidens are to be seen there. The castle and bazaar of Kissamos form a paradise for antiquaries; and the ancient city of Polyrrhenia, discovered twenty years ago, with its ruins remounting from Venetian to Roman, from Roman to Grecian days, is within an easy distance. The ancient coast city of 'hale- sarna, which comes in sight when one has toiled to the summit of a high ridge, must be a strangely suggestive place to con- template, while one wanders among its prodigious earthquake- rent walls, with the blue waves breaking against its overthrown atones, and fearful stillness brooding over the shelving strand of the bay on which it is situated, and the amphitheatre of moun- tains that hides it. The silent, stone-strewn plain is rich with flowers which would be prized in our conservatories, but bloom there in unheeded luxuriance, winter and summer alike :—
"A mountain 3,000 ft. high looks down from Phalasarna from the south. It has a white spot on its crest. That is the monastery of the Agios Elias. And there is no other visible sign of life all around this dead city A stone's-throw away from the nearest of the city walls, a great empty stone throne stands apart from everything else on a rugged carpet of wiry herbs and fragments of rock. A real throne, or Paahley's learned references to the great Phalasarns, who once sat supreme in it, are so much dust on his pages."
The temptation to dwell upon the pictorial and romantic aide of a book of this kind is strong; but it must not prevent us from doing justice to its practical and instructive aide also. It is difficult to imagine what one could want to know about Crete that Mr. Edwardes has left untold.
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