In The Levant

XVIII.—CYPRUS

IN the early morning we were off Cyprus, in the open harbor of Larnaka,—a row of white houses on the low shore. The town is not peculiar and not specially attractive, but the Marina lies prettily on the blue sea, and the palms, the cypresses, the minarets and church-towers, form an agreeable picture behind it, backed by the lovely outline of mountains, conspicuous among them Santa Croce. The highest, Olympus, cannot be seen from this point.

A night had sufficed to transport us into another world, a world in which all outlines are softened and colored, a world in which history appears like romance. We might have imagined that we had sailed into some tropical harbor, except that the island before us was bare of foliage; there was the calm of perfect repose in the sky, on the sea, and the land; Cyprus made no harsh contrast with the azure water in which it seemed to be anchored for the morning, as our ship was. You could believe that the calm of summer and of early morning always rested on the island, and that it slept exhausted in the memory of its glorious past.

Taking a cup of coffee, we rowed ashore. It was the festival of St. George, and the flags of various nations were hung out along the riva, or displayed from the staffs of the consular residences. It is one of the chief fête days of the year, and the foreign representatives, who have not too much excitement, celebrated it by formal visits to the Greek consul. Larnaka does not keep a hotel, and we wandered about for some time before we could discover its sole locanda, where we purposed to breakfast. This establishment would please an artist, but it had few attractions for a person wishing to break his fast, and our unusual demand threw it into confusion. The locanda was nothing but a kitchen in a tumble-down building, smoke-dried, with an earth floor and a rickety table or two. After long delay, the cheerful Greek proprietor and his lively wife—whose good-humored willingness both to furnish us next to nothing, but the best they had, from their scanty larder, and to cipher up a long reckoning for the same, excited our interest—produced some fried veal, sour bread, harsh wine, and tart oranges; and we breakfasted more sumptuously, I have no doubt, than any natives of the island that morning. The scant and hard fare of nearly all the common people in the East would be unendurable to any American; but I think that the hardy peasantry of the Levant would speedily fall into dyspeptic degeneracy upon the introduction of American rural cooking.

After we had killed our appetites at the locanda, we presented our letters to the American consul, General di Cesnola, in whose spacious residence we experienced a delightful mingling of Oriental and Western hospitality. The kawâss of the General was sent to show us the town. This kawâss was a gorgeous official, a kind of glorified being, in silk and gold-lace, who marched before us, huge in bulk, waving his truncheon of office, and gave us the appearance, in spite of our humility, of a triumphal procession. Larnaka has not many sights, although it was the residence of the Lusignan dynasty,—Richard Cour de Lion having, toward the close of the twelfth century, made a gift of the island to Guy de Lusignan. It has, however, some mosques and Greek churches. The church of St. Lazarus, which contains the now vacant tomb of the Lazarus who was raised from the dead at Bethany and afterwards became bishop of Citium, is an interesting old Byzantine edifice, and has attached to it an English burial-ground, with tombs of the seventeenth century. The Greek priest who showed us the church does not lose sight of the gain of godliness in this life while pursuing in this remote station his heavenly journey. He sold my friend some exquisite old crucifixes, carved in wood, mounted in antique silver, which he took from the altar, and he let the church part with some of its quaint old pictures, commemorating the impossible exploits of St. Demetrius and St. George. But he was very careful that none of the Greeks who were lounging about the church should be witnesses of the transfer. He said that these ignorant people had a prejudice about these sacred objects, and might make trouble.

The excavations made at Larnaka have demonstrated that this was the site of ancient Citium, the birthplace of Zeno, the Stoic, and the Chittim so often alluded to by the Hebrew prophets; it was a Phoenician colony, and when Ezekiel foretold the unrecoverable fall of Tyre, among the luxuries of wealth he enumerated were the “benches of ivory brought out of the isles of Chittim.” Paul does not mention it, but he must have passed through it when he made his journey over the island from Salamis to Paphos, where he had his famous encounter with the sorcerer Bar-jesus. A few miles out of town on the road to Citti is a Turkish mosque, which shares the high veneration of Moslems with those of Mecca and Jerusalem. In it is interred the wet-nurse of Mohammed.

We walked on out of the town to the most considerable church in the place, newly built by the Roman Catholics. There is attached to it a Franciscan convent, a neat establishment with a garden; and the hospitable monks, when they knew we were Americans, insisted upon entertaining us; the contributions for their church had largely come from America, they said, and they seemed to regard us as among the number of their benefactors. This Christian charity expressed itself also in some bunches of roses, which the brothers plucked for our ladies. One cannot but suspect and respect that timid sentiment the monk retains for the sex whose faces he flies from, which he expresses in the care of flowers; the blushing rose seems to be the pure and only link between the monk and womankind; he may cultivate it without sin, and offer it to the chance visitor without scandal.

The day was lovely, but the sun had intense power, and in default of donkeys we took a private carriage into the country to visit the church of St. George, at which the fête day of that saint was celebrated by a fair, and a concourse of peasants. Our carriage was a four-wheeled cart, a sort of hay-wagon, drawn by two steers, and driven by a Greek boy in an embroidered jacket. The Franciscans lent us chairs for the cart; the resplendent kawass marched ahead; Abd-el-Atti hung his legs over the tail of the cart in an attitude of dejection; and we moved on, but so slowly that my English friend, Mr. Edward Rae, was able to sketch us, and the Cyprians could enjoy the spectacle.

The country lay bare and blinking under the sun; save here and there a palm or a bunch of cypresses, this part of the island has not a tree or a large shrub. The view of the town and the sea with its boats, as we went inland, was peculiar, not anything real, but a skeleton picture; the sky and sea were indigo blue. We found a crowd of peasants at the church of St. George, which has a dirty interior, like all the Greek churches. The Greeks, as well as the other Orientals, know how to mingle devotion with the profits of trade, and while there were rows of booths outside, and traffic went on briskly, the church was thronged with men and women who bought tapers for offerings, and kissed with fervor the holy relics which were exposed. The articles for sale at the booths and stands were chiefly eatables and the coarsest sort of merchandise. The only specialty of native manufacture was rude but pleasant-sounding little bells, which are sometimes strung upon the necks of donkeys. But so fond are these simple people of musical noise, that these bells are attached to the handles of sickles also. The barley was already dead-ripe in the fields, and many of the peasants at the fair brought their sickles with them. They were, both men and women, a good-humored, primitive sort of people, certainly not a handsome race, but picturesque in appearance; both sexes affect high colors, and the bright petticoats of the women matched the gay jackets of their husbands and lovers.

We do not know what was the ancient standard of beauty in Cyprus; it may have been no higher than it is now, and perhaps the swains at this fête of St. George would turn from any other type of female charms as uninviting. The Cyprian or Paphian Venus could not have been a beauty according to our notions.

The images of her which General di Cesnola found in her temple all have a long and sharp nose. These images are Phoenician, and were made six hundred to a thousand years before the Christian era, at the time that wonderful people occupied this fertile island. It is an interesting fact, and an extraordinary instance of the persistence of nature in perpetuating a type, that all the women of Cyprus to-day—who are, with scarcely any exception, ugly—have exactly the nose of the ancient Paphian Venus, that is to say, the nose of the Phoenician women whose husbands and lovers sailed the Mediterranean as long ago as the siege of Troy.

It was off the southern coast of this island, near Paphos, that Venus Aphrodite, born of the foam, is fabled to have risen from the sea. The anniversary of her birth is still perpetuated by an annual fête on the 11th of August,—a rite having its foundation in nature, that has proved to be stronger than religious instruction or prejudice. Originally, these fêtes were the scenes of a too literal worship of Venus, and even now the Cyprian maiden thinks that her chance of matrimony is increased by her attendance at this annual fair. Upon that day all the young people go upon the sea in small boats, and, until recently, it used to be the custom to dip a virgin into the water in remembrance of the mystic birth of Venus. That ceremony is still partially maintained; instead of sousing the maiden in the sea, her companions spatter the representative of the goddess with salt water,—immersion has given way here also to sprinkling.

The lively curiosity of the world has been of late years turned to Cyprus as the theatre of some of the most important and extensive archaeological discoveries of this century; discoveries unique, and illustrative of the manners and religion of a race, once the most civilized in the Levant, of which only the slightest monuments had hitherto been discovered; discoveries which supply the lost link between Egyptian and Grecian art. These splendid results, which by a stroke of good fortune confer some credit upon the American nation, are wholly due to the scholarship, patient industry, address, and enthusiasm of one man. To those who are familiar with the magnificent Cesnola Collection, which is the chief attraction of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, I need make no apology for devoting a few paragraphs to the antiquities of Cyprus and their explorer.

Cyprus was the coveted prize of all the conquerors of the Orient in turn. The fair island, with an area not so large as the State of Connecticut, owns in its unequal surface the extremes of the temperate climate; snow lies during the greater part of the year upon its mountains, which attain an altitude of over seven thousand feet, and the palm spreads its fan-leaves along the southern coast and in the warm plains; irregular in shape, it has an extreme length of over one hundred and forty miles, and an average breadth of about forty miles, and its deeply indented coast gives an extraordinarily long shore-line and offers the facilities of harbors for the most active commerce.

The maritime Phoenicians early discovered its advantages, and in the seventeenth century b. c., or a little later, a colony from Sidon settled at Citium; and in time these Yankees of the Levant occupied all the southern portion of the island with their busy ports and royal cities. There is a tradition that Teucer, after the Trojan war, founded the city of Salamis on the east coast. But however this may be, and whatever may be the exact date of the advent of the Sidonians upon the island, it is tolerably certain that they were in possession about the year 1600 b.c., when the navy of Thotmes III., the greatest conqueror and statesman in the long line of Pharaohs, visited Cyprus and collected tribute. The Egyptians were never sailors, and the fleet of Thotmes III. was no doubt composed of Phoenician ships manned by Phoenician sailors. He was already in possession of the whole of Syria, the Phoenicians were his tributaries and allies, their ships alone sailed the Grecian seas and carried the products of Egypt and of Asia to the Pelasgic populations. The Phoenician supremacy, established by Sidon in Cyprus, was maintained by Tyre; and it was not seriously subverted until 708 b. c., when the Assyrian ravager of Syria, Sargon, sent a fleet and conquered Cyprus. He set up a stele in Citium, commemorating his exploit, which has been preserved and is now in the museum at Berlin. Two centuries later the island owned the Persians as masters, and was comprised in the fifth satrapy of Darius. It became a part of the empire of the Macedonian Alexander after his conquest of Asia Minor, and was again an Egyptian province under the Ptolemies, until the Roman eagles swooped down upon it. Coins are not seldom found that tell the story of these occupations. Those bearing the head of Ptolemy Physcon, Euergetes VII., found at Paphos and undoubtedly struck there, witness the residence on the island of that licentious and literary tyrant, whom a popular outburst had banished from Alexandria. Another with the head of Vespasian, and on the obverse an outline of the temple of Venus at Paphos, attests the Roman hospitality to the gods and religious rites of all their conquered provinces.

Upon the breaking up of the Roman world, Cyprus fell to the Greek Empire, and for centuries maintained under its ducal governors a sort of independent life, enjoying as much prosperity as was possible under the almost uniform imbecility and corruption of the Byzantine rule. We have already spoken of its transfer to the Lusignans by Richard Cour de Lion; and again a romantic chapter was added to its history by the reign of Queen Catharine Cornaro, who gave her kingdom to the Venetian republic. Since its final conquest by the Turks in 1571, Cyprus has interested the world only by its sufferings; for Turkish history here, as elsewhere, is little but a record of exactions, rapine, and massacre.

From time to time during the present century efforts have been made by individuals and by learned societies to explore the antiquities of Cyprus; but although many interesting discoveries were made, yet the field was comparatively virgin when General di Cesnola was appointed American consul in 1866. Here and there a stele, or some fragments of pottery, or the remains of a temple, had been unearthed by chance or by superficial search, but the few objects discovered served only to pique curiosity. For one reason or another, the efforts made to establish the site of ancient cities had been abandoned, the expeditions sent out by France had been comparatively barren of results, and it seemed as if the traces of the occupation of the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Romans were irrecoverably concealed.

General L. P. di Cesnola, the explorer of Cyprus, is of a noble Piedmontese family; he received a military and classical education at Turin; identified with the party of Italian unity, his sympathies were naturally excited by the contest in America; he offered his sword to our government, and served with distinction in the war for the Union. At its close he was appointed consul at Cyprus, a position of no pecuniary attraction, but I presume that the new consul had in view the explorations which have given his name such honorable celebrity in both hemispheres.

The difficulties of his undertaking were many. He had to encounter at every step the jealousy of the Turkish government, and the fanaticism and superstition of the occupants of the soil. Archaeological researches are not easy in the East under the most favorable circumstances, and in places where the traces of ancient habitations are visible above ground, and ancient sites are known; but in Cyprus no ruins exist in sight to aid the explorer, and, with the exception of one or two localities, no names of ancient places are known to the present generation. But the consul was convinced that the great powers which had from age to age held Cyprus must have left some traces of their occupation, and that intelligent search would discover the ruins of the prosperous cities described by Strabo and mentioned by the geographer Ptolemy. Without other guides than the descriptions of these and other ancient writers, the consul began his search in 1867, and up to 1875 he had ascertained the exact sites of eleven ancient cities mentioned by Strabo and Ptolemy, most of which had ceased to exist before the Christian era, and none of which has left vestiges above the soil.

In the time of David and of Solomon the Phoenicians formed the largest portion of the population of the island; their royal cities of Paphos, Amathus, Carpassa, Citium, and Ammochosto, were in the most flourishing condition. Not a stone remained of them above ground; their sites were unknown in 1867.

When General di Cesnola had satisfied himself of the probable site of an ancient city or temple, it was difficult to obtain permission to dig, even with the authority of the Sultan’s firman. He was obliged to wait for harvests to be gathered, in some cases, to take a lease of the ground; sometimes the religious fanaticism of the occupants could not be overcome, and his working parties were frequently beaten and driven away in his absence. But the consul exhibited tact, patience, energy, the qualities necessary, with knowledge, to a successful explorer. He evaded or cast down all obstacles.

In 1868 he discovered the necropoli of Ledra, Citium, and Idalium, and opened during three years in these localities over ten thousand tombs, bringing to light a mass of ancient objects of art which enable us to understand the customs, religion, and civilization of the earlier inhabitants. Idalium was famous of old as the place where Grecian pottery was first made, and fragments of it have been found from time to time on its site.