Angel of the Ascension

Angel of the Ascension, ca. 1261-1311, recently restored.

 Frankish fresco, main gate of Akro-Nauplion. 

 Photos by Allan Brooks.

For more information on this fresco and the other frescos with it, see Monika Hirschbichler

Monuments of a Syncretic Society: Wall Painting in the Latin Lordship of Athens, Greece (1204-1311).

The bureaucracy deals with the Young Emperor and the Despot

An extraordinary diplomatic memorandum from 1418 gives a list of twenty complaints made by an ambassador of the Despotate, and twenty responses by the Venetian Signoria referring to events which involved the Palaiologos brothers, John and Theodoros. The memorandum was written on behalf of the Despot in awkward Italian: the Venetian clerk carefully reproduced the spelling and grammar of each item, and then gave the formal Latin response from the Signoria. The events had happened in 1416 when co-emperor John (Venetian sources call him “the young emperor”) was giving his brother Theodoros hands-on practice at war in the Morea. The Despotate was at war with the Prince of Achaia, and a thin strip of Achaian territory separated the Venetian territories of Methoni and Koroni.  Territorial boundaries were disrespected.  Venice had to request information from the Morea after receiving the complaint, information had to gathered and sent back, and the time lapse alone suggests the near-impossibility of handling these crises. Simultaneously, Venice was making complaints about raids into Venetian territory by the Despotate.  This memorandum is five large folio pages long, too long to quote completely, but a partial and prejudicial paraphrase will convey the general situation.

* * * * * *

[1] Despotate: What really happened in that riot is that our men were taking some of the men of the Prince (of Achaia). They insulted them, and the Despots came, and told them that . . .

Signoria: With all due respects to your ambassador, what happened is not like that. Your Despots were coming down this way to fight the Prince, and your men attacked our subjects and devastated our casale of Spanacori. They had given us warning of their coming and promised there would be no damage.

[2] Despotate: About the Albanians, the truth is that they were going to Koroni to sell a heifer, and someone told the castellan that they had stolen his goods and killed his pigs, so the castellan hanged them. Word got back. We have 6,000 armed Albanians up here -- the Despots were ready to take them to fight at Clarenza and then the news about Koroni came -- the Albanians wanted to go attack Koroni and it was all the Despots could do to prevent them!

Signoria: Our castellan didn't hang your Albanians for a cow. He hanged them for the wheat, barley, millet, cotton, clothing, wine, and other things they had been taking at knife-point from our subjects in our territory. And your Despots were not going to Clarenza: John was on the other side of the Morea at Mouchli.

[3] Despotate. About the Methoni incident, the Albanians conscientiously did not go down there to cause trouble, but to rob in the Principality. They ran into 300 soldiers who attacked, wounded several horses, and killed one of them. So they got a little excited and misbehaved.

Signoria: That's not what we heard. They came into our territory, insulted some of our people at Chinego who tried to defend themselves, then they attacked and robbed Chinego. The leader is a Greek named Koracha.

[4] Despotate. A man who lives in Methoni, a Piero Catalan, is a great friend of the Prince. He is responsible for the deaths of a number of our men because he has sold blades and crossbows to the [Principality of Achaia]. He has also provided bread and wine and supplies to the Genoese at Belvedere. He also went to Clarentza, took a number of Greeks, took them in irons to Methoni and locked them up. And then sold them to a Catalan ship.

Signoria: We have no information on this. The export of weapons from our territories is not permitted. Had we known about the sale of the Greeks, our officials would have stopped it.

[5] Despotate. One of our rebels, Lamburcho, escaped from prison and went to Nauplion where he was given refuge, then to Koroni. This violates the peace you made with the old Despot (Theodoros I).

Signoria: We have no information on this. We will look into it.

[6] Despotate. Some of your people have amazed us by trying to build fortifications on our territory. We are certain you didn't know about this.

Signoria: We have no information on this. Nor do we believe it.

[7] Despotate. We built the Hexamillion with great expense, and called our people -- top ones and little people -- to work on it, but our villani complained and decamped into your territory, and that's not right.

Signoria: Our territories are open and free to all comers who wish to live well, but if your serfs come our officials will send them back.

* * * * * *

The memorandum noted that on a previous occasion, the despotate had sent down a diplomat, Manuel Sophianos, and a certain David who inspected the damages in detail (“minute examinando”) and agreed with the Venetian estimate of loss. It also said that on this occasion the new damages did not need viewing and examination: it was just needed for the despots make restitution. The present memorandum continues for thirteen more items, providing a remarkable amount of information on aspects of life in the Morea, and dealings between the powers, and claiming attacks from Venetian territory against the Despot's people. It also makes clear that the Despotate had little effective control over its own people, whether merchant or criminal, even when it presumably had some interest in maintaining control.  

From Sathas 3: 174ff.

Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Nine

This image is the underdrawing, sinopia, for the fresco that I selected for an image of Cleofe  Malatesta Palaiologina.  I selected the fresco in part because it is of the right date, in part because it is on a wall of her sister's palace in Mantua, in part because it shares features with portraits of other members of the family.  I also selected it because it seemed to illustrate Bessarion's description that she knew she was beautiful, but that she didn't take particular care about it, and Pepagomenos' statement that she didn't pay much attention to what she was wearing.

Paola Malatesta Gonzaga and her husband Gianfrancesco had hired the young artist Pisanello to fresco the four walls of the great hall of the palace with an Arthurian tournament.  This is a map of the walls of the great hall with indications of the surviving frescos.  

The sinopie have been removed and are on exhibit in another room: there are surviving parts of the sinopie that have not survived in the frescos, and vice versa.  The fresco/sinopia of my interest is from Wall 2, at the right-hand end.  This is what survives of the fresco, and you can compare it with the image at the beginning. 

The frescos have been dated anywhere from 1425 to 1457, and each art historian can give good reasons for the chosen dates. Joanna Marsden-Woods, whose work on the frescos I have found most useful, prefers 1443-1444. I have my own preferred dates. JM-W also gives the Arthurian story behind these frescos, which concerns an important tournament.  The lady in question is under a canopy to the left of the image below. Indistinctly, there are some of the tournament figures to the right, on Wall 1.  If you compare the heads of the figures with the bricks in the wall at the bottom, you will begin to get an idea of how small and dense the figures are.

And Wall 1 more distinctly here:

The tournament was given by a King Brangoire. The daughter of King Brangoire -- nameless in the story -- seduced Bohort, one of the three knights who accomplished the quest for the Holy Grail, at a tournament at her father's court, and by him had a son, Helain, who would become Emperor of Constantinople. Marsden-Woods does not explain what significance this story might have had for the Gonzagas of Mantua, or for her date of 1443-1444.  My date is 1428-1429, a good 15 years earlier.

But consider:  in February 1428, Cleofe -- after six years of a marriage in which her husband had refused a sexual relationship -- had  given birth to a daughter, Helena, the heir to the throne of Constantinople. None of the five living sons of Manuel II would father a son for twenty years. Might not Paola Malatesta Gonzaga enjoy having this painted reminder that she was the aunt of the possible future ruler of Constantinople?  The co-incidence of names -- Helain and Helena (Eleni) -- surely cannot be accidental.

I would like to see another element of the story as significant: Marsden-Woods says: "The love affair between Bohort and the princess, with its glorification of sexual passion, implied that a union between princes in real life could involve mutual passion and love." The sexual implication in the fresco is striking. If this Arthurian imagery effectively represented Cleofe's family's view of the sexual relationship, it is in fine apposition to the view of George Gemistos Plethon.

This is the sinopia with ladies of many and wondrous hair styles watching the tournament.  I cannot say if the nameless princess is one of the ladies in the lower tier, or the upper.  I cannot say if the fresco was intended to portray Cleofe.  I cannot say if Pisanello ever saw her, though dates and routes of his various travels would have given him several opportunities.  I can say that I do most intensely hope so.

Some material and the black-&-white images are taken from Joanna Marsden-Woods' book,  The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello’s Arthurian Frescoes (1998). The color images are from Luke Syson & Dillon Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court (2001).  

Bonus picture: Compare the sinopia drawing of the lady's wreath with the hat worn by Camilla Parker Bowles on her wedding day to Prince Charles who is quite knowledgeable about art.

Previous entries about Cleofe:  

Pavane for a Dead Princess, I
Pavane for a Dead Princess, II
Pavane for a Dead Princess, III
Pavane for a Dead Princess, IV
Pavane for a Dead Princess, V 
Pavane for a Dead Princess, VI

Pavane for a Dead Princess, VII

Pavane for a Dead Princess, VIII

Her Most Dear Daughter, Helena
Glory Days
Theodoros' Poem to Cleofe 
Theodoros II Palaiologos  
Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti 

Bessarion to Theodoros, I
Bessarion to Theodoros, II

Scholarios talks about Theodoros 

Sphrantzes in winter

Marginal drawing, Book of Hours, Utrecht, ca. 1460.

 Giorgios Sphrantzes finished "the account of the events that occurred during my wretched life," on 29 March 1478.  He had introduced himself as "pitiful" and he was much to be pitied. He was seventy-six and a half years old, cold, aching from many years of rheumatism.  Ten years earlier, he and his wife, penniless after lives in imperial palaces, had made confessions of faith and joined convents. In October 1476 he became desperately ill with an infection of the sinuses, ears, and throat.  He was given the last rites three times.  When it was clear that he would live longer, he was deaf for a long time -- he couldn't hear a bell tolling next to him -- and his feet were too painful to walk.

He wrote.  He wrote a priceless book in his own hand, giving us an intimate view of the important individuals and events of the last years of the Eastern Empire. There is much about it that is uneven and incomplete, but he apologizes, "as old age and infirmity did not allow me to finish my work properly." He placed the completed book in the hands of the priest Antonios.

When you read it as a retrospective view, rather than as a contemporary chronicle, it is a book saturated in loss. It begins with death, that of Beyazid I and ends that paragraph with "Mehmed . . . who enslaved us and expelled us from Constantinople." The next event he reports is the humiliation of Manuel, to whom he was devoted, and then the birth of his beloved Constantine. Manuel's brother Theodoros dies, the Patriarch dies, then plague takes Sphrantzes' sister, her husband, a daughter, six servants, and then his parents die.

He finds himself isolated, although he is firmly embedded in the imperial court, best friends with the emperor's sons, with responsibility for the emperor's wardrobe. It is with his first title, protovestiaritis, that he identifies himself at the end of his life despite the accumulation of further titles. When Manuel dies, John inherits his loyalty, and then Constantine begs John for Sphrantzes' services.  He serves Constantine from the fall of 1428 until 29 May 1453, and as soon as he is able to free himself from slavery, he travels to the Morea to offer his services to Thomas, following him into exile.

At the end of his book, he has outlived all Manuel's sons and some of their children, his own four children -- Andronikos died at 8 days, Alexios at nearly six, John was killed by Mehmed at the age of fourteen and a half on a charge of murder in 1453, and Tamar died about the same age of disease in Mehmed's seraglio in 1455 -- and his wife, and his remaining friend.  In 1452 he had wanted to take John on a trip with him, and leave him in the Morea with family for safety, but the trip never came about.  Tamar was to have married in the Morea but she was not old enough for marriage when travelling was possible.

For all he has seen and done, little in his writing gives us images from his world.  He refers to "silver-sealed" documents and Constantine signs a marriage agreement "with his own hand three crosses in red ink on the upper part of the document,"  but the silver and red ink are for him signs of authority, not images.  But there are a few, in the section of his book with the most detail: the scene outside Patras where he and Constantine are pursued on horseback in a skirmish. Constantine fell, Sphrantzes defended him, he escaped, and then Sphrantzes and his horse were cut down.  Sphrantzes was taken prisoner and "thrown into the dark tower of a house, full of ants, weevils,  and mice, as it was located in front of the grain storage."  When he was finally freed from prison, half-dead from wounds and starvation, Constantine sent him "an expensive double green tunic lined with fine green linen . . . a red cap decorated with gold . . . a heavy, gold-colored caftan from Brusa, a green coat, and a finely worked sword." 

And there is his isolated description of 25 January 1470, desperately sad when you think of what it implies: "so much snow covered the whole island of Corfu as no local inhabitant had ever seen.  It was even possible to catch foxes and hares by hand."

Report on Akro-Nauplion

A correspondent was recently in Nauplion, and thoughtfully sent me a report and photographs of what he saw on Akro-Nauplion. He has agreed to let me share it here. This is from publisher and writer, Allan Brooks. 

* * * * * *

New work seems to be in progress on the Frankish gate and its frescoes. A corrugated iron roof has been placed above the gate to prevent more water damage and the whole area inside the wall (originally occupied by the military hospital) is being excavated. I was able to take a surreptitious look inside the gate chamber and was surprised that several elements of the frescoes are still visible.

More work is in progress around the west wall of the castle of the Franks. This has been cleared revealing the base of the great square tower in the centre of the wall and the surviving masonry is being consolidated.

I had a look at the second walled up gate. The garden below is now more manicured (and the house appeared un-occupied) but the views from above and below are essentially the same as your photographs. However I discovered that the gate can also be seen from the Palamidi steps.

From this point it seems as if  the terrace that accommodates the road through the northwest gate of the Castel del Toro (reached via the steps past the catholic church) continues along the flank of the hill as far as the second gate (although the modern lane itself stops about halfway).

Is it possible that the old image showing the approach to the gate parallel to the shore is correct (the third image in your post; The Second Gate Revisited, and Another) and that steep steps directly uphill were not the approach? [DW: I don't think so.]  The creation of a new second gate giving access directly into the Castle of the Greeks must have had real practical value. Presumably the gate was re-modelled when the Dolfin bastion was built in 1703/4 and only walled up when the Sagredo gate was completed in 1713. 

The gate of the grotto must be the walled up entrance that now stands six feet above the modern concrete footpath about eighty yards beyond the gateway below the Five Brothers bastion. The area inside the wall where the descending steps would have been is now occupied by a concrete box structure full of derelict equipment. 

I managed to find Morosini’s postern and took a photo of the walled-up outer face by hanging over the adjacent wall. On the inner side steps must have descended to the gate but the area is now completely filled with rubble to a height above the gate arch with a good growth of prickly pear on top. The gate is exactly where it is shown on the Grimani plan but I couldn’t see any trace of the rock-cut steps from either above or below.

The Sagredo gate is now in worse condition than ever. The attached photo shows it almost obliterated with graffiti. In fact the whole of Nauplio is suffering from this blight. 

[DW: This is a photo of the Sagredo gate I took five years ago. It is incomprehensible, and contemptible, that Nauplion's residents have so little self-respect as to allow this vandalism to continue, and that the authorities have permitted the deterioration of the gate, stairways, and pillars -- an important piece of architecture.  The gate was last open in 1977 or 78, and the stairway then was dangerous.  No efforts at repair have been done since.  Apparently the sensitivities of the hotel above did not want non-paying guests appearing from the hillside, as I had done, and the gate was closed.  I would be grateful for more information on any of the issues raised here.]

The first of the hundred

Doge Leonardo Loredan, Giovanni Bellini, 1501.

National Gallery, London.

When I was a child in West Africa, my parents had a book entitled One Hundred Great Paintings, or The Hundred Greatest Paintings in the World -- it was a title that juxtaposed hundred and great and paintings. This portrait of Leonardo Loredan, Doge between 1501 and 1521, was the first of the hundred. The second was the glorious Titian Bacchus and Ariadne. Mona Lisa was in there, a Sunflowers, The Birth of Venus, The Fighting Temeraire, and a number of ladies wearing very little in the way of clothes. The ladies bemused me, because my parents were extremely intolerant of my coming in the way of noticing anything that might suggest the realities between the chin and the knees, but they apparently allowed to Art what was unacceptable for Life.

I spent a great deal of time with these paintings, and particularly with the first two. The Titian was incomprehensible -- up in the bush in West Africa, there was no place to look for Titian or mythology -- but it was intoxicating, which seems the way to respond.  I spent most of my great-paintings time with Doge Loredan. I didn't know what I was looking at, beyond the fact of a rather tense man in interesting clothes, painted in beautiful colors, but it gave me joy. 

So I was inordinately pleased, fifty years later, to come on his signature in a Venetian protocollo belonging to Jacobo Grasolario probating the will of Zorzi Cernovich.  This is a will written like a love-letter, and it has a fascinating story to it. Most wills did not require a dogal signature, but Cernovich had been the ruler of Montenegro, he died outside Venice, and had created an international incident with the French. Grasolario had to have the will translated from the Slavic Cernovich had written into Italian. 

A protocollo is the permanent, legal, record of a notary, licensed by the Venetian government. This one belonged to a Jacobo Grasolario who handled the wills of my beloved Giovanni Dario. The signature says, "We, Leonardo Loredan, by the grace of God, Duke of Venice, etc, undersigned, his own hand," and it looks to me like the signature of a tense person.

There are a few other scattered Loredan signatures in the Grasolario protocollo, and what is striking about them is that by 1518 or so you can watch the writing deteriorate.  The last signature is nearly illegible and droops far down at the right.  He died less than a week later.



Thanks to Bonnie Blackburn for helping me read the signature.

Resurrection

Piero della Francesca, The Resurrection of Christ,
Museo Civico, Sansepolcro.

The Maltese whelp

In February of last year, I wrote an entry on Bessarion's Little White Dog and used the two dog painting I have here. I think I'may have identified the two dogs here, as to species, even though there are some differences between them. Apparently from ancient times on up to modern, this white toy Maltese -- with some breeding changes over time -- has been traditionally identified as a lady's lap dog.  If Bessarion did have one, he wouldn't have worried about that issue.  Odysseus (xvii: 315) compared his hunting dog Argos to lap dogs.  He called them τραπεζῆες κύνες -- table dogs, the kind of dogs we here who are partial to mastiffs and karabaş might in an off-moment call a "kick-me" dog, though I have been known to become sentimental over a King Charles Spaniel.

What is particularly interesting about this over-enlarged blurry dog is Aristotles' comparison of the Maltese to a mustelid, and it does have a slight resemblance to a weasel. These little white dogs are also found in the writings of Pliny, Strabo, Martial, and possibly first of all in Callimachus.  They have an tradition in scholarly writing, which may be why they appear with images of Bessarion.  Or maybe he really did own a little white dog.  I keep hoping.

But there seems to have been a Byzantine development where the term "Maltese whelp" became a term of literary contempt. We don't know if they had the little white dogs but they had the insult.  Psellos called John Italos a "Maltese whelp." When George Gemistos Plethon wrote Theodoros II about reforming the Morea, he spoke harshly about the present system of military defense:

It is better to be ready for war and inexpensively dressed than to wear golden robes and live in dread of your enemies.  Or one may compare the way of a shepherd, who will feed a guard-dog from his produce rather than waste it on keeping Maltese whelps, or other useless or voracious animals . . . like one or two of those you are now keeping, who flatter and deceive you , with their mouths wide open . . . unable to restrain their greed.

He is mixing a lot of metaphors here and making a lot of points, but contempt for Maltese whelps comes through.  

So think then about how George Gemistos Plethon, the philosopher of Mistra, friend of emperors, despots, and scholars, honored guest of Florence, judge and teacher, wrote George Scholarios in what was presented as a scholarly reply to Scholarios' Defense of Aristotle.  Nestled among arguments about Aristotle's errors, logic, circular motion, comets, and heat, the great Plethon included statements such as these: 

Along with your other faults, lying comes naturally to you. . . .

. . . a man who has no shame in boasting about the influence of a wretched woman -- and a little tart at that . .

You are not only vindictive, but dull-witted, as your present work shows . . 

[You] enjoy discussion, which is a practice of moderation, as well as simultaneously enjoying your own vanity, which is deplorable and tasteless and has nothing in common with moderation; and you seem to be so consumed with your vanity that you will even sacrifice your religious beliefs for it, changing them at every opportunity in whatever direction you think will bring you greater esteem. . . 

They are certainly not stupider than you, for it would be hard to find among serious students of Aristotle anyone stupider than you. . .

You can have nothing to say that affects me . . . I have paid, and shall continue to pay, no more attention to it than to the howling of a Maltese whelp.¹

 I have found these remarks devastating.  Scholarios' response is a matter for another entry.

1Woodhouse 1986: 283, 285, 166, 298, 299, 307. 

Homecoming

[We first arrived in Nauplion in September 1977.  This entry is about how it was then, before the old houses were painted and air-conditioned and turned into boutique hotels, before the voices of children vanished, before the public oven became a bank. The avge man is no more, my Venetian house has been replaced by a gelato shop, the baby-blue helix is white. This wall that we saw from our balcony has been replaced by a bar with red chairs, but the red no longer means what it did 40 years ago. Photo: Bill Connelly.]

In Nauplion, early October is the time of year when the grey mullet run in to the land. After dusk, half the men in town stand along the waterfront dangling unbaited hooks in the water pulling out dozens of fish, while the other half sit at the waterfront cafes and criticize. Every evening after supper we walked the waterfront to watch the mullet catch and then to watch the shrimpers.

There was a strict division of labor: men fished for mullet; small boys went shrimping. Each boy had a small net and a flashlight to shine straight down the side of the quai into the water: the shrimp eyes reflected light like tiny Christmas bulbs and the boys scooped them out, although it might take an hour to collect four or five shrimp. After the shrimp, we walked into the darkness at the end of the quai, past the broken boats, past the football field, and up along the coast road, watching the fishing boats come in, the lights flickering along the road that rimmed the bay, the small soft owls swooping down from the telephone lines.

In the daytime it was still warm enough to swim. We took the bus eight miles over to the great rock of Homeric Asine, spread blankets on the cave side away from the wind, and spent the days with books and picnics of figs and tomatoes and cheese. The children climbed over the ancient stones and searched the thorn and thyme for shards which they threw down to me, shouting. Late in the afternoon, waiting for the bus back to Nauplion, farmers walking home would stop and greet us, as was Odysseus, "Welcome, strangers. Where are you from? Why are you here?" and then take us home with them to give us tangerines or eggs or tomatoes for our supper.

* * * *

I had always wanted to live in Greece, ever since I was thirteen and read about Mycenae, read about the shadows of the grape arbor moving in the firelight at La Belle Hélène, and  young Agamemnon pouring the wine. Once in Greece, I reread the book where I thought I had found the image: it had no grape arbor, though La Belle Hélène does, over the deep veranda;, and Agamemnon has a grandson.

The grape arbor was the first of many images, and finally the desire to come to Greece was as persistent as salt in the mouth, the decision as clear as a gold coin in the hand. There were children to persuade, a house to sell, farewells to make. It was four months between the decision and the oily, suffocating brown dawn when we sailed from a Brooklyn pier, passed under the necklace of lights of the Verrezano bridge, and set out into the fogbound Atlantic.

A month later, there was a bus ride from Corinth to Nauplion on a rainy night: two hours of standing-room-only on a sprained ankle, juggling backpacks, gasping against the accumulation of cigarette smoke and body heats -- an open window apparently meant instant pneumonia -- all of us terrified by our first experience of normal Greek night driving. The windshield wipers were out of order; the driver extended the life of his headlights by using them only on straight stretches where they could shine the farthest; he otherwise relied on his horn and the icons over his head illuminated by a red light to negotiate passing on the curves.

We swayed down through the mountains of the Dervenakia, passed a sign pointing to Mycenae, halted in Argos where most of the passengers got off and we sat down, and then tore along a straight road past the bulk of Tiryns. The night rain was luminous for miles from the lights of Palamidi, a great whale-shaped hill overshadowing Nauplion with an illuminated fortress in the shape of a Byzantine headdress with pendants.

The Nauplion bus stop was closed for the evening. We stumbled into the first taxi, clutching at the phrase-book to find the words for "cheap hotel." There was a pelt through narrow streets under dripping balconies, and we were disgorged at the cheap hotel. Fatigue was washed over with soft color: a white church with a terracotta roof, a gilded shrine hung with roses, cascades of jasmine and four o'clocks over the yellow walls and white pilasters of the Hotel Otto. Inside, there was a circular staircase, a baby-blue helix floating up to a painted ceiling.

"Of course," said Apostolos, reaching for our bags, "you can stay as long as you like.

We breakfasted in the Otto's minute formal garden. It had orange and lemon trees, arbors of jasmine and roses, basil, and cages of ornamental birds. It also had a house across the street which happened to be for rent. We wandered the town for four days, trudging up and down the slippery stone steps of the hill, trying to make up our minds, trying to assimilate the newness and the strangeness and the beauty.

Old Nauplion is built on a hillside. Half the streets are vertical stairs going up to the castle or down to the harbor, past a thousand shadings of terracottas and creams and buffs and yellows on old buildings painted so many times that they have had no edges for a very long time. Every yard has a grape arbor, an orange or fig or lemon tree, a window box spilling geraniums. In early fall, Nauplion had the air of perpetual teatime held among sets left over from one of the lighter Italian operas. The Venetians of 1700 built bulky stone mansions; scattered among them are smaller, slenderer plastered houses built according to what the Bavarians of the 1830s insisted Classical architecture ought to have been: graceful houses of creams and blues and buffs and ochres and mauves, all with balconies and architraves and Corinthian capitals and acanthus leaves and tiny sphinx faces. Above the city, the fortress of Acro-Nauplion is rimmed with sharp-edged Venetian walls that blend into rougher Frankish and Byzantine ruins, and all are supported by massive Cyclopean stones.

The streets were full of cats and the air was full of bells. Beside the church bells, rung often but on schedules known only to God, the bell tower on Acro-Nauplion rang the hours and half-hours, each twice, several minutes apart. If it were ever necessary to know the precise time, there was the bank or the bus station, but the only times exactness was needed was when catching a bus, and there would always be another in half an hour, or tomorrow. There was always tomorrow: Avrio, the most common word in Greek, possibly because of the silken way it floats through the mouth. Nauplion offered limitless tomorrows.

The important thing about living in Nauplion, in Greece, is that the physical facts of life are almost overwhelming. Every sensor of the body is relentlessly besieged by stimuli as distinct as black olives on a plate. Everything has a scent, a nuance, a color, a texture, and as soon as they are perceived, a breeze passes, a cloud changes, and everything is to be learned anew. The golden-brown mountains multiply, merge, become blue and grey.

It is impossible to look at something only once. Homer wrote as much as he did, Seferis said, only because he was blind. Each street can be identified by its blend of smells -- lemon trees, bread ovens, leather workers, the ouzo distillery, fish soup, chestnuts roasting, jasmine, cigarettes, olive pressings, paint, oranges on the quai. Every corner presents another composition -- a blue Turkish fountain, a cascade of pink roses, an old man stitching shoes, cats in the sun, a Byzantine arch, a pyramid of apples, three children and a priest kicking a ball. There are all the ordinary noises that chart the day -- bells, the "Avge!" cry of the egg man, an angry woman shouting across a narrow street, a priest chanting in the church across the street, the gull-sound of winches, a sudden motor cycle, a piano practiced behind closed shutters, voices arguing  in a cafe, the dry rattle of the tric-trac board, the blunted sound of oars.

With sensory experience so acute, time blurs. One day I came back from a hike and reported that I had seen an old Turkish fortified house, an old Mycenean wall, an old woman and an old Byzantine church. With one limited word to speak of two hundred years, thirty-five hundred years, eighty years, and a thousand years, the past becomes a great accumulation of Then, which can only mean whatever is not Now.

Kathleen learned her Roman numerals from Venetian cannon, tracing sleet-chilled letters with mittened fingers; we swam at a beach from which ships set sail for Troy; we filled canteens from a spring mentioned by Pausanias. On any walk we found shards with red Mycenean spirals or fragments of amber Byzantine glaze. Our blue-green parrot was quadrupled in a fifth-century mosaic. The same weeks that we went to Epidauros to see Medea or Oedipos, we read in the paper of a woman killing her children, or of a charge of incest in the courts, and I went to Elektra fresh from wrangling with my teen-aged daughter.

We were outsiders, we were guests – kseni – the word is the same for both.

Ash Wednesday

Then the Lord put a mark on Cain
so that no one would harm him.

Genesis 4:15.