Houses: Part Two

Thomas Hope
Capuchin Convent & Lantern of Demosthenes at Athens

(click to enlarge)

Several weeks ago Pierre MacKay wrote about his discovery in Evliya Celebi of descriptions of Florentine houses that were surviving in Athens in 1668.  He included images from the 17th century and 1765 of probable Florentine houses on the Acropolis.  I have just come across a drawing by Thomas Hope of what looks like remnants of a Florentine house surviving in the late 18th century.

Hope identifies this building as the Capuchin convent. The Lantern of Lysikrates is instantly recognizable, and Byron used the lantern for a study some years later when he stayed at the  convent. Though identified as a convent, the building looks like a private home and Hope has drawn a family beside the door. Three hundred and fifty years before Hope was in Athens, a Florentine built a house attached to the Lantern.  Later, an Ottoman builder added a balcony over the door beneath and built a new door with an Ottoman arch. He or another Ottoman builder enclosed the upper balcony on the left with a lathe construction.  Possibly the Capuchins were responsible for the addition -- stone on the ground floor, lathe above -- at the far left.  That house in Ottoman Athens couldn't have held many Capuchins.

Recall what Evliya wrote

[There are] fine masonry palaces, roofed all over with tile, houses like castles in their own right.  They have no gardens, but from the arches over the seats in the windows and screened balconies. . . . They are sturdy houses, like castles with battlements and loopholes, and built completely of stone---there are no wooden houses or houses with earthen roofs or mud-brick walls, but only splendid houses with stone walls set with mortar and lime. 

This house never had battlements and loopholes, and given Evliya's tendency to dramatize, it is probable that none of them did unless built against the city wall.  But if you remove the Ottoman additions you get a house that is probably early Renaissance and probably Florentine.  One feels there should be evidence of this in some Florentine drawing, in the corner of some Florentine painting, of the period.  The Florentines were buying Greek manuscripts and hiring Greek scholars long before the Council of 1439.  Even low-grade commercial traffic between Athens and Florence over a period of 50 years should have resulted in Athenian images for Florence.  The style of arbor on the right-hand side -- is it attached to columns? -- shows up in Italian frescos where sometimes awnings are added for outdoor feasting.  I love the typically Greek yard with trees in pots. 

A drawing of the monument from 1834 shows no house at all, as if all construction had been cleared away.  This is not necessarily evidence: 19th-century artists were relentless in pruning away non-classical elements from the views they presented.

Detail: Alfred Beaumont,  1834,
The Choragic Monument of Lysicrates

Evliya in Nauplion

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Evliya Çelebi visited Nauplion -- Anapli -- in 1668, at the end of his tour of the Morea.  He loved travel, but he hated travel on boats and he had been putting off attending the siege of Crete which had now been going on for twenty years.  He was not in best reporting form by the time he got to Anapli -- possibly because he did not have time to finish out the notes he took there -- but some of what he says is interesting, and there are a few details not found elsewhere.  There is such a discrepancy between his extensive accounts of the history of Anapli, and his brief notes on everything else, that I suspect he lifted the history from other writers.

One of the first things he did after he arrived was to go up the sixty-five steps of the minaret on Akro-Nauplion in order to see the whole city. While up there, he  made a sketch of "the appearance and the principal buildings of the entire city on a piece of paper."  This has not survived, but he was quite taken with the views in Anapli:

"Outside the city gate that leads in from the lower suburb to the citadel, there is a porch, or loggia, looking out over the harbor. From here, the harbor and the lower city are spread out beneath your feet." (This "porch," by which everyone now enters Akro-Nauplion by foot, is nicely shown there by the round tower on the Schaeffer archaeological map.)

He reported the icy-cold water in the huge cistern on Akro-Nauplion. (I was able to look into this cistern in 1977, when I did not know what I was seeing, but it was fairly extensive and had unmatched columns with unmatched capitals. It was then incorporated into the modern city water storage system, and I have no idea if anyone ever took any photographs. It is behind the rectangle indicated as Zisterne near the bottom of the Schaeffer map .)

He also mentioned the cannon mounted behind wicker shields which are included here in the nearly contemporary view of Nauplion published in Bernard Randolph.  Evliya is the only traveler who mentions the amazing fish invasion:

Every year the grey mullet pay a visit to a magical charm and come into the harbor, at which time they are caught. . . there is a magical fish charm in front of the Castelli (Bourdzi), and the mullet come in under its influence and fall into nets in the hands of the fishermen. This brings a great wealth of fish to the people of Anapli.

(We saw this fish invasion in October 1977 -- Evliya was in Nauplion in October 1668 -- for a couple of days you could almost walk across the harbor on the backs of the fish, and the old men were pulling them out with unbaited hooks.)

Nauplion has long had a Saturday market. In the fifteenth century, it was outside the  walls.  Thirty years ago, it was almost in the same position. Now it occupies the lower end of the long park that divides the old city from the new. In Evliya's time it was a Sunday market, attended by villagers from all the nearby villages and estates. He reported the many mosques, shrines, and tekkes. He said the lower city had three gates. This is one of the rare occasions when his numbers are too small: there were actually four. He reported the "gentlemen of quality" and the boys. Evliya liked boys:

The heart-stopping boys are very famous. These beauties are circumspect and honorable, angel-faced, elegant in form and appearance, and exquisite in delicacy and sensitivity. . . All the fresh youth wear crimson Algerian clothing in colored broadcloth, for they are all young hearties . . ..

The ladies "wear mantles of colored broadcloth and have broad-brimmed hats bound on with ribbons around the cheeks," and he noted the names of Adawiyye's three veiled daughters: Mevzune Kadu, Rabiye Kadu, and Amise Kadu. The slaves were mostly of European origin "with names like Perviz, Shehban, Behzad, Muli, Bali, and Feroz. These were males. The female slaves "have names such as Reproof, Secretary, Dispossession, Elevated, Amber, Soul's Ransom, Passionate." Evliya said little about the Greeks. They lived in the western section of Akro-Nauplion, the part that has been called "castle of the Greeks" since the 13th century. He said there were "seven monastic and patriarchal churches" though that is unlikely. He said that "most of the populace are sailors or naval carpenters . . . and there is an entire class of watchmen and castle sentries." There were also three Greek doctors -- Benefşeli, Mihalaki, and Manolaki, a slave.

Evliya's numbers are always tricky. He writes about the numerous public baths -- you can see the last remaining bath just below the Byron Hotel -- and seventy private baths, amd the many fountains, and while the private baths may be a bit much, the Venetians who arrived twenty years later did find 37 fountains. The water for these fountains came from two sources. "That from Kasim Paşa (Agia Moni) is sweet. The other sources is from Old Anapli. (Tiryns) It is flat and bitter." (Thirty-some years ago the same comparison was still being made, and in fact, the two springs have very different flavors.

The Ottomans who took over in 1540 had built an aqueduct into the city, and the remnants of their fountains are popular targets for tourist photographs, although most of what is seen now comes from Ottoman reconstruction after 1715. (I found ten fountains last year. Both of these fountains here belong to houses I think date originally from Evliya's time.) The cisterns for Anapli's fountains are quite remarkable and several survive. One serves as the crypt-chapel for the Catholic Church. Another, immediately across from Ag. Spyridon, is a luxurious bathroom for the Amfitriti Hotel.

Evliya reported 200 shops. The Venetians found 113, so he was not outlandishly far off. He said there were 1,600 great mansions, and the Venetians listed 795 houses in all, so these numbers suggest that it might be possible to come close on occasion by dividing Evliya by two. At the harbor, the numbers really begin to wander: "A thousand ships can lie here if they are moored so close together that the gunwales crack against one another, but if they lie loosely at anchor . . . it is a safe harbor for three hundred ships." (Maybe two hundred fishing boats squeezed together?)

While he was based in Nauplion, he went down into the Argolid peninsula to Avgo, Methana, Poros,Thermissi and Kastri, then up to Kazarma, Kutzi, Corinth, and back to Nauplion, staying at the great estates where he seemed to know all the landlords. He finally was not able to avoid going to Crete, and in fact, the fleet with which he sailed tipped the military balance and forced the Venetian surrender the next year. The grand admiral of the Ottoman navy arrived in Nauplion with his ships, and interrupted Evliya at dinner:

Welcome back, Evliya my lad . . . Quick now, Bre, jump into my galley and let me take you across to Crete. . . . so I sent six of my horses, three of my slaves and two loads of heavy baggage off to Zekeriya Efendi's tenant-farm estate at Kutsi. (On the road to Argos, this was one of the largest private landholdings the Venetians identified twenty years later.) For my humble self, I kep one horse, one trunk of clothing and three slaves, and thus lightly and simply equipped . . . I went with Zekeriya Efendi and boarded Abdi Paşa-zade Hasan Bey's dark-colored war-galley, taking along my horse and slaves. That evening your humble servant spent in the stern cabin with Hasan Paşa, in pleasant conversation and in readings from the Koran.

The quotations are from Pierre A. MacKay's translation of Evliya's travels in the Morea. This post is in support of the Evliya Celebi conference that began Thursday in Istanbul.

Osman Şah's Mosque

In his inimitable style, Evliya tells us how Osman Şah's mosque came to be:

True, it is rather small, but it is a remarkable, fine and captivating edifice, full of light, a prosperous, well-adorned and brilliantly constructed mosque. There are such jeweled hangings suspended here. . . The court is paved in white marble, and revetted with colored marbles, with arcades along the sides, formed of capdomes supported on monolithic columns, and an upper school formed of chambers for the learned. This brilliant mosque is situated in a level area of lawns and flowerbeds along the bank of the river, with all the other monumental buildings are good works and pious benefactions of Osman Şah.

Koca Osman Şah, the descendant of the Ottoman line, was a man possessed of a magnificently generous nature. He was nephew to Sultan Suleyman, in that his mother was the daughter, born under a happy star, of Sultan Selim the first, and he was slightly older than Sultan Suleyman. Now when Selim turned Suleyman over to the Chief of the Imperial Gardeners with the order to kill him, the Chief Gardener claimed that he had done so, and prepared a bier with a man’s body on it. He took that man out and buried him. Then this foresighted and provident chief gardener disguised prince Suleyman as a gardener, and set him to work with a hoe in the tower garden.

It happened then that Selim Khan fell ill on his return to Istanbul after the conquest of Egypt, and when his remaining household were gathered around him, they said, “My Sovereign, to whom will you pass on this crown, this throne, this mantle and this dominion after you? For behold, my Sovereign, you are left without a son. You have sacrificed your brothers, Sultan Korkud and Sultan Ahmed, and you have sacrificed the darling prince, the tawny lion, free of all faults, your own Suleyman, and now who shall be master of the throne?” When they had said this, Selim answered, “The learned prince Osman Şah, my daughter’s child shall be the supreme and absolute ruler.”

The chief Gardener waited till Selim Şah was in the last agonies of death and taking many hundred thousand oaths in the name of God, he went to find tawny Suleyman in the tower garden, and brought him in to Selim Şah’s presence, still wearing his gilt gardener’s gap and carrying his hoe in his hand. Father and son rushed into one another’s embrace, and Selim Han recovered his health and strength for forty more days. On the fortieth day, after he had raised the Chief Gardener to the rank of a Councillor of State, Selim Han went to his last rest.

When Suleyman Han became absolute sovereign, all the servants of the imperial household raised a great murmur of scandalized outrage, saying, “Selim Han made his testament to us, and we will make Osman Şah our sovereign, since he is a great prince.” So the provident and far-sighted Suleyman got Osman Şah, together with his half-sister, that is to say, Osman Şah’s mother, and sent them off under cavalry escort to ride in a single night into banishment in the Trikkala command. He made this command over as an inalienable lifetime gift to Osman Şah who built this beautiful mosque here in Trikkala and left hundreds of other good works and benefactions. God have mercy on him, for it is certainly a brilliant mosque.

From Evliya's Travels © Pierre A. MacKay.
The mosque today, and here.

Honey-Patras

If you are a Turk, the Greek Palia-Patras, Old Patras (not to be confused with New Patras near Thermopylae) sounds like Bali-Batra, which means Honey-Patras. And this is a true and rightful name because, as Evliya Celebi writes, there is no equal on earth or in all the inhabited quarters of the seven climatic zones to the great cypress tree of Patras, created by God:

This is a mighty tree, a cypress a green as emerald, which is under the special care of that ever-watchful Gardener, the Supreme Creator and Artificer, the Glorious Lord. In all the embellished heavens under the ninth sphere there is no sight like it. It is not tall and straight like other cypresses, but forks out in four trunks, from which spring three hundred and sixty branches reaching to the sky.

As these push out to right and left, forty or fifty picket-lines of horses might be tied in the shade, and forty or fifty thousand sheep might be shaded there. Around each upper trunk, a full fifty or sixty horses could stand, while lower down I and seven young slaves hardly managed to encircle the great main trunk with our arms outstretched. We also unwound a turban from a man's head and the full turban cloth just encircled this tall cypress tree.

In conclusion, at the top of this wondrous cypress threre is an old cavity where honey-bees have made a nest, and produce so much honey that the owner of this tree gets a hundred kilos of honey from it every year, which he sends round as presents to the great men in every province.

God knows, on the face of the earth there has never been a sweeter, purer and more aromatic honey created by the Maker of All Things.

From Evliya's Travels in the Morea © Pierre A. MacKay.

Sari Sadik Baba

Evliya Celebi learned this when he was visiting Patras in 1668:

Sari Sadik Baba is visited by the Greek infidels too, for they say that "this is our Saint Nicholas." By giving their offerings to the keepers of the tomb, they make their visits to him. None of the authorities have been able to root this practice out absolutely.

Once, when this saint wished to cross from the city of Vostitza to the Bay of Naupaktos, opposite, the sailors started across without taking him into the boat. Sari Sadik Sultan then gathered a little sand from the seashore into the skirts of his robe and walked onto the sea after the boat, scattering the sand grain by grain. The sailors watched, and as the heart-wounded dervish came on, filling up an area extending for two thousand paces, they became panic-stricken lest the saintly dervish should fill up the entire sea this way, and by closing off the gulf, deprive them of their place of work.

So they called out, "Come and get in the caĩque, Old Father," and taking him at once into the boat, ferried him across to Naupaktos. For this reason, there is a mile-long sandy point on the Vostitza side of the gulf.

This, then, is Sari Sadik Sultan, holiness be upon him, who lies at rest in Patras, and to bring his holiness to its fullest visibility, he has been transported to Heaven.

From Evliya's Travels in the Morea © Pierre A. MacKay.
About Evliya's manuscript.
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