Cross

Monastiraki, Athens

Much of the research I have been doing has by necessity woven in and around issues of Church Union in the 1420s and 1430s.  I have written here of an emperor shattered and a bride broken in its name, of men embittered, and of one turned great.  But for this year -- and amazingly, for next -- the churches of East and West are united in sharing the day of the Easter feast, united in the centrality of their symbol of the cross.

For the Greeks, as Paul wrote, foolishness.  Humiliation become triumph, torture become healing.  For this day I offer a gleaning of  Greek crosses -- apotropaic, spolia, one representing all those painted crosses in all those olive-scented churches, one a church constructed as a cross.

Christianized gate at Mantinea

Sixth-century cross from the church in the Parthenon

Spolia at Karitena.

Spolia at Nemea

Spolia at Tegea, cross and monogram.

 Spolia at Ag. Triada, Argolid

Areopolis, Mani

Archaeological storeroom, Halkida

Twelfth-century church, Plataniti, Argolid

Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti

Two manuscript portraits of Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti,
 with a jousting shield. The sonnet was written in 1405
on the death of his wife, Elizabetta de Varano.

XXVI

Morta è la sancta donna che tenea
mio spirto unito, tacito e contento;
anzi vive nel cielo, e io in tormento
remaso sono, altr’uom ch’io non solea:

      non huom, ma bruto, sì che ben dovea
sequire il corpo suo di vita spento,
né mai partir da lato al monimento,
ma incenerarmi ove ’l suo cor giacea,

     ché forse l’alma lei sequita arebbe
nel triumpho celeste, ove si vive
eternalmente per divina possa.

     Se pur di seguir lei fusser stà privez
le forze mie, almen stato serebbe
sepulto il corpo presso a le sacr’ossa.

XXVI

The holy lady is dead, who used to hold
my spirit with hers, quiet and content;
Now she lives in heaven, and I in torment
am left, another man from what I was:

     not man, but brute, so that I should have
followed her body, life extinguished,
never to leave the side of her tomb
but burned myself where her heart lies.

     Then perhaps my soul might follow her
in celestial triumph, where all live
eternally by divine power.

    Yet if I with all my force were to be kept
from following her, at least
my body would be buried with her sacred bones.

Malatesta Malatesti, Rime, Ed. Domizia Trolli (Parma, 1982)

Translation copyright 2010 DGW and PAM. 

Last Hurrah at Nauplion

By 1713, the Venetians were ready to demonstrate that they were an empire with staying force (they had conquered Nauplion in 1686), and for the first and only time in Greece -- Crete is a different matter -- they built statements of imperialism. So it was a shame that when the Ottoman army and fleet arrived in 1715, Nauplion had a garrison of about 80 soldiers to face 100,000. But for two years, they thought big.

The Venetian engineers reshaped the main plateia by constructing a massive armory as far to the west as possible, but they needed to leave room for an street connecting the harbor to the new approach they were constructing on Acro-Nauplion (first picture). The width of the street was not grand, as it was constrained by the conventual buildings around the 15th-century church of the Franciscans.  The church is still there, much transformed, known as the Panagia.

Past the armory (rear view here), the street widened a bit going uphill, and it is probable -- documents have not survived -- that they put in actual cut stone steps.  They did so farther up. Here and there along the steps, you can spot something left from that period, such as this bare hint of a Venetian arch at the entrance to a garden.

This garden looks onto an open area in front of the Hotel Leto which the 1713 Venetians must have intended to make into an Italian piazza. There are still remnants around the area, much rebuilt, of Venetian houses with arched doors, and parts of walls. What is particularly interesting, to the left, going away from the Leto, The Venetians built a stone stair to the street above on the hill. At the entrance to the stair, you can spot on either side the remains of stone-cut jambs that once held a heavy gate.  A future blog will discuss where these stairs were going.

For now, there is a sharp right behind the Leto, a dismal flight of crumbling stone stairs, apparently untouched since 1713, and then the stairs reverse to go up to the gate shown in the first picture.  Despite the hundreds of thousands of tourists that come to Nauplion annually, the stairs are almost untouched.  There are two pillars, one on either side, at the top of the stairs, with Venetian stonework typical of the late 17th-early 18th century. The pillars are significant because important visitors arriving in Venice passed between two columns on the waterfront, and once upon a time they passed between two pillars to enter the official south-west entrance of San Marco.

Then you come face to face with the great gate.

It has been locked and barred since 1977 or early 1978.  Once the Greek government got into the hotel business and devastated a the west end of Acro-Nauplion to build its pompous luxury hotel, the hotel management and guests did not want random people turning up in their garden.  The excuse was made that the staircase was dangerous, and the gate was closed.  It was dangerous, true.  Inside the gate another stone stair goes up to the right through an arched passage, and  more than once when I went up in 1977 small bits of stone fell, and the steps were clearly employed as an emergency toilet.

This staircase, though, is a spectacular construction, and it does no good in 2010 to make noises about preserving the national heritage, suffering as the Archeological Service is from brutal budget cuts.  But it would be a splendid restoration project for a donor seeking kleos, and at the very least, cleaning the growth off the stairs would be an admirable project for a youth group.  There are at least three Nauplion groups on Facebook now, probably more, posting the occasional photo and telling one another how much they love Nauplion.  Some of them could clean up the stairwells and repaint the gate over the weekend.

Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Four

 Malatesta coat-of-arms from Pesaro

The year of 1429, may have been the most difficult year in Cleofe Malatesta's life.  The past eight years had been difficult enough, but in 1429 loss piled on loss.    

               In February or March of the previous year, she had given birth to a daughter, Helena, named for her husband's mother, the Empress Helena.  It is Greek tradition to name the first son and daughter after the husband's parents.  Shortly after, she wrote her sister Paola a letter that may be the earliest written description we have of postnatal depression.  She is barely able to mention the baby.  

               During 1429, her brothers-in-law, Constantine and Thomas, were besieging Patras, the city her brother Pandolfo ruled as Archbishop. Pandolfo went to Venice to ask for military aid, but Venice said it would conflict with their agreements.  Pandolfo was on his way back to Patras when he learned of the surrender.  Sphrantzes met with him at Naupaktos to find out his intentions.  

              Meanwhile, all that year, Cleofe's husband, Theodoros II, was dithering about whether he should go into a monastery -- was the fact of becoming a father (and discovering the wonders of sex) too much for him to assimilate?  Whatever the cause, it became clear in 1429, and again in 1436, that he was unable to give up control of Mistra to Constantine although he did hand over a great deal of territory to him.

               Pandolfo had been made a cleric early. He had a hunched back and dragged his foot when he walked -- a birth injury? -- and could not join the Malatesta tradition of warriors, but he joined their tradition of humanists, and he could represent the family's interests in the church.  In 1424 he had been given the archbishopric of Patras which, since the Frankish conquest of 1205, had been a fief of the church.  There, he rebuilt the cathedral of S. Andrea -- the Malatesti all went in for building -- and the Malatesta court composer, Guillaume Dufay, wrote an elegant short motet for the dedication: Apostolo glorioso. Pandolfo put up an inscription.

ΣΕΜΕΙΟΝ ΑΥΤΗΕΝΤΟΥ ΠΑΝΔΟΥΦΟΥ / ΜΑΛΑΤΕΣΤΟΙΣ ΜΕΤΡΟΠΟΛΙΤΟΥ

ΠΑΛΑΙΩΝ ΠΑΤΡΩΝ ΣΥΝΑΝΑΚΑΙ / ΝΙΣΑΝΤΟΣ ΤΟΝ ΤΗΔΕ ΤΗΕΙΟΝ

ΝΑΟΝ Τῼ ΧΙΛΙΟΣΤῼ ΤΕΤΡ[ΑΚ]Ο / ΣΤΩ Ε[ΙΚ]ΟΣΤῼ ΕΚΤΩ ΕΤΕΙ

Coat-of-arms of Pandolfo Malatesta, Metropolitan of Patras, for the rebuilding of this church, 1426.    

               Given that his father, Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti, lord of Pesaro, had given new portals for the churches of S. Dominico and S. Agostino in Pesaro, we can speculate that one or more of the builders and stonecutters were sent over to work in Patras.  S. Andrea of Patras housed the relic of the head of Saint Andrew and much later, when Cleofe's brother-in-law Thomas had to escape to the West at the Ottoman takeover, he brought the relic as a gift for the pope.  But we know almost nothing of Pandolfo at Patras, except that when he had to leave, Cleofe lost an important contact with her family, and a source of comfort.    

Portal of S. Agostino given by Malatesta "dei Sonetti"  

               In August 1429, Cleofe's sister Taddeo died of the plague. Plague was no respecter of class, and a few years later her brothers-in-law's wives, Maria of Trebizond, and Zoe Paraspondylos, died of plague in Constantinople.  Then in November 1429,  Theodora, wife of Constantine, died.  There is no information as to whether they had actually met, but it does appear that Theodora was traveling from Clarenza to Mistra to finish out her pregancy there when something happened on the way, and she and her infant died.

             Then at the end of December, Battista wrote Cleofe a letter she likely would not have received for a month or more.  That letter has not survived, but the one she wrote Cleofe's sister has, and the letters must have been very much alike. This is a rough, partial, translation:

Dearest sister, . . . You should be told of the very sad news, of the transition of our magnificent and most virtuous father into memory.  I thought I ought to tell you what happened. . . he had no pain or physical suffering. . . Thursday night he had a bad cough that settled with treatment . . . Sunday night when we left him, he was in good spirits.  Monday morning he went to Mass as usual . . . he said grace at dinner and then talked a while with Maestro Mateo, he started to eat but took only a little bread and drank a very little . . . then he touched his remaining eye and said, "I don't know what is wrong with this eye."  Mateo asked him what he had said.  He didn't answer, then he said, "Virgin Mary, help me!" and remained with his eye closed . . . [Later] his face darkened, and we had him given Extreme Unction, then there were three great breaths . . .he moved a little . . . then in about an hour it seemed to us this blessed soul had left his body.

First page of the Paris "Rime" manuscript of Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesta    

             Cleofe's father was Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti, widely known for his poetry, as had been his father who was a friend of Petrarch.  He was not, I'm afraid, anywhere near that standard, though he did try to rewrite the last canto of Dante's Paradisio. He was first of all a condottiero. Some fifty-six or so of his poems have survived, mostly about the Church and the Great Schism and the King of Rome.  He hired Guillaume Dufay as court musician and had his children educated in Latin and Greek.

              Dufay wrote a motet for Cleofe's wedding, Vasilissa ergo gaude, and he wrote one for her brother Carlo's wedding, Resvellies vous.  The family was rich in music and books and loyalty, and when Carlo inherited the lordship of Pesaro when Malatesta "dei Sonetti" died, he shared it with his brothers, Pandolfo and Galeazzo (who was married to Battista).  After this, the family story becomes too complicated, but I conclude with the closest thing available to a portrait of Cleofe, in one of Carlo.

Seal of Cleofe's brother, Carlo Malatesta

For more posts in the Cleofe series:

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2008/07/pavane-for-dead-princess.html

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/02/pavane-for-dead-princess-part-two.html

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/07/pavane-for-dead-princess-part-three.html http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2010/05/pavane-for-dead-princess-part-five.html http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/01/pavane-for-dead-princess-part-six.html 

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/04/glory-days.html

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2010/02/theodoros-ii-palaiologos.html

Pictures are from E. Angiolini and A. Falcioni, La Signoria di Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti (1391-1429) (Rimini, 2002).

Toufa, Toupha: Part Two

I gave a light-hearted paper on the toupha-toufa this weekend at the Medieval Academy of the Pacific in Tacoma, Washington,  to answer the question: what did Gozzoli think he was doing with this feathered crown? He clearly has heard of the diadem with feathers traditionally worn by the Eastern emperor in a triumph, a diadem bearing a circle of peacock feathers, called a toupha. I didn't answer it adequately there.

It is a representation -- not a portrait -- of John VIII Palaiologos in procession in Florence for the Council of Union, painted between 1459 and 1461 for the Medici Chapel in their palazzo, although Gozzoli was in Florence and saw John in 1439.  John came for humiliation, not a triumph, but Gozzoli has turned the procession into a triumph.

In preparation for this paper, a few images new to me turned up. For want of writing time, I am kindly making these images available here. This first is carved on an 11th-C ivory box that has various representations of emperors or horseback. Since the toupha is generally associated with a military triumph, it is odd to see it in the context of hunting and I am a bit curious about the way the emperor sits his horse.

The next one I showed before, a toupha portrayed in an 11-th C fabric found in the tomb of a German bishop, but its perspective may help to explain the shape of the headdress on Cyrenius, Governor of Syria, in the 14th-C mosaic in the Kariye Djami in Istanbul.

 

 

Do the striped feathers in Gozzoli's interpretation of the toupha have anything to do with the striped feathers on Ag. Alexandros of Pydna, shown here in the Cave of the Theotokos at Prespa?  Especially as this Ag. Alexandros is wearing, like Gozzoli's, a short-sleeve robe.  This robe is covered with Palaiologan double-headed eagles. He seems to have originated as one of those martyred soldiers, but it does look as if, being in northern Greece, a sainted soldier Alexandros -- soldiers are often shown wearing helmets with a crest which is called a toupha -- became conflated with Alexander the Great, and an emperor is entitled to a right royal toupha and robe. 

Another Ag. Alexandros, from Ag. Athanasios in Kastoria.

Finally, the toupha Piero della Francesca painted about 1447 in his glorious fresco sequence on the Legend of the True Cross in S. Francesco in Arezzo. Ten years ago I visited the church when the frescos were being restored, and was taken up on a scaffolding so that I was as close to the hand of Piero as I am to my computer screen. It represents the emperor Heraclius at the moment of victory.

Piero probably took his toupha from a Roman or Greek image, such as this 500BC toupha I photographed through a reflective glass case in a museum in northern Greece whose name I cannot remember. I was on a tour and it was a three-museum day.

So at the conference, in the question period after the panel I was on, Linda Williams of the University of Puget Sound made a suggestion that elegantly finished off my explanation of the crown as a toufa. She said that the Medici coat of arms had feathers on it.

Looking into that, I find that the Medici arms -- Cosimo and Lorenzo provided the pope with the cash to finance his council and the expenses of the 700 Greeks -- bore a ring mounted by three ostrich feathers.  And look at this Medici marriage tray at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with red, green, yellow, and white feathers around the inner rim of the frame.

Now look again at the colors of the feathers around John's crown -- red, green, and white, with gold replacing the yellow -- and see if you don't think that Gozzoli has adroitly transformed the gawky peacock-feather imperial toupha into a graceful compliment to his patron.

Theodoros II Palaiologos

Theodoros II Palaiologos has been a tremendous disappointment. It shouldn't have been a surprise, given his isolated and distorted upbringing, but there were opportunities where he might have become a better person. I have written about Theodoros more than once, here in particular, and as information collects and sources get translated, my view has been altered.

Regardless of his philosopher father and the philosophers of Mistra -- and, in fact, what we see of Theodoros is no recommendation for any of them -- his heart and courage were starved.  So we see him, when faced with stress -- marriage in 1421, Ottoman assault in 1423, fatherhood in 1428 -- isolating his bride, dithering agan and again about retreat into a monastery, ignoring his child.

In the period when things were good, he became expansive, took on showy public works -- and I am dating the great palace wing at Mistra to this period -- and while I have changed my mind slightly about  the date of the poem I wrote about here, it and the great gold embroidery fit into this period.

He might have learned something from the Kleope experience.  He had finally come to love her, even enjoy her in bed and as a scholarly companion, and despite the horrific shock of her death -- two sources talk about the sudden gush of her blood and one says that Theodoros was spattered with it -- he was able to force himself to a remarkable level of discipline in that first month of grief, enough to write an intricate, highly organized, and deeply loving poem.  That was in 1433.  He may have still been under her influence --maybe the project was already started -- when he wrote the long poem for his parents and ordered up the embroidery.  He clearly had ability at writing, and he should have written a lot more, but he had no one now to serve as muse and editor

Then in 1436 he went to Constantinople, his first visit since he left in 1407 at the age of ten, taking the embroidery and the poem with him.  He came on the same ship as Zoe Paraspondylos who was married to his brother Demetrios a few days after they arrived.   John VIII, gave Theodoros a magnificent processional welcome, and despite the fact that The City was half empty of its population, the infrastructure deeply eroded, the palace poky and crowded, he was  thrilled to be there.  He apparently ignored the fact that he had a motherless seven-year old daughter in Mistra, but then his brother Andronikos had been shipped off to be despot of Thessaloniki when he was seven.

Bessarion was already in Constantinople, in residence at a monastery, and the closeness they had had at Mistra for a couple of years seems to have been forgotten as Bessarion wrote Theodoros letters even though they were in the same city -- two survive -- and they are stunningly revealing.  We have many letters written to Manuel, and despite the florid style apparently required of Byzantine letter-writers, there is much sense of friendship and loyalty.  The language of Bessarion's letters to Theodoros is as extreme and formal as the species can get, and the evident cravings of his personality, exposed to the flattery at the imperial court, are not attractive.  

The letters also give a momentary glimpse of an almost childish personality, Theodoros -- in his 30s -- dancing about and claping when someone in Mistra described some glory of The City. Now he was actually there, and Bessarion shows us Theodoros' excitement over the architectural treasures, the churches that made Mistra's look negligible, the great houses that equaled anything he had as a palace back home.  He seems to have been particularly interested in relics, and he was wallowing in the homage paid him by all sorts of important people -- all of whom seemed to find him tremendously important.  He decided that he would stay in Constantinople and be the heir to the throne.  It could happen any time, really.  John had been extremely ill, expected to die, four years earlier, and suffered from what was probably rheumatoid arthritis.

So it was decided among the brothers that Theodoros would remain in Constantinople, and that Constantine would replace him at Mistra as Despot.  That would leave Constantine and Thomas in the Morea, and Theodoros and Demetrios in Constantinople where, presumably, John could keep an eye on their ambitions.

Constantine left for the Morea in June, and almost immediately Theodoros followed him, not being able to bear actually giving up his position.  This had happened before, in late 1428, when he was so sure he wanted to go into a monastery that Constantine had been sent to take over.  Theodoros changed his mind then, which set Constantine off on the sequence of conquests that eventually acquired Patras, the Tocco lands, and Achaia for Greek rule.  Enough was enough.  Feelings ran so high this time in 1436 that Constantine and Thomas collected an army, while Theodoros collected one on his side.  Outright internecine war was barely avoided, and John sent over two representatives to work out a settlement.

They settled that Constantine would go back to Constantinople and that Theodoros would remain as Despot in Mistra.  He seems to have been the only brother not involved in some way in the Florence-Ferrara conference. It is from the years after this that we see Venetian complaints about Theodoros -- or his people -- making attacks on Venetian territory, and seizing the Thermissi area from Nauplion.  He married off his thirteen-year old daughter, Helena, to King James of Cyprus.  She was miserable, and seems to have spent considerable time making others miserable.

In 1443 there had been letters and negotiations going back and forth, but in June Constantine left for the Morea and in December Theodoros arrived in Constantinople, having travelled back on the same boat had come over on.  He was given Constantine's appanage of Selybria, now Silivri, just south of Constantinople on the Sea of Marmara. It was still a city of some significance, just inside the end of the Anastasian Wall, on the edge of what remained of the Eastern Empire in Thrace.

That is about it.  Nothing more is said about him except that he died in June 1448 of plague, a wretched death with extreme fever and vomiting blood.  He was buried in the family burial church of the Pantokrator in Constantinople, near his father.

The images all contain Palaiologan monograms and eagles.  The two bright ones are from frescos in the Kariye Djami in Istanbul, one is from a cave church at Lake Prespa, and the red one is Theodoros himself as a small boy in the Paris ms. family portrait.

 

Anathema

 

-->

τοῦ Ἰούδα [καὶ τῶν λέγοντων]
ἆρον ἆρον σταύ[ρωσον αὐτὸν]
. . . of Judas [and those saying]
Away with him! Cru[cify him!]
John 19:14

-->

A year ago I wrote about a late antique tombstone found near Argos. It is now Lent in both the Eastern and Western rites, and a good time to revisit the Argos tombstones at a more serious level. 

The image here is from the Byzantine Museum in Athens, but it represents six of the fourteen or fifteen Christian epigraphs from the 5th and 6th centuries in Argos. It is a small thing: all but one of these Argos epigraphs are somewhat smaller than a piece of printer paper, 2/3 the width of my computer screen.  

In the ancient world, grave-entering -- robbing or using someone else's grave -- was an impious act of major importance, and the guilty were to pay fines to the municipal treasury. For a thousand years before Christianity, Jewish, Greek, and Roman epigraphs had called on the gods of the Greeks and Persians, on enraged Apollo, and on the iron broom and the flying sickle to punish the guilty. Constantine's divorce law of 331 considered grave-entering grounds for divorce. In 447 a law of Valentinian said that one who would harass the buried dead was an enemy of light itself. Some thought the clergy were particularly guilty of grave-entering, others said it was the people who carried the body to the grave.

Christian gravestones took up their own warning, often the anathema, or the curse of God on Judas and on those who cried Crucify him! when Pilate asked what to do with Jesus. Significantly, they used the form found in the Gospel of John, the most anti-Semitic of the gospels, and a longer form than those used in the other three. This anathema was quite popular in the Justinianic period, with the Greens using it in their court oaths and shouting it at the Blues. Justinian included the anathema in his law about perjury in 535.

What is striking here is the percentage of Christian epigraphs from Argos that use the anathema -- 6 out of fourteen or fifteen.  There is another from Hermione, in the Argolid.  None have been found at Sparta. We are dealing with survivals, but counting the Corinth epigraphs, I found only 2 out of 162, and at the Argos rate there should have been 50.  I found three from Athens, and at the Argos rate there should have been dozens. The anathema shows up very rarely in epigraphs from Italy, twice out of the thousands from North Africa, one from Asia Minor. [I did this work 10 years ago: it is likely that many more epigraphs have been discovered since, but someone else will have to do the numbers.] 

The Argos use of the anathema crossed class boundaries.  It is found in a monastic burial vault; on the grave of Rhoda, daughter of Kyriaki who must have been poor; on the grave of a member of the city council; on the grave of a Syrian resident; and on two other working-class graves. We know nothing about what was going on in Argos in the 6th century, except that there may be a clue on the epigraph for a Christian of Jewish origin. It says

-->

+ κοιμητήριον
Ἀραβάννας ἀγό
ραστον + ὁ ἠγό
ρασεν Σολομών +

+ [this] resting place
of Arabanna [is] paid
for + Salomon,
bought [it]+

Some, but not all of the Christian epigraphs have crosses: this has the most, three.  It also states twice that the grave site has been paid for.  Does these things reflect an uneasiness on the part of Jewish Christians about their status among Greek Christians?  Two other Jewish epigraphs have been found.  One is seriously eroded and has not been reconstructed.  The other, that of Aurelius Joses, quotes the Theodosian Code at 16.8.13 in asking that his tomb not be entered.

It was perfectly possible for Christians to protest grave-entering without vulgarity. 

-->One from Parori, outside Sparta, began with the Trisagion -- "Holy God, Holy Immortal" -- and concludes, "by this power, do not disturb this tomb. ’ Another, from Corinth, says mildly, "Therefore let no one have designs against them and exhume them, and involve themselves in penalties." The Jew, Aurelius Joses, set a standard no Argos Christian met:

I, Aurelius Joses, pray
the holy and great
power of God and the
power of the Law and the
dignity of the patriarchs and
the dignity of the ethnarchs and
the dignity of the sages and
the dignity of the worship offered
each day before God that
no one will break up my tomb
which I built with much labor.

PS, Part Three: Nauplion Details

Picking up on both of the two details in Nauplion: Two Details.

Going back again to the 16th century map detail of the inverted Y at the plateia of Ag. Spyridon, I said that I had found at that plateia strong support for the reliability of that drawn Y.  I have now found a picture of the end of the right-hand fork where it comes into old Nauplion's main plateia at the southwest corner.

You will recognize the pretty little mosque used for the Trianon cinema --  porch domes and columns now removed, and the building across the street to the left that has been a restaurant for three generations.  To the right of the mosque, where the yellow Acropolis hotel now stands you can see an open space going up the hill.  The top of the space, in a larger version of the picture, shows clearly a ribbon of steps.  So the mosque was built beside the road coming down from the Y.  In the 15th and 16th centuries, before the mosque was built, a church stood where the picture shows houses, just about where Dmitri Kountalis' shop and the bank are now.

* * * * * * * * * *

I wrote that the platan tree at the plateia -- diagonally across the plateia from the end of the street shown above -- was old enough to remember the Turks.  So I have been told many times.  But I found this undated photo on Facebook, and that platan tree looks to me extremely unlikely to have ever seen any Turks at all.  I cannot get the photo clear enough, large enough, to guess at the date from the clothes the people are wearing, so for now, this platan is one more fiction that needs to be allowed to rest quietly although it is a lovely tree, and fine for spending hours under. This means that the wanton slaughter of the great trees by the owners of two restaurants destroyed the two great trees remaining from the 17th century.  

The best Nauplion can do now is point out a palm tree or two, supposedly planted by Kapodistrias at independence. The palm in Greek is phoinix, and the first symbol of free Greece was the phoenix, the bird-lion that is reborn out of the flames that consume it.  This one being decorated for Christmas does not, I think, quite convey the power of that symbol.

You can find a couple of phoenixes left on buildings of the period, and one was used on the first coinage of the country. But a tall skinny palm with its little whoosh of feathers at the top cannot compare with those broad-spreading massive-trunked trees I remember.  Despite all one hears about "preserving our heritage," such preservation is extremely partial and easily influenced by profit.

Roosters

 

Christopher Columbus has the distinction of being nearly the only famous person from the 15th-century Mediterranean not known to Cyriaco of Ancona. When Columbus was not pirating or otherwise engaged, he exported mastic  from Chios, and in his first letter to Queen Isabella, he presented the possibility of new sources of mastic as one reason to invest in his explorations.  One line of Columban theology claims that Columbus was a Greek from Chios but this is not relevant here.

Cyriaco also exported mastic. Mastic is (the word is from the same root as masticate) a gum produced by a small shrub, found mostly on Chios, a highly profitable trade in the pre-Colgate era for sale as a tooth cleaner and breath sweetner. In January 1446, Cyriaco rode out with friends in a mule train to see where mastic came from. "I finally saw drops of glittering mastic in large numbers rather nearby on every side among the tearful but joyous trucks and had the pleasure of gathering some in my hand . . .

"For I recalled that I had often seen numberous boxes filled with this highly esteemed gum being loaded on to the great ships in your broad and tranquil port of Chios and I knew that the world was being filled with the scent of this island's gift, this wholesome exhalation, since in the course of the years, through the agency of Genoese and foreign ships, these fragrances are carried, some through the Dardanelles and the Bosporus to Thrace and eastern Europe, others through the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the River Don, to comfort the Sarmatians, Scythians, and Hyrcanians beneath their cold sky; or elsewhere through Asia, to allure the Colchians, the Albanians, the Georgians, Cappadocians, and Cilicians, and thence the Persians, Parthians and Arabs and Bactrians and Medes and Babylonians, Others are carried over the immense Ionian and Libyan Seas to Egypt and Syria, thence to be transported to the Ethiopians, Garamantians, and Indians. And we know that others are brought via Illyria to Italy, while still others have been transported across the entire Mediterranean Sea, to Ocean and the western lands, to revivify Cadis, the Gauls, Germans, Spaniards, Britons, Irish and Scotch, and far-off Thule." 

This passage brings irresistibly to mind the letter to Henry Miller, in which Lawrence Durrell described George Katsimbalis at the locked gate of the Acropolis one midnight. He "sent out the most bloodcurdling clarion I have ever heard: Cock-a-doodle-doo . . .' and then, after a pause, 'lo from the distance, silvery-clear in the darkness, a cock drowsily answered -- and then another, then another." The night began to quiver with cockcrows.

In Mani at Cape Matapan, Patrick Leigh Fermor was told that they could sometimes hear cocks crowing from Cythera. "The distance between Cythera and Capate Matapan on the tattered map in my pocket, was somewhere between twenty and thirty miles. This enormously extended the possible ambit of George's initial cockcrow . . . the traffic could be reversed, and leap from the Mani (or better still, Cape Malea) to Cythera, from Cythera to Anticythera, and from Anticythera to the piratical peninsulas of western Crete; only to die out south of the great island in a last lonely crow on the islet of Gavdos, in the Libyan Sea. . . . But a timely west wind could carry it to the eastern capes of Crete, over the Cassos straits, through the islands of the Dodecanese, and thence to the Halicarnassus peninsula and the Taurus mountains. . . . The possibilities became suddenly tremendous and in our mind's ear the ghostly clarion travelled south-west into Egypt, south-east to the Persian Gulf; up the Nile, past the villages fo the stork-like Dinkas, through the great forests, from krall to krall of the Zulus, waking the drowsy Boers of the Transvaal and expiring from a chicken-run on Table Mountain over the Cape of Good Hope.

"North of Athens, all was plain sailing; it would be through the Iron Curtain, over the Great Balkan range and across the Danube within the hour, with nothing to hinder its spread across the Ukraine and Great Russia [[ the sudden hubbub in a hundred collective farms alerting the NKVD and causing a number of arrests on suspicion -- until it reached the reindeer-haunted forests of Lapland, and called across the ice toward Nova Zembla to languish among igloos . . . Thus, as the northern call fell silent among the tongue-tied penguins of the Arctic floes, the westward sweep, after startling the solitary Magyar herdsman with the untimely uproar and alarming the night-capped Normans with thoughts of theft, was culminating in ultimate unanswered challenges from John o'Groats and the Blasket Islands, Finisterre and Cape Trafalgar, and a regimental mascot in Gibraltar was already rousing the Berbers of Tangier . . ."

On New Year's Day of 1445, Cyriaco trumped the cock.  Despite the fact that the crew of his boat had celebrated long and deeply the night before, and were sprawled asleep on their benches, "long before the cock with his wakeful voice called for the warm day, I roused the captain and his crew by singing alleluia."

The mosaic is from Roman Tunisia.

The cockcrows are from Mani, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, pp, 123-124,

The mastic is from Cyriac of Ancona: The Later Travels by Edward Bodnar, pp. 213-215.