In The Levant 45

In The Levant 45

Smyrna may be said to have a character of its own in not having any

character of its own. One of the most ancient cities on the globe, it

has no appearance of antiquity; containing all nationalities, it has no

nationality; the second commercial city of the East, it has no chamber

of commerce, no _Bourse_, no commercial unity; its citizens are of no

country and have no impulse of patriotism; it is an Asiatic city with

a European face; it produces nothing, it exchanges everything,--the

fabrics of Europe, the luxuries of the Orient; the children of the

East are sent to its schools, but it has no literary character nor any

influence of culture; it is hospitable to all religions, and conspicuous

for none; it is the paradise of the Turks, the home of luxury and of

beautiful women, but it is also a favorite of the mosquito, and, until

recently, it has been the yearly camp of the plague; it is not the

most healthful city in the world, and yet it is the metropolis of the

drug-trade.

 

Smyrna can be compared to Damascus in its age and in its perpetuity

under all discouragements and changes,--the shocks of earthquakes, the

constant visitations of pestilence, and the rule of a hundred masters.

It was a great city before the migration of the Ionians into Asia Minor,

it saw the rise and fall of Sardis, it was restored from a paralysis

of four centuries by Alexander. Under all vicissitudes it seems to have

retained its character of a great mart of exchange, a necessity for

the trade of Asia; and perhaps the indifference of its conglomerate

inhabitants to freedom and to creeds contributed to its safety.

Certainly it thrived as well under the Christians, when it was the seat

of one of the seven churches, as it did under the Romans, when it was a

seat of a great school of sophists and rhetoricians, and it is equally

prosperous under the sway of the successor of Mohammed. During the

thousand years of the always decaying Byzantine Empire it had its share

of misfortunes, and its walls alternately, at a later day, displayed the

star and crescent, and the equal arms of the cross of St. John. Yet,

in all its history, I seem to see the trading, gay, free, but not

disorderly Smyrna passing on its even way of traffic and of pleasure.

 

Of its two hundred thousand and more inhabitants, about ninety thousand

are Rayah Greeks, and about eighty thousand are Turks. There is a

changing population of perhaps a thousand Europeans, there are large

bodies of Jews and Armenians, and it was recently estimated to have as

many as fifteen thousand Levantines. These latter are the descendants

of the marriage of Europeans with Greek and Jewish women; and whatever

moral reputation the Levantines enjoy in the Levant, the women of this

mixture are famous for their beauty. But the race is said to be not

self-sustaining, and is yielding to the original types. The languages

spoken in Smyrna are Turkish, a Greek dialect (the Romaic), Spanish,

Italian, Trench, English, and Arabic, probably prevailing in the order

named. Our own steamer was much more Oriental than the city of Smyrna.

As soon as we stepped ashore we seemed to have come into a European

city; the people almost all wear the Frank dress, the shops offer little

that is peculiar. One who was unfamiliar with bazaars might wonder at

the tangle of various lanes, but we saw nothing calling for comment. A

walk through the Jewish quarter, here as everywhere else the dirtiest

and most picturesque in the city, will reward the philosophic traveller

with the sight of lovely women lolling at every window. It is not

the fashion for Smyrniote ladies to promenade the streets, but they

mercifully array themselves in full toilet and stand in their doorways.

 

The programme of the voyage of the _Achille_ promised us a day and a

half in Smyrna, which would give us time to visit Ephesus. We were due

Friday noon; we did not arrive till Saturday noon. This vexatious delay

had caused much agitation on board; to be cheated out of Ephesus was an

outrage which the tourists could not submit to; they had come this way

on purpose to see Ephesus. They would rather give up anything else in

the East. The captain said he had no discretion, he must sail at 4 p. M.

The passengers then prepared a handsome petition to the agent, begging

him to detain the steamer till eight o'clock, in order to permit them to

visit Ephesus by a special train. There is a proclivity in all those who

can write to sign any and every thing except a subscription paper, and

this petition received fifty-six eager and first-class signatures. The

agent at Smyrna plumply refused our request, with unnecessary surliness;

but upon the arrival of the captain, and a consultation which no doubt

had more reference to freight than to the petition, the official agreed,

as a special favor, to detain the steamer till eight o'clock, but not a

moment longer.

 

We hastened to the station of the Aidin Railway, which runs eighty miles

to Aidin, the ancient Tralles, a rich Lydian metropolis of immemorial

foundation. The modern town has perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants, and

is a depot for cotton and figs; that sweetmeat of Paradise, the _halva_,

is manufactured there, and its great tanneries produce fine yellow

Morocco leather. The town lies only three miles from the famous

tortuous Mæander, and all the region about it is a garden of vines and

fruit-trees. The railway company is under English management, which

signifies promptness, and the special train was ready in ten minutes;

when lo! of the fifty-six devotees of Ephesus only eleven appeared. We

were off at once; good engine, solid track, clean, elegant, comfortable

carnages. As we moved out of the city the air was full of the odor of

orange-blossoms; we crossed the Meles, and sped down a valley, very

fertile, smiling with grain-fields, green meadows, groves of midberry,

oranges, figs, with blue hills,--an ancient Mount Olympus, beyond which

lay green Sardis, in the distance, a country as lovely and home-like as

an English or American farm-land. We had seen nothing so luxuriant and

thriving in the East before. The hills, indeed, were stripped of trees,

but clad on the tops with verdure, the result of plentiful rains.

 

We went "express." The usual time of trains is three hours; we ran over

the fifty miles in an hour and a quarter. We could hardly believe our

senses, that we were in a luxurious carriage, flying along at this rate

in Asia, and going to Ephesus! While we were confessing that the lazy

swing of the carriage was more agreeable than that of the donkey or the

dromedary, the train pulled up at station Ayasolook, once the residence

of the Sultans of Ayasolook, and the camp of Tamerlane, now a cluster of

coffeehouses and railway-offices, with a few fever-stricken inhabitants,

who prey upon travellers, not with Oriental courtesy, but with European

insolence.

 

On our right was a round hill surmounted by a Roman castle; from the

hills on the left, striding across the railway towards Ephesus, were the

tall stone pillars of a Roman aqueduct, the brick arches and conductor

nearly all fallen away. On the summit of nearly every pillar a white,

red-legged stork had built, from sticks and grass, a high round nest,

which covered the top; and the bird stood in it motionless, a beautiful

object at that height against the sky.

 

The station people had not obeyed our telegram to furnish enough horses,

and those of us who were obliged to walk congratulated ourselves on the

mistake, since the way was as rough as the steeds. The path led over a

ground full of stone _débris_. This was the site of Ayasolook, which had

been built out of the ruins of the old city; most picturesque objects

were the small mosque-tombs and minarets, which revived here the most

graceful forms and fancies of Saracenic art. One, I noticed, which had

the ideal Persian arch and slender columns, Nature herself had taken

into loving care and draped with clinging green and hanging vines. There

were towers of brick, to which age has given a rich tone, flaring at the

top in a curve that fascinated the eye. On each tomb, tower, and minaret

the storks had nested, and upon each stood the mother looking down

upon her brood. About the crumbling sides of a tower, thus draped and

crowned, innumerable swallows had built their nests, so that it was

alive with birds, whose cheerful occupation gave a kind of pathos to the

human desertion and decay.

 

Behind the Roman castle stands the great but ruinous mosque of Sultan

Selim, which was formerly the Church of St. John. We did not turn

aside for its empty glory, but to the theologian or the student of the

formation of Christian dogmas, and of the gladiatorial spectacles of an

ancient convocation, there are few arenas in the East more interesting

than this; for in this church it is supposed were held the two councils

of a. d. 431 and 449. St. John, after his release from Patmos, passed

the remainder of his life here; the Virgin Mary followed him to the

city, so favored by the presence of the first apostles, and here she

died and was buried. From her entombment, Ephesus for a long time

enjoyed the reputation of the City of the Virgin, until that honor

was transferred to Jerusalem, where, however, her empty tomb soon

necessitated her resurrection and assumption,--the subject which

inspired so many artists after the revival of learning in Europe. In the

hill near this church Mary Magdalene was buried; in Ephesus also reposed

the body of St. Timothy, its first bishop.

 

This church of St. John was at some distance from the heart of the city,

which lay in the plain to the south and near the sea, but in the fifth

century Ephesus was a city of churches. The reader needs to remember

that in that century the Christian controversy had passed from the

nature of the Trinity to the incarnation, and that the first council of

Ephesus was called by the emperor Theodosius in the hope of establishing

the opinion of the Syrian Nestorius, the primate of Constantinople, who

refused to give to the mother of Christ the title, then come into use,

of the Mother of God, and discriminated nicely the two natures of

the Saviour. His views were anathematized by Cyril, the patriarch

of Alexandria, and the dispute involved the entire East in a fierce

contest. In the council convened of Greek bishops, Nestorius had no

doubt but he would be sustained by the weight of authority; but the

prompt Cyril, whose qualities would have found a conspicuous and useful

theatre at the head of a Roman army against the Scythians, was first on

the ground, with an abundance of spiritual and temporal arms. In reading

of this council, one recalls without effort the once famous and now

historical conventions of the Democratic party of the State of New York,

in the days when political salvation, offered in the creeds of the "Hard

Shells" and of the "Soft Shells," was enforced by the attendance of

gangs of "Short boys" and "Tammany boys," who understood the use of

slung-shot against heretical opinions. It is true that Nestorius had in

reserve behind his prelates the stout slaves of the bath of Zeuxippus,

but Cyril had secured the alliance of the bishop of Ephesus, and the

support of the rabble of peasants and slaves who were easily excited to

jealousy for the honor of the Virgin of their city; and he landed from

Egypt, with his great retinue of bishops, a band of merciless monks of

the Nile, of fanatics, mariners, and slaves, who took a ready interest

in the theological discussions of those days. The council met in

this church, surrounded by the fierce if not martial array of Cyril;

deliberations were begun before the arrival of the most weighty

supporters of Nestorius,--for Cyril anticipated the slow approach

of John of Antioch and his bishops,--and in one day the primate of

Constantinople was hastily deposed and cursed, together with his heresy.