Sir Arthur Evans

“ Towards evening many of these grave merchants seated themselves in the gardens of a café just outside the town, and, while alternately purring their narghilés and sipping their coffee, contemplated, without uttering a syllable, the beautiful scene before them—the mountains, the green valley, the foaming mill-stream murmuring at their feet.
We were assured by ‘Europeans’ in Bosnia that the Turks do not care a rap for nature—that they are utterly callous as to scenery; that if anything charmed, it was the peace, the silence—not the beauties of the landscape. ”

“ To appreciate the greatest of Latin classics, Virgil—to glance no further afield—one must at least have gained the right to greet him as fellow-antiquary. For the rest, these essays profess to be no more than vindemiatio prima, a first gleaning. When the harvest has been fully gathered in, it will then be time to say, in regard to the classics both of Greece and of Rome, how far the old lives on in the new, how far what the student in his haste is apt to label ‘survival’ stands for a force still tugging at the heart-strings of even the most sophisticated and lordly heir of the ages. ”

“ Were we, one kept asking oneself, passing through what some day may become one of the Black Countries of Europe? Would, as the world grew older, something of the tremendous energy of our Midlands burst forth upon this stagnant valley—blasting, boring, blackening, metamorphosing its every feature? Mountains rose around us overgrown with primeval forest—habitations were few and far between. What there were, were miserable hovels—each in its mangy patch of maize—more ruinous than any we remembered having seen in Bosnia. ”

“ At 8.30 we left Dervent, passing the shapeless ruins of an old castle, two walls of which can alone be traced now, and two mosques, one of them almost as dilapidated as the castle wall. Our march lay through a beautiful country, over the undulating hills which separate the valleys of the Save and Bosna, beyond which, in the exquisitely clear air, rose the lilac outlines of loftier ranges, while every now and then a gap in the hills would reveal to us the rich Possávina spread out below in dim vistas of forest and cornland. ”

“ Historic Greece was not very successful in expelling the beast from human nature. The poets of historical Greece were never so successful as Homer. I infer that the Iliad and the Odyssey are prehistoric, the flowers of a brief age of Achaean civilization, an age when the society of princes and ladies had a taste extraordinarily pure and noble. The poems were framed for an aristocratic, not for a popular audience, though I am perfectly ready to grant that the popular audience to which our best ballad minstrels sang also desired a tone of singular purity in the serious romantic lays. ”

“ Now, at a turn of the road, opens our first glimpse of the ancient duchy of St. Sava—or, as it is now more generally known, the Herzegovina—a magnificent vista of rocky mountains rising beyond the yet unseen valley of the Narenta, their dark blue shadows golden-fringed by the setting sun. The trees become more southern in their character; here and there are fine Spanish chestnuts; on a height to the right are the pines of an Italian landscape; wild vine becomes plentiful once more; we pass a Herzegovinian peasant in a peaked cap of Dalmatian character ”

“ An Ionian Greek had only to travel down his own coast as far as Lycia to find men reckoning descent through the mother, or to travel back in imagination to the legendary origins of his own people, to find that their pedigrees went often up, not to a god, but to a woman. ”

“ The porches of some of these Mahometan prayer-houses had altered little from those of the early Christian church, and were in truth as Byzantine as their domes. The walls are most brilliant, not to say tawdry, outside—painted with what were meant to be delectable fore-glimpses of Paradise—palm-trees loaded with dates, fruitful vines sprouting forth from vases, or here a luscious melon with a knife ready inserted for the carving. Like devices might be seen on the spandrils of the kiosques that rose over the saints’ graves, but all in the most gaudy and inharmonious colours. ”

“ For most primitive races, I suspect, the medicine-chief, the βασιλεύς, with his immense mana, is Theos, and equally the Theos is the medicine-chief. The rainmaker, the bringer of game, the possessor of the power to make dead and to make alive—there he is, the visible doer of all those things which later races have delegated to higher and more shadowy beings, walking palpably before you with his medicine and perhaps his pipe, his grand manner, his fits, and his terrific dress. ”

“ Epic lays of the fatal day of Kóssovo are still sung every day to throngs of peasant listeners by minstrels of the people, whose rhapsodies, set to the dolorous strains of the ghuzla, resound in a great national dirge along the willowed banks of Save and Danube, through the beechwood glens of Bosnia, the dark recesses of the Balkan, the mountain strongholds of the Czernagora, till, far away across the Illyrian desert, they find an echo in that caverned waste of rock that frowns above the blue waters of the Adriatic. ”

“ Resistance, broken down in the gardens of Provence, buried beneath the charred rafters of the Roman cities of the Langue d’Oc, smothered in the dungeons of the Inquisition, was prolonged from generation to generation amongst the primeval forests and mountain fastnesses of Bosnia. There were not wanting, amongst those who sought to exterminate the Bogomiles, Churchmen as dead to human pity as the Abbot of Citeaux, and lay arms as bloodthirsty as De Montfort; but the stubborn genius of the Serbian people fought on with rare persistence, and held out to the end. ”

“ We then saw how the nature of the Italian peninsula as it was in the dawn of civilization, and the universal belief in a world of spirits haunting mountain and woodland, compelled the early Latin farmer to draw a well-defined boundary line between the land he had reclaimed and the forest beyond it, within which he and his familia and his friendly spirits or deities might be at peace; and how he sought to render this boundary impermeable to the hostile spirits outside it by a yearly ceremony consisting of a procession around it of victims for sacrifice. ”

“ The market-place is a spacious studio. The beauty of the Croatian peasant costume is almost unique in Europe—possibly only rivalled at Belgrade. Seen from above, when the market-place is thronged, it looks almost like a bed of red and white geraniums; it is these prevailing colours which give the peasant groups a lightness and brilliancy which I have seen nowhere else. What is remarkable is, that this brightness should be shared in such equal proportions by men and women alike. In Serbia—even in Turkey—the men are not so gay. ”

“ A stratum full of the remains, and at times even betraying the actuality, of those ‘beastly devices of the heathen’ which are dear to the heart of us anthropologists—if a mere Greek scholar may venture to class himself among even amateur anthropologists: ceremonies of magic and purification, beast-worship, stone-worship, ghosts and anthropomorphic gods, traces of the peculiar powers of women both as ‘good medicine’ and as titular heads of the family, and especially a most pervading and almost ubiquitous memory of Human Sacrifice. ”

“ For what could be more appropriate than the rich silver embroidery flowered on the purple-velvet field of her mantle—efflorescent with the poetic yearning of the race for that gorgeous Orient, a yearning as lively as the abhorrence from its yoke—an echo from the Serbian lyre—a protest against your cold foggy West—but subdued withal by a Roman-matronly coiffure wondrously becoming to the tranquil grace of Serbian motherhood? ”

“ Hesiod certainly entered into public knowledge no less than Homer. Finally, if the taste of the seventh and sixth centuries were so pure and austere, why were the poets of the seventh and sixth centuries so rich in matters which the Iliad and Odyssey omit? In no Greek literature of any age do we find the clean austerity of Homer, for example, as regards sins against nature, the permanent blot on the civilization of historic Greece. The theory of educational expurgation in the eighth to the sixth centuries is impossible on all sides. ”

“ How much is here to throw a light on the extension of Western ideas over the old Serbian area! How much to illustrate the national history, the national customs—aye, even the old Sclavonic mythology; how much to recall the origin of illustrious dynasties! I have spoken of the Némanjić ensigns; here, too, were the Castriotić, belonging to the family of Scanderbeg—again, a double-eagle, sable on or, and eagle crest to the helm—the arms of the royal house of Bosnia that was to be—the Tvartkoević shield semé of golden fleurs de lys. In many of the arms might be detected a curious play on words. ”