CYPRUS.

Bruce Herald, Volume XI, Issue 1078, 14 January 1879, Page 6

CYPRUS.

Bt W. Hepworth Dixon. No. 111. — Continued. The villiage has some twenty cabins ; some with courtyards, some with open grounds ; but all of them are built of tbe same square cakes of mud and straw ; and at a little distance, and especially in the waning light, are hardly to be distinguished from the surrounding earth. The colour is the same, and as the roofs are flat, sometimes flush with the hillside, and as neither peaked roof nor chimney breaks the outline, there is no variety ot form. One building only takes the eye; the small Greek village church. This edifice is white, the only building in the place, excepting our asylum, that bas neither form nor colour. WVite seems in every zone to be a sign of order, fixity, and superiority. In Appenzell I have noticed that the whitewashed chalets belong to prosperous Switzers. Tn Little Russia the whitewashed cabin, though no bigger than its neighbour, is certain to belong to the Starost. Even at St Johnsburg, in Vermont, the workmau's paradice, there was a difference; the men who were most skilful in their craft, most careful of their money, painted their ! cabins white. From Valaehia to Bohemia j the whitened hovel is alwaya cleaner and better furnished than its neighbours. In Texas and New Mexico the white ranch is the oue at which a traveller prefers to to seek his rest The whiteness of the white synagogue at Capernaum was but a sign. Like the synagogue in ancient Israel, our vilUige church stands on the hill .slope and at the top, so thafc it is the first object} to take a stranger's eye. A small and poor affair, yet boasting of a tiny cupola and a dwaif belfry, this church is built of hardier material than the surrounding cabins, fragments of stone being worked into the mud walls It may stand for eighty or a hundred years, Internally the church is like all other Greek churches '1 o an English eye the finery is apt to look mean and tawdry ; but one must not judge a poor little church in Ormidia by rules wh eh might apply to chapels of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem and cathedrals of the Archangel afc Moscow. Besicl ?s the sacred figures, always painted on a screen of a Greek altar, hangs a picture of Sfc. George a saint,, who beyond his function of patron of the entire island of Cyprus, has a special charge of this particular cape aud coast. The hill close to us, on which our crane seek she ter fer the night, is called St. George's Hill, and round Cape Gn-go, formerly the promontory of Hedallium, rolls tbe water of St. George's Bay. In former times this coast and cape dedicated to Apollo, to which Pagan god Sfc. George has succeeded as the representative of Christian power. The vicar of the village, Father Pedros, is an old but not imposing man. By birth he is a peasant, like the folks among whom he spends his life. He owns his little farm, and tills the ground with his own hand. Like the white Pope of a Russian village, his education for the ministry has been slight; a little training of the voice for the peculiar sing-song or his ritual, and the acquisition! by rote of his daily prayers. Besides being pastor, he is also miller of the village ; for his patch of ground contains a water-wheel, and his office gives him a practical monopoly of grinding the peasants' seed and grain. Except on Saints' days and Sundays, when Popos Pedros dons his high pontificals : tawdry and faded vestments — nothing in his dress and manner marks him off as a man apart from the other villagers. Stay, thi- re is the cap. That cap is curious, and no other person in the village is allowed to wear it ; for that head gear is a relic of tho past, denoting priesthood and fche sacerdotal caste a thousand pears before the time of Christ, The priests and eunuchs of Nineveh wore, in the days of Sennacherib, the same conical cap which Father Pedros wears in Ormidia in the days of Queen Victoria. Pedros, though a pope, is not an eunuch; nofc even a monk, or bachelor. Like the white [-ope of Russia, he is a married man with wife and child, and all the cares of family life. The parish priest must be a married man. Monks, dwelling apart, walled up in ceil and convent yards, are thought to s and beyond the reach of female graces and allurements. They can take tbe vows of chastity as well as those of poverty, with the chance of keeping them intact; but your parish pope, who has to live amongst his flock, dung the daily duties of nis church to male and female, is required to arm his natural virtue with a wife. Bufc not the less, Pedros is the relic and deposit of a creed in which the celibate man was consecrated to the service of kings and gods. Of that decent hia headdress is the sign. From Nineveh this headdress came to Tyre; from Tyre to Paphos, whence it travelled in the train of the Tynan Ashtorah to every part of Cyprus. When Ashtorah tooktheOreek form of Aphrodite, herpriest (according to the evidence turned up in m»uy ancient graveyards) continued to wear the original cap. Father Pedros never heard of Ashtorah, and has only vague ideas as to Aphrodite ; yet he wears covers of ber priests as he goes out to field, drives in his cattle at nightfall, and watches the workmen grinding at hia mill. The peasants of the village, though Ihey wear the dress, moustache, aud swarthy brows of our stage brigands, are a gentle, kindly, and harmless race. Though idle,

a* we En<.. isii m .•-() c h cai'ioty wi rk, ih-\ ase • -*■ 'r<un iy .-of ! of sp ■<■•', ea>y to c mini. Tney a*e a race o grown-up boy.-. Tm-ir b. -d* "I'd hiare, noo Grei-k. The 1 nig s raighl no.-c aid monumeniul brow ire i.e-er se.-n amongst tbem • neither is the rouiid ami clear-cut chin. The race is Syrian raih< t tbau Attic; ihe none being hunched, ih< chin and forehead both receding — tests oi a more Eastern type of man. No peanair of Ormidia would have served a Greek sculptor for a model, save for a Comedian or grotesque. (To be continued.)