THE PIRÆUS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3029, 3 April 1912, Page 81

THE PIRÆUS.

By Edith Searub Grossman, M.A. We took the afternoon train from Athens, and after a short T>hinge into a tunnel, soon found ourselves at the Pirams. It is not a favourite place with tourists. The hotels have not a good name, the variegated population looks rather villainous, and there are none of the beautiful wrecks of classical architecture to be seen. It is rather like a second-rate or third-rate European seaport ■with a strong infusion of the East. In spite of all this, the place is well worth a short visit. My first evening view, with harbour, shipping, seaport, and the mountains behind, had a beauty of its own. It is so close to Athens that in this clear air the Akropolis and part of the city are visible from certain points, and appear only a short distance off. Along the sea front stretches the shabby, picturesque semi-Oriental market, where dark-eved dirty vendors sell their red and yellow pomegranates and dry fish, the x\lbanian shoes, chunks of Turkish delight, goats' milk, cheese, and cheap, worthless curios. The unclean but equally picturesque ba-ck streets are alive with seaport life, and resounding with strangely mingled tongues. The business premises have notices in other languages than Greek, and occasionally display some queer specimens of English—that language most unfamiliar elsewhere in Greece. One coal merchant's place announces itself to be a "Sea-coaling depot," and an obviously Italian firm writes itself as "Fanciulli Brothers." Leaving the side streets, I came in view of the dots of lamplights that indistinctly marked Akte. Here in the dusk the remains of old walls of sun-baked clay spoke silently of antiquity. They were first built in the great days of Athens, and their builders have been dust of the dust of this dry plain 25 centuries ago. Two of the moles of the harbour date back to the same ago. The background of the scene is formed by mountains, gifted with that beautiful colour and shape which I can only call Greek —soft without haze, finely and delicately tinged with a bine that combines grey and purple, and in sunset and the afterglow a subdued pink. Tho interspaces between shores and hills are clearest water. The sea water \b. one of the great beauties of Greece. It is so clear that you can see to the bottom, and in looking into it you see each wavelet ringed with a circle of prismatic colour ; but, seen at a distance, the whole expanse is of richest blue. Even here in the Pirieus, a dirty and evil-smelling town, the water right up to the shore is transparent. Evidently the Greeks have not yet learnt the civilised custom of polluting the sea with the refuse and drainage of the land. I mentally contrasted the Pirseus with Auckland, and wondered how much we had gained by our method of cleaning up. On my second evening I took a long walk eastward along the South Coast, to Phaleron and the Peninsula of Munychia. Some little vvav off the coast is the cemetery, and on hare, level soil a mound with an unnamed cross, and next to it the mound of Karaiskaki. He was one of the Klephitic heroes of the War of Independence. In the last agony of Misolonghi, Karaiskaki and his guerilla troops wore the forlorn hope of the besieged land, as Miaulis was their hope by sea. It had been concerted that at the last sortie Karaiskaki should come down from the neighbouring mountains and cover the columns of the defenders as they issued from the doomed town. But the Turks had got information from spies, and they kept the rescuers off until only a small number of the ->Jisolonghiotes were left alive. , After the fall of Misolonghi the centre of the war shifted to Athens. The Turkish commander, Kioutagi, marched from the ruined bulwark of the West on to Athens, and surrounded it. Karaiskaki collected a few troops and came from Salamis to join the corps of the Philhellene General Fabvier. From the sea coast of the Pirseus and Phaleron, right up to the Akronolis of Athens there were continual irregular fights, and sometimes the Greeks and sometimes the Turks were victorious. Karaiskaki managed to get fresh troops and provisions into the Akropolis. and after some minor victories he planned a grand attack on the Turks to compel them to raise the siege. But a day or two before it was to take place some soldiers of his undisciplined army began fighting without his orders. Karaiskaki came to stop the action, received a mortal wound, and died the next day. It was on this plain between the Piraeus and Athens that there occurred the last scenes in the Greek War of Independence, the fleet lay in the harbour, with Lord Cochrane as admiral in his flagship, Miaules serving under him. From Phaleron the batteries were fired upon the besieging Turks. The irrand attack came off after the death of Karaiskaki, but the Greeks and Philhellenes were cut to pieces by the Turks, the garrison of the Akropolis was forced to surrender, Athens fell into the hands of the enemy, and the whole Greek cause seemed lost. Biit to leave the tomb of Karaiskaki and the days that it recalls, I diverged back to the coast, and soon after sunset reached New Phaleron. It is, as Baedeker tells us, a modern seaside resort, where the well-to-do Athenians come to live during tne summer, and their less prosperous fel~ low-citiwos to walk in the late summer afternoons and evenings. It has baths and electric light, hotels and a summer theatre, and a music pavilion. I passed the mound of dry earth that projects into the sea, then two round little bays, one of them the harbour of Munychia and the second the harbour of Zea. They are both almost complete circles, and as even as if they had been drawn by compass, and both enclose smooth glittering water. The projecting promontories are covered by tiers of houses. As it was wearing rapidly on towards dusk, their modernity was not eo aggressive as it would have

been by day. Old Phaleron I was obliged by shortness of time to take on trust.