Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence Read Free Page A

which Kalamáta is still famous. These regions had access to the coast and could export some of their produce, including wheat, as the Greek peasants mainly subsisted on the cheaper grains of barley, maize or rye.
    Much more typical of Greece is the bleak region of Arcadia (Arkadhía), the central district of the Peloponnese with Tripolis as its main town. Yet Arcadia came to be represented in art and literature as a pastoral paradise. How did this romanticised and distorted picture of Arcadia originate?
    The Arcadian myth, established in antiquity, was popularised by the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro, whose 1502 romance Arcadia , combining prose and verse, brought together the earlier pastoral themes and set them in an imagined place of tranquil and dignified seclusion. The book was enormously popular and went through 60 editions before the end of the century. By the early 1600s travellers were actually going to Arcadia, and wrote of ‘those pleasant Arcadian plains’, of which there were in fact few, and of the region as ‘famous for shepherds’, 1 which would have included goatherds, of whom Pan was the protecting deity. One of the travellers, William Lithgow, experienced the contrast between the ideal and the actual. In Arcadia, he wrote in a flamboyant passage, only just keeping control of his adjectives: ‘Amongst theserocks my belly was pinched, and wearied was my body, with the climbing of fastidious mountains, which bred no small grief to my breast. Yet notwithstanding my distress, the remembrance of these sweet seasoned Songs of Arcadian Shepherds which pregnant Poets have so well penned, did recreate my fatigated corpse with many sugared suppositions.’ 2
    But Arcadia continued to be romanticised, by painters as well as ‘pregnant Poets’. Guercino in Italy and Poussin in France, among others, included in their landscapes a tombstone with the anonymous and cryptic inscription ‘Et in Arcadia ego’. This was understood as contrasting the deathly chill of the grave with the gloriously happy life of the deceased in Arcadia, and by the middle of the seventeenth century Arcadia had come to stand for an idyllic region of rural felicity.
    Arcadia, mostly hidden away in the central Peloponnese, was of course intriguingly remote, as any idealised Shangri-La must be. Also the very barrenness of the region may have contributed to the high-flown image of it. The travellers would have come across shepherds rather than toilers in the fields. Naturally choosing the summer months for their visits, they would have seen the shepherd sitting on a rock dreamily watching his flock or ambling slowly after it, all under a radiant Greek summer sky, and concluded that the life of a shepherd was easy and carefree, at least compared with agricultural labour. The traveller would have given little thought to the shepherd’s lice-infested clothing and meagre diet, with only a wretched tent or hut to sleep in, let alone how different things would be in the harshness of winter.
    Later travellers, however, were less starry eyed, and described an inhospitable landscape that can hardly have changed over the centuries. As a visitor in the 1880s wrote:
    There is no name in Greece which raises in the mind of the ordinary reader more pleasing and more definite ideas than the name Arcadia. The sound of the shepherd’s pipe and the maiden’s laughter, the rustling of shady trees, the murmuring of gentle fountains, the bleating of lambs and the lowing of oxen – these are the images of peace and plenty which the poets have gathered about that ideal retreat. There are none more historically false, more unfounded in the real nature and aspect of the country. Rugged mountains and gloomy defiles, a harsh and wintry climate, a poor and barren soil, tilled with infinite patience, a climate opposed to intelligence and to culture, a safe retreat of bears and wolves. 3
     
    So much for the myth of Arcadia.
    The first period of Ottoman rule up to