Studies of Travel: GreeceFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Greece
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Greece -- Description and travel
Of this piece of wanton barbarism
Dr. Schliemann must bear the blame. Who, if any, were his Greek
accomplices, we have forborne to ask. But the tower is gone; a most
striking memorial of one age in the history of Athens has been swept
away, under the paltry pretext that inscriptions might be found among
its materials. By a righteous Nemesis, when the destroyers had finished
their work of havoc, they found nothing to reward them.
We can conceive nothing more paltry, nothing more narrow, nothing more
opposed to the true spirit of scholarship, than these attempts to wipe
out the history of any age. So far from destroying the ducal tower,
we would have kept the Turkish minaret. For the Parthenôn, already the
temple of heathendom and of two forms of Christianity, became in the
end the temple of Islam. A mosque had of course its minaret. Its lower
part is still there in the form of a staircase, but the characteristic
upper part has vanished. We know not how it vanished, whether through
wanton destruction or in one of the sieges in the seventeenth or the
nineteenth century. In any case, we should have been well pleased to
see both minaret and tower breaking the outline, and speaking of days
which have been, but which have passed away. Greece is free; the rule
both of the Frank and of the Turk is gone; but that is no reason why
the memorials of either Frank or Turk should be swept away. A higher
national feeling would keep them carefully as trophies of victory. At
all events, let not men, calling themselves scholars, lend themselves
to such deeds of wanton destruction. The name of Morosini is unfairly
held up to execration because an accident of warfare, which he could
not control, made him the destroyer of the Parthenôn. A far heavier
blame rests on those who were the deliberate destroyers of the ducal
tower. On them indeed may well fall the words of withering scorn in
which Byron so well couples the destroying names of Eratostratos and
Elgin.
Athens Below the Akropolis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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