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Sunday, July 31, 2022

ZLATYU BOYAJIEV' PERMANENT EXHIBITION

ZLATYU BOYAJIEV’ PERMANENT EXHIBITION


(Stoyan Chomakov House), 18 Saborna Street


The exhibition displaying the work of the great artist Zlatyu Boyadjiev (1903 – 1976) was opened in 1980 in this representative period-house. The multitude of canvases, some of imposing size, is displayed in all rooms of the big two-storey house. In the courtyard in front of the house there is monument to the honoured artist .


The noble Revival house, where the exhibition has been set out, was built for Dr. Stoyan Chomakov in 1860. It was a very modern-looking house for its time although it was a solid sym-metrically designed building with facades decorated in the classical style widely spread in Europe at the time. Dr.Chomakov was one of the first academically trained physicians in Plovdiv and was a champion for an autonomous Bulgarian church in the Revival bulgaria private tours.


After the Liberation the heirs gave the house as a present to King Ferdinand. In the 50s of the 20th c. it housed a branch of the Ivan Vazov Public Library until the time it was entirely renovated and given over for the setting up of the exhibition of the works by Zlatyu Boyadjiev.


‘GEORGI BOJILOV – SLONA’ PERMANENT EXHIBITION


(Skobelev House), 1 Knyaz Tseretelev Street


This Revival house is adjacent to the Hippocrates Pharmacy. Kostadin Kaftanjiyata, a Bulgarian from the town of Stara Zagora, built it in the 60s of the 19th century. In the years after the Liberation and until her death here lived Olga Sko- beleva (1823 -1880), mother of the Russian General Skobelev. She became known for her charity work in aid of the victims of the Turkish atrocities in South Bulgaria during the April Rising and the Liberation War. In gratitude for her concern for the orphaned children in Thrace, the Bulgarians have called her ‘Mother Skobeleva’. A memorial park has been dedicated to her off the Istanbul highway in the outskirts of Plovdiv.


At present the house is occupied by the Plovdiv branch of the ‘Future for Bulgaria’ Foundation. It was with the contribution of the foundation that in 2003 a permanent exhibition of the work of the prominent artist Georgi Bojilov-Slona was arranged. The end-wall of the house, facing Saborna Street is decorated with a commemorative panel dedicated to the artist and executed in paintings and mosaics to the design of Dimiter Kirov.


Apart from the period houses of great artistic and architectural value, Old Plovdiv possesses some buildings of lesser architectural merit but associated with significant events in the past. These are historic places marked with commemorative inscriptions. On Saborna Street opposite the Holy Virgin Cathedral stands the house of Dr. Rashko Petrov, a physician with a medical degree and a prominent revolutionary, who participated in the First Bulgarian Legion in Belgrade in 1862.


There he became friends with Vasil Levski – the ‘Apostle of Liberty’, who often stayed at Dr. Petrov’s house when in Plovdiv. Right after the Liberation War in 1878 the house was the seat of the interim Russian representation headed by the Imperial Commissioner Prince Alexander Dondukov-Korsakov. Next-door to Dr Rashko’s place is the house where Dr Konstantin Stoilov, an eminent Bulgarian politician and statesman, Prime Minister of Bulgaria from 1894 to 1899, was born.

Saturday, July 30, 2022

THE BULGARIAN BLACK SEA

The Black Sea is a half-enclosed kidney-shaped sea linked with the Mediterranean by the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.


It is bounded on the west by the Balkan Peninsula, on the north and east by the Russian plain and the Caucasus and on the south by the coast of Asia Minor in Turkey. It has low salinity and a high transparency — up to 16-20 m at an average depth of 1,690 m. The temperature of the water in summer averages 23° C.


The Bulgarian coastline (378 km) is less indented than the eastern and southern parts, but is very picturesque. The woody, gentle slopes of the Balkan and Strandja Mountains are covered with vineyards, orchards, trees and shrubs, and are known as the Bulgarian Riviera. Along the entire coast is an almost unbroken strip of fine sand and the sea is clean and shallow sightseeing turkey. Holiday resorts range from old and romantic fishermen’s settlements to the most modern complexes — all with lush greenery, fine sand and clear sea.


Nesebar


SHABLA – KAVARNA – BALCHIK – ALBENA – GOLDEN SANDS – DROUZHBA – VARNA (109 km)


Dourankoulak is the first Bulgarian village associated with the peasant revolt of May 1900. East of the village is Dourankoulak lake abounding in fish The large island in the lake has remains from various historical periods from the Stone Age to the 9th-11th century. Between the village and the beach is the Cosmos camp site for 500 tourists. There is a restaurant at the camp site.


South of Dourankoulak and 24 kilometres from the border is the town of Shabla (pop. 5,000). There was a Thracian settlement here in the 6th-5th century B.C. and it was a seaport in Roman times. The people of Shabla took an active part in the 1900 peasant revolt. About five kilometres east of the town is the Shabla Touzla, a tiny lake separated from the sea by a strip of sand. Its radioactive mud has curative properties. The Dobroudja camp site has a restaurant and a shop.


A road forks from Shabla leading to the sea. After about six kilometres it turns south along the coast to the village of Tyuelenovo, near which are several caves cut into the rocks by the sea and several colonies of seals have taken refuge here. Near the village of Kamen Bryag is the picturesque area of Yal] at a with beautiful rocks and caves. There is an ancient fortress and other interesting architectural and natural places.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Republika Square

There are also various other museums in Pleven to be seen. Hotels: Pleven, 2 Republika Square, three stars, 12 floors, 9 suites, 333 beds (tel. 2-00-62), restaurant, day bar and night club, information bureau, rent-a-car office. Rostovna Don, 2


S.Alexiev St., two stars, 12 floors, 3 suites, 11 single and 95


double rooms, restaurant, bar, cafe, information office, rent’ a-car office tel. (2-70 95). Kailuka, 2 stars, 3 floors 156 beds, 6 suites, restaurant, bar, information office, rent-a-car office (phone 2-55-50).


The Kailuka camp site — 20 bungalows.


Fhe Balkantourist bureau is on 3 Buckstone St., tel. 41-19.


Car-repair shop: 2, Industrialna St., tel. 37-61.


Union of Bulgarian Motorists: 6a Radetski St., tel. 37-93


From Pleven take the main road E-83 and continue east towards Byala (pop. 10,922). The town is mentioned in 17th century documents. In 1907 one of the first museums in the country dedicated to the Russo-Turkish War of Liberation 1877-1878 was founded here in the building which held the headquarters of the Russian Army in 1877. The Russian nurse Baroness Yulia Vreyska is buried in the museum yard. Byala’s most important sight is the bridge over the River Yantra, built 1865-1867 on orders by Rousse vali Midhad Pasha. The bridge is 276 m long, 9 m wide and has 14 arches with relief figures.


Danubian port of Rousse


52 km along the E-85 main road is the Danubian port of Rousse (pop, 178,000 situated to the east of the mouth of the Roussenski Lorn river, opposite the Romanian town of Gyurvevo (Ghiurghiu). This is Bulgaria’s fourth largest town sofia daily tours, In Roman times a garrison was stationed here and the fortress was called Sexaginti (port of 60 ships). During the barbarian invasions in the 6th-7th centuries the fortress was destroyed and the population withdrew 26 km to the south of the Danube where the mediaeval fortress town of Cherven was built, resembling Tsarevets in Veliko Turnovo.


After the Ottoman invasion it was destroyed and a new fortress called Rouschouk here was built. 7 he town could be entered through five stone gates with iron doors — the Kyuntoukapou gate still exists. In 1864 Rouschouk became the centre of the Danubian province which included Nish, Sofia and Vidin. It had broad paved streets with curbed pavements and street lights delivered from Vienna; an old people’s house, a hospital, a post office, two large western style hotels were also built which are still to be seen. The first railway line in Bulgaria, Rouschouk-Vama, was built in 1866. Rouschouk became one of the great revolutionary centres and a link between revolutionaries in Bulgaria and emigrants in Romania. Many fighters for national independence are associated with the town.


Russian liberators entered the town on February 20, 1878. In the first years following liberation, Rousse had the highest population in Bulgaria, and had more factories, banks and consulates than Sofia, Today the town is one of the largest industrial centres in the country with shipyards and oil refineries.

Thursday, July 28, 2022

The River Roussenski Lorn

The manifestations of this Renaissance, the penetration and revival of interest in antiquity, the striving to bring contemporary art closer to it, are plainly visible in the murals of one of the rupestral churches near the village of Ivanovo, Rousse district. The River Roussenski Lorn, cutting deep into the soft limestone rocks, has formed a wide canyon here, sunoundcd by walls up to 50 m. in height. Many caves were foimed in these almost perpendicular rocks, and in the 13th and 14th centuries entire colonies of monks and hermits lock refuge in them, enlarging the natural caves, and adapting them to use as cells or churches. In these rock cells, chapels and churches inhabited by Hezychasts and mystics who had given up life, far from the centres of cultural life, an art made its way, the votaries of which had a totally different attitude to the reality around them.


They sought this reality, they tried to attain it and recreate it in their work. This was the art of people who knew how to enjoy life, all that nature, and man in the first place, has created. So man appears in these murals not only in the person of biblical characters with their garments and poses painted according to the strict canons of church painting, but chiefly as a living natural form with his specific dynamics, with his free characteristic and expressive movements city tour istanbul. Man’s living body appears for the foist time partly naked here (some of the servants in the scene of Christ’s betrayal), and quite naked in the presentation of the two Atlantes.


Roussenski Lorn


The bodies are instinct with life and strength. They are not the withered, tortured and powerless bodies we have known so far. The artist who painted the Ivanovo murals was a great artist, and life on earth was closer to his heart than life in paradise after death, the life of which the inhabitants of the rupestral hermitage above the banks of the Roussenski Lorn dreamt and preached. This well-schooled artist was acquainted with classicism and entirely taken up with its new trends in Bulgarian art; he gave full expression to them in his work on the rupestral church of Ivanovo, where the attempt to return to the aesthetics of antique art are clearly apparent.


Art in West Bulgaria was of a totally different character at that time. Here the influence of the Turnovo school was comparatively slight. It was chiefly masters from the western regions of Bulgaria, from Macedonia, who worked here. Under the influence of their art a local school came into being, which was based on the traditions of a folk art with the linear and mainly decorative style typical of it, inbued with a sound and fresh, though often naive and primitive, realism. The mmals of the Zemen Monastery, 70 km. to the south of Sofia on the road to Radomir, are typical examples of this art. The church is a small cruciform- cupolaed one, with a square foundation, three apses to the east and a cupola on a high drum. Theouter walls are divided into sec – ticns by three recessed arches, the central one of which is higher, and they stress the inner structure of the church.


The wallpaintings in the church are well preserved. Of thesix portraits of laymen those of Despot Deyan of Kyustendil and Despotitsa Doya are the best preserved. The church was decorated with these frescoes in their day, a little after 1354. They are real individual portraits. Doya has the fire features of a refined bolyar beauty. Many details in her costume, of an ethnographic nature, complete the realistic image of this Despotitsa, or Princess.

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

People’s Republic of Bulgaria

Of all the colonies mentioned above, only part of those along the west coast of the Black Sea are today within the boundaries of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria — Apollonia, Anchialo, Mesambria, Odessos and Dionysopolis. Their location on the shores of the two big Black Sea Bays of Bourgas and Varna proved so favourable from a geographical and economic point of view, that life never died out here. With changed aspects and names these settlements continued their existence without interruption throughout the Middle Ages and the period of Ottoman bondage; they exist to this day, as some of the most important and romantic cities of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. It is precisely this circumstance which makes a complete and systematic archaeological study of the cultural strata of the earlier settlements impossible. They lie deep beneath the foundations of the different districts of the modern towns.


The oldest of these colonies was Apollonia, founded probably at the end of the 7th century by the Miletan Greeks. It was situated on the site of present day Sozopol, upon a smal peninsula in the southernmost part of the Bay of Bourgas. Several islands lie around it. Certain ancient authors speak of Apollonia as a town the larger part of which was on an island. Accidental archaeological finds on the neighbouring island of Kirik confirm this piece of information tours bulgaria.


The Dorian colony of Mesambria


The Dorian colony of Mesambria, founded about 510 by settlers from the city of Megara, was similarly situated on the site of present- day Nessebur. It rose upon a rocky peninsula, linked by such a narrow isthmus with the mainland, that it is more like an island with steep shores, sometimes from 13 to 16 m. high.


We have almost no definite conceptions as to the outer architectural appearance of the Greek Black Sea colonies along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, nor of their private and public buildings, fortifications, etc. There can be no doubt, however, that their aspect as cities was no different in general lines from that of the aspect and character of the remaining Greek polises. They had their town squares and rich public buildings, both civic and religious. There was no lack here of palestrae so necessary for the physical training and amusement of the free and wealthy citizens, nor gymnasiums, in which the sons of these citizens were taught.


There was no lack of bouleutorions, where the full-fledged citizens held their meetings, nor of theatres, where different public ceremonies were held and plays were performed. Finally there was no lack of old Greek temple architecture, the most typical representative of the Greek art of building. From written data we know that there was a Temple of Apollo latros (The Ftealer) in Apol- lonia, for which a colossal bronze statue of this god was cast by Cala- mis, the well known Athenian sculptor, who worked in the first half of the 5th century B. C. There was a temple of Apollo in Odessos, and also in Mesambria. On an inscription from the latter city, the theatre is also mentioned, where festivals were held in honour of Dionysus Painting and sculpture were highly developed in these cities. An interesting archaic statue found in the surroundings of Apollonia and dating back as early as the 6th century B. C. is in the Bourgas Museum.

Monday, July 25, 2022

Buyuk Djarniya

From the Turkish BuyukDjarniya (15th century) — at the corner of Legue and Alexander Stamboliiski Blvd; Banya Bashi Djamiya (16th century), opposite the Central Supermarket; the Black Mosque (16th century), now the Seven Saints’ Church – at the comer of Graf Ignatiev and Tsar Shishman streets.


Small churches with interesting mural paintings: St Nikolai – Tsar Kaloyan St.; St Petka – in the courtyard of the building on the corner of Stamboliiski Blvd and Tsar Kaloyan Street; St Petka Samardjiiska — in the pedestrian sub-way on Lenin Square.


More recent monuments: Monument to the Liberators, Narodno Subranie Square, to the memory of the Russian liberators of Bulgaria from Ottoman mle, the work of the Italian sculptor Arnoldo Zocchi; Alexander Nevsky Memorial Church, on the square of the same name (in its basement the Crypt houses an original exhibition of icons); Monument to the Soviet Army — in the park between Rousski Blvd, Tolbukhin Blvd and Evlogi Georgiev Blvd; the Obelisk to those who fell in the antifascist struggle – on the common grave in Freedom Park; the Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum – on the Ninth of September Square; Lenin’s Monument – on Lenin Square.


Museums: Archaeological Museum – Alexander Stamboliiski Blvd; Ethnographic Museum – The Ninth of September Square (in the former royal palace); Natural Science Museum, 1 Rousski Blvd; Museum of the Revolutionary Movement in Bulgaria, 14 Rousski Blvd; National Military History Museum, 23 Skobelev Blvd; Church History and Archaeological Museum, 19 Lenin Square; Museum of Bulgaro-Soviet Friendship, 4 Klement Gottwald Blvd; Museum of the History of Sofia, 27 Exarch Yossif Street ephesus sightseeing; Dimiter Blagoev Museum- House, Lajos Cossuth Street; Georgi Dimitrov Museum-House, 66 Opulchenska Street; Alexander Stamboliiski Museum- House, 44 Souhodol Street; Ivan Vazov Museum-House, 10 Ivan Vazov Street; Petko and Pencho Slaveikov Museum- House, 138 Rakovski Street; Peyo Yavorov Museum-House, 136 Rakovski Street; Hristo Smyrnenski Museum-House, 116 Emil Shekerdjiiski Street; Nikola Vaptsarov Museum-House, 37′ Angel Kunchev Street


National Art Gallery — Ninth of September Square, in the former royal palace.


The National Assembly


Interesting buildings: The National Assembly, the University of Sofia, the National Theatre, the Palace of Justice, the Central Home of the People’s Army, the Ministry of Defence, the Holy Synod Building, the Bulgarian National Bank, Universiade Hall, the Central Supermarket, etc.


Parks: Freedom Park, Hristo Smyrnenski Park (Western Park), Vladimir Zaimov Park, Park of the Doctors’ Monument, etc.


Major hotels: Park Hotel Moskva – tel. 45-51-21; Sofia, 4-Narodno Subranie Square — tel. 87-88-21; Balkan, 2 Lenin Square – tel. 87-65-43; Bulgaria, 4 Rousski Blvd —tel. 87-19-77; Pliska, 87 Lenin Blvd — tel. 72-37-21; Hemus, 31 Georgi Traikov Blvd – tel. 66-14-15; Slavia, Hippodrouma Housing Estate – tel. 52-55-51; Serdika, 2 Vladimir Zaimov Blvd – tel. 44-34-11; Slavyanska Besseda, 127 Rakovski Street tel. 88-36-91; Vitosha, 9 Isker Street- tel. 88-01-12; Sevastopol, 116 Rakovski Street – tel. 87-59-41; Preslav, 3 Triaditsa Street – tel. 87-65-86; Lyulin, 2 Triaditsa Street, tel. 88-56-42.


Well, the time has now come to get away from it all and go back to Mother Nature to take a breath of fresh air and mull over your impressions. Sofia is blessed in this respect, too, for its surroundings are of unique scenic beauty.So get your car ready and let’s go! The first place to go to, of course, is Mount Vitosha, the capital’s outstanding landmark and an integral part of its landscape. Moreover, on the way there is a little gem that you simply can’t afford to miss.


You’d hardly suspect that the little unassuming Boyana Church in a village in the foothills of Mount Vitosha, a mere six miles from the city centre, is one of Bulgaria’s foremost monuments of medieval art. But just go inside and you’ll have another ‘think’ coming for there you will find 13th-century murals that are veritable masterpieces of medieval art.


After leaving this little art treasure, you’ll be in the very heart of the mountain in less than half an hour. There you may visit Kopitoto (The Hoof),a modern hotel with restaurant built on a big rock projecting out into space, offering you a wonderful panoramic view of Sofia and the whole surrounding plain. If you drive on for another ten minutes, you will reach the famous Zlat- ni Mostove (Golden Bridges), a picturesque spot with a veritable


river of stones washed by the waters of a real river, and where you will find a very cosy Tyrolese-style restaurant.

Thursday, July 14, 2022

Work of much anxious discrimination

Now the action and reaction of these two competing sets of impulses undoubtedly makes the protection of our ancient buildings a very complex and very difficult problem. Both sets are very powerful, both act in varying degrees, and the final compromise between the rival sets of claims is necessarily the work of much anxious discrimination. I venture to maintain that the complication and antagonism is such that no hard-and-fast doctrine can be laid down. Each case must stand on its merits. Each decision must be the laborious reconcilement of conflicting interests. Our cause has suffered from over-arbitrary dogmas and some affectation of contempt for the plain necessities of material existence. Every one outside the Tuileries laughed at Edmond About, when he told the Romans of to-day that the only thing left for them was ‘ to contemplate their ruins.’ I wish myself that they had contemplated their ruins a little longer, or had allowed us to contemplate them, instead of seeking to turn Rome into a third-rate Paris. But we shall be laughed at if we ever venture to tell the nineteenth century that it must con-template its ruins.


The trust imposed on the century is not to contemplate its ruins, but to protect its ancient buildings. Now that will be done if the century can learn to feel the true sacredness of ancient buildings, if it will admit that the building stands on the same footing with picture, statue, and poem, that it is unique, inimitable, irreplaceable; and, above all, has its own consecration of place, continuity, and record. Admit this first, and then we will consider the claims of the present, their convenience, and their means. But the burden of proof ought always to be pressed imperiously against those whose claim is to destroy, to convert, or to extend.


Ancient building


When every other means fail, when irresistible necessity is proved, it may be a sad duty to remove an ancient building, to add to it, or to incorporate it. But this can never justify what we now call restoring,’ a process which makes it as much like the original as Madame Tussaud’s figures are like the statesman or general they represent. It can never justify re-decoration — cutting out ancient art-work and replacing it by new work or machine work. It can never justify archaeological exercises — I mean the patching on to old buildings new pieces of our own invention, which we deliberately present as fabrications of the antique. These things are mere Wardour Street spurious bric-d-brac, no more like ancient buildings than a schoolboy’s iambics are like Yeschylus. How often do committees, dean and chapter, public offices, and even Parliament itself private turkey tours, treat our great national possessions as if they were mere copy books, on the face of which our modern architects were free to practise the art of composing imitations of the ancients. Such buildings become much like a Palimpsest manuscript; whereon, over a lost tragedy of Sophocles, some wretched monk has scribbled his barbarous prose. How often is the priceless original for ever lost beneath the later stuff!


In these remarks I have strictly confined myself to general principles: first, because I do not pretend to any special or technical knowledge which would entitle me to criticise particular works, but mainly because I believe our true part to be the maintenance of general principles. If we fall into discussions of detail we may lose hold of our main strength. We have to raise the discussion into a higher atmosphere than that of architectural anachronism. We cannot pitch our tone too high. It is not architectural anachronism which we have to check: it is the safety of our national records, our national self-respect, the spirit of religious reverence that we have to uphold. We have to do battle against forgery, irreverence, and desecration. Let us raise a voice against the idea that any work of art can ever, under any circumstances, be really ‘ restored; ’ against the idea that any ancient art-work can usefully be ‘imitated,’ against the idea that ancient monuments are a corpus vile whereon to practise antiquarian exercises; against the habit of forging spurious monuments, as the monks in the Middle Ages forged spurious charters; finally, against the idea that the convenience of to-day is always to outweigh the sacredness of the past.

Saturday, July 9, 2022

The Musie Dupuytren

This Conciergerie, with the hall of the Cordelier Club, the Musie Dupuytren, is the only extant building in Paris, which is closely associated with great scenes of the Revo-lution. The Bastille is gone, the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville, the Hall of the Convention in the R. de Rivoli, the Jacobin Club, the prisons, the Temple, Abbaye, La Force, Chatelet, and the rest. So, too, the tombs of Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marat, Louis xvi., and Marie Antoinette no longer hold their bones, and cenotaphs record the spot where they were laid. Etiam periere sepulchra. New Haussmannic streets cover the soil, wherein the ashes of Danton and Vergniaud, Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland, moulder unknown. Of the Revolution no buildings remain but only sites; and the only edifices, which survive to speak to us of the September massacres and the Terror, are the dining-hall of the followers of St. Francis and the palace of St. Louis, the knight and crusader.


In spite of destruction and reconstruction, the history pf the great edifices of old Paris is wonderfully instructive, even that of the buildings which have wholly disappeared. But they must be studied in the learned and elaborate works, such as those of Dulaure, Piganiol, Viollet-le-Duc, Lacroix, Lenoir, Guilhermy, Fournier, Hoffbauer, Fergus- son, Hamerton, in the Histoire Generale, and in Paris a travers les Ages, in the splendid series of etchings and engravings of old Paris, which may be found in the library of the Carnavalet Museum, and in our British Museum. Bastille, Louvre, Hdtel de Ville, Tuileries, Luxembourg, the Citd, St. Germain, St. Genevilve, would each require an essay, or a volume with maps and plans and restorations, to make them intelligible private tours istanbul. But those who seek to know what Paris has been in the long succession of ages may still revive it in their minds, with the aid of the mass of literature that is open to them, and if they will study not only the extant churches, but such works of domestic art as the Hotel Cluny, and Hotel de Sens, Hotel la Valette, the house in the Corn’s la Reine, and the Hotel Carnavalet.


Ducerceau and M6ryon


A careful study of Silvestre, Ducerceau, and M6ryon will give some idea of old Paris, with its vast walls, gates, towers, castles, its crowded churches, its immense abbeys, its narrow winding streets, its fetid cemeteries, gloomy courts and impasses, its filthy lanes, and its bridges loaded with houses. We may linger about the old remnants of churches, the flotsam and jetsam of the Mediaeval Catholicism, such bits as the tower of St. Jacques, and the portals of the two St. Germains and of St. Nicolas des Champs, the old churches of St. Jnlien le Pauvre, and St. Martin des Champs, the church of St. Sdverin, and the chapel of the Chdteau de Vincennes.


Then let us study the tombs in St. Germain des Pris, of St. Denis, St. Etienne du Mont: and then we may go on to the tomb that all Englishmen visit — the tomb which I always feel to be the grandest of all sepulchral conceptions (to be set beside the tomb of Theod- oric at Ravenna, and the tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian way), almost the one work of modern art, which is at once colossal, noble, and pathetic — I mean the mighty vault beneath the dome of the Invalidcs, where the greatest soldier and the worst ruler of our age sleeps at last in peace, guarded by the veterans of France.


We need not deny to modern Paris the gift of charm; we may admit that her museums and libraries, her collections, and her treasures are inexhaustible to the fit student; but far more impressive is the history of this memorable city, with its vast range of time, of variety, of association — with its record of the dawn of Western civilisation, of Catholicism and Feudalism, of the Renascence, and the modern world, of the Revolution of the last century, and the Imperialism of this century — with its dust enriched with the bones of those who in things of the soul and in things of war, in the love of beauty, and in the passion for new life, have dared and done memorable deeds, from the days of Genevieve and Clotilda, the Louis and the Henrys, down to the two Napoleons, and the three Republics.

This glorious vision

This glorious vision, if not the most beautiful, is the most varied and fascinating of its kind in Europe. Some prefer the bay of Naples, or the bay of Salamis, or of Genoa; but neither Naples, nor Athens, nor Rome, nor Genoa, nor Venice, have, as cities, anything of the extent, variety, and complexity of Constantinople, if we include its four or five suburbs, its magnificent sea landscape, its bays, islands, and mountains, in the distance. For Constantinople does not stand upon an open sea like Naples, or Genoa, but on a great marine lake with its shores, vine- clad hills, headlands, and pearly mountain ranges in the far horizon. Like Athens or Venice, it has a seaport without an open sea outside. And as a city, it is vastly more grand and varied than Venice, Athens, Florence, or Edinburgh. Hence, Constantinople combines such sea views as we find round the Western islands of Scotland or of Greece, with the summer sky and vegetation of Italy, and the mountain ranges which fill the horizon from the plains of Lombardy.


Was it more beautiful in the age of the Empire than it is to-day? Perhaps from a distance, from the sea, the Stamboul of to-day is a far more striking sight than the Byzantium of the Caesars. The minarets, an Eastern and Moslem feature, are the distinctive mark of the modern city, and do much to break the monotony of the Byzantine cupolas local ephesus tour guides. There are four or five mosques which repeat and rival the church of the Holy Wisdom, and some of them have nobler sites.


Nor were the towers and battlements of ancient architecture to be compared in beauty and in scale with those of Mediaeval and Moslem builders. But the city, as seen within, in the Isaurian and Basilian dynasties, we may assume in the five centuries which separate Justinian from the First Crusade, must have greatly surpassed in noble art, if not in pictorial effect, the Ottoman city that we see. The enormous palace and hippodrome, the basilicas, churches, halls, and porticoes, with their profusion of marble, mosaic, bronzes, and paintings, their colossal figures, obelisks, and columns, the choicest relics of Greek sculpture, the memorial statues, baths, theatres, and forums — must have far surpassed the decaying remnant of Stamboul which so often disenchants the traveller when he disembarks from the Golden Horn.


III. Antiquities of Constantinople,


Constantine created his New Rome in 330, as never ruler before or since created a city. It was made a mighty and resplendent capital within a single decade. Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Mauritania, were despoiled of their treasures to adorn the new metropolis. Constantine built churches, theatres, forums, baths, porticoes, palaces, monuments, and aqueducts. He built, adorned, and peopled a great capital all at a stroke, and made it, after Rome and Athens, the most splendid city of the ancient world. Two centuries later, Justinian became the second founder of the city. And from Constantine down to the capture by the Crusaders, for nearly nine centuries, a succession of Emperors continued to raise great sacred and lay buildings. Of the city before Constantine little remains above the ground, except some sculptures in the museum, and foundations of some walls, which Dr. Pas- pates believes that he can trace.


Of Constantine and his immediate successors there remain parts of the hippodrome, of walls, aqueducts, cisterns, and forums, some columns and monuments. Of the Emperors from Theodosius to the Crusades, we still have, little injured, the grand church of Sophia, some twenty churches much altered and mostly late in date, the foundations of palaces, and one still standing in ruins, and lastly the twelve miles of walls with their gates and towers. The museums contain sarcophagi, statues, inscriptions of the Roman age. But we can hardly doubt that an immense body of Byzantine relics and buildings still lie buried some ten or twenty ‘ feet below the ground whereon stand to-day the serails, khans, mosques, and houses of Stamboul, a soil which the Ottoman is loth to disturb.

Friday, July 8, 2022

Into Imperial Rome

At every turn we come on some new crime against humanity done by fanaticism or greed. Into Imperial Rome there was swept, as into the museum of the world, the marbles, the statues, the bronzes, the ivories, the paintings and carvings, the precious works of human genius for some six or seven centuries — everything of rarity and loveliness that could be found between Cadiz and the Black Sea.


There were tens of thousands of statues in Greek marble, and as many in bronze; there were marble columns, monoliths, friezes, reliefs, obelisks, colossi, fountains. Halls, porticos, temples, theatres, baths, were crowded with the spoils of the world, rich enough to furnish forth ten such cities as London, Paris, or New York. It is all gone. There are but a few fragments now that chance has spared. Twenty sieges, stormings, pillages, a hundred conflagrations, the barbarous greed of the invading hordes, the barbarous fanaticism of the first Christians, the incessant wars, revolutions, riots, and faction fights of the Middle Ages, the brutal greediness of popes, cardinals, their nephews and their favourites — worst of all, perhaps, modem industrial iconoclasm — have swept away all but a few chance fragments.


Greek art of the great age


In the time of Pliny there must have been still extant thousands of works of the purest Greek art of the great age. There is now not one surviving intact in the whole world; and there are but two — the Hermes of Olympia and the Aphrodite of Melos — of which even fragments remain in sufficient preservation to enable us to judge them. Every other work of the greatest age is either, like the Parthenon relics, a mere ruin, or is known to us only by a later imitation. Of the bronzes not a single complete specimen of the great age survives. And this loss is irreparable. Even if such genius of art were ever to return to this earth again, it is certain that the same passion for physical beauty, the same habit of displaying the form, can never again be universal with any civilised people. And thus by the wanton destructiveness of successive ages, one of the most original types of human genius has become extinct on this earth, even as the mastodon or the dodo are extinct mystical bulgaria tours.


But masterpieces of marble and bronze were dross in comparison with the masterpieces of the human soul, of intellect, purity, and love, that have been mangled on this same spot and in sight of these supreme works of genius. The Christian pilgrim from some Irish or American monastery, from Santiago in Chile, from Armenia or Warsaw — the Catholic missionary on his way to die in China, or Polynesia, or Uganda — prostrates himself in the dust where Paul was beheaded and Peter crucified, where Gregory and Augustine prayed, and in the Colosseum he sees nothing but a monstrous black ruin; but he kneels in the arena where the blood of martyrs was poured forth like water, which has witnessed such heroic deaths, such revolting crimes. Each zealot —Catholic, Protestant, or sceptic — remembers only his own martyrs. Romans massacred Gaul and Goth; Polytheists martyred Christians; Papal creatures tortured Republicans, Protestants, and Reformers; emperors’ men slew popes’ men, and popes’ men slew the emperors’ men; Colonnas and Orsinis, Borgias and Cencis, Borgheses and Barberinis have poured out blood upon blood, and piled up crime on crime, till every stone records some inhuman act, and witnesses also to courage and faith as memorable and quite as human.

Saturday, July 2, 2022

Traveller of 1889

Turn to our traveller of 1889. Berri, says Miss Betham- Edwards, has been transformed under a sound land system. It has indeed a poor soil; but, even in the ltriste Sologne,’ plantations, irrigation canals, and improved methods of agriculture are transforming this region. So rapid is the progress that George Sand, who died but the other day, would hardly recognise the country she has described so well. Here and there may be seen, now used as an outhouse, one of those bare, windowless cabins which shocked Arthur Young, and close at hand the ‘neat, airy, solid dwellings ’ the peasant owners have built for themselves.


Here Miss Betham-Edwards visited newly-made farms, with their spick-and-span buildings, the whole having the appearance of a little settlement in the Far West. The holdings vary from 6 to 30 acres, their owners possessing a capital of 5000 to 8000 and even 25,000 francs, the land well stocked and cultivated, the people well dressed, and signs of general content and well-being delightful to contemplate.


And as to metayage, ‘that miserable system which perpetuates poverty,’ Miss Betham-Edwards finds it now one of the chief factors of the agricultural progress of France, creating cordial relations between landlord and tenant. The secret of this curious conflict between two most competent observers is this: mitayage—the system under which the owner of the soil finds land, stock, and implements, the tiller of the farm finds manual labour, and all produce is equally shared — depends for its fair working upon just laws, equality before the law, absence of any privilege in the owner, and good understanding as between men who alike respect each other private tours istanbul.


Large tracts in France


With these, it is an excellent system of farming, very favourable to the labourer; without these, it may almost reduce him to serfdom. It may thus be one of the best, or one of the worst, of all systems of husbandry. As Arthur Young saw it under the ancient system of privileged orders, it was almost as bad as an Irish tenancy at will. Under the new system of post-revolutionary equality, it has given prosperity to large tracts in France.


From Autun in Burgundy, Arthur Young travelled across the Bourbonnais and the Nivernais, and he found the country ‘villainously cultivated’; when he sees such a country ‘in the hands of starving metayers, instead of fat farmers,’ he knows not how to pity the seigneurs. To-day, his editor finds ‘fat farmers’ innumerable, for metayage has greatly advanced the condition of the peasants. The country that lies between the mouths of the Garonne and the Loire is precisely that part of his journey which wrings from Arthur Young his furious invective against the great lords whom he wished he could make


‘to skip again.’ Now, the Gironde, the Charente, and La Vendde are thriving, rich districts, intersected with railways; ‘ and, owing to the indefatigable labours of peasant owners, hundreds of thousands of acres of waste land have been put under cultivation.’


Or turn to Brittany, which Arthur Young calls ‘a miserable province ’; ‘ husbandry not much further advanced than among the Hurons ’; ‘the people almost as wild as their country ’; ‘ mud houses, no windows ’; ‘ a hideous heap of wretchedness ’ — all through ‘ the execrable maxims of despotism, or the equally detestable prejudices of a feudal nobility.’ And this is the rich, thriving, laborious, and delightful Brittany which our tourists love, where Miss Betham-Edwards tells us of scientific farming, artificial manures, machinery, ‘the granary of Western France,’ market gardens, of fabulous value, and a great agricultural college, one of the most important in Europe.

Friday, July 1, 2022

Ferdinand of Arragon

It may surprise some readers to treat the thirteenth century as the virtual close of the Middle Ages, an epoch which is usually placed in the latter half of the fifteenth century, in the age of Louis xi., Henry VII., and Ferdinand of Arragon. But the true spirit of Feudalism, the living soul of Catholicism, which together make up the compound type of society we call mediaeval, were, in point of fact, waning all through the thirteenth century. The hurly-burly of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries was merely one long and cruel death agony. Nay, the inner soul of Catholic Feudalism quite ended in the first generation of the thirteenth century — with St. Dominic, St. Francis, Innocent in., Philip Augustus, and Otto iv., Stephen Langton, and William, Earl Mareschal.


The truly characteristic period of mediaeval- ism is in the twelfth, rather than the thirteenth, century, the period covered by the first three Crusades from 1094, the date of the Council of Clermont, to 1192, when Coeur- de-Lion withdrew from the Holy Land. Or, if we put it a little wider in limits, we may date true mediaevalism from the rise of Hildebrand, about 1070, to the death of Innocent HI. in 1216, or just about a century and a half. St. Louis himself, as we read Joinville’s Memoirs, seems to us a man belated, born too late, and almost an anachronism in the second half of the thirteenth century sofia city tour.


We know that in the slow evolution of society the social brilliancy of a movement is seldom visible, and is almost never ripe for poetic and artistic idealisation until the energy of the movement itself is waning, or even it may be, is demonstrably spent. Shakespeare prolonged the Renascence of the fifteenth century, the Renascence of Leonardo and Raphael, into the seventeenth century, when Puritanism was in full career; and Shakespeare — it is deeply significant — died on the day when Oliver Cromwell entered college at Cambridge. And so, when Dante, in his Vision of 1300, saw the heights and the depths of Catholic Feudalism, he was looking back over great movements which were mighty forces a hundred years earlier. Just so, though the thirteenth century contained within its bosom the plainest proofs that the mediaeval world was ending, the flower, the brilliancy, the variety, the poetry, the soul of the mediaeval world, were never seen in so rich a glow as in the thirteenth century, its last great effort.


Thirteenth century as a whole


In a brief review of each of the dominant movements which give so profound a character to the thirteenth century as a whole, one begins naturally with the central movement of all — the Church. The thirteenth century was the era of the culmination, the over-straining, and then the shameful defeat of the claim made by the Church of Rome to a moral and spiritual autocracy in Christendom. There are at least five Popes in that one hundred years — Innocent HI., Gregory ix., Innocent iv., Gregory x., and Boniface vm.—whose characters impress us with a sense of power or of astounding desire of power, whose lives are romances and dreams, and whose careers are amongst the most instructive in history. He who would understand the Middle Ages must study from beginning to end the long and crowded Pontificate of Innocent HI. In genius, in commanding nature, in intensity of character, in universal energy, in aspiring designs, Innocent HI. has few rivals in the fourteenth centuries of the Roman Pontiffs, and few superiors in any age on any throne in the world.


His eighteen years of rule, from 1198 to 1216, were one long effort, for the moment successful, and in part deserving success, to enforce on the kings and peoples of Europe a higher morality, respect for the spiritual mission of the Church, and a sense of their common civilisation. We feel that he is truly a great man with a noble cause, when the Pope forces Philip Augustus to take back the wife he had so insolently cast off, when the Pope forces John to respect the rights of all his subjects, laymen or churchmen, when the Pope gives to England the best of her Primates, Stephen Langton, the principal author of our Great Charter, when the Pope accepts the potent enthusiasm of the New Friars and sends them forth on their mission of revivalism.