THE Greek peninsula is the southernmost point of the much larger Balkan peninsula. This is bounded on the north by the Danube, on the west by the Adriatic, which separates it from Italy, on the east by the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmora, the Bosporus and the Aegean Sea, which separate it from Asia, and on the south by the Mediterranean, which separates it from Africa.

I have never seen the Balkan peninsula from the air but it seems to me that from a high distance it must look like a hand, reaching out from Europe to Asia and Africa. Greece is the thumb.Thrace the little finger.Constantinople the nail on the little finger.The other fingers are the mountain-ranges that run from Macedonia and Thessaly to Asia Minor.Only the tops of these mountain-ranges are visible.The lower parts are covered by the waves of the Aegean, but from a great height one would undoubtedly be able to follow them as closely as the fingers of a hand partly submerged by the water in a wash-bowl.

The skin of this hand is stretched across a skeleton of sturdy mountain-ranges. In the main, these run from north-west to south-east, I might almost say, diagonal-wise.They have Bulgarian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Turkish, Albanian and Greek names but there are only a few important enough for you to remember.

These are the Dinaric Alps, stretching from the Alps of Switzerland to the Gulf of Corinth, the wide bay which separates the northern half of Greece from the southern half, the triangle which the early Greeks mistook for an island(small wonder, since the isthmus of Corinth which connects it with the mainland is only about three and a half miles wide)and which they called the Peloponnesus or the Island of Pelops, who, according to Greek tradition, was the son of Tantalus and a grandson of Zeus, and who at Olympia was honored as the father of all good sportsmen.

The Venetians who conquered Greece during the Middle Ages were prosaic merchants with no interest in a young man who once upon a time in his career had been served up as a roast at his father's dinner table. They found that a map of the Peloponnesus looked very much like the leaf of a mulberry-tree.And so they called it the Morea, and that is the name you will find on all modern atlases.

There are two mountain-ranges in this part of the world which have a separate existence of their own. In the north there are the Balkans which have given their name to the entire peninsula.The Balkans are merely the southern end of a half circle of hills of which the northern part is known as the Carpathians.They are cut off from the rest of the Carpathians by the socalled“Iron Gate”—the narrow ravine through which the Danube has dug itself a path on its way to the sea;and they act as a barrier which forces the Danube to run straight from east to west and to lose itself finally in the Black Sea instead of the Aegean Sea, towards which that river seems bound when it leaves the plains of Hungary.

Unfortunately, this wall separating the peninsula from Roumania is not as high as the Alps and so does not succeed in protecting the Balkan region from the chilly blasts that come blowing down from the great Russian plain. The northern part of the peninsula therefore is quite familiar with snow and ice, but ere the clouds can reach Greece they are stopped by a second wall, the Rhodope Mountains which, by their very name of the“rose-covered hills”(the same word as you will find in rhododendron, the rose-tree, and in Rhodes, the“rose-covered island”of the Aegean),indicate a milder climate.

The Rhodope Mountains reach a height of almost 9000 feet. The highest top in the Balkans, situated near the famous Shipka pass which the Russian armies forced in September of 1877 amidst a great deal of discomfort, is only 8000 feet.The Rhodope Mountains therefore play a very important part in deciding the climate of the rest of the peninsula, and for good measure there is snow-covered Olympus,10,000 feet high, which stands sentinel over the plains of Thessaly, where the real Greece begins.

This fertile plain of Thessaly was once upon a time an inland sea. But the river Peneus(the Salambria of the modern map)cut itself a road-bed through the famous valley of Tempe, and the vast Thessalian lake emptied itself into the Gulf of Saloniki and became dry land.As for Thessaly, the granary of ancient Greece, the Turks neglected it, as they neglected everything, not so much through wickedness of heart as that hopeless Mohammedan inertia which answers all questions of immediate practical importance with a shrug of the shoulder and a brief“What is the use?”And as soon as the Turks had been driven out, the Greek money-lenders got hold of the peasants and continued where the others had left off.Today Thessaly is raising tobacco.It has one harbor, Volo, from which the Argonauts set forth on their quest of the Golden Fleece, a story that was already hoary with age long before the heroes of Troy were born.It also has one industrial town and railroad center, Larissa.

As a matter of curiosity and in order to show how strangely people got scrambled in the olden days, I might mention that this city in the heart of the Greek land of Thessaly has a negro quarter of its own. The Turks, who did not care who got killed fighting their battles for them, had imported several regiments of Sudanese natives from their Egyptian possessions to help them suppress the great Greek uprising of 1821-1829.Larissa was their headquarters during that war and after the war the poor Sudanese were forgotten.They remained stranded and they are still there.

But you will meet with stranger things than that ere we get through. You will hear of Red Indians in northern Africa and Jews in eastern China and horses on an uninhabited island in the Atlantic Ocean.This is much for the benefit of the“pure race”enthusiasts.

From Thessaly we cross the Pindus Mountains into the Epirus. This mountain-range, as high as the Balkans, has always been a barrier between the Epirus and the rest of Greece.Why Aristotle should have identified this part of the world with the original home of the human race will ever remain a mystery, for it is a poverty-stricken country of high hills and wandering herds of cattle, without harbors or decent roads.Of its early population little remained when the Romans on one of their campaigns sold 150,000 Epirotes into slavery(the famous Roman way of establishing law and order).But two parts of the Epirus, separated from the mainland by narrow stretches of water from the Ionian Sea, are interesting.One is Ithaca, the legendary home of long-suffering Odysseus, and the other is Corfu, the early home of the Phaeacians, whose king, Alcionous, was the father of Nausicaa, loveliest of all women in ancient literature and an example of gracious hospitality until the end of time.Today the island(one of the Ionian islands, occupied first by Venice, later by the French, then by the English until ceded by them to Greece in 1869)is chiefly famous as the place of retreat for the defeated Serbian armies in the year 1916 and as a target for some very loose and useless shooting on the part of the Fascist navy only a few years ago.It has however a great future as a winter resort, but is undoubtedly situated on one of the great European earthquake belts.

The Dinaric Alps have a bad record as earthquake producers, while the neighboring island of Zante suffered most severely from an earthquake as recently as 1893. But earthquakes have never yet prevented people from going where it was pleasant to be and we can discount the element of danger.We shall meet with a great many volcanoes on our trip around the world and still find their gentle slopes more densely populated than the less energetic parts of the world's brittle surface.Explain this who may.I proceed from the Epirus further towards the south, and behold, Boeotia!

I mention this region, which lies like a vast, empty soup-plate between the hills of Attica towards the south and Thessaly and the mountains of the Epirus towards the north, most particularly because it is a classical example of that influence of Nature upon Man which I mentioned in the beginning of this book. To the average Greek of the good classical days, a Boeotian, although he came from the land of Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses, on the slopes of which the Delphic Oracle had established its shrine, was a clod-hopper, a heavy-witted rustic, a clown, an oaf, a lout, a gawk, a thick-skulled dunderpate, predestined for all the cheap slap-stick humor of the early stage.

And yet, the Boeotians by nature were no less intelligent than the rest of the Greeks. Epaminondas, the strategian, and Plutarch, the biographer, were Boeotians but they had left their native haunts at an early age.Those who remained behind suffered from the poisonous vapors that arose from the swamp-ridden borders of Lake Copais.In plain, modern medical terms, they probably were victims of malaria, a disease which does not tend to make people brilliantminded.

The French Crusaders, who set up as rulers of Athens during the entire thirteenth century, began to drain these quagmires, and conditions among the Boeotians improved. The Turks, of course, allowed the mosquitoes to breed to their hearts'content and the Boeotians grew worse.Finally under the new kingdom, a French and afterwards an English company let the muddy waters of Lake Copais flow into the Euboic Sea and turned the bottom of this inland sea into fertile pasture-land.

Today the Boeotian is no more Boeotian than an Athenian or Brooklyn bootblack and, Heaven knows, they are quick-witted enough to get an extra nickel out of a Scotchman or Armenian. The marshes are gone, the vapors are gone, the malaria mosquitoes are gone.And an entire country-side that had been derided for centuries as Exhibit A of rustic numskullery and ignoble imbecility was restored to normal behavior by the draining of a few miasmic swamps.

And then we come to Attica, most, interesting of the Greek lands. Nowadays we take the train that goes from Larissa to Athens and that connects with the trunk-lines to Europe.But in the olden days, those who wanted to get from Thessaly in the north to Attica in the south had only one route at their disposal, the route of the famous pass of Thermopylae.It was not really a pass in the modern sense of the word—a narrow gap between two high mountains.It was a narrow track, about 45 feet wide, between the rocks of Mount Oeta and the Gulf of Halae, which was part of the Euboic Sea.It was here that Leonidas and three hundred Spartans sacrificed themselves to the last man to save Europe from Asia, when they tried to halt the advancing hordes of Xerxes in the year 480 B.C..Two hundred years later it was here that the barbarous Gauls were prevented from invading Greece.Even as late as the years 1821 and 1822 the pass played an important military role in the war between Turks and Greeks.Today the pass is no longer visible.The sea has retreated almost three miles from the mainland and all that remains is a fifth-rate bathing establishment where people afflicted with rheumatism and sciatica try to find relief in those hot springs(“thermos”is Greek for“hot”,as you will know from“thermometer”and“thermos bottle”)which gave their name to a battle-field which shall be remembered as long as mankind continues to honor those who died in defending a lost cause.

As for Attica itself, it is a small triangle—a rocky promontory bordered by the blue waters of the Aegean Sea. Between its many hills lie numerous small valleys, all of them having direct access to the sea and kept fresh and pure by the breezes that come in from the waterfront.The ancient Athenians declared that their sharpness of wit and clearness of vision were due to the delightful air they breathed.They may have been right.There were no stagnant Boeotian pools to encourage the thrifty malaria mosquito.As a result, the Athenians were healthy and kept healthy.They were the first people to recognize that man is not divided into two equal parts, body and soul, but that body and soul are one, that a healthy body is necessary to encourage a healthy soul, that a healthy soul is an indispensable part of a healthy body.

In that air it was possible to look all the way from the Acro-polis to the Pentelian Mountains that dominated the plain of Marathon and provided the city with marble. But it was not only the climate that made the Athenians what they were, and for that matter are to this very day.

There was the sea that gave the people of Attica direct access to every part of the inhabited and uninhabited world. And there was that geological freak of Nature which had dumped a steep but flat-topped miniature mountain, a sort of mesa more than 500 feet high,870 feet long and 435 feet wide, right in the heart of the plain surrounded by Mt.Hymettus(home of the best Athenian honey),by Mt.Pentelicus and by that Aegaleus from the slopes of which the unhappy fugitives from Athens watched the annihilation of the Persian fleet in the straits of Salamis a few days after the troops of Xerxes had set their city on fire.This flat-topped, steeply sloped hill had first of all attracted the immigrants from the north, for there they found what we all need—food and safety.

It is a curious fact that both Athens and Rome(or modern London or Amsterdam),the most important settlements of ancient Europe, were situated not immediately on the sea but several miles away from it. The example of Cnossos, the Cretan center of the Mediterranean world hundreds of years before either of them had been founded, may have acted as a warning of that dreadful thing that may happen when one is forever exposed to a surprise attack by pirates.Athens, however, was more conveniently near to the sea than Rome.A short time after he had landed in the Piraeus, then as now the harbor of Athens, the Greek sailor could be with his family.The Roman merchant needed three days for the trip.That was a little too long.He lost the habit of going back to his home city, settled down in the port at the mouth of the Tiber, and Rome gradually lost that intimate touch with the high seas which is of such tremendous benefit to all nations aspiring to world domination.

But gradually these mesa people, these inhabitants of the“top city”(for that is what acropolis meant)moved into the plain, built houses around the foot of their hill, surrounded them with walls, finally connected these fortifications and those of the Piraeus and settled down to a glorious life of trade and robbery which ere long made their impregnable fortress the richest metropolis of the entire Mediterranean Sea. Then their Acropolis was given up as a place of abode and became a shrine—a shrine which lifted its white marble temples proudly against the violet-tinted sky of Attica—a shrine which even today, when an explosion in a Turkish powder-magazine has destroyed some of its more important buildings(during the siege of Athens in 1645),remains unique and sublime among those show-places where the genius of man is revealed in its highest from of perfection.

When Greece regained her liberty in 1829,Athens had dwindled down to a mere village of 2000 inhabitants. In 1870 it had a population of 45,000.Today it has 700,000,a growth that is only paralleled by some of our own western cities.If the Greeks had not gambled with fate immediately after the Great War and had not foolishly thrown away all those immensely valuable possessions they had acquired in Asia Minor, Athens today would be the center of a mighty Aegean power.But all that may still happen in the near future.The mills of the Gods grind slowly but they continue day and night.And the city called after the shrewdest and wisest daughter of Zeus, born out of her father's brain, has shown itself to have a tremendous power of recuperation.

This brings us to the last and most distant part of the great Greek peninsula and there, alas, our confident and prophetic words of hope are of no further avail. The curse that rested upon Pelops on account of his father's great wickedness has never been lifted from the land upon which that unfortunate prince bestowed his name.Here, hidden from the sea by mighty mountain-ranges, lay the idyllic land of Arcadia, praised by all poets as the home of simple but honest and lovable shepherds and shepherdesses.Poets are apt to wax most enthusiastic about that of which they knew least.For the Arcadians were not more honest than the rest of the Greeks.If they did not practice the shabby tricks of their more sophisticated fellow-Hellenes, it was not because they disapproved of them.It was simply because they had never heard of them.It is true they did not steal, but there was nothing worth the taking in a country of dates and goats.They did not lie, but their hamlets were so small that everybody knew everything about everybody anyway.And if they kept away from the refined and decadent luxuries of those Gods worshipped in Eleusis and other Athenian centers of mysteries, they had a deity of their own, the great God Pan, who could give cards and spades to all the other Olympians when it came to coarse jokes and the low wit of barn-yard yokels.

It is true, then as now the Arcadians could fight, but it did them little good, for like most peasants they loathed discipline and could never agree who would be their commander-in-chief.

Southward of mountainous Arcadia stretched the plain of Laconia, a fertile plain, infinitely more fertile than the valleys of Attica, but sterile as to independence of thought and barren of all ideas that stretched beyond the mere necessities of life. In this plain the most curious city of antiquity was situated.Its name was Sparta and it stood for everything the northern Greeks held in abhorrence.Athens said“yea”unto life and Sparta said“nay”.Athens believed in inspired brilliancy, while Sparta worked towards efficiency and service.Athens proudly preached the divine right of her exceptional individuals.Sparta reduced all men to the dreary monotony of the mediocre.Athens opened its doors wide to foreigners.Sparta kept them out of the country or murdered them.The Athenians were born traders, but no Spartan was allowed to soil his hands with business.If we are to judge by the final success of these two policies, the town of Sparta did not do so well.The spirit of Athens has penetrated the whole world.The spirit of Sparta has gone the way of the city that gave it birth—it has disappeared.

You will find a place called Sparta on the modern maps of Greece. It is a village composed of small scale farmers and humble keepers of silk-worms.It was built in 1839 on the spot where ancient Sparta was supposed to have stood.English enthusiasm provided the money, a German architect drew the plans.But no one wanted to go and live there.Today after almost a century of effort, it has 4000 inhabitants.The old curse of Pelops!A curse that makes itself felt even more distinctly in another part of the peninsula—a curse that comes to full fruition in the prehistoric fortress of Mycenae.

The ruins of Mycenae are not far away from Nauplia the best-known harbor of the Peloponnesus, situated on the gulf of that name. The town was destroyed five centuries before the birth of Christ.But to us people of the modern world it is of more direct importance than even Athens or Rome.For it was here that long before the beginning of written history, civilization for the first time touched the shores of savage Europe.

In order to understand how this came about, look at the three half-submerged ridges of the great Balkan hand that reaches from Europe to Asia. These fingers are composed of islands.Those islands nowadays belong to Greece except for a few in the eastern part of the Aegean which Italy has occupied and continues to occupy for the reason that no other nation wants to go to war on account of a few worthless rocks in a distant sea.For convenience'sake we divide those islands into two groups, the Cyclades near the Grecian coast and the Sporades near the coast of Asia Minor.Those islands, as St.Paul already knew, are within short sailing distance of each other.And they formed the bridge across which the civilization of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria moved westward until it reached the shores of Europe.Meanwhile that civilization, under the influence of those early immigrants of Asiatic origin who had settled down on the Aegean islands, had already been very distinctly“easternized”and it was in that form that finally it reached Mycenae which should have become what Athens afterwards became, the center of the classical Greek world.

Why didn't this happen?We do not know. No more than we know why Marseilles, the logical successor to Athens as the dominating power of the Mediterranean, should have been forced to surrender that honor to a very modern and very up start village called Rome.The short-lived glory of Mycenae and its abrupt decline will ever remain a mystery.

But, you will object, all that is history and this is supposed to be a book on geography. But in Greece, as in many ancient lands, history and geography have become so interwoven that the two cannot be discussed separately.And from a modern point of view there are only a few geographical items really worth mentioning.

The isthmus of Corinth has been pierced by a canal about three miles long but too shallow and too narrow for large vessels. Greece, as a result of a series of wars with Turkey(alone and together with Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro),almost doubled its territory, then lost one-half of all those new acquisitions because in her dreams of grandeur she underestimated the fighting qualities of the Turks.The Greeks today, as in ancient times, take readily to the sea, and the blue and white flag of the republic(the ancient Bavarian colors imported by the first king of the country after it had regained its independence in 1829)is to be seen in every part of the Mediterranean.Also occasionally in the North Sea and the Baltic, where such Grecian vessels, unlike the Grecian urn of Keats, are famous for their slovenliness and dirt.And for the rest, there are the figs and the olives and currants that are exported to all countries that care for such delicacies.

Will Greece ever return to her ancient glories as so many of her people hope and fervently expect?Perhaps.

But a nation overrun in turn by Macedonians, by Romans, by Goths and Vandals and Herulians and Slavs, conquered and turned into a colony by Normans, Byzantines, Venetians and the unspeakable riff-raff of the Crusades, then almost completely depopulated and repopulated by Albanians, forced to live under Turkish domination for almost four entire centuries and used as a base of supply and a battlefield by the forces of the Allies in the Great War—such a nation has suffered certain hardships from which it will find it extremely difficult to recuperate. As long as there is life, there is hope.But it is a mighty slender one.