After giving advice on protection against vermin Murray makes suggestions on the equipment to be taken: ‘A large and stout cotton umbrella is required as a protection not only from the rain, but also from the sun. A green veil, and blue or neutral-tinted spectacles, are very useful as a safeguard against the glare of the sun. A pocket-telescope, a thermometer, drawing materials, measuring tape, and the like, are luxuries to be provided or not, according to the taste and pursuits of each individual tourist.’
The section on kitting out quotes Edward Lear as saying: ‘Arms and ammunition, fine raiment, presents for natives, are all nonsense, simplicity should be your aim’, though Murray goes on to inform us that those who stay some time in the East, or sail in their own yachts, ‘will often wish to leave some token of remembrance with officials. For this purpose the best articles to provide are a few pairs of English pistols, knives, pocket-telescopes, toys for children, and ornaments for ladies. Prints of the Queen, the Ministers etc., are very acceptable to the British Consular Agents, who are generally natives.’
A few pages of hints concerning health tell us that: ‘The abundance of fruit is a great temptation to foreigners, but nothing is more pernicious, or more likely to lead to fatal consequences.’ As for malaria: ‘No Eastern traveller should be without a small bottle of quinine pills, and a few simple directions for their use.’
Locomotion is by horse. ‘One hour is, on average, equivalent to about 3 English miles; though in level parts of the country, and with good horses, the traveller may ride much faster’, but ‘the usual rate of progress does not exceed from 20 to 25 miles a-day’.
Though hotels existed in Athens and other large places, charging about ten francs a day for full board, it was different in the countryside, where: ‘The keepers of coffee-houses and billiard-rooms (which are now very general) will always lodge a traveller, but he must expect no privacy here. He must live all day in public, and be content at night to have his mattress spread, with some twenty others belonging to the family or other guests, either on the floor or on a wooden divan which surrounds the room. When particular honour is to be shown to a guest, his bed is laid upon the billiard table: he never should decline this distinction, as he will thereby have a better chance of escape from vermin.’
The traveller can take some comfort on reading that: ‘The stranger is almost invariably received with much natural courtesy; and in the domestic arrangements, manners, and language of his hosts, he will find much to remind him of their forefathers. The description in Homer of the cottage of Eumaeus is not inapplicable to the hut of a Greek peasant of the existing generation; while the agricultural implements and usages of the present day are not far removed from those of the times of Hesiod.’
On the inhabitants, after a few words each about the Ghegs, Toskes, Liapes, and Tjames, we are told that the genuine Skipetar (or Albanian) is ‘generally of the middle stature, and of lighter complexion than the Greeks; very spare and muscular, and particularly slight around the waist. The lower classes are filthily dirty, often wearing the same coarse woollen skirt and kilt till they fall to pieces. The peasant women are generally handsome and well formed when young, but hard fare, exposure, and the field labour which they undergo, soon nip their beauty in its bud.’
As for the Greeks, they are ‘often called assassins, robbers, etc.’, says one of Mr Murray’s correspondents quoted in the book, ‘yet I knew the commander of the police well, when in a whole winter at Athens — the population being 20,000 — there was no case of housebreaking or murder. Indeed, my kitchen was cleared of its contents, being an outhouse, and a householder killed in a village; but the one, as most other pilferings, was the work of Bavarians, and the other the crime of a British subject — a Maltese. Greeks are generally called rogues, yet in commerce no Greek merchant of consequence has failed; and both an astute English merchant and a canny Scotch agent have often told me a bill, with three good Greek names to it, is security never known to fail.’
Murray tells us that the Greek character has suffered much from centuries of slavery: ‘All the vices which tyranny generates — the abject vices which it generates in those who quail under it — the ferocious vices which it generates in those who struggle against it — have occasionally been exhibited by Greeks in modern times. Despite their many faults we call to mind their misfortunes and the blood that is in them, and still love the Greeks. Their forefathers were the intellectual aristocracy of mankind.’
Should the British traveller wish to learn more of the country he might with advantage meet ‘Mr. Black, professor of English etc., and husband of Lord Byron’s “Maid of Athens”, who gives lessons in Modern Greek and other languages, and may be applied to for general information with regard to the country where he has been established amidst all its vicissitudes for many years.’
There is no street plan of Athens in Murray, and the traveller may be forgiven for getting lost on his way to the Acropolis. ‘The minor streets are hardly deserving of the name, being merely narrow lanes displaying a marked contempt for all regularity.’
Forty-four lines of Milton and eighteen lines of Byron are given the traveller to read while pausing with wonder on the steps of the Acropolis. Perhaps it will not surprise him to note that, concerning the nature of democracy among the Ancient Greeks, ‘The chief authority for the population of ancient Attica is the census of Demetrius Phalerus, taken in B.C. 317. According to this census, there were 21,000 Athenian citizens, 10,000 resident aliens, and 400,000 slaves.’
The Acropolis suffered in repeated wars, during which the ten Doric columns of the Parthenon were ‘together with the whole of the central building and the adjoining columns of the peristyle, thrown down by the explosion of a magazine of gunpowder, ignited by the Venetian bombardment in 1687’.
According to Baedeker: ‘The Turks entrenched themselves on the Acropolis and concealed their store of powder in the Parthenon. The latter accordingly became the target of the Venetian artillerymen, and on Friday, Sept. 26th, [1687] at 7 p.m., a German lieutenant had the doubtful honour of firing the bomb which ignited the powder and blew the stately building into the air.’
Some distinguished travellers had a fine time archaeologically looting while in Greece, and the museums of Europe have much to thank them for, depending on your point of view, if not your nationality. With an eye, as it were, to the main chance, the Venetian commander, Morosini, ‘after the capture of the city’ — back to Murray — ‘attempted to carry off some of the statues in the western pediment; but, owing to the unskilfulness of the Venetians, they were thrown down as they were being lowered, and were dashed in pieces’.
Then of course there is the issue of the Elgin Marbles, on which Murray says: ‘At the beginning of the present century, many of the finest sculptures of the Parthenon were removed to England.’ More recent archeological investigations (1835) had revealed ‘fragments of columns of a sculptured frieze, exactly answering to four pieces in the British Museum brought over by Lord Elgin …’ as if that might in some way make up for his depredations.