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Grecian Hours

Last winter I was living in Athens. Talk was all of deficit, Troika, national strikes. I borrowed a flat and learnt Greek. Four hours daily of tuition, five more of homework: my life was bound by verbs and the horrors of the accusative. My teacher Theodora was relentless. She said we were timetabled a ten-minute break every hour, but if it was okay with us she’d dispense with that. We would come to regret this.

I knew no one. The quiet in my flat was dense, as if it was muffled in wool. Adjacent flats were empty, and there was no Internet. There were ribald jokes in class when Theodora discovered that Ahmad, a Syrian, had found a Greek woman for pillow talk despite having a wife in Damascus. I didn’t have anyone for pillow talk. At weekends, when my language school closed, I went to bed in silence and woke in silence, then to bed again and to wake again, all in silence. A vista of emptiness yawned, reeking of boredom.

But I did have a companion, of a sort. GFB accompanied my every foray around the city. Whenever I opened his book, flakes fell off, but the spine, curling like an autumn leaf, bore remnants of the celebrated blood-red cloth binding and gold lettering: Hand-book Greece Ionian Islands &c. 15/- London. John Murray.

Published in 1854, it’s the world’s first guidebook to Greece, by which its author, the mysterious GFB, meant classical and historical Greece, many of these places ‘not yet reunited to Christendom’. Admittedly Pausanius produced ten topographical volumes back in the second century ad, and footnotes to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage describe how to visit places mentioned in his topographical poem, but this was the first informative, practical guide. Suggested routes around Greece accompany essays on language, government, character, soil, the justice system, the economy, history, architecture, religion, plus tips on how and when to go. It’s a good read too. GFB was determined th

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Last winter I was living in Athens. Talk was all of deficit, Troika, national strikes. I borrowed a flat and learnt Greek. Four hours daily of tuition, five more of homework: my life was bound by verbs and the horrors of the accusative. My teacher Theodora was relentless. She said we were timetabled a ten-minute break every hour, but if it was okay with us she’d dispense with that. We would come to regret this.

I knew no one. The quiet in my flat was dense, as if it was muffled in wool. Adjacent flats were empty, and there was no Internet. There were ribald jokes in class when Theodora discovered that Ahmad, a Syrian, had found a Greek woman for pillow talk despite having a wife in Damascus. I didn’t have anyone for pillow talk. At weekends, when my language school closed, I went to bed in silence and woke in silence, then to bed again and to wake again, all in silence. A vista of emptiness yawned, reeking of boredom. But I did have a companion, of a sort. GFB accompanied my every foray around the city. Whenever I opened his book, flakes fell off, but the spine, curling like an autumn leaf, bore remnants of the celebrated blood-red cloth binding and gold lettering: Hand-book Greece Ionian Islands &c. 15/- London. John Murray. Published in 1854, it’s the world’s first guidebook to Greece, by which its author, the mysterious GFB, meant classical and historical Greece, many of these places ‘not yet reunited to Christendom’. Admittedly Pausanius produced ten topographical volumes back in the second century ad, and footnotes to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage describe how to visit places mentioned in his topographical poem, but this was the first informative, practical guide. Suggested routes around Greece accompany essays on language, government, character, soil, the justice system, the economy, history, architecture, religion, plus tips on how and when to go. It’s a good read too. GFB was determined that it should be enjoyed as much beside the fire at home as it was on the road. Salaries and pensions cut; taxes and unemployment rising; corruption exploding; riots in Syntagma Square as the government wrestles with its hydra-like economy, and citizens revolt against rule by the Germans. This is the 1840s. Plus ça change. Broader than a literary travel book, less selective or personal, the Handbook provides an insight into that particular world at that particular time. It’s like a pathology slice, or a core sample. Flâneuring around Athens, I tried to see what GFB saw; his view illuminated mine. The Acropolis soaring above a building site, raw and rough, with a grid of streets planted with saplings. To make way for the new city hundreds of churches being demolished, and detested mosques and other Turkish accretions stripped away. The Acropolis still dominated by a massive Frankish tower. Some things are disappearing; others have yet to be unearthed. Push your hand into red cloth pockets inside the cover and withdraw maps of 1854 Greece; they’re missing future roads, railways and cities, and also great monuments of the past. No Keramikos or Sacred Way, no Mycenae or Vergina, treasures that would shape the infant state’s identity as it struggled from under the Ottoman yoke. Until then, few Grand Tourists had made it this far. Greece was infested with murderous Klephts and malarial infections, visited only by foolhardy philhellenes. But times were changing and, as GFB declares rather pompously in his opening sentence, ‘A journey in Greece is full of deep and lasting interest for a traveller of every character, except indeed for a mere idler or man of pleasure.’ Now there’s something that’s changed. Authorities of the genre say that for comprehensive coverage verified in situ, Murray guides have never been surpassed. Baedeker, Hachette, Michelin, Lonely Planet, Cadogan, Rough Guides: all were preceded by Murray. Karl Baedeker was Murray’s agent in Germany and Rotterdam, but also Murray’s greatest imitator, using Murray’s suggested routes, stars to grade a site, and even the trademark gold lettering on red cloth, and by the 1880s Baedeker would far outsell Murray. It’s a Baedeker that E. M. Forster’s Lucy Honeychurch consults in Florence, or isn’t allowed to consult, meaning that she and Miss Lavish get lost (before Miss Lavish disappears altogether). ‘But Miss Lavish has even taken away Baedeker,’ Lucy complains to the Emersons in Santa Croce. Without Baedeker she’s as lost culturally as she was physically. But Murray had got there first, and beat Baedeker to every place they both covered. Murray’s Handbooks were not just tools, but a popular new literary genre. Everyone clamoured to climb aboard. Trollope wanted to write on Ireland but was rejected, as was Ruskin on Cumbria. In his own proposal letter, as I later discovered in the John Murray archive in Edinburgh, GFB tweaked the old school tie (Charterhouse), but clinched his commission through his exceptional knowledge of contemporary Greece and – as he grandly put it – ‘every person of note’. President of the Ionian University, he used his holidays to travel, culminating in an 1848 ride from Constantinople to Corfu. He met the Patriarch, galloped across the plains of Troy, was hauled in a basket up to Meteora’s cliff-top monasteries, and visited Ottoman pashas who gave him fruit and armed guards. Exceptional was GFB’s fluency in modern Greek, and his enthusiasm for modern Greeks. It was the lack of such a companion that had triggered the start of the Handbook series. Aged 21, John Murray III was in Hamburg, destitute without a guidebook, so he made notes on culture and practicalities and persuaded his father to publish them. It was such a success that he swiftly wrote Southern Germany (1837), Switzerland (1838) and France (1843). It was brilliant timing, a turning-point in the history of travel and travel-writing, coinciding with excitement about expansion across the world. Rain, steam and speed. I’m thinking of Turner’s 1844 watercolour, the train hurtling along its brandnew viaduct, the black vertical of the engine’s chimney echoing the chimneys sprouting over industrializing Europe. Soon few English-speaking travellers would embark for Europe, Egypt, Syria, India, Japan, New Zealand or any English county without a Handbook stashed in their portmanteau. According to The Times of the day, an Englishman ‘trusts to his Murray as he would trust to his razor, because it is thoroughly English and reliable; and for his history, hotels, exchanges, scenery, for the clue to his route and his comfort by the way, the Red Handbook is his “guide, philosopher, and friend”.’ GFB provides an insight not just into mid-nineteenth-century Greece, but into those who went there – my predecessors. They were concerned with hiring a travelling servant (essential), dealing with Klephts (launch an international incident), and constructing verminproof contraptions, part mosquito-net, part box, into which you clambered for the night. The wonderful adverts reveal a world of parasols, of taking the air on deck, dipping limbs into therapeutic baths. Dr Locock invites you to try his Pulmonic Wafers, with a testimony by a Primitive Methodist Minister whose wife coughed for seven years until Providence placed these truly amazing Wafers in her way, which provided instantaneous relief and enabled her to return to domestic duties. Messrs Bing Brothers of Frankfurt respectfully invite the Public to peruse their Assortment of Articles in Stag’s Horn, consisting of Ear-rings, Watch-stands, Snuff boxes and Whips, and other Fancy Objects including Bronze Copies of the Statue of Ariadne. F. Straker of Fleet Street supplies Acromatic Microscopes for Travellers, plus Micrometers, Polarizing apparatus, Object-glasses and Eye-pieces.With all this to lug, try Pratt’s patent travelling wardrobe, with commodious compartments for Bonnets. Highly educated, these travellers were happy to read GFB’s quotations in Latin, French and ancient Greek without translations. They didn’t mind wading through fifty-two closely written pages just on the Acropolis and Asty, six of which discuss whether the Parthenon did, or did not, have windows in its roof. Have our intellects shrivelled so much that we can no longer take this stuff ? If the 1840s and ’50s saw the birth of travel publishing, now is the time of its demise, with sales plummeting and publishers disappearing. Who wants to lug a guidebook – out-of-date before it’s even published – when you can get accurate bite-sized info on your phone? But GFB must have done something right because the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of Mycenae, was never parted from his Handbook, and it remained in print for twenty years, despite the fact that Greece was in flux, borders were changing, Athens hotels opening and closing overnight, buildings going up and being torn down. Notwithstanding their illustrious authors, the Handbooks were anonymous – this was anti-celebrity publishing. The Handbooks were Murray’s, with a house style and a disapproval of flights of individualism. So who was GFB? Before leaving England, I read an 1870s article extolling the scholarship of eminent British statesmen. After a tempestuous night in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Charles James Fox would calmly read Thucydides in the original Greek. After forty years of parliamentary life, Gladstone resumed his Homeric studies and, after a lifetime in the Cabinet, the Earl of Derby translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into Miltonic blank verse. ‘This type of public man is almost peculiar to our own country, and no finer type has the world yet seen.’ G. F. Bowen, the article said, was one such. People were more indebted than they knew to the colonial governor Sir George Ferguson Bowen and his researches amongst localities enshrined in ancient Greek literature. After a stint as Secretary to the British government in the Ionian islands he was packed off to the colonies to govern Queensland, Victoria, New Zealand, Mauritius and Hong Kong, but he never lost his passion for Greece, and married a Greek. ‘As a rule, it must be confessed that books of Greek travel are the reverse of lively reading.’ Oh, how true! But, the author adds, after twenty-five years, and publication by others of enough volumes on Greece to furnish a library, Bowen’s Handbook continued to be the unsurpassed descriptive work. I’d treasured it for years before discovering that my great-great-grandfather had written it. One day I left my Handbook behind. ‘Every Englishman abroad carries a Murray for information, and a Byron for sentiment, and finds out by them what he is to know and feel by every step.’ Or so, in the 1860s, sneered the American sculptor William Wetmore Story, who lived in Italy and watched Grand Tourists pass through. I wanted to enjoy my own responses, not inherit them. Guidebooks spoil the illusion that we discover sights for ourselves. I would let my imagination wander. As adventurous Miss Lavish admonishes Miss Honeychurch: ‘Tut, tut! Miss Lucy! I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things.’ And later: ‘No, you are not, not, not to look at your Baedeker. Give it to me; I shan’t let you carry it. We will simply drift.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46 © Helena Drysdale 2015


About the contributor

Helena Drysdale’s books include Strangerland, Mother Tongues and Looking for George. She is working hard so that her own book of Greek travel won’t be the reverse of lively reading.

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