Transcriber’s Note
The photographs and maps been repositioned, where necessary, to fallat a paragraph or chapter break.
Larger versions of the two maps can be viewed using the link providedbelow the image.
Please see the transcriber’s notes at the end of this text for a morecomplete account of any other textual issues and their resolution.
VACATION DAYS
IN GREECE
BY
RUFUS B. RICHARDSON
FORMERLY DIRECTOR OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF
ARCHÆOLOGY, ATHENS
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1903
Copyright, 1903, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published, September, 1903
TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK
To
MY SON
THE COMPANION OF
MY TRAVELS
PREFACE
During a residence of eleven years in Greece I have formed the habitof writing to certain periodicals descriptions of my journeys. Theoccasion for making a book out of these articles was the suggestion onthe part of many members of the American School of Classical Studies,at Athens, who had shared these journeys with me, that I should doso, and so make the descriptions accessible to them. I yielded tothis suggestion all the more readily from the consideration that mywanderings have taken me into many nooks and corners not usuallyvisited by those whose stay in the country is short.
Having seen the sunrise from most of the mountain-tops of the country,having forded many of its rivers, and having caught the indescribablecolor at early dawn and at evening twilight, from the deck of coastingsteamers, all along these fascinating shores, I felt it only right thatI should try to convey to others, less fortunate than myself, somepicture, however inadequate, of all this experience and enjoyment. Allthat is here set down is, however, but a part of a larger picture thatis ever present in my memory.
For the most part I have avoided what has been most frequentlydescribed. Athens, Olympia, and the much-visited Argive plain, I havenot touched upon, because I did not wish to swell the book by tellingthrice-told tales. I tell of what I have most enjoyed, in the hope thatreaders may feel with me the charm of this poet’s land, which has, morethan any other, “infinite riches in a little room.”
The slight alterations that I have made in the original form of thedescriptions was made with the design of bringing them, in a measure,up to the present time. I have also arranged them on a geographicalthread, running from the Ionian Islands, through Northern Greece to thePeloponnesus. The two larger articles, on Sicily and Dalmatia, are notsimply tacked on. They belong to the subject, inasmuch as Sicily wasan important part of Hellas, as the Greeks called their country, andinasmuch as Greek colonies once skirted the greater part of the coastof Dalmatia.
In regard to