Chapter VI: Part 6

The visitor to Spalato and Salona should, if possible, not fail to pay a visit to Traü. To most readers the very name will doubtless be strange. Yet Tragurium is an old city, a city old enough to be named by Polybios, to say nothing of later Greek and Latin writers. As in countless other cases, many readers may have passed by the name without any notice at all; others may have turned to the map, and, having once found Tragurium, may have presently forgotten that Tragurium was anywhere recorded. The case may be different with those who carry on their studies so far as to have dealings with the Imperial topographer. In his pages the name of the city has got lengthened into [Greek: Tetrangourion], and we are told that it was so called [Greek: dia to einai auto mikron dikên angouriou]. We are not ashamed to confess that the word [Greek: angouriou] gave us no meaning whatever, and that we had to turn to our dictionary to find that [Greek: angourion] means a water-melon. But where the point of likeness is between the town of Traü and a water-melon, and why the name should have been lengthened, so as to suggest, if anything, the notion of four water-melons, we are as much in the dark as before. Those therefore who have made acquaintance with the city in the shape of [Greek: Tetrangourion] will have a chance of keeping it in their minds. But with those who light only either on Tragurium or on Traü, it will most likely happen as most commonly happens with places which play no great part in general history. The name passes away as a mere name, till something happens to clothe it with a special meaning. Salona the parent and Spalato the child are names which never can become meaningless to any one who has a decent knowledge of the history of the world. But the name of Tragurium, Traü, will probably always be purely meaningless, save to those whom anything may have led to take a special interest in Dalmatian matters. Tragurium has a history--no place is without one--but its history is purely local and Dalmatian. As far as one can venture to judge, the great course of human affairs would have been much the same if Tragurium had never become a city. But there it stands, and, as it stands, its position, its buildings, even its local history, combine to give it no small interest. They make it no contemptible appendage even to the famous spots in its immediate neighbourhood. Whatever was its origin, Tragurium became a Roman town, and it was one of those places on the Dalmatian coast which so long and steadily clave to their allegiance to the Eastern Cæsars. As the Byzantine power declined, the town was disputed between the Kings of Hungary and the commonwealth of Venice, and once at least it is said to have felt the hand of Saracen plunderers. By each of the Christian powers by which it was disputed it was won and lost more than once, till it finally became Venetian in 1420. Perhaps the point of greatest interest in these dates is that Traü was a Hungarian possession at the time of the building of its cathedral church in the thirteenth century. It is said to have points of likeness to other great Hungarian churches of the same date.

The approach to Traü is a speaking commentary on the state of things in days when no one but the lord of a private fortress could be safe anywhere except within a walled town. The road from Spalato to Traü goes through Salona, through the heart of the ruined city, as does the railway which the traveller may use for part of his journey. The railway turns off; the road keeps on alongside of the bay, with the water on one side and the mountains on the other. This road passes through the district of the _castelli_, forts with surrounding villages, which various lords, spiritual and temporal, held of the Serene Republic by a feudal tenure. Things were under the oligarchy of Venice as they were under the democracy of Athens. A private fortress within either city was unheard of; neither Demos nor the Council of Ten would for a moment have endured the existence of such towers as we still see at Rome and at Bologna. But in the outlying possessions of either commonwealth greater licence was allowed. Alkibiadês had his private forts in the Thracian Chersonêsos, and a string of Venetian nobles and subjects of the Republic were allowed to have their private forts along the shores of the bay of Salona. The points which they occupied still remain as small towns and villages, some of them with their little havens on the lake-like sea, where the traveller whom the railway has forsaken may haply light on a small steamer to take him on. But none of those among the _castelli_ which we can ourselves speak of from our own knowledge possess any architectural interest. When at last we reach Traü, we see further how needful it was, even in the case of a walled city, to plant it in the position best suited for defence. Traü, now at least, belongs to the class of island cities. At the point where the large island of Bua comes nearest to the mainland, a small island lies between it and the shore, leaving only a narrow channel on each side, spanned in each case by a bridge. But the language of the Emperor who likens the city to a water-melon might suggest the idea that the site was once, not insular, but peninsular. Constantine places his [Greek: Tetrangourion] on a small island, but the small island has a neck like a bridge which joins it to the mainland ([Greek: mikron esti nêsion en tê thalassê, echon kai trachêlon heôs tês gês stenôtaton dikên gephyriou, en hô dierchontai hoi katoikountes es to auto kastron]). This somewhat contradictory way of speaking sounds as if, as in the case of some other peninsular cities, a narrow isthmus had been cut through. In the Peutinger Table too, "Ragurio" is made distinctly peninsular. Now at least the likeness of a bridge is exchanged for the reality; the island is an island, and on this island is built the main part of the city of Traü. A small part only spreads itself on to Bua, where it begins to climb the hills, though it goes up only a very little way, by paths almost as rugged as though they were in Montenegro. This outlying part, which contains two churches, may pass as a suburb, a _Peraia_; for Bua may reckon as a mainland when compared with the neighbouring islet, and the real mainland of Dalmatia seems to have been carefully avoided by the builders of Tragurium. The view in Wheler would give no one any idea of the size of Bua, any more than the Peutinger Table would give any idea of its position. But Wheler's view well brings out the relative positions of mainland, islet, and island, and it shows how strongly Traü was fortified in his day. Such a site as this was a valuable one in days when security was the main object; but it hardly tends to prosperity in modern times, and Tragurium must be reckoned among the cities whose day is past. While Spalato is putting on the likeness of a busy modern town, Traü has nothing to show but its ancient memories.

Traü, as we now see it, is indeed an old-world place. Even the new-made railway, which has appeared long since our first visit, and which startles the quiet of Salona and some of the _castelli_, keeps away from the city of the four water-melons. Strangers come but seldom, and they are remembered when they do come; a visitor showing himself again after some years is greeted in friendly guise as "one of the three Englishmen with red beards." And the city looks like one of the ends of the world. Owing to the peculiar position of Traü, the fashion of narrow streets, common to all the Dalmatian towns, is here carried to an extreme point. Indeed the crooked alleys through which the visitor has to thread his way, and the dark arches and vaults under which he has to pass, give the place a Turkish rather than a Venetian look. The explorer of Traü might almost fancy himself at Trebinje. One wonders how the Tragurians manage to live; it is only on the quay and in the open place by the cathedral that there seems room to breathe. Yet, uninviting as the streets of Traü are in their general effect, they are far from being void of objects of interest. As elsewhere in Dalmatia, we ever and anon light on ornamental doorways and windows. In Traü some of these show better forms than those of the familiar Venetian Gothic; one or two windows are in style, whatever they may be in date, genuine Romanesque. Of the Venetian defences some considerable portions remain; close by the water, at the south-western point of the smaller island, is a castle bearing the badge of Saint Mark, whose chief feature is a tower of irregular octagonal shape, singularly and ingeniously vaulted within. Of civic buildings the chief is the Venetian _loggia_, now dirty and uncared for. But it still keeps at its east end what at first sight seems like an altar, dedicated, not to the Evangelist but to his lion, but which really marks the judgment-seat of the representative of the Republic in Traü. The building was repaired over and over again, the last renovation dating early in the seventeenth century; but it keeps a colonnade, which, whenever it was put together, was put together out of materials of far earlier date. Some of the capitals seem to be late; but there is one of true Corinthian form, which seems closely akin to those in Diocletian's peristyle; another capital is covered with rich foliage of a type rather Byzantine than classical. And on either side of the _loggia_, forming a strange contrast to one another, one of them utterly hidden from view, the other proclaiming itself as the main ornament of the town, stand the two most important ecclesiastical buildings of Traü.

The chief architectural ornament of the city is undoubtedly the formerly cathedral, now only collegiate, church. This is a work of the thirteenth century, with a stately bell-tower of the fourteenth or fifteenth. But the tower of Traü is no detached campanile, such as we have seen at Zara and Spalato. It forms part of the building; it occupies its north-western corner, and was designed to be one of a pair, after the usage of more northern lands. The inscription on the southern doorway gives 1215 as its date; one on the great western doorway names 1240, and adds the name of Raduanus as its artist. Looked at from the outside, the work is of the best and most finished kind of Italian Romanesque; and we have here, what is by no means uncommon in Dalmatia, an example of the late retention of the forms of that admirable style. The tower palpably belongs to a later date, as it shows the distinct forms of the Venetian Gothic, though, as usual in Dalmatia, in a not unpleasing form. Eitelberger quotes an inscription which gives the date as 1321, while in his text he speaks of it as 1421, just after the Venetian capture of the town. And the course of Dalmatian architecture is so capricious, forms are found at dates when one would so little have looked for them, that we really cannot undertake to decide between the two. The inside of the church is striking, with its round arches resting on massive square piers of German rather than Italian character, and with its clerestory and vault, in which the round and pointed arch are struggling for the mastery. By a freak almost more unaccountable than the red rags of Zara, the piers have very lately been taught to discharge the perhaps useful, but rather incongruous, function of a catalogue of the bishops of Traü, bishops whose succession has come to an end. The pulpit, the stalls, and other fittings, are also striking in many ways, and the triapsidal east end shows us a rather simple Romanesque style in all its purity. But the glory of Traü is at the other end. The stately portico veils the still more stately western doorway, in which, if the purity of the architectural style is somewhat forsaken, we forgive it for the richness and variety of its sculpture. The scriptural scenes in the tympanum, the animal forms, the statues of Adam and Eve, the crouching turbaned figures, the strange blending together of sculpture and architectural forms, make together a wonderful whole, none the less wonderful because it is clear that everything is not exactly in its right place, but that there has been a change or removal of some kind at some time. The details of this splendid doorway, and of the church in general, must be studied in the elaborate memoir of Eitelberger, which, with its illustrations, goes further than most memoirs of the kind to make the building really intelligible at a distance. The turbaned figures are far older than the appearance of the Ottoman in the neighbourhood of Traü, or indeed in any part of Europe. Are they Saracens whose forms record the memories of some returning Crusader? Or are we to believe that the Morlacchi used the turban as their head-dress before the Ottoman came?

But the _duomo_ is not all that Traü has to show in the way of churches. On the other side of the Venetian loggia stands, hidden among other buildings, a church which is in its way of equal interest with its greater neighbour, which certainly shows us a purer form of Romanesque. This is the little desecrated church of Saint Martin, now called Saint Barbara, one of those domical buildings on a small scale of which we have seen other varieties at Zara and at Spalato. Its height and the tall stilts on its columns would, if the building were cleared out, make it one of the most striking instances of its style and scale. Nearer to the water, south-east from the cathedral, is another small Romanesque church, almost as striking without as Saint Barbara is within. This is the small church of Saint John Baptist, which, except that it has a square east end, might pass for an almost typical Romanesque church on a small scale. Nearly opposite to Saint Barbara is the most striking house in Traü, with an open galleried court; and not very far off, hidden in the narrow streets, is the Benedictine monastery of Saint Nicolas, the foundation of the local saint John Orsini in 1064. The points to be noticed are not in the church but in the adjoining buildings. There, besides some pretty Venetian windows and doorways, is an arcade which looks as if it were of genuine Romanesque date, though perhaps hardly so old as the saint himself. A walk outside the walls in the direction of the Venetian castle leads to other churches, one of which, attached to a house of Dominican nuns, surprises the visitor, like the ruined chapel of the Gaetani by the tomb of Cæcilia Metella, by its almost English look. A few hours may well be spent in examining the antiquities of this strange little island city, and in taking in the varied views of land and sea which are to be had alike from the lofty bell-tower and from the higher ground on Bua. The journey back again shows us objects which have become familiar to us, but which are now seen in a reverse order. We mark the ever shifting outlines of the hills, the islands and the bay which they surround, the ruins of fallen Salona, Clissa on its peak, the stream of Giadro, the aqueduct of Diocletian, till we again mount and descend the little hill on the neck of the isthmus, and find ourselves once more under the shadow of the palace-walls of Spalato and of the bell-tower which soars so proudly over them.

SPALATO TO CATTARO.

SPALATO TO CATTARO.

1875.

[I have not thought it needful to strike out of this paper a
few allusions to the times when it was written, the early
days of the revolt in Herzegovina with which the war of
1875-1878 began.]

As Spalato must be looked on as the great object of a Dalmatian voyage, it may also be looked on as its centre. After Spalato the coast scenery changes its character in a marked way. Hitherto hills, comparatively low and utterly barren, come down straight to the sea, while the higher mountains are seen only farther inland. From this point the great mountains themselves come nearer to the water. We are thus reminded of the change in the political boundary, how from this point the Hadriatic territory of Austria and of Christendom becomes narrower and narrower, till we reach the stage when the old dominion of Ragusa becomes a mere fringe between the sea and the Turk, fenced in from the former land of Saint Mark by the two points at either end where the less dangerous infidel was allowed to spread himself to the actual sea-board. But as the mountains come nearer to the sea, a fringe of cultivation, narrower or wider, now spreads itself between them and the water. Small towns and villages, detached houses, land tilled with the vine and the olive, now skirt the bases of the mountains, in marked contrast to the mere stony hills of the earlier part of the voyage. The islands too among whose narrow channels we have to make our way change their character also. After Spalato, instead of mere uninhabited rocks, we come to islands of greater size, some of them thirty or forty miles long, islands several of which have a distinct place in history, islands containing towns and cities, and which are still seats of industry and cultivation. These are the islands which give such a marked character to the map of this part of the Hadriatic, and they form the most marked feature in the fourth day's voyage of the course from Trieste to Cattaro. The endless islands which we have seen along the northern part of the Dalmatian shore, bare and uninhabited rocks as many of them are, are without history. Some of the Croatian islands indeed have somewhat of a history; but with these we are not dealing; the barren archipelago of Zara could never have had any tale to tell. First we pass through the channel which divides the mainland from the large island of Brazza, distinguished at a glance by its solid shape from its endless long and narrow fellows. Dreary and rocky as it seems, it is the most populous and industrious of the group, and at one point of its coast, San Pietro, the steamer makes a short halt. So it does at the picturesque little port of Almissa on the mainland, a nest of houses and trees at the mountain's foot, standing so invitingly as to make the traveller wish for a longer sojourn. Then comes Makarska, where we are allowed a short glimpse of the little hill-side town, smaller and more Dalmatian than any that we have yet seen. Presently we plunge into the full intricacies of the Dalmatian seas. We pass through the narrow channel which parts the mainland from the eastern promontory of the long, slender island of Lesina--the _awl_. Here we come within old Hellenic memories. We are now within the full range of Greek colonization, though of Greek colonization only in its latest stage. Issa, now Lissa, Black Korkyra, now Curzola, amongst the islands, and Epidauros on the mainland, were all of them undoubted Greek settlements. But Issa and Pharos, the only ones to which we can fix a positive date, were colonized only in the first half of the fourth century, and Dionysios of Syracuse had a hand in their colonization. Lesina is Pharos, the ancient colony of the Ægæan Paros, whose name still lives on Slavonic lips in the shape of _Far_ or _Hvar_. It plays a considerable part in the history of Polybios, as the island of that Dêmêtrios whose crooked policy formed an important element in the affairs of mankind in the days when Greek and Roman history began to flow together into one stream. These islands form one of the highways by which Rome advanced to the possession of Illyricum, Macedonia, and Greece. But we see neither the ancient nor the modern city, neither Pharos nor Lesina; we merely skirt the island to find ourselves in the channel of Narenta. That name suggests yet another pirate power, later than that of Tenta and Dêmêtrios, that power of the old Pagania against which Venice, in her early days, had to wage so hard a struggle. We seem to be pressing on between the mainland and a long, slender, mountainous island; but our course suddenly turns; the seeming island is no other than the long peninsula of Sabioncello, a peninsula not Venetian but Ragusan. We get merely a glimpse down the gulf, at the end of which Turkish Klek once divided the possessions of the two maritime commonwealths, and still, nominally at least, breaks the continuity of Austrian dominion. But, if the peninsula was Ragusan, a narrow channel only parts it from an island which was a chief seat of the power of the rival city. We skirt the western horn of Sabioncello, and another turn leads us through the channel--narrower than any through which we have passed--which divides it from Curzola, Black Korkyra of old. We stop for a little while off the island capital, the fortress of Curzola, which was to the declining navy of Venice what Pola now is to the rising navy of Austria. This channel passed, we come to the last of the great islands. For miles and miles we skirt the Ragusan island of Meleda, long, slender, with its endless hills of no great height standing up like the teeth of a saw--a true sierra in miniature. Here volumes of scriptural controversy are open to us. As we are not tossed up and down in Hadria, but are floating along as on a lake or a river, we muse on the claims which all local and some independent authorities have set up for Illyrian Meleda, as against Phoenician Malta, to be the true seat of the shipwreck of Saint Paul. But Meleda can have its claims admitted only on the condition of being shut out from Hellenic fellowship, even though its barbarians were of a mood which led them to show no little kindness to strangers. It is hard also to understand how those who were making their way from Meleda to any point of Italy could have any possible business at Syracuse. At all events, with Meleda the island history ends, though the island scenery does not end as yet. Several islands, smaller than these more famous ones, but not so small as they look on the map, fringe the coast till we enter the haven of Gravosa, the port of modern Ragusa, with its thickly wooded shores, a marked contrast to the bleakness and barrenness of so many other points of the Dalmatian coast.

Ragusa, the city of argosies, the commonwealth which so long was the rival of Venice and which never stooped to be her subject, so thoroughly suggests maritime enterprise by her very name, that we are surprised to find that Ragusa herself has ceased to be a port of any moment. Her mighty walls, her castles, her more distant forts, still rise out of the sea, and the mightier wall of mountains just behind her still fence off her land, as the narrowest rim of Christendom, from the land of the infidel beyond. All this is as it was; modern military art has added to the defences of Ragusa, but it has not taken away her elder bulwarks. But her haven is now of the very smallest, and admits only vessels of the smallest size. The modern haven is at Gravosa, and the road which Sir Gardner Wilkinson describes as so well kept, but as useless because no carriages went upon it, is still as good and more useful. At this moment Ragusa bears the honourable character of a city of refuge for the unhappy ones who seek shelter under the government of a civilized state from the barbarian rule beyond the mountains. Her suburbs are crowded with women and children flying from the seat of war, for whom the charity both of the state and of private persons is doing much, but whose sufferings--as one who has seen them can bear witness--cry for the sympathy and help of all who have hearts and who have not invested in Turkish bonds. As we pass by and look on the city--no city surely fronts the sea more proudly than Ragusa--as we turn round to the island of La Croma, lying off what was Ragusa's harbour, the island which suggests the names of Richard of Poitou and of Maximilian of Mexico--the scene is so peaceful and lovely, the warlike defences look such mere things of the past, that it is hard indeed to believe that, just beyond the mountain barrier, warfare is going on in its bitterest and yet its noblest form--the struggle of an oppressed people to cast off the yoke of ages. This form of speech may grate somewhat on the received phrases of Western diplomacy; but, however we might be bound to write in England, in Dalmatia--so close to the facts--we may be allowed to write as all men in Dalmatia think and speak. We pass La Croma, and our time among the islands is over; no other that can be called more than a mere rock meets us between Ragusa and Cattaro. At last we enter the loveliest of inlets of the sea, the _Bocche di Cattaro_. A narrow strait leads us between points of land which were once Ragusan on the west and Venetian to the east, into the winding gulf, girded by mountains, and now for nearly its whole extent fringed by towns, villages, houses, cultivation in every form--a land where the sublimity of the rugged mountain has come into close partnership with the loveliness of the smiling dwelling-places of man. As we pass through the strait, a piece of barren mountain to the left marks the second piece of territory where the Turk was allowed to isolate the two commonwealths, and where, in name, his dominion still reaches to the shore of the lovely gulf. We pass on, as on the smoothest of lakes, round mountain headlands, with their rich fringe of life, by towns and villages, many of which have their own local history both in earlier and later times, till we reach the most distant of Dalmatian cities, Cattaro at the innermost point of her own unrivalled _Bocche_. Hemmed in between the mountains and the sea--though it seems almost strange to apply the word sea to the gentle waters of her harbour--with the mountains again rising on the other side, Cattaro seems indeed to be the end of its own world. Yet in the days of Venetian greatness, Cattaro was far indeed from being the last point of the dominion of Saint Mark. Climb the heights above the city, and the eye stretches far away along the Albanian coast, a coast along which many a city and island once bowed to the winged lion, till in fancy we track our course, as by stepping stones along the sea, to distant Crete and to more distant Cyprus.

Cattaro, the end of the outward journey, will also be the beginning of the journey back again. The little town, with its narrow paved streets, its little piazze, still keeps up the same Venetian tradition as elsewhere. And the walls of the fortress climbing far up the mountain show how firm was the grasp of the ruling city over its subjects. But at Cattaro and throughout the Bocche another feature strikes us which we do not see either at Spalato or at Ragusa. The churches do not all belong to one denomination; the Eastern, the Orthodox, Church, holds its own in this corner of Venetian or Austrian rule at least as firmly as its Latin rival. The fact is, what is forced upon our notice at every step, that, the further we go along this coast, the Italian element dies out and the Slavonic element grows. It is so in language, in dress, in everything. Zara, Spalato, Ragusa, Cattaro, each city is less and less Italian according to its geographical position. The inland country is, of course, Slave throughout. But at Cattaro the Slave element distinctly predominates, even in the town; Italian can hardly be said to be more than the best known among foreign languages. The pistol and yataghan worn in the belt, a general costume essentially the same as that of the Montenegrin, has gradually been growing upon us; here in Cattaro it is the rule, almost more than the rule. In short, the Bocchese, the Montenegrin, the Turkish rayah of Herzegovina, really differ in nothing but the difference of their political destinies. They are members of the same immediate family, whose fortunes have led them in three different directions. Now the religious tendency of the south-eastern Slaves, as is only natural from their geographical position, has always been towards the Eastern Church rather than the Western, towards the New Rome rather than towards the Old. Here, where the Slavonic element is so distinctly the stronger, the religious developement has taken its natural course, and the Orthodox population in Cattaro and all the coasts thereof is always a large minority, and in some places it actually outnumbers the Latins.

We have professed to give only the impressions of the outward voyage, though our account may have here and there been influenced by later impressions drawn from fuller observation on the way back. But the way back, and the fuller knowledge gained in its course, only brings out more strongly the intense charm of Dalmatian coast and mountain scenery, fitly united with the deep historic interest of cities which, though they seem to form a world apart by themselves, have played their part in the world's history none the less. No one can visit Dalmatia once without a wish that his first visit may not be his last; no one can take a glimpse of any of her cities without the desire that the glimpse may be only the forerunner of more perfect knowledge.

CURZOLA.

1881.

We part from Spalato; by the time that we have made two or three voyages in these seas, we shall find that there are several ways of reaching and parting from Spalato. We speak of course of ways by sea; by land there is but one way, and that way leads only to and from places at no great distance, and it does not lead to or from any place in the direction in which we are now bent. By sea the steamer takes two courses. One keeps along the mainland, that which allows a glimpse of the little towns of Almissa and Makarska, both nestling by the water's edge at the mountain's foot. Of these Almissa at least has an historical interest. Here Saint Mark was no direct sovereign; his lion, if we rightly remember, is nowhere to be seen, a distinction which, along this whole line of coast, Almissa alone shares with greater Ragusa. Was it a commonwealth by itself, cradled on the channel of Brazza like Gersau on the Lake of the Four Cantons? Or was it the haven of the inland commonwealth of Polizza, which, like Gersau and a crowd of other commonwealths, perished at the hands of their newborn French sister for the unpardonable crime of being old? But far more interesting is the other route of the steamers, that which leads us among the greater islands. Here, as soon as we pass Spalato, as soon as we pass the greatest monument of the dominion of Rome, we presently find ourselves in a manner within the borders of Hellas. We pass between Brazza and Solta, we skirt Lesina and think once more of its old Parian memories. We look out on Lissa, where the Hellenic name lives on with slighter change, but we are more inclined to dwell on those later memories which have made its name an unlucky one in our own day, a far luckier one in the days of our grandfathers. At last we make our first halt for study where a narrow strait divides the mainland, itself all but an island, from another ancient seat of Greek settlement, the once renowned isle of Curzola.

Curzola--such is its familiar Italian form--is the ancient Black Korkyra, and on Slavonic lips it still keeps the elder name in the shape of _Kerker_. But the sight of [Greek: hê melaina Korkyra] suggests a question of the same kind as that which the visitor is driven to ask on his first sight of Montenegro. How does a mass of white limestone come to be called the Black Mountain? Curzola can hardly be called a mass of white limestone; but the first glance shows nothing specially black about it, nothing to make us choose this epithet rather than any other to distinguish this Hadriatic Korkyra from the more famous Korkyra to the south. That some distinguishing epithet is needed is shown by the fact that, not so very long ago, a special correspondent of the _Times_ took the whole history of Corfu and transferred it bodily to Curzola. The reason given for the name is the same in Curzola and in Montenegro. The blackness both of the island and of the mountain is the blackness of the woods with which they are covered. True the traveller from Cattaro to Tzetinje sees no woods, black or otherwise; but he is told that the name comes from thick woods on the other side of the principality. So he is told that Black Korkyra was called from its thick woods, its distinctive feature as compared with the many bare islands in its neighbourhood. But no black woods are now to be seen in that part of the island which the traveller is most likely to see anything of. There were such, he is told; but they have been cut down on this side, while on the other side they still flourish. As things are now, Curzola is certainly less bare than most of its fellows; but the impression which it gives us is, of the two, rather that of a green island than of a black one. It is not green in the sense of rich verdure, but such trees as show themselves give it a look rather green than black. At any rate, the island looks both low and well-covered, as compared with the lofty and rocky mountains of the opposite peninsula of Sabioncello. The two are at one point, and that a point close by the town of Curzola, separated by a very narrow strait. And the nearness of the two formed no inconsiderable part of their history. There was a time when Curzola must have been, before all things, a standing menace to Sabioncello, and to the state of which Sabioncello formed an outpost. Sabioncello, the long, narrow, stony peninsula, all backbone and nothing else, formed part of the dominions of the commonwealth of Ragusa. Curzola was for three centuries and a half a stronghold of that other commonwealth which Ragusa so dreaded that she preferred the Turk as her neighbour. Nowhere does the winged lion meet us more often or more prominently than on the towers and over the gates of Curzola. And no wonder; for Curzola was the choice seat of Venetian power in these waters, her strong arsenal, the place for the building of her galleys. If Aigina was the eyesore of Peiraieus, Curzola must have been yet more truly the eyesore of Sabioncello.

It is only of what must have been the special eyesore of its Ragusan neighbours, of the fortified town of Curzola and of a few points in its near neighbourhood, that we can now speak. Curzola is one of the larger Dalmatian islands; and it is an island of some zoological interest. It is one of the few spots in Europe where the jackal still lingers. Perhaps there is no other, but, as we have heard rumours of like phænomenon in Epeiros, a decided negative is dangerous. We believe that, according to the best scientific opinion, "lingered" is the right word. The jackal is not an importation from anywhere else into Curzola; he is an old inhabitant of Europe, who has kept his ground in Curzola after he has been driven out of other places. But he who gives such time as the steamer allows him in the island to the antiquities of the town of Curzola need cherish no hope or fear of meeting jackals. He might as soon expect to meet with a horse. For, true child of Venice, Curzola knows neither horse nor carriage. Horses and carriages are not prominent features in any of the Dalmatian towns; but they may be seen here and there. They are faintly tolerated within the walls of Ragusa, and we have certainly seen a cart in the streets of Zara. But at Curzola they are as impossible as at Venice itself, though not for the same reason. Curzola does not float upon the waters; it soars above them. The Knidian emigrants chose the site of their town in the true spirit of Greek colonists. It is such another site as the Sicilian Naxos, as the Epidauros of the Hadriatic, as Zara too and Parenzo, though Zara and Parenzo can lay no claim to a Greek foundation. The town occupies a peninsula, which is joined to the main body of the island by a narrow isthmus. The positive elevation is slight, but the slope close to the water on each side is steep. From the narrow ridge where stands the once cathedral church, the streets run down on each side, narrow and steep, for the most part ascended by steps. The horses of the wave are the only steeds for the men of Black Korkyra, and those steeds they have at all times managed with much skill. The seafaring habits of the people take off in some measure from the picturesque effect of the place. There is much less to be seen, among men at least, of local costume at Curzola than at other Dalmatian towns. We miss the Morlacchian turbans which become familiar at Spalato; we miss the Montenegrin coats of the brave _Bocchesi_, which fill the streets of Cattaro, not without a meaning. Seafaring folk are apt to wear the dress of their calling rather than that of their race, and the island city cannot be made such a centre for a large rural population as the cities on the mainland. But, if the men to be seen at Curzola are less picturesque than the men to be seen at Spalato or Ragusa, their dwellings make up for the lack. Curzola is a perfect specimen of a Venetian town. It is singular how utterly everything earlier than the final Venetian occupation of 1420 has passed away. The Greek colonist has left no sign of himself but the site. Of Roman, of earlier mediæval, times there is nothing to be seen beyond an inscription or two, one of which, a fragment worked into the pavement of one of the steep streets, records the connexion which once was between Curzola and Hungary. With præ-Venetian inscriptions we may class one which is post-Venetian, and which records another form of foreign dominion, one which may be classed with that of Lewis the Great as at least better than those which went between them. From 1813 to 1815--a time memorable at Curzola as well as at Cattaro--the island was under English rule, and the time of English rule was looked on as a time of freedom, compared with French rule before or with Austrian rule both before and after. It is not only that an official inscription speaks of the island as "libertate fruens" at the moment when the connexion was severed; we believe that we are justified in saying that those two years live in Black-Korkyraian memory as the one time for many ages when the people of Black Korkyra were let alone.

The formerly cathedral church is the only building in the town of Curzola which suggests any thought that it can be older than 1420. Documentary evidence, we believe, is scanty, and contains no mention of the church earlier than the thirteenth century. In England we should at first sight be tempted to assign the internal arcades to the latter days of the twelfth; but the long retention of earlier forms which is so characteristic of the architecture of this whole region makes it quite possible that they may be no earlier than the Venetian times to which we must certainly attribute the west front. Setting aside a later addition to the north, which is no improvement, this little _duomo_ consists of a nave and aisles of five bays, ending in three round apses. Five bays we say, though on the north side there are only four arches; for the tower occupies one at the west end. The inner arcades and the west doorway are worthy of real study, as contributions to the stock of what is at any rate singular in architecture; indeed a more honourable word might fairly be used. The arcades consist of plain pointed arches rising from columns with richly carved capitals, and, like so many columns of all ages in this region, with tongues of foliage at their bases. Above is a small triforium, a pair of round arches over each bay; above that is a clerestory of windows which within seem to be square, but which outside are found to be broad pointed lancets with their heads cut off. In England or France such a composition as this would certainly, at the first sight of its general effect, be set down as belonging to the time of transition between Romanesque and Gothic, to the days of Richard of Poitou and Philip Augustus. And the proportions are just as good as they would be in England or France; there is not a trace of that love of ungainly sprawling arches which ruins half the so-called Gothic churches of Italy. But, when we look at the capitals, we begin to doubt. They are singularly rich and fine; but they are not rich and fine according to any received pattern. They are eminently not classical; they have nothing more than that faint Corinthian stamp which no floriated capital seems able quite to throw away; they do not come anything like so near to the original model as the capitals at Canterbury, at Sens, or even at Lisieux. But neither do they approach to any of the received Romanesque or Byzantine types, nor have they a trace of the freedom which belongs to the English foliage of days only a little later. They are more like, though still not very much like, our foliage of the fourteenth century; there is a massiveness about them, a kind of cleaving to the shape of the block, which after all has something Byzantine about it. Those on the north side have figures wrought among the foliage; the four responds have the four evangelistic symbols. Here then we cannot fail to find the lion of Saint Mark, but we find him only in his place as one of a company of four. Would the devotion of the Most Serene Republic have allowed its patron anywhere so lowly a place as this to occupy? Otherwise the character of the capitals, which extends to the small shafts in the triforium, might tempt us to assign a far later date to these columns and arches than their general effect would suggest. But at all events they are thoroughly mediæval; there is not the faintest trace of _Renaissance_ about them.

Outside the church, the usual mixed character of the district comes out more strongly. The addition to the north, and the tower worked in instead of standing detached, go far to spoil what would otherwise be a simple and well-proportioned Italian front. Both the round window--of course there is a round window--and the great doorway are worthy of notice. The window is not a mere wheel; the diverging lines run off into real tracery, such as we might see in either England or France. The doorway is a curious example of the way in which for a long time in these regions, the square head, the round arch, and the pointed arch, were for some purposes used almost indifferently. The tradition of the square-headed doorway with the arched tympanum over it never died out. We may believe that the mighty gateways and doorways of Diocletian's palace set the general model for all ages. But when the pointed arch came in, the tympanum might be as well pointed as round. Sometimes the pointed tympanum crowns a thoroughly round-headed doorway, and is itself crowned with a square spandril, looking wonderfully like a piece of English Perpendicular. In the west doorway at Curzola things do not go quite to such lengths as this; but they go a good way. The square doorway is crowned by a pointed tympanum, containing the figure of a bishop; over that again is a kind of canopy. This is formed of a round arch, springing from a pair of lions supported on projections such as those which are constantly used, specially at Curzola, for the support of balconies. The lions which in many places would have supported the columns of the doorway seem, though wingless, to have flown up to this higher post. For here the doorway has nothing to be called columns, nothing but small shafts, twisted and otherwise, continued in the mouldings of the arch. The cornice under the low gable is very rich; the tower is of no great account, except the parapet, and the octagon and cupola which crown it, a rich and graceful piece of work of that better kind of _Renaissance_ which we claim as really Romanesque.

In the general view of the town from the sea this tower counts for more than it does when we come close up to it in the nearest approach to a _piazza_ which Curzola can boast. It is the crown of the whole mass of buildings rising from the water. At Curzola the fortifications are far more to the taste of the antiquary than they are at Ragusa; they fence things round at the bottom, instead of hiding everything from the top. We may shut our eyes to a modern fort or two on the hills; the walls of the town itself, where they are left, are picturesque mediæval walls broken by round towers, on some of which the winged lion does not fail to show himself. He presides again over a _loggia_ by the seashore, one of those buildings with nondescript columns, which may be of any date, which most likely are of very late date, but which, because they are simply straightforward and sensible, are pleasing, whatever may be their date. Here they simply support a wooden roof, without either arch or entablature. And while we are seated under the lion in the _loggia_, we may look down at another lion in a sculptured fragment by the shore, in company with a female half-figure, something of the nature of a siren, Nereid, or mermaid, who seems an odd yoke-fellow for the Evangelist. He seems more in his natural place over the gate by which we shall most likely enter the town, a gate of 1643, itself square-headed, but with pointed vaulting within. Its inscriptions do not fail to commemorate the Trojan Antênor as founder of Black Korkyra, along with a more modern ruler, the Venetian John-Baptist Grimani. To the right hand, curiosity is raised by a series of inscriptions which have been carefully scratched out. About them there are many guesses and many traditions. One cannot help thinking that the deed was more likely to be done by the French than by the Austrian intruder. To scratch out an inscription is a foolish and barbarous act; but it implies an understanding of its meaning and a misapplied kind of vigour, which, of the two stolen eagles, was more likely to flourish under the single-headed one. The double-headed pretender, by the way, though he is seen rather too often in these parts, is seldom wrought in such lasting materials as Saint Mark's lion. So, when the good time comes, the stolen badge of Empire may, at Curzola as at Venice and Verona, pass away and be no more seen, without any destruction of monuments, old or new.

We are now fairly in the town. The best way to see Curzola thoroughly is for the traveller to make his way how he will to the ridge of the peninsula, and then systematically to visit the steep and narrow streets, going in regular order down one and up another. There is not one which does not contain some bit of domestic architecture which is well worth looking at. But he should first walk along the ridge itself from the gate by the isthmus to the point where the ground begins to slope to the sea opposite Sabioncello. Hard by the gate is the town-hall, _Obcina_, as it is now marked in the native speech. The mixed style--most likely of the seventeenth century--of these parts comes out here in its fulness. Columns and round arches which would satisfy any reasonable Romanesque ideal, support square windows which are relieved from ugliness by a slight moulding, the dentel--akin to our Romanesque billet--which is seen everywhere. But in a projecting building, which is clearly of a piece with the rest, columns with nondescript capitals support pointed arches. Opposite to the town-hall is one of the smaller churches, most of which are of but little importance. This one bears the name of Saint Michael, and is said to have formerly been dedicated to Orthodox worship. It shows however no sign of such use, unless we are to count the presence of a little cupola over the altar. We pass along the ridge, by a house where the projection for balconies, so abundant everywhere, puts on a specially artistic shape, being wrought into various forms, human and animal. Opposite the cathedral the houses display some characteristic forms of the local style, and we get more fully familiar with them, as we plunge into the steep streets, following the regular order which has been already prescribed. Some graceful scrap meets us at every step; the pity is that the streets are so narrow that it needs some straining of the neck to see those windows which are set at all high in the walls. For it is chiefly windows which we light upon: very little care seems to have been bestowed on the doorways. A square or segmental-headed doorway, with no attempt at ornament, was thought quite enough for a house for whose windows the finest work of the style was not deemed too good. Indeed the contrasts are so odd that, in the finest house in Curzola, in one of the streets leading down eastward from the cathedral, a central story for which _magnificent_ would not be too strong a word is placed between these simple doorways below and no less simple square-headed windows above. This is one of the few houses in Curzola where the windows are double or triple divided by shafts. Most of the windows are of a single light, with a pointed, an ogee, or even a round head, but always, we think, with the eminently Venetian trefoil, and with the jambs treated as a kind of pilaster. With windows of this kind the town of Curzola is thick-set in every quarter. We may be sure that there is nothing older than the Venetian occupation, and that most of the houses are of quite late date, of the sixteenth and even the seventeenth century. The Venetian style clave to mediæval forms of window long after the _Renaissance_ had fully set in in everything else. And for an obvious reason; whatever attractions the _Renaissance_ might have from any other point of view, in the matter of windows at least it hopelessly failed. In the streets of Curzola therefore we meet with an endless store of windows, but with little else. Yet here and there there are other details. The visitor will certainly be sent to see a door-knocker in a house in one of the streets on the western slope. There Daniel between two lions is represented in fine bronze work. And some Venetian effigies, which would doubtless prove something for local history, may be seen in the same court. Of the houses in Curzola not a few are roofless; not a few have their rich windows blocked; not a few stand open for the visitor to see their simple inside arrangements. The town can still make some show on a day of festival; but it is plain that the wealth and life of Curzola passed away when it ceased to be the arsenal of Venice. And poverty has one incidental advantage; it lets things fall to ruin, but it does not improve or restore.