This is the first in a series of occasional posts on 18th– and 19th-century traveller writers and their responses to the mountains of Greece! It follows up on our earlier post on Mount Lykaion in classical antiquity.
Edward Dodwell in Greece
We have written about the Irish travel writer and artist Edward Dodwell a couple of times before, on Hymettos and on Parnitha.
Dodwell travelled through Greece in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He published an account of his travels in A Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece in two volumes in 1819.
He is most famous these days for his pictures. He was accompanied on his travels by a professional artist, Simone Pomardi. Dodwell was also a talented artist in his own right. One of the distinctive things about his work was his use of a camera obscura, which he lugged around with him right across Greece.
A lot of northern European travellers were fascinated by the mountains of Greece. They seem to have thought of them as places where they could get closer to the classical past, as if going up to the summits allowed them to see the landscapes of ancient history stretching out in front of their gaze.
Dodwell was no exception. He went up repeatedly to mountain summits, often stopping for hours on end to sketch when he got there, and often brushing aside dangerous situations and conditions along the way.
J. Walker, ‘Map of Greece’, from Dodwell, Classical and Topographical Tour Vol. 1, facing p. x
Bandits
Dodwell visited Mount Lykaion in Arkadia in late February 1806. By this stage he had already had a number of distant encounters with groups he refers to as ‘bandits’.
Sometimes there seems to be a note of admiration in his description of them (‘the great band of Captain George Kolokotrone’, II, 373). At other times, however, he seems to view them with irritation, because of the way they interrupt his attempts to investigate the ancient sites of Arkadia and Messenia.
Earlier in February he had watched from a distance a gun battle in the village of Alitouri (modern Stenyklaros), and then been repeatedly disturbed by warnings about approaching bandits while trying to sketch in the ruins of Messene and on the summit of Mount Ithome.
Edward Dodwell, ‘The Alpheios near Karitena’
A human head
Two weeks later he and his travelling companions are approaching Mount Lykaion from the west, setting out from the village of Ampelone (modern Ambeliona).
He repeatedly emphasizes the roughness and remoteness of the terrain, but even so he is not prepared for what they find on the way:
In one of these passes we found a human head, which, from the state of preservation, appeared not to have been cut off more than two days, and from the tonsure of the hair, it was evidently an Albanian Christian, and it had the appearance of a beardless youth with a fine physiognomy. It had no wound, except some bruises, caused perhaps by its having been thrown down the rocks at some distance from the place where it was severed from the body. (II, 390)
Dodwell explains that the bandits cut off the heads of their fallen comrades in order to prevent the Turks from carrying them off and using them to claim rewards. ‘This head’, he tells us, ‘had probably undergone a similar fate, as we searched for the body in vain’ .
Dodwell and his companions bury the head beneath an oak tree and move on.
In some ways the bandits who inhabit these mountains are a distraction from Dodwell’s quest for classical ruins.
But in other ways he represents them as if they are a part of the exotic past that he is seeking to recapture, thrilling but also unsettling relics from antiquity.
The bandit’s head is equivalent to the many heads from ruined classical statues that Dodwell describes and depicts elsewhere in his travels.
Edward Dodwell, ‘Fragments on the Temple of Theseus’
A fallen horse
They struggle on to the summit. On the way one of their horses falls over a precipice and has to be rescued with a rope:
Having proceeded fifty minutes, we lost all trace of the way, which became so rugged and perilous, that we were obliged to descend from our horses, and keep close to the edge of a tremendous precipice, rising almost perpendicularly from the craggy ravines, and savage glens below. Here we contemplated some of the wildest scenery in Greece. One of our horses fell at the edge of the precipice, and would have been dashed to pieces had not one of its fore legs stuck in a fissure of the rock. (II, 391)
Edward Dodwell, ‘View of Orchomenos in Arcadia’
Once again Dodwell is perpetuating a very ancient image of Arkadia as wild place far removed from urban civilisation.
Finally on the summit
They finally reach the top to be greeted by ‘a cold, bleak wind’, snow, thunder, and the sound of musket-fire from below in the valley:
In a short time the clouds were dispersed by the sweeping violence of the northern wind; and when the atmosphere became clear, no words can convey an adequate idea of the enchanting scene which burst upon us. The snow-crested summits of Taygeton rose in rugged majesty, and towering pride, over the smooth and even surface of the Messenian gulf. (II, 392)
The thunder has arrived right on queue: this is the mountain of Zeus, the god of lightning, where he was worshipped in antiquity. Dodwell imagines the scene:
The lofty thundering god of Lycaeon, when invested with all his glory, and surrounded by his pagan worshippers, could not have made a more magnificent display. (II, 392)
As so often, the mountaintop seems to be a place that for Dodwell brings him much closer to the classical past.
The route
I haven’t walked on any of the routes on western Lykaion, and obviously it’s very hard to retrace Dodwell’s route when he spends much of the journey without knowing where he is, so I’m not going to offer a precise route for now–but I might repost this with a full route once I have had the chance to explore!
If you know this side of the mountain and can work out what route Dodwell was taking I would love to know! You can read the full version of Dodwell’s description here.
In the mean time, you can see the standard route from Ambeliona to the Mount Lykaion summit here.
The standard route approaching from Ano Karyes in the east is in our earlier post here.