Studies Of Travel : Greece

The traveller who enters the older Hellenic world by way of Corfu, and who
leaves that island by an evening steamer, will awake the next morning
within a region which even modern geography and politics allow to be wholly
Hellenic. As long as light serves him, he still keeps along the channel which
divides free Corfu from enslaved Epeiros; night cuts him off from the sight of
the mouth of the Ambrakian Gulf, and of the point where modern diplomacy
has decreed that Greek nationality shall, as far as diplomacy can affect such
matters, come to an end. The next morning's dawn finds him off the mouth
of the outer Corinthian Gulf. To the east he is shown the position, on one
side, of Patras, the old Achaian city which St. Andrew a thousand years back
so manfully defended against Slave and Saracen, on the other side, of
Mesolongi, whose fame belongs wholly to our own day. We call up the two
sieges—the one where the civilian Mavrokordatos, the one hero whom the
Fanariot aristocracy gave to the cause of Greece, beat back the Ottoman
from its mud walls; the other made more famous still by that fearful sally of
the besieged, when, like the men of Ithômê or Eira, they cut their way
through the thickest bayonets of the Egyptian invader. There may be some
to whom the record of those great deeds may be an unknown tale, but who
may yet remember how Mesolongi saw the last and worthiest days of the life
of Byron. Of Patras, of Mesolongi, however, we have hardly so much as a
distant glimpse; we are told where they are, and that is all.