The nearer East

Front matter

EDITED BY

H. J. MACKINDER, M.A.

Edited by H. J. MACKINDER, M.A.

Preface

The aim of this volume is to present the causative influence of geographical conditions upon Man in a certain region. As the operation of the same physical feature may often be traced in diverse aspects of human life, the same idea has to be expressed more than once in other, and sometimes the same, words in such a treatise as the following. The public for which this series is designed by its promoters is so various, that the first essential is to be generally intelligible. In the matter of the orthography of proper names, therefore, I have attempted no scholarly precision. Philological transliterations of, e.g.y Arabic or Turkish words are eschewed. Such recognised conventions as Bedawins " are retained. To the unfamiliar Asiatic names the Royal Geographical Society's compromise system has been applied ; but familiar names, e.g. in the Holy Land, or those usually transliterated on a familiar system, such as the Latin rendering of Greek, have been left alone. It is useless to write Evvia for Euboea, if Piraeus is not to be Pireefs. As a guide to pronunciation, an accent has been placed on the stress syllable of the less familiar names on their first occurrence.

D. G. H.

ix

Contents

FIRST PAR T

CHAI'TEK FACE

I. Area and Position i

Chapter II

The character of man's life is determined primarily by the Relief of the land, exercising a various influence, especially through the climatic conditions. In treating, however, of any region in a Temperate Zone, we must bear in mind that its own Relief will not be the first cause of its climate, but will act only as a secondary agent upon contending influences of extreme zones on either hand. The cold currents in the atmosphere of the Nearer East are drawn from the Russian and Siberian steppes : its warm airs originate in Equatoria. The seas, which lie wholly within its boundaries, are not its main reserves of moisture, nor are those of its tracts like the Persian Desert and the Arabian Plateau, which experience tropical heats, the main determinants of its aridity.

This influence of local Relief on the races of mankind is modified by their recollection of other regions, in which they may formerly have dwelt, and yet more by the influence of other groups living under different physical conditions. It will be, therefore, necessary to glance in passing both at the origin of races and the causes of their present distribution, and, further, at their natural opportunities for communication.

The better to survey the superficial aspect of the Nearer East, we will envisage our region as part of a relief model of the globe, which w^e are to clothe in imagination with proper soils and organic life.

The eye, which having surveyed Central Europe has been attracted down the great depression of the Danube and up to the remotest sources of its right bank affluents, is arrested by a continuous curving swell of the land. High, precipitous, and very broad at the north end, the mountains which compose this swell shrink greatly both in height and breadth as the curve turns south-eastward, then rise again into an imposing pyramid, only to drop once more as the bend swings round to true east. Thereafter the elevation rises steadily, with one slight check, to a broad ganglion of peaks, whence, after a last dip, it is carried high and almost straight eastward, till it falls by a steep stairway to the Black Sea. This swell is the Balkan watershed. The mountain mass at the end of the curve is the butt of the North Albanian Alps, which throw huge fibres through Montenegro to the Adriatic, to complete the partition of the Peninsula. The pyramid, which springs up between two depressions, is the mighty northern slope of Liubotrn, the butt and crown of the Shar range ; the second ganglion, which closes a gradual rise to the east, is the syenite group of Vitocha and the Rila Dagh, south of Sophia ; and the straight continuation thence to the Black Sea is the Haemus" or proper Balkan system. On the outer face of this great curve begins the Nearer East," as for present purposes we are to understand that region.

Here is a continuous parting of waters, but not, orographically, a continuous mountain range. For the swell, so far as its composition is known, is made up of a succession of oblique chains radiating to south-west and south-east, as from a common centre in the north-west. And though their foothills interlock to make an unbroken horizontal watershed, the integral ranges themselves, prolonged to the south, give a vertical, not a horizontal, direction to the main structural lines of the Balkan Peninsula, dividing the land into long Belts, which may communicate more readily with what lies to north or south of them, whether sea or land, than with one another (Fig. 2).

The westernmost of these vertical Belts bears the general name Albania, being, as to its northern part, all the territory that intervenes between the main range of the North Albanian Alps and the start of a main vertical Spine in the Shar Mountains, and as to its southern part, such land as divides that Spine from the Adriatic Sea, into which the original ganglion, continued by the Montenegrin system, runs round the head of the Skutari Lake.

Over- 6 00 feet '0^/.:^ £n^ti..ih Htles Z.

Fig. 2. — The Balkan Peninsula, showing the general scheme of the Mountain Ranges.

The largest part of the Albanian Belt is mountain, being the western half of the complex system of the Spine, which, originated by the single and lofty chain of Shar, runs due south to the extremity of the land.

This long limestone Spine, which assumes bolder and barer outlines as it runs southward to the metamorphic i6 systems of Greece; is orographically not very well known. Lateral pressure, exerted from the Adriatic side, has crumpled up the ridges in crabbed confusion. But the broad fact may be stated, that it throws off at constant intervals great ribs which, on the eastern side especially, tend to curve upwards against the course of the main Spine, and, mingling their roots, to lock the intervening valleys. Hence there are found on the Macedonian flank a succession of low basins of greater or less extent, some still occupied in part by lakes, others, of which the plains of Monastir and Thessaly are the most considerable examples, now drained almost dry by natural outflows.

On the western or Albanian side the ribs are equally frequent and perverse. They do not, however, recurve so much towards the Spine, but make long alignments of river valleys trending northward, rather than enclose lake-basins. From the Black Drin to the Voyiitza, Albania is disposed in deep and narrow grooves, denuded at one end of the soil which is to make marsh at the other. These disastrous conditions are modified, however, in the south of the Belt, coincidently with a change in the direction of the rivers. For those that spring in the ganglion of Mezzovo follow more faithfully the general trend of the Spine, whose lateral chains are hardly to be called any longer ribs, but a thickening of the Spine itself. Amid the lower hills to the west appear upland lake-basins and plains, such as that of Janina, which drains by a subterranean outlet. The parallels of the Spine align the sea, throwing out short spurs, which form breakwaters, leaving less room for marshes. The coasts are sheltered by the long island line of Corfu. But the land is still terribly broken, and the ranges which compose the central Spine are not less high and steep, and are more barren, than the northern Grammos or Shar. The rivers, in their natural state, serve to impede man far more than to aid him ; for during the most of the year, owing to the heavy rain and snow falls of this Adriatic slope, they sweep along with currents too full to be forded, while they are never at any part navigable, always dry when most

I

I needed, and sunk too deep in their limestone troughs to be turned upon the thirsty lands of their banks.

Such is Albania, closed at the lower end by the shallow inlet of Arta, which leaves only one narrow passage under the face of the Spine — a Thermopylae of Western Greece — to admit to the southern extremity of the Belt, which is politically Greek. This in its structure is not different to south Albania, being disposed in a series of moderate valleys enclosed between not lofty lateral offshoots of the neighbouring Spine, and containing lacustrine deposits and a chain of actual lakes, about which agriculture is possible and profitable, though small in extent.

Parallel to its coasts and to the general trend of its ranges, the south end of this western Belt has a chain of mountainous but fertile islands, which are in intimate geographical connection with it, sharing to the full its sheltered immunity from the north-easterly scourge of Greece, and its copious Adriatic rainfall, but free from the maleficent influence of the Albanian rivers and the south-westerly exposure of the Albanian shores. In every other physical respect Corfu is a favoured fragment of lower Albania. The other five larger isles, with their dependent islets, Santa Mavra excepted, have less continental character, and group more fitly with the southern sea-girt prolongations of the Spine. Kefalonia, the largest of the group and set farther than the others into the sea, possesses so much higher a relief than any other point either of the islands or the nearest mainland, that it is largely responsible for its own frequent rains, and enjoys greater variety of climate than its fellow-isles. Zante, again, though much smaller, is hardly less an independent unit, blessed with a broad deep plain and a fair port, but cursed with too frequent earth-tremors, of which its bitumen springs afford constant warning. The rest of the Seven Isle group are no better than small dependent rocks, Cerigo not being reckoned into the account. For that island has no connection with the group other than is due to a tradition of political union. It is a prolongation of the

B i8

Malevos range, and a visible link in its chain of connection with the Cretan highlands.

The Spine of the mainland has been already summarily described; but it may detain the eye a moment longer as we pass to the second vertical Belt. For this is the most important, because the longest, structural line in the European part of the Nearer East, and its course is not exhausted on the mainland, but is carried on by half drowned peaks from the Morea even to Crete.

It starts, as we have seen, in the huge Shar range, whose highest peak, Liubotrn, though never yet accurately measured, may be taken to overtop by some hundreds of feet all other points of the Balkan Peninsula, even Musalla in the Rila group, or the majestic Olympus. Itself impassable, the Shar is easily rounded on the north by way of the two depressions that appeared in the Swell, when our eye first scanned the concave curve of the Balkan Divide ; and through these is conducted the northernmost of two great roads, which cross the Peninsula from east to west. From its southern butt, below the Vardar head, the Shar throws off a great eastern spur, which, running obliquely south-east to the elbow of the Vistritza, leaves space between itself and the main Spine for the lake-basins of Presba, Malo Jezero, and Kastoria, and throws up one superb peak, Peristeri, the dominant feature of the plain of Monastir. Subsidiary ranges, leaving this again on the east, bound the Monastir plain and enclose the lake-basin of (3strovo ; and of these one, running to the Vardar at the Iron Gate, and another, which does not die down till it reaches the Vardar plain, north of the Vistritza estuary, define the main divisions of western Macedonia.

The main Spine keeps due south, first as Galichica, then, when it enters a Greek-speaking land, as Grammos, leaving on its right the gorge of the Black Drin, wherein lies Dibra, the lake of Ochrida, and the low-lying basin of Goritza, and throws off westward spurs between the Albanian rivers, of which the most noteworthy towers above Berat into the great Tomar, nearly 8000 feet high.

But the main Spine rises to a yet higher peak, Samanna, far seen as a ghttering point from the block-houses on the Greek frontier, ere it falls at the north-westernmost angle of Thessaly to the Zygos or Mezzovo gap, whence part more races, rivers, and ranges than from any other point in the Peninsula. Of the ranges which thence trend westward we have spoken above, though not by name — of Vradeton, better known under its ancient title of Tymphe ; of Mishikeli, which, curving round the Drynos head, swells into the group whose vast Acroceraunian walls " close the northward prospect from Corfu ; and of the lower ranges, which, declining towards the Gulf of Arta, contain the gloomy subterranean waters of Acheron and Cocytus, and the much sung rock of Suli. But the most famous offshoot of Zygos is that which starts from the eastern slope, and, after a low interval of rounded sandstone hills, bends north-eastward as a succession of short oblique ranges to the mighty many-peaked group of Olympus and the eastern sea.

From the southern butt of Shar to the Zygos knot the Spine itself is not so formidable but that it might be crossed by many other trunk roads than that single ill-kept track from Monastir to Durazzo by way of Ochi ida and Elbassan, which is the old Egnatian Way," were it not for the savage character of its eastern slopes, which has formed and fosters the rude nature of the men of Dibra and Goritza. And when, south of Zygos, the ridge dominates a softer prospect, at the same time it becomes itself more rugged and abrupt. The limestone parallels, abruptly folded and diagonally cleft by the Aspro river, which constitute Pindus, are very difficult of passage. There are only two fairly practicable summer tracks in all the length, and no easy pass until the ganglion of Velukhi is left behind and two lateral chains are thrown off right and left ; of which the last, famous in history as Othrys, bends round the Gulf of Volo to Pelion, and after forking south by way of the Magnesian tongue to the chain of islands of which Skiathos is the first, is joined to Kissavos (Ossa), and divided only by the narrow cleft of Tempe from the roots of the Olympus system. The right-hand offshoot of Velukhi forms the Acarnanian group, east and south of the Gulf of Arta. Thereafter the Spine opens out a low col, west of Karpenisi, giving easy traverse ; but immediately beyond, trending south-eastward and changing its constitution to metamorphic, it throws up 6xia, a rocky ganglion, whence chains radiate on ail hands, west to Arabokefalon and Varassova of the yEtolian group, south to the peak of Kiona, highest point on Greek soil, and eastward in the long oblique line of Oeta, which ends, as Ptoon, above the Boeotian basin, only to emerge again in the high Euboic chain and the islands of the eastern Cyclad group.

The Spine itself continues at a great elevation through a series of storied peaks, whose old Greek names are more familiar than the Romaic — Vardusi (Corax), Liakura (Parnassus), Palaeovouno (Helicon), to the lower range of Elatea (Cithaeron). Here is the last important fork. The main Spine, keeping its direction, falls rapidly through the Attic hills, re-emerges, and at last dies away in the western chain of Cyclad isles. But a right-hand offshoot, which has declined through the famous Geraneian heights almost to sea-level at the Corinthian Isthmus, springs up again in the many-peaked semi-island of the Morea, which is nothing but a single mass of mountain, most uniformly uplifted in the north, hollow in the centre, and ribbed vertically on either hand of its heart by four ridges, which all start from the ganglion of the North Arcadian Alps. Of these the first and easternmost runs down the Argolic Peninsula into the islands of Hydra and Spetsae ; the second fringes the hollow heart on the east, and under many names, of which Malevos or Parnon stands for its highest point, continues to the sea at Cape Malea and re-emerges in Cerigo ; the third skirts the west of the hollow and rises into beautiful Taygetus ere falling to Cape Matapan; the fourth and westernmost is that chain of many names which passes through Elis and Messenia to enter the sea at Cape Gallo.

Continued from Cerigo by way of Cerigotto and a sunken reef, the Spine emerges for the last time in Crete. This long island must originally have been three units, of which the first is represented now by the lofty chains of the White Mountains, Kedros, and Psiloriti (Ida) ; the second by the group of Lasithi (Dicte) with Kofina ; and the third by the so-called eastern Lasithi, or mountains of Sitia. The three massifs are divided now by low tracts, upheaved by a pressure working from the south-west, whose not exhausted travail may be gauged by the fact that the ancient quays of the western city of Selinos are now nearly twenty feet above the water-mark.

The other islands that depend on the Spine of the I^eninsula or its offshoots, the northern Sporades, and all the Cyclades, need only be mentioned, for they are too small to be affected by their own Relief so much as by the Relief of the mainlands about them.

In enumerating the recurving chains thrown off eastward by the Spine, we have noted already the most significant feature in the relief of the Second Belt, namely, its series of basins. As the eye travels southward over the model of Macedonia, it must follow four grooves, more or less parallel (Fig. 3). On the extreme right, and still on the Albanian flank of the Spine, the long gorge of the Black Drin, widest below Dibra, leads at last to a deep basin, filled wholly, except for the black Struga strand, by the blue waters of Ochrida. The rib which hems the lake on the south, bounds on the north a second basin not less wide, but occupied only in small part by the Malik Lake. This is the rich and populous vale of Goritza, crossed by the Devol not far below its source above Biklista. Next in order is a short groove lying immediately under the Macedonian slope of the Spine, and hemmed in on the east by its main lateral offshoot, which holds the lakes of Presba, Malo Jezero, and Kastoria, each with a broad northern and eastern strand of fat soil, and carries southward the headwaters of the Vistritza. Third comes that most important groove, which determines the character of the whole Belt. Opening under the southern flank of Shar, from the gentle watershed between the Morava and the broad head valley of the Vardar, it is continued beyond a rugged belt by the largest of the Macedonian basins, the rich plain of Monastir or Vitolia, drained entirely by the greatest tributary of the Vardar. With hardly an interval this passes on the south into the smaller basin of Ostrovo and Kailer, still filled in part by a lake, and beyond the flcx.X.l^cx,jy.a

Fig. 3. — Macedonia.

Vistritza and the low Cambunian range it is resumed by an immense expanse girt on every hand by hills (Fig. 4). The lake, which once spread over all this Thessalian plain, and flowed out to sea through rifts on each side of Ossa, has shrunk to a little mere in the south-east corner, leaving the southern outflow dry ; but the northern rift, deep-wooded Tempe, still passes the drainage of the upper plain down the channel of the Salamvria. A broad belt, formed by the eastern offshoots of the Velukhi and Oxia gangliay and fringed on the east by small deltaic tracts, shuts off the last hollow in this central groove, the basin of Boeotia, once filled as to its northern part with the Copaic marsh, but now drained by the energy of French and English engineers, who have re-opened and enlarged old subterranean out-

FiG. 4.— Thessaly.

flows, partly natural, and given the Hellenic kingdom its largest arable area outside Thessaly.

The eastward curve of the Spine to the sea closes this long chain of basins, and with them the second main Belt ; but in its northern part there remains yet to be noted on the east a fourth parallel groove, traversed in all its length by the greatest stream of the Peninsula. Swift and much broken by rapids in all its upper course, choked by sands in its lower reaches, the Vardar affords no through waterway ; but its long and gently inclined valley, only once narrowed to a gorge, conducts an easy land-road to the heart of the Peninsula, and spreads out on the south into an immense deltaic flat which, united to the alluvia of the Vistritza, rivals the basin of Monastir in extent. These two broad plains, lowland and upland, the Emathian and the Pelagonian, made the great Macedonia of the past, and will be the determinants of its fate in the future.

East of the long Vardar valley three ranges start from three ganglia on the Balkan Curve and run south, penning between their respective spurs two large rivers, the Struma and the Mesta. This mountain tract may be taken to be the third Belt of the Peninsula, corresponding in political nomenclature to eastern Macedonia, and the western part of Rumelia. Its three vertical ranges increase in scale from west to east. The first, known under many names, but chiefly as the Plashkavitza, Kursha Balkan, and Beshik chains, falls on the south into a low alluvial plain filled by a line of marshy lakes, draining to the Gulf of Rendina. But it rises again in an interlaced group of minor chains ; and these run out southwards in three long promontories, of which the two on the west are low, but the third, ere it sinks below sea, throws up the 6000 feet of Athos. On its eastern flank the main range puts out long spurs, which, confronted across the Struma by others of the second and higher range, as the Perim and Boz mountains, break up the valley into three basins. The valley of the Mesta, lying beyond the peak of Perim, whose shape and position make it not less imposing than its loftier neighbours in the Rila and Despoto groups across the stream, is narrower and wilder and, therefore, more exclusively pasture and forest than that of the Struma. The Perim range falls on the south, like its western parallel, to a low plain, and likewise also, ere reaching the sea, rises again in the Bunar group, and sinking once more reappears in the island of Thasos. Last and highest of the three main ranges of this Belt is that which, starting from the syenite rocks of Vitocha, reaches its greatest elevation in the Rila group, and is continued by the broad and shaggy mass of the Despoto chain, anciently Rhodope, and by three islands, Samothrace, a solitary peak 5000 feet high, Imbros, low and rocky, and Lemnos, still lower but volcanic, plain and arable.

All the length of the coast below the butts of the three main ranges, extends a low tract of varying width, and for the most part both fertile above measure and genial because sheltered from the north, which permits of easy passage from west to east. But, being fringed by almost continuous sea-marsh, this malarious strip hardly permits sea access between Dedeagach and Kavalla.

The eye which, since it left the Vardar, has been arrested by ridge upon ridge each higher and wilder than the last, comes suddenly over the bare peaks of the Despoto chain upon a very different prospect. Spurs, densely wooded, fall abruptly to an immense lowland, roughly triangular, with apex lying high up on the left, between the Rhodope and the Haemus, which are its nearly equilateral sides. The sea forms a base, which would trend fairly straight north-eastward from the Dardanelles to the lagoons of Burgas, were it not for an intrusive mass of plutonic rock, a detached bit of Asia, which breaks the line half-way, carrying Constantinople on its low crest. This triangle is the fourth and last main division of the European Nearer East — those fat Rumelian plains of the Maritza basin, which are, so to speak, the vast home-farm of whatever Power may chance to rule in the capital city of the Eastern Empire (Fig. 5). Seen from the top of its mighty western wall the triangle seems one unbroken plain ; but in reality it is crossed horizontally by a low swell, through which the Maritza breaks at Harmanli ; and this, connected with a shaggy group of hills which align the Black Sea, and continued on the Marmora coast into the Gallipoli Peninsula, separates the basin of the river into upper and lower parts, centred respectively on Philippopolis and Adrianople, and constitutes now a political frontier. The northern wall of the triangle is less savage than the western ; for a lower range, made up of the Sredna and Karaja chains, which starts independently from the Rila ganglion and lies parallel to the main Balkan, graduates the rise from the south and interposes the deep vales of Karlovo and rose-growing Kasanlik below the abrupt fall of the watershed. For the rest the immense treeless basin, drained by slow-flowing earthy streams, varies its monotonous fertility with little but occasional marshes, even from its apex at Ikhtiman, where the most impor-

FiG. 5.— Runielia.

tant gate of the Nearer East admits the Sophia railway, to its natural outlets of -^nos and Dedeagach by the Maritza mouth. But so insignificant and narrow is the rise which divides from the Marmora coast the low headwaters of the Erkene, the main left-bank affluent of the Maritza, that Rodosto and the Golden Horn serve for ports to Rumelia as well as those to which the right-bank railway conducts directly from Demotika ; and Constantinople draws its supplies from European cornlands as easily as from the gardens of opposite Asia.

Such is the so-called Balkan Peninsula, the north-eastern part of which is, perhaps, more properly to be counted part of the continental mass of Europe. The true peninsular dependency begins to south of a line drawn from the head of the Gulf of S. Juan di Medua to that of Salonica through the low basin region of western Macedonia, which is continued by a deep marine trench from Olympus to Gallipoli.

The relief of most of the western part of the Balkan Peninsula is treated thoroughly by A. Tuma in his Griechenland^ Makedomen iind Sud Albanien, an official commentary on the Austrian Staff Map. There is no similar authority for the Eastern part, but much may be gleaned from the geographical chapters in C. Jirifek's Ftirsienthuui Bulgariens as to all but Turkish Rumelia. For that, as for N. Albania, I know no comprehensive authority. One must rifle the travellers. Murray's Constantinople describes the capital and its environs excellently. The Thracian Islands are well dealt with in H. F. Tozers Islands of the ^gean.

Of less known districts Middle Albania and Epirus have been illuminated by the work of Baldacci and Hassert, botanists {P. J/., 1897, pp. 175, 198), and the Macedonian side of the Spine by that of geologists, Cvijic, Die Macedonischen Seen (Mitth. d. Ung. Geogr. Gesellschaft, 1900), and Oestreich, Reisen im Vilajet Kosovo (Verh. d. Ges. fiir Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1899). The Thessalian border chains equally by the travels of Philippson ( Thessalien U7id Epirus\ and the yEtolian by those of Woodhouse {yEtolia). For Greece proper there is a good deal that is useful in Dr. Clon Stephanos' La Grece an point de vue physique.

Crete awaits a geographical monograph. Spratt is still the best authority. But several of the smaller islands have received special attention of late, e.g. Kefalonia from A. Issel (Mem. d. Soc. Geog. Italiana, 1896). Cerigo from R. Leonhard (/*. M.^ Erganz, 128). Milos from Ehrenburg {Inselgruppe Milos). Santorin from Hiller von Gartringen ( Thera).

Chapter III

• The ferry across those marine rivers, the Bosphoriis or the Dardanelles, lands the traveller in a new continent, but not in any sense in a nev^ geographical world. The shallow cut, which divides the Castle of Europe from the Castle of Asia, pierces a mass of plutonic rock on which Stambul and Skutari alike stand ; and opposite cliffs of the Dardanelles show the same stratification. Two submarine ridges connect the European and Asiatic isles of the ^gean, the one making a chain of shallows from Skyros to Chios, the other bounding the central deep-sea trench on the south with a line of continuous shoal from the northern Cyclades to Nikaria and Samos. Moreover, as we shall see, the general trend and character of the Asia Minor mountain ranges are not other than the trend and character of the south-eastern ranges of Europe.

As the student of the relief model would see it, the land, over which his eye has been travelling south-eastward, sinks to an almost imperceptible streak of sea, which, starting from one great land-locked basin, broadens out into a second and smaller pool and again narrows to a thread. Beyond this the land rises again rapidly and forms a great blunt-headed Peninsula, whose western front supplies a third side to the oblong sea which contains the Archipelago. On the north its coast continues the northern land limit of the Nearer East. On the south it carries to eastward the hne of the islands which, from Cerigo through Crete to Rhodes, set a southern limit to the ^gean shallows and a northern limit to the profounder eastern basin of the Mediterranean, the true Levant.