of the surviving lads and girls were sold by auction, "the buyers taking no thought or count of their noble birth, but only of the beauty of their faces." But these poor victims, or most of them, were not destined to serve as slaves in any Turkish harem. The great galleon of Muhamites and two other vessels were laden with them as a gift to the Sultan, to Mehmed Pasha, and Murad the Sultan's son. But some noble girl or woman, her name is not recorded though surely her glory should live on for ever, thinking that the death of herself and her companions was preferable to so infamous a fate, contrived to creep to the magazine and fire it, with the result that the galleon and two other ships with every living soul on board of them were blown into the air. The incident is in perfect keeping with the horrid history of that period throughout Europe. Famagusta was invested by Mustafa and between one and two hundred thousand soldiers and adventurers upon September 18, 1570, the defence being under the charge of the immortal Mark Antonio Bragadino, the captain of the city. For nearly eleven months did the little garrison and townsfolk hold out, with but scant aid from Venice. They beat back assault after assault-there were six or eight of them; they mined and countermined; they made sallies and erected new defences as the old were battered down; in short they did everything that desperation could contrive or courage execute. length when only five hundred Italian soldiers and a few Cyprian men and women were left sound within their gates, and many of their walls and towers had been blown into the air, it was want that conquered them, not the Turk. At "The position of the city was now desperate; within the walls everything was lacking except hope, the valour of the commanders, and the daring of the soldiers. The wine was exhausted, neither fresh nor salted meat nor cheese could be had except at extravagant prices. The horses, asses, and cats truly happy and blessed spirit. His skin was taken and stuffed with straw, carried round the city, and then, hung on the yard of a galliot, was paraded along the coast of Syria with great rejoicings. The body was quartered, and a part set on each battery. The skin, after its parade, was placed in a box together with the head of the brave Captain Hestor Baglione, and those of S. Luigi Martinengo, G. A. Bragadino, and G. A. Querini, and all were carried to Constantinople and presented to the Gran Signor, who caused them to be put in his prison, and I who was a captive chained in that prison as spy of the Pope, on my liberation tried to steal that skin, but could not." According to Johannes Cotovicus, or Johann van Kootwick, a Hollander whose work was published at Antwerp in 1619, this hideous execution of Bragadino was carried out by a Jewish hangman. The same author tells us that the martyr's skin was in the end purchased at a great price by his brother and sons, and, five-and-twenty years after the murder, buried in a marble urn in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo at Venice. Here is the inscription and a translation : D. O. P. M. Antonii Bragadeni dum pro fide et patria Pellis Ann. Sal. CIɔ. IC. LXXI. XV. Kal. Sept. Anton. fratris Atque hic a Marco Hermolao Antonioque filiis Posita Ann. Sal. CIɔ. IC. LXXXXVI. vixit ann. XLVI. TO GOD THE BEST AND MIGHTIEST. The skin of Mark Antony Bragadino, torn from him while alive and suffering fearlessly, by the faithless hand of the enemy, on the eighteenth day of August, in the year of our Salvation 1571, when, in the Cyprian war waged against the Turks for faith and fatherland, he was overborne in the long siege of Salamis, where he commanded with constancy and valour, was brought hither from Byzantium by the care and at the cost of his brother Antony, and laid here by his devoted sons, Mark Hermolaus and Antony, to the eternal glory of God most High, of their country, and their father's name, in the year of our Salvation 1596. He lived forty-six years. In this inscription it will be observed that the besieged town is spoken of as Salamis, that being the name of the ancient ruined city which stood a few miles. from Famagusta. Thus Famagusta and with it all Cyprus fell into the power of the Turk, who for three centuries ruled it as ill as only he can do. Now once more it has passed into the hands of England. Long may this fair and fruitful island abide there, to its own benefit and that of the empire. One sad change I noticed on this my second visit to Famagusta. Fourteen years ago the gardens of Varoshia, as the present town is called, were full of the most lovely orange-trees. Even at this distance of time I can recall the pleasure with which I walked in one of them, smelling the scent of the flowers and considering the golden fruit and green, shiny leaves. Now they are all dead, or nearly so. The blight of which I have spoken upon a previous page, in the absence of remedies that their owners were too idle to apply, has slain them. Here and there stick up old stems with blackened foliage and some shrivelled fruit, sad mementoes of the past that would be better done away. Often have I wished that I could paint but never more so, I think, than at Famagusta, especially one morning when I stood upon the lonely seashore looking out across the still more lonely ocean. Storm-clouds were gathering, and in their blackest shadow, old as the walls of Famagusta perhaps, stood a single giant fig-tree, its buds just bursting into points of crinkled, green-gold leaf. There was something very strange about the aspect of that tree. It looked as though it lived and suffered; it reminded me, fantastically enough, of the tortured Bragadino. Its natural bent was sideways and groundwards, but the straight branches, trained thus by centuries of wind, lay back from the sloping trunk like the outblown hair of a frightened fleeing woman. In colour it was ashen, the hue of death, only its roots were goldtinted, for the shifting sand revealed them, gripping and strangling each other like hateful yellow snakes. It was such a tree as the Saviour might have cursed for barrenness, and the site seemed appropriate to its aspect. About it were the sand-dunes, behind it lay a swamp with dead and feathered grasses shivering in the wind. To the right more sands, in front the bitter sea, and to the left, showing stately against a background of gloom, the cathedral of Famagusta still royal in its ruins. As I stood a raven flew overhead, croaking, and a great fox darker than our own in colour, loped past me to vanish among the dunes. Altogether it was a scene fitted to the brush of an artist, or so I thought. Within three miles or so of Old Famagusta lie the ruins that were Salamis, formerly the famous port of the Messaoria plain, where once St. Paul and Barnabas "preached the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews." It was a town eight hundred years before Christ was born however, for a monument of Sargon the Assyrian tells of a certain king of Salamis, and until the reign of Constantine the Great when an earthquake destroyed it, it flourished more than any other Cyprian city. Now not even a house is to be found upon its vast site, and the harbour that was always full of ships, is quite silted up. Many of the stones also that made its palaces and temples, have been built into the walls and churches of Famagusta, to find often enough an ultimate home in Egypt, whither the Turks exported them. One day we visited this place. On our left as we went our host, Mr. Percy Christian, pointed out to me a tumulus, in Cyprus a rare and notable thing. Some years ago he opened it, indeed the scar of that operation is still visible. Tunnelling through the outer earth the workmen came to a most beautiful tomb, built of huge monolithic stones fitted together with an accuracy which Mr. Christian describes as marvellous. As it proved impossible to pierce these stones, the visitors were obliged to burrow lower and force a passage through the floor. I could not, I confess, help laughing when Mr. Christian added that to his intense disgust he discovered that other antiquarians, in some past age, had attacked the sepulchre from the further side of the mound. They also had been beaten by the gigantic blocks. They also had burrowed and made their visit through the floor. Moreover, by way of souvenir they had taken with them whatever articles of value the tomb may have chanced to contain. I am Even sepulchre-searching has its sorrows. afraid that if after those days and weeks of toil, it had been my fortune, full of glorious anticipation, to poke my head through that violated floor merely to discover in the opposite corner another hole whereby another head had once arisen, I should have said how vexed I was and with some emphasis. He who labours among the tombs should be very patient and gentle-natured-like Mr. Christian. Almost opposite to this tumulus is a barrow-shaped building also composed of huge blocks of stone, set in an arch and enclosing a space beneath of the size of a small chapel out of which another little chamber opens. This is called the tomb of St. Katherine, why I do not know. |