Samothraki Island
Samothrace is the most mysterious of the islands in the northern sea. For a thousand years or more it has been considered almost inaccessible, and so preserved from the ships of the traders and the war galleys of the invader. Today it is slightly more accessible, but the most convenient approach is from Alexan-droupolis on the Thracian mainland. Pleasant small town though it is, not many people go there for its own sake. As we saw in Thasos, the key is to be found in Kavala. From there buses run to Alexandroupo-lis which has a regular morning ferry service across to Kamariotissa on the west coast of Samothrace. However, that means spending an awkward night on the mainland, so it may be better to wait for a weekly ship which leaves Kavala early in the morning and reaches Kamariotissa four hours later.
The approach by sea from the west can be mystifying in itself if, as often happens, the island is wrapped in a sea fog. Until almost there you may see nothing at all, and then only a low coastline, difficult to recognize as mountainous Samothrace. You may be alongside before you see Mount Phengari towering into the clouds, far higher than is reasonable from so small a base. Phengari is the popular Greek word for moon, so perhaps the inhabitants have the same trouble.
Kamariotissa is hardly more than a line of buildings behind a long and undistinguished harbour front. There are a few cafes and
travel offices, but the atmosphere is unfamiliar. You miss at once the lively feeling of a Greek seaport, the arguments and gestures, the rapid fire of conversation. Round the cafe tables people sit almost in silence, and - most unusual in the Greek world - there are few friendly words for the visitor. Taxi drivers are curt, even surly. There are two explana¬tions, both possibly true. One is the large number of non-Greeks (’bar¬barians’ as they used to call them) in the population; you are close to Bulgaria here, and it was to the Bulgarians that the Nazis handed over Samothrace after their conquest of Greece in 1941. The other is the feeling they may have that nobody comes here except to see ‘the ruins’, and they long to escape to mainland Alexandroupolis, even for a day. This is a pity from both points of view, for the island they live on has some of the grandest scenery to be found anywhere, and it would not be difficult to make it more welcoming and accessible.
The land behind the harbour, though fertile, is not inspiring. Once the summer crops of maize have been cut it is a brown and dusty desert, but the soaring skyline beyond is a different matter. Palaiopo-lis, the ancient capital on the north coast, is dominated by Mount Phengari, over 5000 feet high and, after Mount Athos, the highest in the Thracian sea. From its summit you look west to Athos and east to Phrygian Ida, and on that summit Poseidon sat to monitor the siege of his own city of Troy.
For many centuries Palaiopolis was the home of an eastern fertil¬ity cult, whose central figure was a Mother Goddess, most easily identified in classical times as Demeter. The city itself was built on a rocky ridge extending northwards to the sea from the main mountain range, but nothing remains of it but parts of the massive wall which protected it from the west, and two mediaeval towers built by the Genoese Gattilusi as a guard to seaward.
The city thrived from the sixth century BC to the second century AD almost entirely because of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, which lies athwart a ravine to the west of the walls. The Great Gods of Samothrace were a family group, perhaps of Phrygian origin, and their cult existed before the first Greek-speaking people arrived about 700 BC. The language spoken then has not been identified, but it seems to have been an Aeolian dialect from Asia Minor, and it was still used for the rituals of the cult in the first century BC. In it the name of the Mother Goddess was Axieros, and she had a subordinate husband called Kadmilos whose speciality is known in polite archae¬ological circles as ‘ithyphallic’. They were later identified with De-meter and Hermes.
Making up a formidable quartet was a pair of twin spirits, or daimones, called Kabeiroi, and it was with these that the cult became chiefly identified in the public mind. When the Greeks arrived they adopted them as the Dioskouroi (Castor and Pollux), the twin sons of Zeus who among their other functions were particularly invoked by those in peril on the sea. Successful initiates were presented with an amulet of purple cloth to protect them at such times. St Paul actually called at Samothrace on his way ‘over to Macedonia’ (his destination was Kavala, then known as Neapolis) and although he was an un¬likely initiate he was later to be memorably saved from shipwreck. Pilgrimages to the island continued into the late Roman period, for the Romans claimed the Kabeiroi as a legacy from their Trojan ancestors.
In essence the cult of the Great Gods was an early ‘mystery’ religion, involving initiation, revelation and probably baptism in blood - by its nature a matter of secret rituals about which we can only guess. In importance it at least equalled the Eleusinian mysteries of Attica, and in a sense it was more popular because it admitted initiates without distinction of sex or social status. This popularity did not deter the Spartan King Lysander, the historian Herodotus, the royal house of Macedon or the Roman emperor Hadrian from taking part. It was just the scene which would have attracted that restless and impressionable ruler, and if you add the Egyptian Ptolemies the list gives an idea of the fame and richness of Palaiopolis for most of its history.
We can imagine some of the procedure most easily by visiting the site, which was first thoroughly excavated by an American team with a research fund from New York University. They began work in 1938, and it was continued after the war under the leadership of Karl Lehmann until his death in 1960. Apart from the excavations he was also re¬sponsible for building the museum close by, which is a necessary first call, if only because the road ends just outside it. (Although buses go that way in the summer, the most reliable way of getting there is by taxi.) Since Lehmann’s death his widow Phyllis Williams Lehmann has seen to the orderly development of both site and museum.
It is not primarily a museum for objets trouves, but rather laid out to illustrate the nature and architecture of the various buildings dis¬covered, with the help of some dramatic restorations. Lehmann’s illustrated Guide, now in its fifth edition of 1983, is on sale there and well worth buying. A stony path leads uphill from the museum to the main part of the site.
You may well catch your breath as you come out on to the shelf which follows the north-to-south line of the excavations. Clearly marked foundations, with walls which sometimes rise to ten feet or more, fill a flattened ridge between two stream beds, but first the head lifts high to the south, where jagged mountain shoulders jostle each other among the clouds, and a final gap is filled by the peak of Phengari. Streams run all year long down those mighty gorges to keep the lower stretches green in summer, and in autumn the leaves of the plane trees turn golden.
At the lowest point of the site is the Anaktoron, a building where the lesser and preliminary mysteries were enacted; it is about a hun¬dred yards long and probably dates from the Roman period. Most of the wall on the east side still stands, and there is a libation pit in the south-east corner. Next towards the south is an impressive circular building known as the Rotunda of Queen Arsinoe, probably used as a gathering place for overseas dignitaries at the annual summer festi¬val. This is the biggest enclosed circular structure known in Greek architecture, and judging from the restoration portrayed in the mu¬seum it must have been the most elegant.
That it was built at the orders of a queen, the wife of King Lysi-machus of Thrace, is only one sign of the interest in Samothrace shown by the royals of the Macedonian, Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties which succeeded Alexander the Great. It was here that Alexander’s mother, the princess Olympias of Epirus, first met his father Philip, founder of the Macedonian empire. They were fellow initiates, and it would be hard to think of a more romantic and emotional setting for the encounter.
Further along is a less well defined rectangular space, known to the Lehmanns as the Temenos (meaning ‘enclosure’) where people gathered for organized feasts. Stones inside it were pierced to hold torches, which suggests that possibly all the initiation ceremonies were held at night. In 1995-6 a fresh campaign by the Institute of Fine Arts of New York Universities altered radically the Lehmanns’ idea of the nature and purpose of this building. An analysis of the stonework recovered from the debris of its destruction in the third century AD revealed a larger building containing two separate rooms, and - most importantly - that it was roofed. The new name of The Hall of the Dancing Maidens was based on the earlier discovery of a lovely frieze of girls dancing to a lute which decorated the Ionic portico of its formal entrance. Some of its marble slabs are preserved in the museum.
The last group of buildings in the sequence was approached only by initiates who had passed through the Anaktoron in the first stage of revelation. The great temple, or Hieron, now with five columns of the pronaos re-erected, was the place of final revelation and accep¬tance, but we know that before the candidates could enter they had to go through something like the confessional of the Roman church. Standing or kneeling on a particular stone before a sacred flame - the socket for the torch is still there - the initiate had to convince a priest that he was clean from sin and worthy to take part. This was not quite the moral or psychological sanction of the confessional, as it was intended to ensure that the sanctity of the temple was not profaned by the entry of a technically ‘unclean’ person. We can only guess at the nature of the ceremonies and revelation: the word ‘mysteries’ comes from the Greek muein, ‘to whisper in secret’, and no one, as far as we know, ever broke the code of secrecy in writing.
Two other regular features of the classical world can be traced nearby. The stonework of the Theatre has disappeared, but the semi¬circle hollowed out for the seats can be seen above the path to the south of the Hieron. Behind it was built a vast Stoa, a good hundred yards long, to shelter visitors during times of leisure. Several other large buildings have been excavated round about, all concerned in some way with the mysteries. The most notable lies across the bed of the eastern stream, a majestic Propylon, or ceremonial gateway, commissioned by Ptolemy II and built in the Corinthian order early in the third century BC to provide a direct entry from the city of Palaiopolis.
We come last to the most evocative place, the site of the Nike Fountain, above and to the left of the theatre. Here in 1863 the French Consul at Adrianople, a M. Champoiseau, discovered what was left of the marble figure of the Winged Victory, represented as standing on the prow of a ship - the ship seeming to float in a marble basin filled with running water. With no more inhibitions than Lord Elgin he sent the pieces home to Paris, where Nike was reconstituted to stand at the head of the Louvre stairway. ‘Stand’ is hardly the word, for she seems at that moment to have landed, her wings still half spread. Who the sculptor was, and who designed that magical setting to commemorate an unidentified naval victory in the second century BC, no one knows. In 1950 Nike’s right hand was discovered near the fountain, and the Louvre authorities quickly offered to ex¬change for it three valuable exhibits to go on permanent loan to the museum. Swift as usual off the diplomatic mark, the French seem to
have forestalled any call for the body to be repatriated to join the
hand.Nothing else you see in Samothrace compares for excitement or even interest. A small village occupies the site of the inland Chora, for which the last inhabitants of Palaiopolis deserted their city during the pirate-infested fifteenth century. Long before that the harbour had begun to silt up, and the source of their wealth had dwindled as Christianity spread. In the ninth century a Byzantine castle was built to protect the new self-supporting community, and this was con¬verted into a much stronger fortress by the Gattilusi. It is still the only ancient place on Samothrace with a modern identity.
A much smaller village at Loutra on the north coast marks a rising of thermal springs, but on the whole the coastline is grand and harsh. At one point on the south coast a waterfall drops sheer out of a cliff face into the sea. It is the grandeur and isolation which distin¬guish Samothrace, to which man has added an extraordinary witness to the power of ancient religion. Although there is no one left to initiate the visitor into the mysteries of the Great Gods, if he stays long enough he should be entitled to wear the purple amulet and be spared the dangers of shipwreck