who chanted as they walked along. Such sounds! Greek chanting is a
horrible nasal caterwauling. Get a dozen boys to hold their noses, and
then in a high key imitate the gamut performed by several festive cats
as they prowl over the housetops on a quiet night, and you have Greek,
Armenian or Turkish chanting and singing to perfection. There is not the
first conception of music in the souls of these barbarians. Behind this
choir came four men carrying the open coffin. The corpse was that of a
middle-aged man dressed in black clothes, with a red fez cap on the head
and yellow, red and white flowers scattered over the body. The hot sun
shone full on the pinched and shriveled features, and the sight was most
revolting. Several mourners followed the coffin, the ladies in black
clothes, with black lace veils on their heads and their hair much
dressed. The Greeks are obliged to carry their dead in this way,
uncovered, because concealed arms were at one time conveyed in coffins
to their churches, and then used in an uprising against the government.
We witnessed a still more dreadful funeral outside the walls. A party,
evidently of poor people, were approaching an unenclosed cemetery, and
we waited to see the interment. The body, in its usual clothes, was
carried on a board covered by a sheet. When they reached the grave the
women shrieked, wept and kissed the face of the dead man: then his
clothes were taken off, the body wrapped in the sheet and laid in the
grave, which was only two feet deep. The priest broke a bottle of wine
over the head, the earth was loosely thrown in, and the party went away.
There is no more melancholy spot to me than a Turkish cemetery. The
graves are squeezed tightly together, and the headstones, generally in a
tumble-down state, are shaped like a coffin standing on end, or like a
round hitching-post with a fez cap carved on the top. Weeds and rank
wild-flowers cover the ground, and over all sway the dark, stiff
cypresses.