Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/158

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136 CHRISTIAN GREECE AND LIVING GREEK. of the world. Greece became unknown. From time to time travellers like those already quoted , would venture to visit Hellas to see what monu- ments of her past greatness might still survive. Some of these men were moved by sympathy; others reproached the unfortunate Greeks, cruelly and unjustly, as being unworthy of the soil of classical Hellas. And even this very day those latter sentiments run riot in the heads of a large class of ignorant and malevolent people, and in anti-Hellenic literature. " When I was at Gastouni," says M. Bartholdy, "I overheard a conversation between an English traveller, a Greek monk, and our host, who was the doctor in the place. The churchman and the physi- cian complained bitterly of the Turkish yoke. 'God,' said the Englishman, 'has deprived the Hellenes of their freedom because they did not deserve to have it.'" "The town of Dhivri," says the traveller Leake, already quoted, "oc- cupies a large space, the houses to the num- ber of three hundred being dispersed in clusters over the side of the hills, but a great part of them are uninhabited. This is chiefly owing to the angaria of the Lalliotes, who come here and force the poor Greeks to carry straw, wood, with- out payment." The inhabitants of Monembasia