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Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor / Series One and Series Two in one Volume cover

Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor / Series One and Series Two in one Volume

Chapter 92: PASS AND WATERFALL IN THE BALKAN MOUNTAINS.
By R. Walsh
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About This Book

The work pairs detailed engraved views with descriptive text to present the landscapes, monuments, and everyday life of Constantinople and sites across Asia Minor. Plates depict cityscapes, mosques, bazaars, cemeteries, ruins, and coastal scenes, while accompanying commentary explains local customs, architecture, and routes along the Bosphorus and interior passes. A map highlights key localities and an appended historical sketch traces the city's development and rulers, so the collection combines visual documentation with travel observations and concise historical and topographical notes to capture a society in transition between traditional local customs and Europeanizing reforms.

Drawn fom Nature by F. HervéE. Benjamin.

PASS AND WATERFALL IN THE BALKAN MOUNTAINS.

This celebrated chain presents continually to the traveller a succession of objects sometimes minute and picturesque, sometimes vast and sublime. In the recesses between the high ridges, the scenery is rural and pastoral, equalling that of Arcadia; on the summits of the mountains, all seems thunder-splintered rocks and riven precipices, where the ear is stunned with the roar of cataracts, as the eye is astonished and the senses are appalled by the vast chasms through which they rush. The Balkans are seldom seen covered with snows, and the waters are rarely arrested by ice. At no season is observed, as in the Alps, frost-suspended waterfalls,

“Whose idle torrents only seem to roar;”

but the sound of the bursting cataract never ceases, and the mountain-streams, fed by continued showers, do not depend on the solution of snows, but are always tumbling down the steeps and rushing through the ravines.

The beautiful waterfall given in our illustration, occurs in the pass by Bazarjik, not far from the village of Yenikui, half way up the mountain-side. In several parts of this pass, the vegetation is extremely luxuriant. Sometimes vast forest-trees are seen rising from the depths of chasms, and shooting their giant trunks, as they struggle up for light and air, till they reach the summit, and then, and not till then, expanding their noble foliage; while the eye of the traveller, looking down into the chasm from which they issue, is lost in the immensity of the depth, and cannot trace the vast stems of the trees to the ground. Sometimes the vegetation is of a very different character: the mountains are celebrated for the abundance of plants and shrubs used in dyeing, and parties set out every year, in the season, from Adrianople, Philopopoli, and other towns, to collect them. Nothing can then surpass the rich and glowing hue which clothes the surface. The deep crimson of the sumachs, with the varying colours of yellow, brown, purple, and the dark tints of the overhanging evergreens, give a beautiful variety, exceeding perhaps that of any other region on the surface of the earth.