I never saw any one lay a sacrifice to the Goddess of Plenty on that ancient marble. A real rite of sacrifice may be seen, however, at the last panayíri of the year, in the village of San Stefano. The panayíri, as you might suppose, is that of St. Stephen. In the Greek calendar St. Stephen’s Day falls on the 27th of December (January 9th), instead of the 26th. The most characteristic part of the panayíri is a church procession which takes place on the afternoon before the feast, when priests and choir-boys march through the village with banners and incense and a small flock of sheep. The sheep are gaily decorated, like those of Kourban Baïram, and they come to the same end. In fact, the Greeks apply to their own sacrifice the Turkish name of kourban. The main difference is that each animal represents some special votive offering. And the offering may take different forms, according to the means of the giver. One rainy winter afternoon I was watching the sheep, daubed with paint and decorated with ribbons and artificial flowers, gather in the yard of the church, when an old crone came into the porch. She had pulled two or three of her many skirts over her head to protect herself from the rain, and when she dropped them into place there appeared in her arms a big rooster. “My kourban,” she said, showing him to a neighbour who greeted her, and she made no bones about taking him with her into the church. Holding him tightly under one arm she proceeded to buy, at the stall inside the door, three big candles, one of which she lighted at the shrine of St. Stephen, another at that of the Virgin, and a third in front of an icon which I did not recognise. That done, she made the round of all the icons in the church, twice over, kissing each one and piously crossing herself before it. Then she sat down in a stall at the back of the church, her rooster blinking around as if determined to pass his last hour with credit. The old woman encouraged him with pats and with remarks which I was sorry not to catch. In the meantime candles multiplied before the icons, a sharp sweet odour added itself to that of the strewn bay on the floor, a brisk business was done by a choir-boy who sold, wrapped up in gay tissue-paper, dried leaves supposed to be of the plant which sprang from St. Stephen’s crown of martyrdom, and a big frosted cake was brought in with ceremony and put between two candles on a table opposite the bishop’s throne. At last the Bishop himself arrived, rather wet and out of breath, and was inducted into his vestments beside the stove at the back of the church, not far from where the old woman was sitting with her cock. At that point the latter, unable to contain his emotions any longer, suddenly filled the holy place with a loud and pagan crow.

These panayíria are only a few of an inexhaustible list, for every church and spring has its own. I have not even mentioned certain famous ones that are not easily visited. Of this category, though less famous than the fairs of Darîja, Pyrgos, or Silivri, is the feast of the Panayía Mavromolítissa. This madonna in the church of Arnaout-kyöi is a black icon reputed to have been found in the fields at the mouth of the Black Sea. Every year on the 5th of September she is carried back in a cortège of fishing-boats—weeping, it is said—by priests and well-wishers who hold a picnic panayíri in the vicinity of the Cyanean Rocks. I have not spoken, either, of Ascension Day, which it is proper to celebrate by taking your first sea bath. Or of St. John’s Day, known by its bonfires and divinations. The Greeks often burn in the fires of St. John one or two effigies which are said to represent Judas, though Herod and Salome should rather perish on that occasion. Then there is May Day, when young men and maidens get up early in the morning, as they do in Italy, and go out into the fields to sing, to dance, to drink milk, to pick flowers, and to make wreaths which the swain hangs up on the door-post of the lady of his heart. And equally characteristic, in a different way, are the days when men eat and drink in honour of their dead.

No one, I suppose, tries any longer to prove that the modern Greek is one with his classic ancestor. Yet he remains curiously faithful to the customs of ancient Greece. Whereby he affords us an interesting glimpse into the processes of evolution. In him the antique and the modern world come together, and we see for ourselves, more clearly than on the alien soil of the West, how strangely habit is rooted in the heart of man, and how the forms of Christianity are those of the paganism that preceded it.