Missionary travel. Travellers in Greece. An Occasional Series 5. Samuel Sheridan Wilson

The woods and forests of Greece abound with wild boars, jackals, hares, wolves, wild cats, lynxes and chamois; whilst the principal feathered tenants of her sylvan groves and mountain glens are finches, nightingales, eagles, owls and falcons. The surface of this lovely land is richly covered and adorned with waving corn, Indian maize, olive-grounds, vineyards, orange groves, and almond, mulberry and other fruit trees. And, as if to give a fine finish to every enclosure, the fields are fenced with laurel, roselaurel, dogrose, aloes and geraniums. The pastures are numerous, and well stocked with flocks of sheep and goats. These are attended by shepherds in arms, boys in rags, or girls in rustic finery; and give additional life and interest to the green hills and sunny vales, over which they are scattered. Over all this vegetation and life, is spread a sky generally fair, and blue and serene; and although occasionally the thunder peal will disperse the affrighted cattle, the nipping frost compel the native to draw the thick capote over his brawny shoulders, and copious showers descend to water the earth; yet the sun smiles during the greater portion of the year.

The author of this bucolic piece, Samuel Sheridan Wilson, made several visits to Greece between 1824 and 1835. Even in his time he must have seemed an unusual man; that is surely even truer nearly two centuries later. Born in Manchester in 1797, he was ordained a minister of the Congregational Church (a dissenting Protestant denomination, which in England now forms part of the United Reformed Church) and from 1819 was posted to Malta by the London Missionary Society, an arm of the Congregational Church, with the task of strengthening the Society’s mission to Greece. On returning to England in 1835, he became pastor of the Congregationalists in Shepton Mallet in Somerset and spent the rest of his life there, dying in 1866. In 1839, he published a memoir of his time in Malta and Greece: A Narrative of the Greek Mission; or Sixteen Years in Malta and Greece, including Tours in the Peloponnesus, the Aegean and the Ionian Isles; with Remarks on the Religious Opinions, Social Habits, Politics, Language etc. [London: John Snow, 1839].[1] It is a remarkable account, not just of Wilson’s missionary activities in Malta and Greece, but also of Greece itself during the revolutionary years.

 

Wilson’s memoir was, in his own words, ‘drawn up for general readers…present[ing] no dry statistics, but incident, narrative and detail’. It is undoubtedly a lively, readable and, in many places, surprising story. The first 180 or so pages deal with Wilson’s arrival in Malta in 1819 and the roughly five years he spent there preparing for the Greek mission. Britain took Malta from the French in 1800 and its possession of the island had been recently confirmed in the treaties that closed the Napoleonic wars. The attachment of the Maltese islands to the British Empire brought Protestantism in all its forms to what was a Catholic people. The opening chapters of the travel memoir show Wilson to have been rabidly anti-Catholic, with a fierce hatred of monastics and Jesuits, and a highly sectarian conviction about the righteousness of the cause of the reformed churches. But for all his efforts at proselytising the Maltese – efforts which caused several skirmishes with the Papal authorities and the local population – Wilson did not lose sight of the fact that he was in Malta to help the Congregationalists’ missionary efforts in Greece and Asia Minor. He worked hard to acquire – from the small Greek population of Valletta – a good working knowledge of demotic Greek and he used this to notable effect. 

 

The final 400 pages of his memoirs are a composite account of his various travels to Greece, together with a summary of the activities in Asia Minor (which he seems himself not to have visited) of the London Missionary Society (LMS), often alongside missionary agents of US Protestant denominations and of the Anglican Church. He visited the Ionian Islands, then under the British Protectorate, in the first half of 1824. As the year closed, he left Malta again for Greece, catching sight of Cape Matapan on 23 December 1824. He spent time on Milos, Spetses, Hydra and Kea, before reaching the mainland at Porto Rafti on the east coast of Attica. From there, he journeyed to Athens and then went onwards to Corinth, Nafplio, Tripoli, Pyrgos, Katakolo and Zakynthos. He was back in Malta in April 1825, after some four months of travels. The memoirs are unclear about the timing of his subsequent visits to independent Greece, but he was clearly in Athens again under the reign of King Otto, probably in 1834/5, shortly before he returned home to England.

 

But why was the LMS launching a religious mission to Greece? The simple reality is that the Congregationalists, unlike the Anglicans and Episcopalians, saw Greece as a fertile ground for proselytism.[2] They knew that the Orthodox Church had not been reformed, as had the churches of NW Europe, and still showed many of the traditional religious stances associated by the reformers with Roman Catholicism, though Wilson consistently viewed Orthodox priests as more friendly to the reformed cause and less pernicious than their Catholic brethren.[3] From 1813 onwards, the LMS sent a succession of its Ministers to Malta, bound for the Ionian Islands. When Wilson arrived on Malta in 1819, the Rev. Isaac Lowndes had recently set sail from there for Corfu, where he would work very closely with the British authorities on educational matters as inspector of schools. On the Ionian Islands, the British authorities, with active support of the missionaries, were looking to establish elementary schools for boys and girls, on the so-called Lancasterian principle, by which the older pupils were taught enough to pass on their learning to the younger pupils. This emphasis on education – particularly on the education of girls – is probably the most remarkable and admirable aspect of the Protestant missions. On mainland and insular Greece and in Asia Minor the LMS worked with comparable US missions and the Anglicans to found elementary schools and spread literacy, irrespective of gender. 

 

         The dissemination of the Greek Bible was central to these efforts. On his travels in Greece, Wilson gave away and sold hundreds of copies of the New Testament in Greek, printed on the Society’s press in Malta; there was huge demand for this among the Greek priesthood and laity. In Asia Minor, these efforts were aided by the interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society. Back in Malta in the second half of 1825, Wilson took sole charge of the Society’s press. Under his leadership, some sixty titles were printed and issued within a decade. Examples included Wilson’s own Anglo-Greek Primer[4], his Greek translation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, tracts by Chrysostom, translations of Isaac Watts’s hymns, Psalms in verse, Protestant apologetics and biographies, and so on. It was a Stakhanovite labour of love and Wilson, aided by his Greek friends on Malta, was the Society’s principal translator, working in a variety of genres and registers.

 

Wilson’s account of his travels is not only interesting because of his religious mission. It also shines as a travelogue. Wilson had his eyes open to new places, unknown customs and new experiences. As a Christian missionary, he was not so much interested in the classical world as in the proto-Christian world: the journeys of the apostles and the lives of their first European disciples. Wilson followed the footsteps of St Paul in Athens and Corinth as closely as the poor state of archaeological knowledge then allowed (his confusion of the Pnyx with the Areopagus was total).[5] Though scarcely Byronic in habits or tastes, he had a sometimes romantic sense of the decay of Greece’s antique glories into its contemporary poverty and was impressed by the first signs of recovery under the Bavarian monarchy in the early 1830s. He noticed and recorded carefully the landscapes over which he passed. And he observed the people closely, giving fascinating accounts of their social and domestic lives. He wrote well about marriage customs, Greek hospitality (“On entering, we leave our shoes, generally at the edge of the carpet, lay our right hand on the left breast, bow to the company, say ‘καλ’ ημέρα σας, good day,’ and seat ourselves à la tailor on the divan. The master of the house pronounces some compliment…”)[6], women’s costumes and make-up, the evil eye and other superstitions.

 

Above all, Wilson was excited, as liberal westerners were, by the outbreak of Greek revolutionary fervour in 1821. He was indeed entranced by the prospect of the revival of Greece as a Christian state: 

 

To draw public attention to Greece and to attract the footsteps of the philanthropist towards the land of Basil, the cradle of science, the former scene of apostolic labour, is the object of this volume. She was then filing her chains, and soon she snapt them, to the astonishment of all in Malta. Now was the crisis of Greece. Now the moment of her transit, a transit either to formalism and infidelity, or to light and piety, as Christians in the west might neglect her fate, or direct her course.[7]

 

Travelling to Greece in 1824/5, Wilson had to show considerable courage as he passed through the theatres of war, but he also had the opportunity to meet key figures in the revolution. On Spetses he met Bouboulina. On Hydra, he actually lodged with admiral Miaoulis. In Napflio he met Mavrocordato. In Athens he was received cordially by the Governor (though Wilson wondered if he might be mistaken for a spy) and called on the Bishop. He appears to have met people fearlessly and in full confidence of his rights to be in Greece and to be playing a specific role.

 

        But perhaps most amazingly of all Wilson wrote and published a novel in Greek before he returned to England. His memoirs imply that he wrote it first in English as The Rumeliot Chieftain, but the English manuscript has never been found or published, and the novel exists only in Wilson’s Greek translation, as Το παλληκάριον.[8] It was printed on the LMS press in Malta in 1835 and anonymously published; it is one of the very earliest examples of a Greek novel and is something of a mess (mistakes were clearly made in the translation and printing processes).[9] But as an important curiosity, it was most recently reprinted in 1990 with a scholarly introduction by Dimitrios Polemis.[10] Surely the most eccentric and unexpected legacy of English non-conformist missionary activity.

 

Wilson is undoubtedly a challenging travelling companion. Opinionated and bigoted (while often ignorantly decrying as bigoted the opinions of others), he can appear preposterous (I laughed out loud at his absurd attempts to brow-beat hard-pressed, intellectually and materially impoverished Orthodox clergy and religious into accepting the hair-splitting subtleties of his exposition of substitutionary atonement) and was frequently obtuse about much that is glorious and beautiful in Greek Orthodox tradition; but he undoubtedly liked the Greeks, he worked harder than most of my compatriots then or since to learn and master the language, he was open to Greek experience and Greek customs, and, when all is said and done, he invested sixteen years of his life to spread knowledge among the Greeks of the Gospel in Greek. His memoirs deserve an audience.

 

John Kittmer

Easter 2023

 

NOTES

 

[1] The book has been digitised and is available in print-to-order paperback from the British Library Historical Print Collections.

[2] On the Anglican and Episcopalian decision not to proselytise in Greece, see the chapter by M. Nestlehutt (‘The Development of the Anglican Chaplaincy in Athens’) in L.W. Doolan (ed.), Opening the Doors: A View into the Historic Tradition and Current Life of St Paul’s Church Athens (Athens: St Paul’s Church, 2022), particularly 29. 

[3] See, e.g., Wilson, 204: “We had not been long in the Greek mission, ere we discovered that it had a character all its own. The wants and the supplies, the evils and the antidotes of Greece, differ much from those of heathen nations. It was ours to minister to a mind diseased indeed, but not to any great extent infidel. We had to combat with Christianity paganised, with semi-heathenism baptised with the Christian name; with the errors and vices, the dogmas and sophistries of Platonists, Pharisees, and old Numidian monks, under a visor.”

[4] S.S. Wilson, The Anglo-Greek Primer, or First Step to a Practical Knowledge of the English and Greek Languages. Το Αγγλο-Ελληνικόν αλφαβητάριον, ήτοι πρώτον βήμα προς μιαν εύπρακτον γνώσιν των Αγγλικών και Γραικικών Γλωσσών (Malta: London Missionary Society Press, 1829).

[5] Wilson, A Narrative, 434-6. 

[6] Wilson, op.cit., 296f.

[7] Wilson, op.cit., 86.

[8] Wilson, op.cit., 370.

[9] See R. Beaton, An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1999²), 57.

[10] S.S. Wilson, Το παλληκάριον, edited and introduced by D.I. Polemis (Athens: Idryma Kosta kai Elenis Ourani, 1990).

The Great Forty Days

As often happens, Lent began this year a few days earlier in the western rite than it did in the Orthodox. But all Christians who follow the Gregorian calendar are now, I think, keeping Lent. My first experiences of Greece, 39 years ago, are inseparable from my first experiences of Orthodox Lent, Holy Week and Easter. Those celebrations, in 1984, impressed and, indeed, overawed me, forming indelible memories and sparking what has proved a lifelong interest in Orthodoxy and in the ecumenism of eastern and western Christianity.

Each year, I love tracking the – sometimes similar, sometimes starkly contrasting – customs and traditions marked by Christians of the Orthodox and western rites. Carnival, taking place in the three weeks before Lent, is not important here in the UK, but over the years I have celebrated it in Catholic lands and in Greece. While I was still eating meat (I became a pescatarian several years ago), Τσικνοπέμπτη / Tsiknopempti, which takes place in Greece on the second Thursday in Carnival, was always a great joy: a feast to be enjoyed with friends around a brimming table. ‘Tsikna’ in Greek denotes the smell of roasting or grilling meat and 'Pempti' is Thursday, so the closest equivalent in western Christianity to this day of feasting is Mardi Gras (‘Fat Tuesday’), known to English tradition as Pancake Day or Shrove Tuesday, which happens on the eve of Lent, when traditionally the last eggs and dairy products were eaten before the start of the great fast. 

 

Kites flying on the edge of Philopappou Hill, Lent 2022

Last year, I celebrated the start of Lent twice: doing Ash Wednesday, the start of western Lent, here in Scarborough and Καθαρά Δευτέρα / Kathara Deftera (‘Clean Monday’), the start of Orthodox Lent, in Athens. The weather in Athens on that day was fine and I watched the traditional kite-flying on Philopappou Hill, before having an equally traditional seafood lunch on Mercouri Square in Petralona. This year, I was able to mark the start of Lent only once: on Ash Wednesday, when I took part in the Sung Mass at my local parish church of St Martin’s on the Hill, Scarborough.

 

The liturgical and musical traditions of Lent are profoundly moving, in whatever rite one celebrates. For Anglicans and Catholics, the singing of the Lent Prose (‘Hear us, o Lord, have mercy upon us’) or of Allegri’s great setting of Psalm 51 (‘Miserere mei, Deus’ / ‘Have mercy on me, o God’) and the imposition of the ashes of the previous year’s palms are signs that one has passed out of ordinary and into sacred time. When I was serving as ambassador in Athens, I tried always to go at least once or twice every Lent to hear the singing of the great Χαιρετισμοί της Θεοτόκου, the Salutations to the Mother of God, which are sung sequentially every Friday in Lent, until the whole is performed on the fifth Friday in Lent as the ΑκάθιστοςΎμνος / the Akathist Hymn, the 'hymn for which no one sits’. The glories of our musical and liturgical traditions in Lent are magnificent scene-setters for the great outpouring of words, music and devotion in Holy Week.

 

All of these rites, traditions and practices help us, I think, to mark out sacred time and to keep Lent properly. The Anglican rites for Ash Wednesday are very clear about what is required. We are encouraged ‘to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word’. I owe my own understanding of the practice of fasting to my Greek Orthodox friends, whose discreet and careful Lenten habits impressed me greatly when I was living in Athens. Fasting and self-denial are not only, of course, practices for the disciplining of the self; they are supposed also to lead to ‘almsgiving’, the practice of looking after and taking care of others. Above all, Lent as a preparation for Holy Week and Easter is an annual opportunity to meditate closely on the life of Christ, to align ourselves deliberately and in conviction with what the faith requires of us. We are fortunate indeed if we are able to do this as members of an active congregation, a worshipping community. To all who are observing Lent this year, I wish you a Holy Lent: Καλή Σαρακοστή. 

 

John

3 March 2023

Marie Spartali Stillman – Three Anglo-Hellenic Graces – Scarborough

Marie Spartali Stillman (self-portrait)

I was delighted to learn earlier this week that English Heritage are to instal a Blue Plaque in honour of the memory of Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927) “at the house where she first began to realise her ambition of becoming a painter” (this is presumably the Spartali family home, known as The Shrubbery, now situated behind St Barnabas’s Church on Clapham Common North Side).[1] Spartali Stillman was born into a prosperous family of London Greeks in the middle of the nineteenth century. Her father, Michael, was one of the heads of Spartali & Co., an import business, and served for several years as the Greek consul-general in London.  

Spartali Stillman became associated at an early age with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1864, she sat for him and, telling him that she herself wanted to learn to paint, took lessons from Ford Madox Brown. From 1867, she started to exhibit her work professionally, while continuing to model – for Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and John Spencer Stanhope among others. In 1871, she married the American Pre-Raphaelite painter and journalist, William James Stillman. The last retrospective of her work was at the Delaware Art Gallery in 2015/16 [2]. 

 

Spartali Stillman is being honoured, of course, in her own right. But in the London Greek community of the day, she was simply the most talented of three cousins who were closely associated and collectively known as ‘the Three Graces’ because of their striking beauty and presence and their role as models and muses for the Pre-Raphaelite artists of the second generation. Alongside Spartali Stillman, Maria Zambaco (née Kassaveti) (1843-1914) was the mistress and model of Edward Burne-Jones; Aglaia Koronio (née Ionidi) (1834-1906) was one of William Morris’s great confidantes.[3] All three were artists. In this last year, I have found myself increasingly thinking about their milieu because of the church in which I am now worshipping: St Martin’s on the Hill in Scarborough. 

 

St Martin's on the Hill

St Martin’s has one of the most important and complete collections of Pre-Raphaelite art in any English church. Built in 1861-3 by the architect George Frederick Bodley, it has one of the three earliest schemes of decoration by the first company founded by William Morris, along with his Pre-Raphaelite friends: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Together with Bodley himself, the company decorated ceilings and walls in the church, and also provided a nearly full set of stained-glass windows, an elegant painted reredos, a decorated organ screen and a beautifully painted pulpit. The designs and work are by Morris, Philip Webb, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Stanhope, Peter Paul Marshall and the company’s principal glass painter George Campfield.[4]

It is one of the features of work by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. that their ecclesiastical art no more disguises the identities of the models for their murals, images and stained glass than do the paintings by individual members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The images of several saints and angels in the stained glass at St Martin’s are portraits of Pre-Raphaelite “stunners”: the non-PC term given by Rossetti and friends to the several tall, striking and beautiful women who posed for them and became entangled in their lives as lovers, wives and friends. A lovely window by Morris and Burne-Jones is devoted to the ‘three Marys’ (the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany) with the images based on Georgiana Macdonald, who married Burne-Jones; Lizzie Siddall, the wife of Rossetti; and Annie Miller, one of Rossetti’s many lovers. We have, I think, no window modelled on Spartali Stillman. But one of the most intense windows, designed by Burne-Jones, daringly depicts his mistress Zambaco variously as St Dorothea, St Theophilus and an Archangel, with gorgeous flaming wings. This is certainly a connection I didn’t expect to find, mediated by the personalities and practices of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, between the London Greek community of late Victorian England and the High Church circles of then fashionable Scarborough.

 

English Heritage has not yet announced the date for unveiling the plaque in honour of Marie Spartali Stillman. But I hope that today’s London Greek community will get involved and that an image of the plaque is soon widely available. It is good to have this opportunity to recall and celebrate particularly Spartali Stillman’s work as a painter, but also the broader artistic influence of the renowned women of the Kassavetis-Spartalis-Ionidis clan. 

 

John

28 January 2023

 

[1] See the English Heritage announcement here.

 

[2] A book was produced to accompany the exhibition: Margaretta S. Frederick & Jan Marsh (ed.), Poetry in Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Marie Spartali Stillman (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2015).

 

[3] There is an excellent overview of the milieu of 'the Three Graces' in Victoria Solomonidis-Hunter's article (in two parts) for the Friends of West Norwood Cemetery: 'Aglaia Coronio née Ionides (1834-1906)', at https://www.fownc.org/pdf/newsletter103.pdf (pp.6-8) and https://www.fownc.org/pdf/newsletter104.pdf (pp.6-8). An image gallery, giving biographical details and illustrations, of the Three Graces and their work is available here (thanks to Victoria for sharing this link with me). 

 

[4] The Friends of St Martin’s have produced a good website and several guides and booklets exploring different aspects of the church and its Pre-Raphaelite heritage.