Читать книгу Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals онлайн

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If then, as is now generally admitted, Fallmerayer’s conclusions were somewhat exaggerated, it remains none the less an historical fact that there is a very large admixture of Slavonic blood in the veins of the present inhabitants of Greece. The truth of this is moreover enforced by the physical characteristics of the people as a whole. Travellers conversant alike with Slavs and with modern Greeks have affirmed to me their impression that there is a close physical resemblance between the two races; and while I have not the experience of Slavonic races which would permit me to judge of this resemblance for myself, it certainly offers the best explanation of my own observations with regard to the variations of physical type in different parts of the Greek world. In the islands of the Aegean and in the promontory of Maina, to which the Slavs never penetrated, the ancient Hellenic types are far commoner than in the rest of the Peloponnese or in Northern Greece. Not a little of the charm of Tenos or Myconos or Scyros lies in the fact that the grand and impassive beauty of the earlier Greek sculpture may still be seen in the living figures and faces of men and women: and if anyone would see in the flesh the burly, black-bearded type idealised in a Heracles, he need but go to the south of the Peloponnese, and among the Maniotes he will soon be satisfied: for there he will find not merely an occasional example, as of reversion to an ancestral type, but a whole tribe of swarthy, stalwart warriors, whose aspect seems to justify their claim that in proud, though poverty-stricken, isolation they have kept their native peninsula free from alien aggression, and the old Laconian blood still pure in their veins. The ordinary Greek of the mainland, on the other hand, is usually of a mongrel and unattractive appearance; and in view of the marked difference of the type in regions untouched by the Slavs, I cannot but impute his lack of beauty to his largely Slavonic ancestry.