There are only three inhabited houses in this remote little bay to the extreme north of Siphnos: two of these were shut for the winter, and the third, inhabited by an old potter and his wife, opened its door to us, such as it was. The house consisted of one room, with the potter’s wheel in the middle, and around were all the results of his last day’s labour waiting to be baked on the morrow; a seat built into the wall, a low table, a gourd or two, cheese baskets, and a bed in a corner formed all the potter's household goods.

From this bed the potter and his wife had just risen: it was formed by some boards fixed into the wall on two sides and supported at the outer angle by the rough trunk of a tree, with one branch left as a step to help you climb the four feet that it was raised from the ground. Some hard woollen sheets and a hairy rug, or ‘chlamys,’ of home-spun material formed all the covering for these boards; and on to this the potter and his wife insisted that we should mount. They would take no refusal, poor hospitable old things, so we passed the remainder of the night there as best we could, whilst our host and hostess, Captain George, and our sailors lay stretched on the mud floor around us ready, as the captain grimly remarked before he went to sleep, to protect us and our baggage from the sponge-fishers if they should attack us in the night.

In the night a tremendous storm arose, which burst open the door. For a moment we thought our enemies had come, but were relieved to find that only the rain and wind came in; we were thankful, too, that we had insisted on leaving Seriphos when we did — such a storm as this might last for days.

We liked our old potter very much on further acquaintance: the woman did all she could for us next morning, and, like the demarch of Galene, she said she had been expecting guests, for her eye had been itching all the previous day. The potters of Siphnos are celebrated throughout Greece. In the spring time they start on their travels far and wide, and settle in towns and villages for days and weeks until the place is supplied with large well-made earthenware amphorae and cooking utensils; and it is an ancient art which has never left the island. In Pliny’s time and before that the Siphniote keramic art was celebrated, and some specimens found lately at the bottom of the sea off Cape Kalymnia, to the south of the island, prove that jars of excellent workmanship of the best period of Greek art were manufactured here; and these were probably lost when being exported.

The old potter worked for us at his wheel. There was the disc (trochiá ^gr) which he turned by the application of his foot; this was joined by a spindle (roka ^gr) to a smaller upper disc (mikra trochiá ^gr). And as the clay revolved round it, it was fashioned into the form he wished by a wooden lathe which he held in his hand. He reminded me strongly of a potter at work as represented on a certain vase in the British Museum.

We had to wait some hours before mules could be fetched, and the old couple tried to prepare us a meal, which consisted of fish soup and onions, for onions, as appears from a proverb in these parts, are common enough in Siphnos. ‘Give a Siphniote an onion’ corresponds to ‘carrying coals to Newcastle.’ And as we sat around the low table the potter told us some of his family troubles: how two of his sons had been burnt in a fire at Constantinople, and how all his daughters had gone to the mainland as cooks; for Siphnos has another speciality besides pots, namely, cooks, and in the Greek restaurants at Constantinople all the chefs are Siphniotes.

By daylight the neighbourhood of the potter’s house looked dreary enough. It was but a stony, barren promontory swept by the northern blast, with a disused monastery, dedicated to St. George, at the end of it; also the remains of an old Hellenic watch tower, turned into a shelter for cattle. Captain George went with us to the end of this promontory, and pointed out to us a dangerous rock just outside the harbour, and let us understand that if we had had any other captain but himself we should have found a watery grave last night.

‘Bad sailors, these Siphniotes; wretched island!’ he muttered, and the insular jealousy at once showed itself. ‘Look at all these stones,’ he continued; ‘they are full of vipers, and in summer people have to wear shoes and gaiters on purpose to protect themselves: we have nothing of this kind in Seriphos.’

I could not help rejoining that, at all events, they had plenty of stones, and thought to myself they probably had plenty of vipers, whereas they have nothing to boast of like the fertility of Southern Siphnos. Captain George was a thorough Greek, such a one as Pallas Athene would have admired, like Ulysses, for his cunning. Having driven as good a bargain with us as he could, we overheard him arranging with the old potter for the export of pots on his return journey.

About midday our mules arrived, and we set forth on our way to the centre of Siphniote life, which lies to the south-west of the island, where it always was. Our road led through the bed of a mountain torrent, with laurel roses waving on either side; and when we had crossed the ridge of central hills we saw the long line of villages, five in all, which runs for nearly two miles along the western slopes. As each house has its own garden and olive orchard, and as green fields cover all the hillside, it was by far the most luxurious sight we had as yet seen in the Cyclades. I could not help remarking this to Captain George, who still accompanied us, and who shrugged his shoulders as he replied, ‘Yes, the Siphniotes have advantages that we have not in Seriphos; a wonder they do not make more use of them.’

The Siphniotes are wonderful hands at whitewash. Every house, every church is covered with it. Ancient bits of statues and inscriptions, which have been let into the walls by way of ornament, are coated and illegible with it; a clean housewife picks out the edges of her stone floor with whitewash once a week, when she does her cleaning, and if the effect is monotonous it is at any rate clean; and the villages of Siphnos, if it were not for the quantity of coarse-looking pigs with short bristles which swarm in them, would be bright and pleasant enough. But these pigs are abominable creatures; they saunter in and out of houses at will. The Siphniotes cut their bristles for sewing shoes and making brushes with; hence a pig with a strong crop of these ready to be shorn presents a particularly forbidding appearance. Captain George at once remarked our disgust at these animals, and laughed and propounded a local riddle.

‘What sort of a chicken is that which they scrape and cut, and then the shoemaker uses his feathers in his art ?’ — Answer: ‘A pig.’

All this fertile strip of Siphnos is shut off from the north and west by a lofty, prettily indented range of mountains. Of course Prophet Elias is the name of the highest, with a church on the summit, a specimen of old Byzantine of the tenth century; another is St. Simeon, with another church. We passed through two of the villages without stopping, and then drew up at Apollonia, a village built on the site of an old temple of Apollo, the ruins of which were used to build the modern church dedicated to the Virgin. In this village is the seat of government in Siphnos, the barracks, and the demarcheion, and here we were introduced to another brave mariner, Captain Prokos by name, who was to be our host, and who had been in command of a merchant ship, and had seen much of the world. He was an exceedingly jovial man, and had a buxom wife and blooming daughters, who at once came forward to receive us and introduced us to our new quarters. The women were very demonstrative, and loved to mark their civility by stroking my wife, examining minutely her clothes, and calling her a doll (koukla ^gr). They expressed the greatest astonishment at our luggage, humble as it seemed to us, and likened it to that of monarchs. Their house was built on the same principle as Captain George’s, having a square sitting room, and four cabins for bedrooms leading off it, which contained huge beds, but no room to dress in, and were well stocked with what the Greeks playfully call ‘black-faced heifers all blood and skin’; but we had a glorious satin quilt and a valance of magnificent Greek lace to make up for the other discomforts.

The Siphniotes are industrious and well-to-do; they have a fertile island, olives grow to any extent, and every Greek knows that ‘an olive with a kernel gives a boot to a man.’ They have mines, too, and though the richer inhabitants complain that the existence of mines makes labour and provisions dear yet there are two sides to this question. A French company has started mining operations at Kamara, a place so called from the vaulted chambers cut by ancient miners in the cliffs (Italian, camera) close to the sea. We visited them one day, and saw there an interesting cave with the inscription over it, NYMPHON IERON ^gr (the temple of the nymphs), cut in the rock. Here we have an old centre of nymph worship, and here we still find wonderful stories of Nereids and genii loci (stoicheia ^gr) associated with the spot. Travellers who cross a certain stream close to here, more especially at midnight or midday, are exposed to the danger of being possessed (nympholiptos ^gr); and to cure such cases it is customary to prepare and place at a spot where three roads meet (trístrata ^gr), or hang in the wells, some bread wrapped up in a clean napkin, and some honey, milk, and eggs, to appease these nymphs. The genii loci, too, haunt certain well-known trees and cliffs, and are like our old friends the Hamadryads. Woodcutters fear to lie or sleep under a big old olive tree called Megdanos; and when they have to cut down a tree that they suppose to be possessed they are exceedingly careful when it falls to prostrate themselves humbly and in silence lest the spirit should chastise them as it escapes; and sometimes they put a stone on the trunk of the tree so as to prevent its egress.

At the wells we find another kind of sprite called by the peasants Arabs (Arápides ^gr); and sometimes even piously inclined sprites haunt churches; these are rarely evil-doing; if they are, they do not live in the church, but in a cave hard by, so as to prevent people from going there to worship. And not unfrequently we hear stories of the prowess of the patron saint — how he has driven them off and rendered the place safe again.

On our return journey we visited what was once a celebrated convent for nuns, dedicated to St. John the Theologian. Captain Prokos told us some sorry tales about the goings on of these ladies when he was young, for generally before they were placed in this convent they had been guilty of some misconduct at home; and the Convent of St. John the Theologian before it was disestablished by the present Government was the favourite rendezvous of all the gallants of Siphnos. Captain Prokos lead us to infer that he had been there more than once, at which speech his wife administered a sharp reprimand, for she was not the down-trodden squaw our late hostess had become. Now these giddy nuns are scattered to the wind, and the tottering walls of their convent are inhabited by two very ancient females whose duty it is to clean the church and keep the lamps burning. The Siphniotes call it the Convent of Monkou ^gr amongst themselves. The name was curious, and excited my curiosity. A tradition, on which is based the origin of this name, says that a pious Siphniote built it years ago, and his wife objected to the money he had spent upon it; whereat he replied, in French, ‘J’ai fait mon goût ^eng,’ and the name has stuck to it ever since. It is curious what a lot of western words have crept into the Siphniote dialect. Pigs they call francesi (Frenchmen) because a traveller of that nation exclaimed on hearing a pig grunt, ‘Voilà une langue que je comprends! ^eng’ The schoolmaster of Siphnos rejoices in the name of Gkión ^gr. ‘Mine is a family of French origin,’ he said; ‘the name was formerly spelt Jean.’ Probably the mines had something to do with this and the family who ruled in Siphnos in the Venetian days, the Da Corogna, of Spanish extraction: this family provided princes for Siphnos for a century and a half, and then, in 1456, the heiress of this family married one Nikolas Gozzadini, who became lord of Siphnos; not until 1617 was the last of this family cast out by the Turks. There still live on the island of Santorin another branch of the Da Corogna family.

The Latin seat of government was at the town now called Kastro, an interesting specimen of mediaeval fortification, built on a tongue of land running out into the sea, about half-an-hour’s ride from Apollonia. And thither on the following morning our course was bent.

One is surprised at the quantity of churches spread about Siphnos, ‘a proof of the piety of our ancestors,’ said our muleteer. Two of these domed, whitewashed buildings lie close together, and have a peculiar interest of their own, inasmuch as they formed the lecture halls of the once celebrated ‘School of Siphnos,’ an establishment which will soon be blotted out of memory and forgotten; a generation hence none will remember what an important rôle this ‘School of the Holy Tomb’ played in the preservation of the Greek nationality during the dark ages.

It was founded by some refugees from Constantinople who fled to Siphnos for peace during the reign of the iconoclast Emperors of the East. On account of the seclusion of the spot and the difficulty of access it retained in all their simplicity the earliest customs of the Greek Church, purer even than the School of Mount Athos. Extensive grants of land and liberties were secured for it by pupils who in after-life gained distinction for themselves: amongst these were numbered patriarchs, archpriests, and bishops, who held sees at Caesarea, Belgrade, Cyzicus, and elsewhere, many of whom returned to spend their last days in the island, and introduced the enlightenment of the world into their old school. The pupils lodged in the town and villages, and came daily, bringing their food with them, to attend lectures at these churches; and their minds were nurtured by men whose notoriety, if it has not extended far, is well attested to by contemporary writers was headmaster of this school at the time of the outbreak of the war of independence. He forthwith initiated his scholars into the mysteries of the Friendly Society, and when, on March 25, 1821, the banner of freedom was unfurled, Chrysogelos took those of his pupils who were fit to carry arms and joined the army in the Peloponnese. For some time he was Capo d’Istria’s right-hand man in council and in war, and when he returned home after the final establishment of freedom he was made the first the demarch of Siphnos, and died full of years and honour in 1857.

Under the new regime the School of Siphnos had of necessity to be remodelled, for its work had been done. It had assisted in preserving the Greek language, religion, and customs from being obliterated during a period when they were assailed on all sides by Italians, by Albanians, and by Turks. And now the revenues of the School of the Holy Tomb have been appropriated to and form the nucleus of the modern gymnasium of Syra. We passed by the two churches just before reaching the Kastro; they will soon share the fate of many others of a like nature in ungrateful Greece — they will be ruined and forgotten.

The Kastro of Siphnos, or Seraglio, as it is still occasionally called, is a regular old-world Italian town, which has not been improved by the introduction of a few Greek customs. Each house has an outer staircase, which projects into the street for the benefit of the inhabitants of the upper storey; up this staircase climbs the chimney of the lower storey, and beneath it is the pigsty. The streets are narrow and dirty, many houses are falling into ruins, for the glory of Siphnos has left the Kastro, and is now centred in the villages on the hillside.