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y! THENATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC
MAGAZINE
DECEMBER, 1930
@
CONTENTS
seals otitiacl
PEARL
Sash
‘TWENTY-FOUR PAGES OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN FULL COLOR
New Greece, the Centenarian, Forges Ahead
‘With 52 [lustrations MAYNARD OWEN WILLIAMS
Amidst the Templed Hills of Greece
13 Natural-Color Photographs
Scenes Along the Byways of Hellas
13 Natural-Color Photographs
Festival Days on the Slopes of Mount Parnassus
14 Natural-Color Photographs
The World's Highest International Telephone
Cable
‘With 8 [llustrations
Gigantic Brazil and Its Glittering Capital
‘With 55 TMastrations FREDERICK SIMPICH
PUBLISHED BY THE
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
HUBBARD MEMORIAL HALL
WASHINGTON, D.C,Vor, LVL, No. 6
WASHINGTON
Decemper, 1930
THE
NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC
MAGAZINE
NEW GREECE, THE CENTENARIAN,
FORGES AHEAD
By Mayxarp Owen Wituiams
Avrmoa or “Bese tHe Rosroawe, Diemues or Conn
‘Moonr on rae Dacakoce,” x1< Ere,
si" “Uasromen Cxrace” “Eset of Sues to tus
‘THLE Narloval, GxOomavune Mata ret
With Iitustritions from Photographs by the Author
of modern Greece, most of them
picturing leaders of the Greek War
f Independence which ended a fandred
years ago, none is more interesting than
that used on letters to foreign lands,
It contrasts, on 2 single map, the Greece
of 1830 with the vastly enlarged Greece
of to-day (see inset, page 652).
‘To my father, as to lundreds of classi-
eal scholurs, there wus never another land
like classic Greece. Its glories were his
fable talk, the gods of Olympus his, inti-
mates, But when he visited Greece a
quarter of a century ago and studied the
classic sites,, Zeus, Aphrodite, Hermes,and
Apollo. were “barbarians” to the extent
that their Olympian abode was beyond the
boundaries of Hellas:
‘The Hellenic Republic of to-day istwice
as large and twice as populous as the
Greece he knew. It no longer iaces the
past, Since he saw them, the very skies
of Athens have changed, The prosperity
with which Greece is now being rewarded
for her hospitality to a million and a half
refugees is smudging with factory smoke
‘that limpid blue in which the ancient api:
dairies monmted the precious stenes of
Propyleca and Parthenon (see ilhstra-
tions, page 650).
The aaa in Hellas must ever beware
Jest he ignore the invisible emanations of
classie glories. Perhaps the returned mill
A MONG the Centenary postage stamps
hand from “Haverhillmass.” who xets as
his tnettor, is really Athena in disguise.
But here the lens must speak. Its task
is not to interpret the past, but to picture
New Greece, the centenarian, Let, the
Greece of Homer or Piato inspires, ‘The
Greece of today will not betray our in-
terest. Mere mortals wow live in the
haunts of the immortal gods, but they
make ita friendly land.
‘The roughest peasant will not disillusion
‘one who eomes to Greece with the spell of
the past upon him, Like the woman who
speat the entire morning on the Acropolis
without finding the “Four Horsemen,”
he may discover something finer than he
sought, ‘The Greece of reality, like that af
dreams, is a lind of inexhaustible charm.
SCIENCE POINTS US To THE ACROPOLIS
In ctnntiess tineanny ways Greece links
us with ourselves. We are astounded at
what this rocky little Jand has done to and
for us. Study the sciences whose names
end in “ies” or “y” and your thoughts in-
evitably turn to the Acropolis. Aeschylus
lifted the theater from low vaudeville to
drama whose sublimity has’ never been,
equaled, Xenophon as a war carrespond~
ent has seldom if ever been Surpussed.
Pericles, Phidins, Thucydides, Iktinas,
Herodotus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aris-
tophanes, and Socrates—a single lifetime
knew all those giants! Draw forth from