Visits to Monasteries in the Levant

by Robert Curzon

"[...]mounted his horse and rode towards the gate of Silivria, where he was encountered by a band of the enemy and slain, after a brave resistance, by the hand of an Arab or a Negro. The broiled fishes still swim about in the water of the spring, the sides of which have been lined with white marble, in which are certain recesses where they can retire when they do not wish to receive company. The only way of turning the attention of these holy fish to the respectful presence of their adorers is accomplished by[...]."

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, History

423 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1849

About the author

Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche- styled The Honourable Robert Curzon between 1829 and 1870- was an English traveller, diplomat and author. He may also appear as Robert Curzon, Jr.

Reviews

[Philip Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

No mealy-mouthed apology, carefully worded excuse or legal argument can deny the truth. 'Visits to Monasteries in the Levent' is the tale of a gentleman thief. But nor is its author any sort of Raffles, no down-on-his-luck aristocrat preying on the follies of an idle rich bretheren. The book, despite a plea to have been written for his own pleasure, was a runaway success when first published, adding immoral profit to hoodwinks and larceny. In the years 1834-37 Robert Curzon, later fourteenth Baron Zouche, plundered the libraries of Orthodox monasteries in Egypt, Palestine and Greece. His claims to legitimacy include cash payments and donations made to the monks in occupation, assertions that he was looking principally for lost non-religious works, and that he rescued many books from destruction.

The publication of Curzon's book in 1849, coming five years on the heels of Kinglake's 'Eothen', turned its well-heeled author into a literary celebrity. The work went through three printings in its first year, then several editions. 'Eothen' had created a surge in demand for travel writing, especially about the Orient; a popular sensation which would climax in the 1865 issue of Sir Richard Burton's 'Pilgrimage to Mecca'. Curzon's tome played up to Victorian fantasies of the East, exploited the eternal craze for treasure hunting; and the author was lent academic credibility by his pursuit of lost classical texts.

What merit does the book have besides the achievement of popular success? Perhaps not as not as finely written as Kinglake's journal - which always avoids reading like a diary - where 'Monasteries' is lacking in literary artifice, it makes up for in the freshness of its portraits and landscapes. Curzon, still only twenty-three years of age when he first sailed for the East, had come down from Oxford without a degree in order to succeed his father as member of parliament for Clitheroe. He promptly lost this seat, as a result of the Great Reform Bill, and so embarked on his own version of what was still called The Grand Tour. One of the first scenes he describes is the harbour of Navarino, where wrecks of the Egyptian and Turkish fleets could still be seen, seven years after they were destroyed by Admiral Codrington's coalition fleet. From the Peloponnese, Curzon and his companion would embark for Egypt, and so the scene shift to the streets of Alexandria and their first vision of life in the Orient.

Curzon's portrayal of what nowadays would be called culture shock relies on a thoughtful evaluation of what it meant to be a traveller in those days. In this, he is a decidedly modern writer. From the balcony of what he calls 'the only hotel in Africa', a typical paragraph,

“Some miserable-looking black slaves caught our attention, clothed each in a piece of Isabel-coloured canvas and led by a well-dressed man, who had probably just bought them. Then a great personage came by on horseback with a number of mounted attendants and some men on foot, who cleared the way before him, and struck everybody on the head with their sticks who did not get out of the way fast enough. These blows were dealt all round in the most unceremonious manner; but what appeared to us extraordinary was, that all these beaten people did not seem to care for being beat. They looked neither angry nor affronted, but only grinned and rubbed their shoulders, and moved on one side to let the train of the great man pass by. Now if this were done in London, what a ferment would it create! what speeches would be made about tyranny and oppression! what a capital thing some high-minded and independent patriot would make of it! how he would call a meeting to defend the rights of the subject! and how he would get his admirers to vote him a piece of plate for his noble and glorious exertions! Here nobody minded the thing; they took no heed of the indignity; and I verily believe my friend and I, who were safe up at the window, were the only persons in the place who felt any annoyance.”

The 'annoyance' felt by Curzon and his companion is not, I would suggest, indignation. His irritation was less to do with self-righteousness than the affront to human dignity with which such peremptory beatings were endured. There is exploitation here, too. The passage quoted is accompanied by the following illustration:



I assume this to be a romanticised representation of slavery as it still existed in Egypt at the time. Curzon's reactionary pique was aroused not only by the oppressions of daily life in the east, but the corresponding freedoms his countrymen enjoyed. He was writing as a Tory whose narrative begins in the very year in which the Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported to Botany Bay.

Not all of Curzon's attitudes, however, are of a political reactionary. There was something like Humanism in the man, too. Firstly, we see the human touch in his challenge to the prevalent Protestant belief that all monks were fat and lazy. At least as far as Benedictine monks of the Catholic Church were concerned, he disavowed the image of Friar Tuck in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe as unreal. He asserts that the majority of Orthodox monks he encountered in the Levant were pious, hard-working and worthy individuals. Secondly, he parodies European attitudes towards Islam in a jocular passage his contemporary Edward Lear might have penned. A Persian – i.e. a Moslem - visitor to England enters a church. On seeing the organ pipes then hearing it played, he starts at its ugliness and guesses it to be the incarnation of a monster. When, service being over, the congregation stream headlong out of the church, the Persian naturally assumes it is in flight from the said beast.

There are in fact many anecdotes in the book, mostly second hand (as the above), that illustrate, for example, the honesty of Turkish porters or the guile of Armenian dealers. I suspect many a national stereotype has its origins in the tales told to Victorian travellers. But enough apologies already! No matter that Curzon was content to be cheated of a few shekels for his board & lodging. He carried about with him a bag of universal gold and he carried off the core of what is now the British Museum's collection of Orthodox Church manuscripts. No doubt the curators there will excuse his avarice by pointing to the bad conditions the books were kept in and how he had actually rescued them from the hungry jaws of rat & bookworm. Will these two wrongs make a right? If yes, then at least we have Curzon's own words to help restore the books to their original locations.

[LeeAnn Heringer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book rather by accident. I need epub digital book files to test some software with and so grabbed a few books randomly from gutenberg.org and this was one of them. My version of the book says that it was written in 1849, not the 2007 that goodreads lists. But it sucked me in. To read the travel accounts of someone trying to travel through Egypt, the Middle East, and Greece with the idea of looking through monasteries for old overlooked, uncared-for manuscripts and rescuing them was fascinating. To say that the travel industry was as yet uncreated, is an under-statement. He dines with heads of states and soldiers, gets caught in a deadly panic in a church in Jerusalem where people are crushed to death, sweet-talks his way around bandits.

Very interesting.

[Dimitris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a regular visitor to Mount Athos so I managed to acquire an American first edition of this book from 1849. I would agree with the other reviewers that this book was a suprinsigly fascinating read. The author certainly had the gift of being a great storyteller. He was also veru lucky. He visited places like Meteora and Mount Athos only a few years after the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Turks. And even though the revolution was a success at that point in the southern parts of the country, it had been crashed in the regions that he visited. Establishments like monasteries were in the frontline of Turkish revenge, and by the time Robert Curzon had set foot in them they were just starting to recover from the attrocities of the war. Their original brotherhoods had either fled or worse, and the monks that he met where mostly a new gerneration of younger illiterate men from local villages. So it is no wonder that many of them had no interest in the old books and prioritised every day survival and acquiring funds for the restoration of their monasteries. Needless to say, Robert Curzon is not a very pupular historical figure in Athos today, as many of today's monks believe that he is the Athos version of Lord Elgin.