Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/95

 COLLECTANEA.

, or as the Greeks call it Axó, is a village lying out in the middle of the Cappadocian plain about six hours' drive to the north of Nigde. With the exception of the church and the school now being constructed, the buildings consist entirely of flat-roofed houses of mud bricks, plastered over with a compound of straw, mud, and dung (Plate I). Against almost every wall are to be seen the dung cakes, which in this treeless country serve as fuel in the severe winter, plastered up to dry in the sun. The village naturally presents a somewhat squalid and insignificant appearance, but it is of considerable size. It is said to contain 800 houses, and in each house live the νοικοκύρης or head of the house, his unmarried daughters and his sons and their wives and families. In the house in which my companion and I were lodged the total number of the family was twenty-four. In the winter, when snow lies a metre deep on the ground and sheep and cattle are added to the human inhabitants of a mud dwelling, ill-calculated to withstand the assaults of rain and snow, the conditions of life must be uncomfortable indeed.

The inhabitants are all Christians, and, with the characteristic and pathetic hankering after an ancestral patrimony, the learned men of the place are convinced that Axó must have been a colony of Naxos! The majority of the people talk Turkish and one of the Cappadocian dialects of modern Greek. It was the latter indeed which brought Mr. Dawkins, whom I had the good fortune to accompany, to the place. One or two, the intellectual aristocracy, who had been taken out of their village by mercantile enterprise, spoke the "pure" tongue of modern Greece.