Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/78

 wonders.' And wonders are worked as the people expect—some in appearance, some in fact.

A sham miracle is annually worked by the priests of a church near Volo in Thessaly. Within the walls, still easily traced, of the old town of Demetrias on a spur of Mount Pelion stands an unfinished church dedicated to the Virgin. Here on the Friday after Easter there is a concourse from all Thessaly to see the miracle. At the east end of the church, on the outside, a square tank has been sunk ten or twelve feet below the level of the church floor, exposing, on the side formed by the church wall, ancient foundations—perhaps of some temple where the same miracle was worked two thousand years ago. The miracle consists in the filling of this tank with water; but seeing that under the floor of the church itself there are cisterns to which a shaft in each aisle descends, and that the tank outside, sunk, as has been said, to a lower level, undisguisedly derives its water from a hole in the foundations of the church, there is less of the marvellous in the fact that the priests by opening some sluice fill the tank than in the simple faith with which the throng from all parts presses to obtain a cupful of the miraculously fertilizing but withal muddy liquid. The women drink it, the men carry it home to sprinkle a few drops on cornfield or vineyard.

Genuine miracles, at any rate of healing, seem to be well established. After personal investigation and enquiry at the great festival of Tenos I concluded that some faith-cures had actually occurred. Some travellers indeed have been inclined to scoff at these miracles and to write them down mere fabrications of interested priests. But in an official 'Description of some of the miracles of the wonder-working icon of the Annunciation in Tenos' the total number claimed down to the year 1898 is only forty-four, that is to say not an average even of one a year; and a large majority of the cases detailed—including twelve cases of mental derangement, eleven of blindness, and ten of paralysis, none of them congenital,—might I suppose come under the category of nervous diseases for which a faith-cure is possible; while several of the remainder, such as the case of a man who at first sight of the icon coughed up a fish bone which had stuck in his throat for two years, do not pass the bounds of belief; and