Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/80

 prostrate forms from the south to the north door. The atmosphere was suffocating and reeked with the smoke of wax tapers which all day long the pilgrims had been burning before the icon. Every malady and affliction seemed to be represented; the moaning and coughing never stopped: and I wondered, not whether there would be any miraculous cures, but how many deaths there would be in the six or seven hours of confinement before even the doors were again opened.

But this is the practice at its worst. Where there is more time available, there is nothing insanitary in it. In the list of cures at Tenos, to which I have alluded, there are many cases in which the patient spent not one night only but several months in the church. As a typical case I may take that of a sailor who while keeping look-out on a steamer in the harbour of Patras had some kind of paralytic seizure. He was taken to Tenos and for four months suffered terribly. Then about midday at Easter he had fallen asleep and heard a voice bidding him rise. He woke up and asked those about him who had called him; they said no one; so he slept again. This happened twice. The third time on hearing the voice he opened his eyes and saw entering the church a woman of unspeakable beauty and brilliance, and at the shock he rose to his feet and began to walk; and the same day accompanied the festival procession round the town to the astonishment of all the people.

When I was in Scyros I heard of an equally curious case of a long-deferred cure which had recently taken place and was the talk of the town. For seven consecutive years a man from Euboea had brought his wife, who was mad, to the church of S. George to 'sleep in' for forty days. Shortly before I arrived the last of these periods was just drawing to a close, when one night both the man and his wife saw a vision of S. George who came and laid his hand on her head; and in the morning she woke sane. Of her sanity when I saw her—for they were still in the island, paying, I think, some vow which the man had made—I had no doubt; and the evidence of the people of the place who for seven years previously had seen her mad seemed irrefragable.

The instances which I have cited are from the records of churches which have succeeded to the reputation possessed by Epidaurus in antiquity. These owing to the enthusiasm which