Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/98

 saint Demetra ([Greek: hê hagía Dêmêtra]) entirely unknown elsewhere and never canonised. Further, in open defiance of an iconoclastic Church, they retained an old statue of Demeter, and merely prefixing the title 'saint' to the name of their cherished goddess, continued to worship her as before. The statue was regularly crowned with garlands of flowers in the avowed hope of obtaining good harvests, and without doubt prayer was made before it as now before the pictures of canonical saints. This state of things continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, in 1801, two Englishmen, named Clarke and Cripps, armed by the Turkish authorities with a license to plunder, perpetrated an act unenviably like that of Verres at Enna, and in spite of a riot among the peasants of Eleusis removed by force the venerable marble; and that which was the visible form of the great goddess on whose presence and goodwill had depended from immemorial ages the fertility of the Thriasian plain is now a little-regarded object catalogued as 'No., Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, (much mutilated) .'

Saint Demetra however, though lost to sight, was yet dear to the memory of the village-folk; and in spite of the devastation of old beliefs and legends which the much-vaunted progress and education of Greece have committed in the more civilised districts without conferring any sensible compensation, the antiquarian Lenormant found in 1860 an old Albanian priest who when once reassured that no ridicule was intended, recited to him the following remarkable legend : 'S. Demetra was an old woman of Athens, kind and good, who devoted all her little means to feeding the poor. She had a daughter who was beautiful past all imagining; since "lady Aphrodite" ([Greek: kyra 'phrodítê]) none had been seen so lovely. A Turkish lord of the neighbourhood of Souli, who was a wicked man and versed in magic, saw her one day combing her hair, which was of golden hue and reached to the very ground, and became passionately enamoured of her. He bided his time, and having found his chance of speaking with her tried to seduce her. But she being as prudent as she was beautiful, repulsed all the miscreant's advances. Thereupon he resolved