The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage by Jan Morris

association of ideas.
    At first, then, even on an ordinary weekday, Tinos feelsanything but Venetian. The big white pilgrimage church above the town is patrolled by bearded tall-hatted priests. Crowds of black-shawled women move in and out of the shrine. Through the open doors of the icon’s chapel you may glimpse that mystery of candles, incense, gleaming silver things, swarthy ecstatic faces, shadows and resplendences that is the essence of the Orthodox style. The long, wide highway to the church is lined with booths and pilgrim hostels, and every other souvenir is stamped, somehow or other, with the image of the icon. Attended by these holy events, busy always with the ferry-steamers, the motor-caiques, the speedboats, the visiting yachts and the rumbling motor-gunboats of the Hellenic seas, Tinos town is pure, almost archetypically Greek. Only the fancifully decorated dovecotes on the edge of town, like so many pastry-houses, remind one that the Venetians, with their taste for the frivolous and the extravagant, were ever here at all.
    It is in the countryside behind that you can still get in touch with them. The Catholic archbishop, successor to a long line of Venetian incumbents, tactfully has his palace in the inland village of Xynara, well away from the holy icon, and the Venetians themselves, in their days of power, established their headquarters away from the water’s edge. From a boat off-shore you can see the pattern of their settlement. To the left of the modern port a mole and a couple of ruins mark the site of their harbour; inland, white villages with Italianate campaniles speckle the countryside like exiles from the Veneto; and over the shoulder of the town, clinging to the sides of an almost conical mountain peak, you can just make out the remains of the Venetian colonial capital, their very last foothold in the Aegean Sea, Exombourgo.
    Not much is left of it. In its great days it was something of a wonder, and the old prints, prone to licence though they are, suggest its spectacular character. The peak, which is actually 1,700 feet high, looks excessively tall, steep and sudden in these high-spirited old versions, and towers like an Everest over the island: and perched dizzily on its summit, like an outcrop of the rock itself, the fortress of Santa Elena stands in a positive eruption of towers, walls and flags. Apparently impregnable ramparts circle the peak, and below it the island seems to lie trustful and
    Tinos
    secure, characterized by benign farmsteads and peacefully anchored ships.
    It is not like that now. The remains on top of the hill still gloriously command the island landscape and the seas around, westward to Kea, northward to Andros, eastward to Chios and Irakia, southward to Paros and Naxos of the dukes. They are scarcely more than piles of stones, though, hardly recognizable as a fortress at all but for the steep steps that lead up the crag to them, the fortified gateway in the ramparts, and the little chapel which survives, fresh-painted and candle-lit, in the lee of the mountain below.
    Besides, if the drama is there, the glory is gone, for in the end the Venetians themselves tamely surrendered the Rose of the Aegean, and brought their long suzerainty in these waters to an ignoble conclusion.
    It was a famous scandal. By the end of the seventeenth century the island’s defences were in a shameful state. The Rector might still row about the place with his fourteen-oar galley, and the Venetiangentry still lived in some style in their mansions on the mountain. But the fortress was held, so a French visitor reported in 1700, only by ‘fourteen ragged soldiers, seven of whom are French deserters’. There were some 500 houses within the walls of Exombourgo then, but grand though their situation seemed to imaginative cartographers, on the spot it was not so enviable. Tinos was traditionally the home of Aeolus, Lord of the Winds: the cutting north winds of the Aegean swept through those stony