Taygetos
An Excerpt from the Travel Writing of Kostas Ouranis
No mountain of those I saw in my life – from Mt Blanc, with its eternally untrodden snow, we saw the wildest Spanish ‘Sierra’ – ever made the impression I felt (that I accepted, I should say) when from a high bend in the carriage-road I saw Taygetos in all its imposing stature.
Never had I imagined that there existed a mountain of such character, such individuality. Its image was one of immeasurable majesty. It is presented resting on huge, solid slopes – similar to buttresses – of a leaden purple hue. Its peaks, which have the shapes of pyramids, jut against the blue sky, distinct and hard. There are no – as is the case with other tall mountains – smaller mountain ranges to half-hide it and hinder one from embracing its entire grandeur with one’s eye. From the valley of Sparta – which spreads out as a sea of greenery, and wherein serpentine manoeuvres are made by the Eurotas – Taygetos rises unobstructed, straight, mature, and strong, with a proud elevation – up to the height of its snow-covered peaks. Appearing like this, it gives not only an impression of greatness, but also deep emotion.
No one imagines it as soulless: a cold eternity of matter. As it rises with majesty and power, shadowing the great plain, it seems like a living presence, as though it were its titanic sentinel – it truly teaches that lesson of energy and strength felt by Maurice Barrès at the sight of it, by which he explained the martial miracle of ancient Sparta. Indeed, upon seeing Taygetos, one understands further and completely that there once was a proud race, an exceedingly manly, strict, austere, and warlike race who lived in this Spartan valley, without ever feeling the need to enclose themselves in citadels to escape in times of enemy raids – the people who saw daily the titan called Taygetos, who breathed the air that descends from its summits, who felt not its weight upon their plains, but its mighty height. It was impossible, in those seasons of war and confined fatherland, not to grow into steely and proud warriors, and not to claim the superiority of their race even to the civilisation of the Athenians…
In other words, before I had ever seen Taygetos, I, along with everyone else, considered inferior this tribe that had vanished from the face of the earth without leaving to the centuries any reminder of its passage: not a temple, not even a work of art. Now I feel that the Spartans left Taygetos as their monument because, inspired by its proud presence, they arose like their soul to its highest peak, and with it became one…