Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/57

mutton, and as the Trojan wine of the villages of Yeni-Shehr, Yeni Kioi, and Ren Kioi, is magnificent, and excels even the very best Bordeaux wine, we had an abundance of good food; but of vegetables we could only get potatoes and spinach; the former are not grown at all in the plain of Troy, and had to be fetched from the town of the Dardanelles, whither they are imported probably from Italy. It appears very extraordinary that the villagers of the Troad, Greeks as well as Turks, do not use potatoes for food, though the soil is well adapted for the cultivation of this vegetable, and that they should use bread in its stead. In June and July we were supplied by the villagers with an abundance of hog-beans, kidney-beans, and artichokes, which appear to be, besides spinach, almost the sole kinds of vegetable they cultivate. It seems that garden peas are not cultivated in the Troad, for I could only buy them in June and July in the town of the Dardanelles, whither they were imported by sea.

I heard that the country was infested by marauders and highway robbers; besides that, the continual acts of brigandage in Macedonia, where a number of opulent men had been carried off by the robbers to the mountains and ransomed for heavy amounts, made me afraid of a like fate at Hissarlik. I therefore required at least eleven gendarmes for my safeguard. During my excavations at Hissarlik in 1878 and 1879 I had always kept ten gendarmes; but these were refugees from Bulgaria and Albania, and to such men I would not now entrust myself. I therefore applied to Hamid Pasha, the civil governor at the Dardanelles, to give me as a guard the eleven surest men he could find. By his permission they were picked out for me by his first dragoman and political agent, M. Nicolaos Didymos, from among the strongest and most trustworthy Turks of the Dardanelles. Their wages were £30 10s. monthly. So I had now eleven brave gendarmes of a powerful frame; all of them were well armed with