When I was at Candia in the autumn of 1913, Dr. Hatzidakis, the Ephor of Antiquities, told me that a report had reached him of a Minoan site near the village of Pláti in the plain of Lasithi, and suggested that the School should apply for a permit to excavate it. Before leaving Crete I made a preliminary inspection of the site, and the prospects seemed to justify the School in undertaking the work. The local account was that a woman had had a dream that by digging in a certain place a church bell would be found. The villagers accordingly dug a hole in the place indicated, and found not a bell but an early piece of wall and some fragments of obsidian. A report of the discovery was made to the authorities by the scholarch of Tsermiádo, the chief village of Lasithi, and it was this document to which Dr. Hatzidakis called my attention.

The usual kindness of the Cretan authorities produced the required permit, and by the 25th of April the site had been measured by the government engineer in accordance with the law now in force, and we were able to begin the work. This lasted for exactly a month, until the 25th of May, the number of men employed being for the most part about thirty, and resulted in the discovery of the Minoan settlement described in the second section of this report. The party consisted of Messrs. J. P. Droop, R. M. Heath, and M. L. W. Laistner with the Director in charge throughout.

The folk-tales and translations which follow are given as being the best means of illustrating the dialect of Tsakonia. They were in every case taken down in the village to which they are assigned and from a native, and were not collected without some difficulty as the popularity of story-telling of this kind no longer exists or perhaps never had any strong hold over the district. This of course is true generally of the mainland of Greece to-day as opposed to the Aegean islands. The speaker generally appeared rather confused as if he (or she) did not remember or did not understand the plot of the story.

Upon the Eve of St. Basil, whose festival, in the Greek Church, falls upon New Year's Day, processions of carol-singers go from house to house making their collections under the pretext of wishing the inmates good fortune for the coming year. That the practice is of very considerable antiquity is shown by the existence of a carol of the Byzantine Age which I have discussed elsewhere. The name κάλαντα by which such songs are called is connected with the Latin kalendae. The procession, now usually composed of children, carries lanterns and often the paper model of a ship.

Mention must further be made of the mumming plays, which have been discussed by Mr. Wace, since the performers in the two instances draw in part upon a common stock of popular poetical commonplace. It is clear that the tendency to transfer these mumming plays to the period of Carnival is modern and to be accounted for by European and ecclesiastical influences. Originally they too appear to be associated with the period between New Year's Day and the Epiphany rather than with Shrove Tuesday.

The following fragments of a Gypsy carol in honour of St. Basil have been supplied to me by Dr. John Sampson. The references are to Paspáti, Études sur les Tchinghianés, from which he has excerpted and pieced together the relevant quotations.

A. Åyo Vasílí avéla

Pi lolí djornisa.

St. Basile vient avec son mulet rouge (‘Ch[anson] du premier jour de l'an,’ p. 228 s.v. Djorní).

Two folio volumes in the Bibliothèque Nationale (MS. Fr. 15, 452–3) contain an ambitious work by André Thevet on the islands of the world, entitled Le Grand Insulaire et Pilotage d'Andre Thevet, Angoumousin, cosmographe du Roy, dans lequel sont contenus plusieurs plants d'isles habitées et déshiabitées et description d'icelles. The date 1586 is scribbled on the back of one of the maps in vol. i. and checked by a reference on f. 112, which gives the date of the Insulaire as twenty-five years later than a voyage undertaken by the author to the New World in 1551. We may thus take the date of the composition as lying between 1576 and 1586.

The first volume of the Insulaire (numbered ff. 413, of which nineteen are blank, plus thirty-two unnumbered written sheets) contains descriptions and many engraved maps of the North European and East Indian Islands, Japan, the Canaries, and the islands of the New World.

The story of the Rhodian knight Dieudonné de Gozon and the slaying of the great dragon of Malpasso is, largely owing to Schiller's adoption of the theme in a ballad, one of the best-known legends of its type. It is one of several instances in which an historical personage figures as the hero of this quite mythical adventure.

Dieudonné de Gozon, a member of the Provençal langue, was the third Grand Master of the Knights of S. John at Rhodes, ruling from 1346 to 1353. He is represented as a simple knight at the time of his great adventure. As might be expected, no contemporary or nearly contemporary authority mentions the dragon-fight of de Gozon. But so early as Mandeville and Schiltberger we find anonymous Rhodian knights figuring as the heroes of current folk-tales of the chivalric type.

The history and authenticity of the so-called ‘tomb of S. Polycarp’ at Smyrna have lately formed the subject of a monograph by Père S. Lorenzo of the Order of S. Francis, who claims to have discovered the real church and tomb of S. Polycarp in a vineyard at some distance from the site tacitly accepted hitherto both by the Greek and Latin communities. The first section of the present paper attempts to trace as far as possible the history of the traditional tomb; the second to discuss the antiquity of its traditions, and the value of tradition in general at Smyrna; and the third to establish a point in the topography of ancient Smyrna on evidence arising from, or closely connected with, the former discussions.

The stratification of cults at famous sanctuaries of the ancient world, reflected for the most part in their local mythology, has long been interpreted as evidence of the invasion of older by newer gods and religious systems. A religion carried by a conquering race or by a missionary priesthood to alien lands superimposes itself, by force or persuasion, on an indigenous cult: the process is expressed in mythological terms under the figure of a personal combat between the rival gods or of the ‘reception’ of the new god by the old. Eventually either one god or the other succumbs and disappears or is relegated to an inferior position; or, again, the two may be more or less completely identified and fused.

Of the religions of antiquity it is seldom possible to do more than conjecture by what methods and processes these transitions were actually carried out. The paper which follows is an attempt to examine some phenomena of the superimposition of cult in the case of a modern Mahommedan sect—the Bektashi—acting on the sanctuaries of the mixed populations of Turkey and in particular on Christian saint-cults. So far as we can see, where Bektashism has gained ground at the expense of Christianity this has been accomplished without violence, either by processes analogous to that known to the ancient world as the ‘reception’ of the new god by the old, or simply by the identification of the two personalities.

The local account of the Saint Haidar at Haidar-es-Sultan is given by Crowfoot as follows: ‘Haidar was the son of the king of Persia and came from a town named Yassevi; he was also called Khodja Akhmed and was the disciple of the famous Hadji Bektash. With the latter he travelled to Caesarea, and there took a Christian named Mēnĕ to wife, and together they came to the place of his tomb, where they begat children and died—the whole village claiming descent from him.’

The last clause makes clear the identity of Haidar as far as the village is concerned: he is their sainted ancestor. Whether, as Crowfoot suggests, he is confused with Haidar the father (not the son) of Ismail, the founder of the Safi dynasty in Persia, is for present purposes immaterial.

The Bektashi addition to the local legend consists, as we shall see, in the identification of Haidar with Khodja Achmet Yassevi, who seems himself confounded with the Bektashi saint Karadja Achmet: both Achmets have been adopted into the Bektashi cycle.

A recent journey has given me the opportunity of verifying and supplementing the observations on the prehistoric sites of Macedonia made by Mr. M. S. Thompson and myself in 1909. The following remarks are to be considered merely as notes intended to assist in the future exploration of Macedonian prehistoric mounds, as they are based on observation and not on excavation.

In 1911 we noted a prehistoric settlement on a bluff on the right bank of the Haliakmon just above the Serfije end of the bridge over the river on the Kozane-Serfije road. The mound directly overlooks the bridge-head and is skirted on the west by the high road. The fields round are known as Emir Chaiir. In our previous examination of the mound Mr. Thompson and I found only plain hand-made prehistoric potsherds which possessed no sufficiently marked characteristics to enable us to determine to what group they belonged.