Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks - eBooks4Greeks.gr

origin. 1THE GREEK MAINLAND 3This people forms the backbone of ruralGreece, for your true Greek will not till the landif he can earn a living in any other way. He isinstinctively a townsman and a trader. TheAlbanian is a farmer, and considering that 70 percent of the exports of Greece consists of landproduce, it must be allowed that he is a veryvaluable asset to the kingdom.By far the largest grain-growing district inGreece is the Thessalian plain, which was a lakeuntil the defile of Tempe was cloven betweenOssa and Olympus by a seismic cataclysm whichlet the water out. The ancient myth attributedthe cleft to the trident of Neptune, but it wasVulcan who accomplished the task. Geologistssay that it occurred at no distant period, ifreckoned in terms of geologic time ; but in anycase the plain is a lake bottom of exuberant1The Albanian population of Greece is completely Hellenised.It is of Toskh origin. The Toskhs are the Southern Albanians,whose northern limit may be assigned to the neighbourhood ofthe River Skumbi. They differ materially from the Ghegs orNorthern Albanians. The latter are divided into tribes, theToskhs are not. When the Gheg is a Christian, he is a RomanCatholic, whilst the Toskh is Orthodox. Greek influence hasmoulded the Toskhs for centuries, and a Toskh, even in Turkishterritory, resembles a Greek more than he does his Gheg compatriot,whose chief occupation is fighting. When not thusengaged his condition is that of armed idleness. The differenceextends even to the dress ; the Albanian costume adopted by theGreeks, whose distinguishing feature is the fustanella, the manypleatedwhite kilt, is Toskh. The fustanella is unknown amongthe Ghegs. It is difficult to draw a line of demarcation betweenGreeks and Toskhs in North-Western Greece. But the divisionbetween Toskhs and Ghegs farther north is as sharp asbetween two different nations.