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was to be interred, or places of secondary rank like Damascus, or the Hadji Bek Tashi monastery, or some local shrine.

The Armenians of one region are wont to assemble on Cross Mountain at the festival of Vartavar in midsummer, which is interpreted as celebrating the transfiguration of our Lord, and partly also as recalling the flood of Noah. They may throw water over one another in memory of the flood, or release captive pigeons as Noah sent the dove forth of the ark, but why do they in some cases build fires, about which they walk seven times and then jump through the flames? And why do they in some places read from the Gospel at each of the four sides of the fire, and then take a burning stick and shake ashes from it on all the principal parts of the house, or strike it seven times on every person and animal at hand? Why indeed, unless the midsummer festival of the Armenians, which is traced by their own more intelligent men to the pre-Christian Armenian festival in honour of Anahid, preserves certain features of fire worship held by the early Armenians in common with their neighbours and kinsfolk, the Persians?

At Beuyurtlen in Pontus, Greeks from a hundred villages are said to gather on a mountain top in the summer of every year. There they spend the night in the open air, have religious services, led by the priests, in the morning dawn, they eat the food they have brought, and after enjoying to the full a religious picnic return to their homes.

Take another day in midsummer and visit a bald limestone ridge, a hundred miles from the last named place, and, if what eye-witnesses say is true, you will see another crowd, this time one of Redhead or Shia Turks, assembling to the number of thousands. There is a sheep for every house among the well-todo, the animals are sacrificed, the meat is distributed to the poor and to friends, with plenty left over for the family that makes the offering. The date is determined by the beginning of the harvest in any given year, or as some affirm by the summer solstice," the turn of the year." I have not yet been able to accept the invitation given me to attend and participate in this scene. There is more truth, however, than is sometimes realised in the claim of Shia Turks, that less than the thickness of an onion skin separates them from Christians. They are strongly affirmed by outsiders to practise a degenerate form of the Lord's Supper, but they are ignorant, low in the social scale, and in religious habits are secretive and deceptive. All the gatherings of religious clans, of which the above are samples, represent a mild type of pilgrimage. The more formal pilgrim

age to the great world centres is enjoined by the various hierarchies, but this resort to local shrines is a remnant of pagan customs, for it is similar to what we know was practised in Asia Minor in the centuries preceding the Christian

era.

The desire to forecast the future and the attempt to force the omens to assume a favourable character are impulses planted deeply in the human bosom. Books on this and kindred subjects, to the value of fifty thousand pieces of silver, were once burned in Asia Minor, but I suppose that any language of the Levant can still furnish books telling how to read the stars, the palm of the hand, etc. Old women in the city streets offer for sale collections of rings, seals and stones recommending certain ones as very powerful and sure to bring good luck. In Zile I saw a flat stone in a graveyard with a few pebbles on it, and a friend informed me that people often go to this stone, throw a handful of pebbles upon it with a prayer, and from the number of pebbles in a given space, or from the number as odd or even, or from the desigus as resembling letters of the alphabet, they predict a favourable or unfavourable issue to any undertaking in hand. A shop-keeper sometimes hires a person considered luck-bringing to be the first customer at his shop in the morning, hoping thus to secure good luck in business for the day. At a retired nook in the mountains is a peculiar hole in the thin edge of a huge rock through which people have tried to pass in such numbers as to have worn the rock smooth. Supposably a sinner cannot pass; an innocent person can. The place also abounds in little stones: a person gathers up a handful, and expects to live as many years as he has stones in his hand. the monastery of Sourp Minas visitors clap stones against a wall greasy from the candles which have been lighted and stuck against it, and if a stone adheres to the wall the owner is expected to be fortunate. When a dog rolls before the door of a sick man it is thought that he has seen the angel of death; and so in the house of a sick man bread is kept ready to throw to the dogs to prevent them from rolling before the door.

At

There are traces remaining of a primitive agricultural religious year. Praying for rain in the Spring, already referred to, is a custom which has a wide and deep hold. Fixing crosses in the windows at the Spring equinox, or holding a festival at the beginning of harvest, which coincides almost exactly with the Summer solstice, has the same significance. A day in Spring is called "mouse day," and no work, especially no weaving, is done on it by the women lest mice gnaw and spoil the result.

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