The Lion from Piraeus
Visiting
Venice recently I found time to take a morning walk to the gates of the
Arsenal. I wanted to see the stone
lion with the Scandinavian runes carved into its shoulders, the Greek sculpture
known as the Piraeus lion. Though
I'd long wanted to see inside the Arsenal also--the medieval mother of all
shipyards--I knew it had become off limits. I set out to see the lion.
Sculpted of white marble, the Piraeus lion is one of two placed on either side of the Arsenal's entry. Around nine feet tall, the lion is a striking example of the vagaries of history.
The Piraeus
Lion.
Originally
stationed at the Piraeus harbor near Athens, the two lions were transported to
Venice in 1687 by Francesco Morosini after a successful campaign against the
Turks. From the beginning it was
noticed that one of them had strange markings carved into its shoulders,
apparently some kind of writing. Nobody knew the meaning of the writing, however, or even what
language it was. Only much later
did scholars recognize the markings as runes. It was a puzzling discovery. What were Scandinavian runes doing on a marble lion taken from
a Greek port? The inscribed words
themselves would answer the question.
A guidebook gives one translation of the inscription on the lion's left
shoulder:
Hakon,
combined with Ulf, with Asmund, and with Orn, conquered this port. These men and Harold the Tall imposed
large fines, on account of the revolt of the Greek people. Dalk has been detained in distant
lands. Egil was waging war,
together with Ragnar, in Romania and Armenia.
According to the runes on the lion's other shoulder,
it was Harold the Tall who ordered the inscription, against the wishes of the
defeated Greeks. At the time he
and his cohorts were working as mercenaries for the Byzantine emperor.
Proof once more of what my grandmother used to
say: Those Vikings didn't dress very well, but they sure got around. In an essay about the Scandinavians and
their ambiguous conquests, Borges makes a similar point, underlining their odd
individualism, how they covered vast territories and raised settlements, only
to, culturally speaking, disappear:
Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro conquered lands for their
kings: the Vikings' prolonged expeditions were individual. . . . After a century, the Normans (men of
the North) who, under Rolf, settled in the province of Normandy and gave it
their name, had forgotten their language and were speaking French. . . .
Runic graffiti can still be seen on the marble
balustrades of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, carved ten centuries ago by Vikings who
made up part of the Byzantine emperor's imperial guard. One imagines the Northern warriors
standing through the Byzantine liturgy, understanding none of it. Restless and bored, one of them begins
to scratch in the marble with a knife or the edge of a buckle: Halvdan was
here. That, at least, is what the longest bit
of graffiti says.
Borges writes of runic inscriptions
"scattered across the face of the earth," of Leif Eriksson's
expedition to North America and the failed Viking settlement, of the Vikings'
books--particularly the Icelanders' great literary tradition of the sagas, how
in the twelfth century they developed an advanced art of narrative fiction, a
hardboiled realist form whose like wouldn't be seen again in the West until the
19th century. This literature
remained a phenomenon entirely of Iceland, utterly without influence on the
other people's of Europe:
These facts suffice, in my
understanding, to define the strange and futile destiny of the Scandinavian
people. In universal history, the
wars and books of Scandinavia are as if they had never existed; everything
remains isolated and without a trace, as if it had come to pass in a dream or
in the crystal balls where clairvoyants gaze. In the twelfth century, the Icelanders discovered the
novel--the art of Flaubert, the Norman--and this discovery is as secret and
sterile, for the economy of the world, as their discovery of America.
But think of the poor lion. Sculpted to guard a Greek port, it ends
up getting inscribed upon by northern henchmen: crooked barbaric characters are
chiseled into its once proud shoulders.
Later it's dragged to Venice by yet another conqueror, this one
Italian. Finally the lion has to
suffer being photographed in the morning light by another barbarian of sorts,
this one an American in sandals wielding a digital camera made in Japan. The greatest indignity yet?
The Greeks who carved the lion might be glad to
know that my camera later malfunctioned and the photos of its shoulders, as
well as all my other photos of Venice, were erased. One-hundred-fifty carefully shot images gone in an instant. It's called technological progress.
Inscription on
the lion's right shoulder.
Though the runes on the lion's shoulders are
much weathered, they are still recognizable, after all these centuries, as
runes. The memory chip in my
camera however is empty, utterly void and empty. And as for this page you're reading--if you don't print it
out it and store it safely, if you don't scratch it into copper or carve it
into stone, it will likewise disappear as soon as the Internet crashes along
with our own overproud civilization.
It's called technological progress.
Eric Mader,
September, 2003
[Photos taken from various Internet sites;
Borges' essay, "The Scandinavian Destiny," is in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger.]
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Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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