Pelotome –
around Greece on a bicycle.
“As at Marathon, so here, it was my lot to take an extraordinary route.
Before I found that I was on the wrong road to make the ascent of the rock, I was half round its base on the east side.
Looking up at the beetling crags, I saw a possible track, and asked a white-kilted, gaily-attired Peloponnesian, who was passing mounted on a mule, if I could get up that way.
He laughed and said, ‘Yes, if you are a monkey’.”
~ Wanderings: On Wheel and On Foot in Europe – Hugh Callan (1887).
My Life and Times
by Jerome K. Jerome
From £4,75
August 1886 – Published October 1887.
Wanderings: On Wheel and On Foot in Europe.
Setting out from Glasgow on the 3rd July, 1886, to catch the steamer to Hamburg, Hugh Callan details his 1,500 mile, high-wheeler, 33 day journey “on wheel down Europe from the German ocean to the Aegean Sea”, reaching Thessaloniki from what is today Veles in North Macedonia, (both places, at the time, part of Turkey) and catching a French steamer to Piraeus, Greece, via Volos. After paying a visit to family on the island of Aegina, he visited Athens on foot and made cycle trips to Eleusis, and Marathon, via a wrong turn to the Tatoi Palace (Dekeleia).
Catching the train to the new city of Corinth – 28 years after an earthquake had destroyed its ancient predecessor – he visited the ruins before taking an old Glasgow steamer on the Gulf of Corinth to Patras, where he caught a ship back to Britain.
The second part of the book is dedicated to his earlier July 1885 trip “on wheel up the Rhine Valley, from Amsterdam to Geneva, and back by Antwerp,” while Part Three follows his six week walking tour “‘on the tramp’ in Belgium and France,” in 1881.
- By Hugh Callan.
- Published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, London.
April 1889 – Published 1890.
Round About The World on Bicycles.
“The pleasure tour of G.W. Burston and H.R. Stokes, Melbourne Bicycle Club, Australia,” follows George Burston and Harry Stokes on their 56-inch high-wheel bicycle journey around the world, setting off from Melbourne, on 1st November 1888, arriving back in Australia on the 14th December 1889.
The Greek section of their journey (at the time part of the Ottoman Empire), was chronicled in The Australasian, on 2nd and 30th November, 1889.
Arriving at Rhodes on a Turkish liner, having sailed from Beirut (Lebanon), they “went all over the place, and saw some interesting sights,” before sailing on past Samos, “another of those famous islands of ancient days,” and briefly setting ashore at Chios on route to Smyrna (İzmir, Turkey).
After exploring the ancient Greek city of Ephesus (near Selçuk in modern day Turkey), they anchored just off the (now Greek) island of Lesbos before steaming on to Constantinople (Istanbul), where they spent five days “visiting a great many places of interest,” before sailing on to Athens.
With two days to spare in the Greek capital, they explored all the ancient sights and witnessed the build up to the huge Easter celebrations, leaving on Good Friday. 19th April 1889 for Sicily.
- by G.W. Burston and H.R. Stokes.
- Published by George Robertson and Company, Melbourne, Australia “for private circulation only”
WANDERINGS ON WHEEL AND ON FOOT
“In an ancient land like Greece, the thoughtful stranger is never at peace. He wishes to get away back to the Past and live in it ; but the Present kills all his fine feelings defiles, demeans the Past.
At first I thought to visit all the sacred spots round Athens on my bicycle ; but soon gave up that mode of locomotion when I found its presence made the process of getting back to the Past harder still.
To hurry indecently over ground where trod Solon and Pericles, Plato and Demosthenes, and many more of the Past’s great ones, through the groves of Academus or by ‘the whispering stream of Ilissus,’ was pure desecration !
What has a bicycle to do with Greece, with the Past? It is there in discord with the simplicity of past Greek life and thought.”
~ Wanderings on Wheel and on Foot, Hugh Callan (1887).