Nearer East / [D.G. Hogarth].

  • David George Hogarth
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Nearer East / [D.G. Hogarth]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    way ; but its long and gently inclined valley, only once narrowed to a gorge, conducts an easy land-road to the heart of the Peninsula, and spreads out on the south into an immense deltaic flat which, united to the alluvia of the Vistritza, rivals the basin of Monastir in extent. These two broad plains, lowland and upland, the Emathian and the Pelagonian, made the great Macedonia of the past, and will be the determinants of its fate in the future. East of the long Vardar valley three ranges start from three ganglia on the Balkan Curve and run south, penning between their respective spurs two large rivers, the Struma and the Mesta. This mountain tract may be taken to be the third Belt of the Peninsula, corresponding in political nomenclature to eastern Macedonia, and the western part of Rumelia. Its three vertical ranges increase in scale from west to east. The first, known under many names, but chiefly as the Plashkavitza, Kursha Balkan, and Beshik chains, falls on the south into a low alluvial plain filled by a line of marshy lakes, draining to the Gulf of Rendina. But it rises again in an interlaced group of minor chains ; and these run out southwards in three long pro- montories, of which the two on the west are low, but the third, ere it sinks below sea, throws up the 6000 feet of Athos. On its eastern flank the main range puts out long spurs, which, confronted across the Struma by others of the second and higher range, as the Perim and Boz mountains, break up the valley into three basins. The valley of the Mesta, lying beyond the peak of Perim, whose shape and position make it not less imposing than its loftier neighbours in the Rila and Despoto groups across the stream, is narrower and wilder and, therefore, more exclusively pasture and forest than that of the Struma. The Perim range falls on the south, like its western parallel, to a low plain, and likewise also, ere reaching the sea, rises again in the Bunar group, and sinking once more reappears in the island of Thasos. Last and highest of the three main ranges of this Belt is that which, starting from the syenite rocks of Vitocha,
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