Greece Untrodden

The final story in Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895-1954 (2022), edited by Amara Thornton and Katy Soar, was by an author new to me. It is "The Golden Ring" by Alan J.B. Wace; it derives from his posthumous collection of nine stories titled Greece Untrodden (1964).

Alan John Bayard Wace (1879-1957) was an English archeologist, primarily known for his studies of ancient Greece, and for his associations with the British School at Athens, first as an attendee in 1902, and later as Director from 1912-1923. In 1925 he married the American Helen Pence (1892-1982), whom he had met at Mycenae a few years earlier. It was as his widow that Helen Wace arranged for the publication of his posthumous collection. 

Greece Untrodden came out as a trade paperback, printed by the Stinehour Press in Vermont, but published in Athens. Four of the nine stories were published previously:  "The Island of Pelos" in Archaeology, December 1952; "The Golden Ring" in Archaeology, March 1954; "St. George the Vampire" in Antiquity, September 1956; and "The Brummagen Philhellene" in Antiquity, June 1957. 

Greece Untrodden also includes a Foreword by its author, which thus indicates he had planned the collection himself before his death on 9 November 1957. Wace notes that the final two stories included in the volume are folk tales retold from memory as he had heard them in Northern Greece. In the book they are attributed as told by their muleteer Lushu al Yakka; somewhat simpler than the other stories they sadly end the collection on a lower note. Also, the book contains some unfortunately simplistic line-drawings by Elektra Megaw, including on the cover.

The seven main stories are centered around the (fictional) archeologist George Evesham, who died (we are told) in battle in 1917, and most of the stories are set in the decade of the 1910s. Wace tells us that six of these stories originated as requests from his colleagues during excavations at Mycenae, where he worked from 1950-1955. Five of the stories are pretty good, though a bit wobbly in structure and execution. Not all are supernatural (one solves a longtime mystery of a missing man and lost gold), but most of them are to varying degrees. "The Golden Ring" tells of a ring with a curse attached. "St. George the Vampire" tells of a haunting associated with a tomb--a skeleton whose bones move about; the vampire association added later by pious villagers. "Phaenna" tells of visions of a kind of nymph that leads to discoveries. All these stories have nice descriptions of unfamiliar byways of Greece, and intriguing if at times subtle connections to the Greek mythology. Greece Untrodden is not an essential collection, but a good read anyways, with a number of high spots.