Just one of a catalogue of hotels and other establishments patronised by the Bents during their twenty years of explorations to the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Africa, from 1880 to 1900 (see the interactive maps on this site for additional info!).
Next time you’re sailing via Sýros, stroll into Miaouli Square (Πλατεία Μιαούλη) in the centre of Ermoúpoli – just 100m up from the sea. There (turn left as you enter the square) you will find the splendid old edifice that was the Bents’ hotel of choice in the 1880s – The ‘Grand Hôtel d’Angleterre’.
It’s in a sorry state at the moment though, with just the street level occupied as cafés. But it takes no imagination at all, as the light fades on a warm evening, to see the Bents on a balcony, listening to the trombones and clarinets in the bandstand below, as white-aproned waiters serve spritzers to the fashionable. Raise your boaters to them if you wish, for they sail in the morning on their travels – they will nod back for sure.
Panagiotis Kouloumbis of Syros Today has written (2021) a fascinating extended online essay on this building and others.
The photo shows the ‘Grand Hôtel d’Angleterre’, Ermoúpoli (Sýros), a reproduction based on a contemporary postcard of the time (taken from ‘The Travel Chronicles of Mabel Bent‘, Vol. I (p. 358), (Archaeopress, Oxford, 2006).
Theodore Bent covers Syros at length in his ‘The Cyclades‘.
Another guest a couple of times at the hotel in the early 1890s was J. Irving Manatt, whose book on Aegean travels – Aegean Islands (London, J. Murray, 1913) – constitutes one leg of that great tripod of very readable early books in English on the area: along with Bent’s Cyclades (1885) and Tozer’s The islands of the Aegean (1890).
Manatt makes these references to the Hotel d’Angleterre: “We had been nearly twelve hours from Piraeus instead of eight, and we lost no time in seeking rest and food [on Syra]. Ask for the best hotel anywhere in the Levant and you may count on being directed to a Hotel d’Angleterre or Grande Bretagne: it is a subtle flattery that gives Her Majesty’s subjects everywhere a choice between the two biggest words on the map, whereas the pilgrims from all other shores as a rule find nothing homelier than a Hotel de l’Europe or des Etrangers. It is generally safe to select your hotel for its name’s sake and turn in under the British arms – not always that these guarantee good living; but you are pretty sure to go further only to fare worse. So we found it in Syra, where the Angleterre is unquestionably the best of a bad lot. Its cuisine tended to aggravate rather than to allay our sea-sickness, but we were not looking forward to a long stay (pp. 41-2),” and a page later when returning from another (rough) sea trip: “After four hours of that sea even the Hotel d’Angleterre seemed inviting. We turned in there and found a room and beds as sweet and clean as heart could wish – a very godsend, as it proved. For we had three long days and nights to spend there before the sea and the waves should be stilled… But for the pleasant room looking out on the pretty little square… I should have had a bad enough time of it; yet I… was able even to survive the stews that were carried up to me by the Angleterre’s man-of-all-work, who with the landlord and scullion made up (so far as one could see) the personnel of the establishment (p. 43).
It is inconceivable that these same staff would not have mentioned the Bents to Manatt. The Morning Post of 13 April 1914 has a review of Manatt’s book, the review starting, “Since the late Mr. Theodore Bent published, in 1885, his charming, but now rare, book on ‘the Cyclades’, we have not read any account of ‘the Isles of Greece’ so delightful as that of Mr. Manatt.” Manatt (1845-1915) was a US university professor, Hellenist philologist, and traveller; between 1889 and 1893 he was US consul in Athens and would have been aware of the Bents’ work in the Aegean, oddly, though, there is no reference to the English explorers in his otherwise valuable book, now rarely cited.
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