The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  From the beginning the Turks in Athens confine themselves to taking hostages (Easter 1821) and imprisoning them in a Frankish tower. The janissary guard closes off the gates of the city to prevent rebels from entering, but the rebels succeed in gaining control of the city regardless. The rather poor technical equipment of both sides in the fighting, and particularly the chronic lack of artillery on the side of the rebels, was a blessing for the Acropolis as a monument. The besieged side improvised a sally beyond the fortress walls. A Turkish division, led by an enormous Moor straight from the Arabian Nights, unexpectedly launches an attack on the rebels’ trenches with a terrifying cry. But this division is decimated and in response the Turks carry out an immediate execution of hostages. The executions are carried out on the wall of Themistocles. The severed heads roll down the hill all the way to the doorsteps of the first houses.*

  Pasha Brioni arrives to the aid of those cut off in the fortress at the head of four thousand Albanians. Just as in classical times, the population leaves the city and takes refuge on the island of Salamis. When Brioni withdraws, the Athenians return and the blockade of the fortress is resumed. It is merely the beginning of the murderous contredance around the sacred mount.

  After nearly a year of siege, the Turks, having exhausted their last supplies of ammunition and water, surrender. Enthusiasm, chaos, mutual killing of Christians and Muslims. Odysseus Androutsos is named commander of the fortress. He is a figure on whom historians have made contradictory judgments: for some he is a national hero, the victim of a lack of understanding on the part of the leaders of the rebellion, for others a firebrand and a traitor. Archaeologists cannot forgive him for having razed the lion in Cheronea under which Odysseus thought to find a legendary treasure.

  The new commander tackled the defense preparations with great energy. Near the Pinakoteka he found an ancient fountain, which was surrounded by a bastion. The commander, following the old great builders, did not neglect to place an inscription reading: “This bastion was built from its foundation by general Odysseus son of Androutsos in the month of September 1822.”

  No trace remains of the bastion, and its builder suffered a tragic fate. Having quarreled with the rebel leaders, he takes command of a Turkish gang that goes around pillaging Attica. Caught, he is imprisoned in the Frankish tower and then killed. His body, tied up with rope, was thrown out the window to suggest an attempt to escape.*

  In the summer of 1826, a black year for the rebellion—the year of the slaughter at Missolunghi—the Turks again lay siege to the Acropolis under the command of Pasha Reshid. Batteries stationed on the Hill of Muses shoot at the western façade of the Parthenon. Musketeers riddle the walls of the Pinakoteka and Propylaea with holes. Hit by a bullet, the cupola of the former harem in the Erechtheion falls, together with the greater part of the fragments of ancient sculpture.

  It seems that this time the Acropolis will be dealt a fatal blow, that the history of Morosini will repeat itself. Pasha Reshid, unable to take the fortress by storm, orders his sappers to dig a long tunnel under the hill, which is to serve as a huge mine. In that tunnel the Turks plant three and a half tons of explosives, enough to blow up at least half the citadel. The pasha is certain of success and withdraws his forces from the first line of the siege. But the farsighted Greeks dig twelve deep subterranean moats which neutralize the force of the blast. The mountain gave birth to the proverbial mouse.

  Now colonel Charles Fabvier appears in the theater of war. This French career officer born in Lorraine ordered himself painted in a turban, a sheepskin jacket, and with a big curved broadsword at his side. Apart from his Romantic enthusiasm Fabvier brought in an invaluable quality—a good knowledge of warcraft and a rationalistic approach to military tasks. He organizes the regular divisions of rebels. He introduces the idea of order and discipline to the anachronistic and amateuristic leadership.

  In the winter of 1827 he takes command of a modest size corps whose task is to help those besieged in the Athenian fortress. It is a strange expedition, consisting less of reinforcement to the defensive garrison than the transport of military supplies. The division led by Fabvier is almost unarmed, but it is weighed down almost to the limit of human endurance with sacks of gunpowder and cartridges. It is worth quoting the commander’s dry account: “With the Philhellenes at the front we made our way up to half a bullet shot’s distance from the Turkish trenches; they were deep and well guarded. An hour before midnight; a full moon. When we were sighted, we moved our step as if to attack, but with unloaded guns. We ran by the line of trenches and the terrain separating us from the fortress, under quite heavy fire of case-shots and rifles. We suffered four casualties and twelve wounded.”

  Fabvier’s bold expedition prolonged the defense of the Acropolis to the end of 1827. From a military point of view it was an episode of little weight, but the endurance of the defenders had an enormous moral and political significance. At the moment when the Greeks left the fortress, the fate of their fatherland is sealed. The peace of Adrianopolis concluded in 1829 restores Greece’s independence. The Turks, however, do not leave the Acropolis until April 1833. At that time Athens counted three hundred houses and two thousand inhabitants. One of the first acts of king Otto is the demilitarization of the sacred mount. Archaeologists and architects occupy the positions abandoned by soldiers.

  In the autumn 1838 issue of the Revue des Deux Mondes, there is a letter which gives a good picture of the state of the monuments: “You too, my dear friend, have seen and admired the Acropolis; but to get there today you must pass by a whole ring of fortifications, you must go around the bastion, past one battery and then another battery. Having made it as far as the foot of the Propylaea, you will look in vain for the Propylaea. You see before you a storehouse of gunpowder, surrounded by thick walls, in the middle of which you can barely make out the imprisoned columns. Continuing along this path through a narrow entrance on the right, you will search in vain for the temple of Wingless Victory. But it was here, you will say to yourself, holding Pausanias’s book in hand, it was here, from this point one could see the sea and here Aegeus once—with his gaze directed toward the ships that were to bring his son Theseus, conqueror of the Minotaur—threw himself from the cliff, deceived by the black sails he saw on the horizon. It was here, in this place, that the temple of Wingless Nike should have stood. But the building was razed by the Venetians in 1687, and the Turks scattered the remains, taking the marble and leaving the place itself impossible to recognize. Finding yourself at last on the Acropolis, still searching for the Propylaea, you will want to locate the Pinakoteka, which constituted the left wing of that splendid entrance. Now you will find amid the crumbling Turkish houses but one hall filled with fragments to three quarters of its height. It was in this hall that the architect Stuart attempted to reconstruct the temple of Nike, because it was impossible to find it elsewhere.”

  In the first years of the monarchy, consideration was given to the problem of where the new royal seat should be located. The German neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel projected a new Acropolis. The model of this fortunately unrealized dream still casts us into perplexity and horror. The Parthenon was lost amid an inundation of porticos, columns, and heavy rotundas. In addition, this faux architecture was to be decorated with hanging gardens, rose terraces, groves of cypresses and palm trees. Above a stone decoration (as if from a bad opera) a monument to Athena was to be raised, having little in common with the spirit of Phidias.

  Not many tourists who visit the Acropolis today are aware that what they see is the work of more than a hundred years of drudging reconstruction. Here the word reconstruction is misleading. The neologism used to describe the work is anastylosis34, which means raising columns anew, and in the broader sense of the word means all work associated with putting the authentic fragments of architecture in their original places and fortifying them, in strict accordance with archaeological principles.

  Toward the end of the 1830s the first
anastylosis of the temple of Athena Nike, razed by the Turks, was carried out. However, in the course of this work two cardinal errors were committed: the bastion on which the temple stood was not fortified, nor were the ancient foundations examined. A hundred years later it was necessary to dismantle the building stone by stone and build it again.

  In practice, however, the apparently simple principle of anastylosis creates a number of almost intractable problems. The Greek architect Balanos, who supervised the work on the Acropolis in the twentieth century, describes the difficulties of just one fragment of the Erechtheion’s architecture as follows:

  “A lithograph by Georgios Soutzos35 shows the façade with caryatids almost completely destroyed in 1827. In the city Efor Pittakis found the head of a caryatid that had been subjected to conservation treatment by a Bavarian sculptor, Imhoff. A fragment of that caryatid’s torso lying next to the eastern side of the temple was found and restored by the Greek sculptor Androulis during the Paccard works in 1844. The vault, completed with new blocks of marble, had been supported by wooden columns, which were replaced in 1872 with iron columns. One of those iron supports passed through a terracotta copy of a caryatid (the original having been taken to London by Lord Elgin) and held up a part of the vault. But the heads of the caryatids, even the one restored in 1844, were in very bad condition, because the poorly fitted iron supports had moved; in addition, it was necessary to replace the caryatid of terracotta with a caryatid of cement. The underlying masonry of the portico also had to be changed. For these various reasons it was decided to take the whole façade apart and put it together again.”

  The rebuilding of the Greek temples made it possible in practice to become familiar with the secrets of ancient architecture. The first accurate measurement of the Parthenon was carried out in 1845 by the English scholar Francis Cranmer Penrose. He caught the subtle optical corrections, for example the stylobate’s slight diversion from the horizontal line, which came to 228 millimeters, which is one thousandth of the breadth of this main temple of the Acropolis. What for long centuries had passed for a work of cold geometry in fact turned out to be a complex play of curved lines.

  The anastylosis of the Parthenon led by Balanos facilitated the discovery that the drums which form a column were marked in antiquity with the same letter or symbol to indicate the order in which they should be laid on top of each other. Parts missing from columns were replaced with cement casts, because new marble would not have had the famed golden patina of the Parthenon. The works demanded great, one would almost say clockmaker’s precision. New oiled blocks of the architrave, necessary to fortify the construction, were inserted exactly in the place of the missing fragments. With admirable tact they restrained themselves from a complete reconstruction, which might have changed the Parthenon into a cheerless citadel of academic classicism.

  High up on the hill—there it is!

  An inner cry in a clear and almost triumphant voice.

  The road was long and winding and the chance that I would reach my destination—negligible. I had to overcome obstacles, office walls, closed doors, corridors, and a whole pack of petty Cerberuses behind desks, hesitating over whether to bring down the magic stamp, holding and braiding the thread of my adventure in their fingers.

  And after all, I could content myself with the accounts of others, the testimonies of experts, I could agree that the object of our dreams will always be beyond reach of sight and touch. Why then this overwhelming will to confront it, this passion driving me toward physical proximity, possession, feeling with my hands, uniting bodily, and then tearing myself away, leaving and taking with me—what? An image? A shudder?

  I never ceased to believe that the Acropolis really existed; a face to face encounter with it was not necessary to reinforce that faith. The Acropolis was a true miracle. It didn’t lead my senses into temptation, it didn’t promise that it would be something it was not. It fulfilled itself entirely, was equal to itself.

  I repeated to myself the awkward formula: it is and I am, and the vast expanse of time separating the dates of our birth contracted, vanished. We were contemporaries.

  I got to Athens in the late afternoon. The search for a hotel, the irritations of luggage, the first uncertain wandering through the city. The loss of precious time writing postcards, drinking coffee, looking at exhibitions. I was aware that subconsciously I was postponing the moment of encounter with the Acropolis, as if I were trying to sharpen my powers of sensation.

  Night had fallen. The area around the hill was almost deserted. If I remember the moment rightly, I began to count, simply to count the columns—eight, seventeen, and again eight, seventeen, exactly the number we drew in our school exercise books. As if I wanted to accept that unexpected inheritance coolly, rationally.

  Soon I realized that two Acropolises existed inside me: by day and by night. The first was analytical, my face in the guidebook. Checking the map, studying the structure of the whole, touching stones, imagining what was lost—a little like examining the anatomy of an animal found on a dig.

  The first efforts to assimilate and develop a personal relationship to the monument. I chose “for myself” the Propylaea and Parthenon, for their grandeur, mass, and order. The Temple of Nike was too dainty for me to feel its stone materiality, it gave the impression of a successful copy, a good elaboration on a classical theme. Hardest for me was coming to an understanding with the Erechtheion. The caryatid portico was marred by the metal support pipes, which deprived the building of its meaning and intended lightness. The caryatids themselves, mutilated and stripped of grace, were as if frozen halfway between columns and human shapes. Above the dark pool of old Athenian cults this Ionian temple seems to speak of the futility of marrying an old faith with a new form of architectural expression.

  The second Acropolis, nocturnal, lit up in the sky, gave itself to be viewed as a whole. I sat on the Hill of Muses right by the monument of Philopappos. From the poor district of Plaka below me, a banal and quotidian babble reached me. The white houses glowed with chalk in the dark. A smell of lamb, olive oil, and garlic floated in the air. The Acropolis in a wreath of onion smells. On the left, among the trees, a performance called “Son et Lumière” was taking place. The choruses of Sophocles cried by turns in French and English. The light picked out fragments of the sacred mount from the night. A red glare thrown by reflectors imitated fires.

  To me the Acropolis was then like a sculpture; not an architectural ensemble but a sculpture. The ruined southern colonnade of the Parthenon, the stumps of columns cut off low, made my heart contract. The stone fought against the encroaching void.

  From the aesthetic sphere the Acropolis moved in my consciousness into the sphere of history. I could neither have the feelings nor say the prayer of the nineteenth-century humanist. I could not make myself speak the words of the rationalist faith: “O noblesse, o beaut36é simple et vraie! Déesse dont le culte signifie raison et sagesse, toi dont le temple est une leçon éternelle de conscience et de sincérité.”

  The Acropolis I had before my eyes, reduced to a skeleton, stripped of its flesh, was for me equally a work of will and harmony and of chaos, artists and history—the work of Pericles and Morosini, Iktinos and the looters. And touching its wounds and mutilations with my eye, I felt an emotion in which admiration was mixed with pity.

  If I drew from this a strange feeling, the happiness of the endangered, it probably was because I was conscious of the extraordinary fact that “I made it” before the Acropolis and I shared the fate of all human creations on the dark promontory of time, faced with an unknown future.

  THE SAMOS AFFAIR

  for Miroslaw Holub

  A PIECE OF EARTH torn from the Asian continent—the island Samos, on the waves of the Aegean Sea, here beautifully named the Sea of Icarus. The distance dividing the Eastern promontory of the island from the Turkish mainland is so negligible that on a fine day a seasoned swimmer can make the crossing without any great effort.

>   The island has an elongated shape. On its northeastern side the sea carves its way inland, creating a bay. Here is the main harbor and the capital, which carries the same name as the island.

  The terrain is mountainous. Strabo, emphasizing its mountainousness, explains that samos means hill. The greatest elevations are in the western part of Samos. Open to the East, it defends itself in the West by a chain of mountains, the Kerketevs, which attain 1400 meters and fall steeply down to the sea.

  Samos is not quite 500 square kilometers, which makes it a mere crumb on the scale of great empires. But the island’s significance exceeds its natural dimensions.

  Colonized by the Greeks in approximately 1000 B.C., Samos became the center of Ionian culture long before the time of Athens’ glory. Great sacred buildings, among them the enormous Heraion, were built in the 8th century B.C. That temple, renovated in the 7th century and then reconstructed around 560 B.C. by the architects Roikos and Teodoros, was the largest sanctuary of Greece at that time, its measurements imposing: 102 meters long and 52 meters wide. In Herodotus’s time the island’s capital, laid out like an amphitheater on the sea, was considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

  In the period when Athens had but a modest number of ships, the mighty Samian fleet reigned supreme on the Aegean, extending its reach to Sicily, Epirus, and many overseas colonies. The rulers of Samos maintained friendly relations with Egypt and were treated as equals by Oriental satraps.

  Samos was the fatherland of great builders, engineers, and artists. A famous school of sculpture and ceramics was born here, and it was here that the art of melting iron and bronze was brought to perfection. The fame of Samian architects was unequaled. To this day we may admire a sluice hewn from a cliff, dating back to the times of Polycrates. When Darius decided to build a bridge across the Danube, he entrusted the supervision of the work to Samian architects.