Mani

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  “Not many people come this way,” Chrysanthos observed, slashing through films of this grey rigging and wiping the tatters from his stick. “It’s a bad place.”

  He rattled the stick across some boulders and a small party of bats went hurtling up towards the ribbon of sky overhead. Once he dislodged a little owl of Pallas Athene which flew noiselessly to the branch of a wild fig and watched us out of sight, its body in profile and its head full-face in the precise posture of vigilant alertness one knows from Greek coins.

  At last the walls began to slant outwards and subside. The sky expanded. Curling down from the east, an old road, paved with slabs, carried us up again over a milder hillside while the river bed and its diminishing canyon trailed away to the west. We followed Chrysanthos on to a knoll, which he said had been the site of an old temple of Artemis, and sure enough, guarding the corridor which led back to the pass, great irregular blocks of Pelasgian masonry jutted in a bastion, and on the top of the knoll, presumably on the emplacement of the vanished temple itself, stood a handsome old church embedded in scaffolding. The interior was a jungle of lashed beams and platforms of planks, and three masons in those neat paper caps, of the kind worn by the Carpenter in Alice in Wonderland (made, in this case, of folded sheets of the Akropolis and the Ethnikos Kiryx), were sitting smoking among a débris of fallen plaster. They were repairing it, they said, as it had been struck by lightning the year before. They led us up a ladder to the top of the narthex. Daylight showed through gaps, fragments of the rood-screen were broken off, and great fissures crossed the painted walls. These were populated with lively seventeenth-century frescoes bright with the elaborate gilding of haloes and splendid with splashes of blue and scarlet robes; all were dominated by the church’s patron, St. Demetrius, on a prancing steed. A ray of sunlight fell on a menacing figure of Apollyon holding aloft a flaming sword. A mason stroked his gorgoned breastplate, and the two hideous faces embossed on his brazen greaves.

  “Look at those two ugly devils!” He pointed to one on the left leg. “That’s Stalin,” he said, then at the right, “and that’s Gromyko.”

  The mountains were behind us, and the gentle foothills waved softly seawards dotted with villages and sparkling with threshing floors. Beyond the last hills lay the mild expanse of the Messenian Gulf and the westernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, where Methoni and Coroni lay. To the north a grey shoulder of the Taygetus concealed the innermost part of the gulf, where sizzled Kalamata. In Galtes, the first village, we stopped for a glass of wine under a trellis with the priest and some peasants in those great Maniot hats, and continued downhill. The road unwound in easy loops. The late afternoon sunset softened everything and, combined with the relief of escape from the confinement of the mountains, it charged the air with a feeling of well-being and holiday. As the hills subsided into a little plain, we fell in with a troop of mules, three of which were mounted by young men. One was a god-brother of Chrysanthos, so in a moment we were hoisting our tired limbs into the saddle.

  “From Kalamata?” the god-brother asked.

  “No, from Anavryti.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The other side of the Taygetus.”

  He plainly didn’t believe it, until Chrysanthos assured him it was true. His sympathy was immediate. “And the lady—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name——?”

  “Ioanna.”

  “And the Kyria Ioanna too? Po, po, po! You must be dead! Those goat-rocks are enough to kill anyone. They are desperate things, they drag the soul out of you.” His face grew serious. “There’s only one remedy when anyone’s as tired as that.” He spoke with the earnestness of a diagnostician. “A medium coffee carefully boiled. Then, after half an hour,” he closed and raised his fist and made a gesture of pouring towards his mouth with an extended thumb, “wine. Good wine. And a great deal of it.” His knit brow became still graver and to avoid all ambiguity he decided to re-phrase it. “When you get to Kampos,” he pointed to the little town ahead of us, whose bells had been clanking for the last few minutes, “you must drink a great deal of wine.”

  We were riding through a grove of olives growing out of red earth scattered with stones. The twisted branches were strident with cicadas. The mules trotted along at a spanking pace, and, infected by the excitement of nearing home, they broke into something approaching a gallop. The little cavalcade kicked up a cloud of dust that the last rays of the sun turned into a transfiguring red-gold cloud. We drew rein at the outskirts of Kampos, as the mules were going on to Varousia to collect sacks for wheat which had been threshed during the day. The sun had gone down but the trees and the first houses of Kampos were still glowing with the sunlight they had been storing up since dawn. It seemed to be shining from inside them with the private, interior radiance of summer in Greece that lasts for about an hour after sundown so that the white walls and the tree trunks and the stones fade into the darkness at last like slowly expiring lamps.

  “Don’t forget my advice,” the muleteer said and with a rattle of hoofs his brisk score of mules went pricking away through the olive trees in their strange aureole of dust.

  * * *

  His prescription was excellent. Sitting in the humble plateia of Kampos after dinner, fittingly drugged with wine, all the weariness of the long day’s trudge had resolved itself into a pleasantly blurring torpor. Over the rooftops and leaves in the glimmer of starlight and of the thin ghost of a new moon, the bulk of the Taygetus mountains looked steeper and more impregnable than ever. It seemed impossible that it was only that morning we had set off from that far-away pseudo-Judaea the other side.... Self-congratulation, however, deflated slightly at the thought of Yorgo striding across them at that very moment....A tall form, wishing us good evening and then subsiding on a chair, broke the trend of our sleepy talk. It was a lean, quixotic-looking man with hollow cheeks and beetling eyebrows. He put an ekatostáriko of wine on the table and filled the glasses. We asked him about the town of Kampos.

  “It’s a miserable place,” he said, “a suburb of Kalamata, really, although it’s several hours away, and the inhabitants are a useless lot. They’re Vlachs.”

  “Vlachs? Surely not in the Peloponnese?”

  “That’s what we call them.”

  I said I had never heard of any Vlachs south of the Gulf of Corinth, and never expected to find any in the Mani.[1]

  “This isn’t the real Mani,” he said, “it’s what they call the Exo Mani, the Outer Mani. You have to wait till you get to the Deep Mani, the Mesa Mani, south of Areopolis, before finding true Maniots. They are quite a different thing. Honourable, tall, good-looking, hospitable, patriotic, intelligent, modest——”

  “So you don’t come from Kampos?”

  “May God forfend!”

  “Where from, then?”

  “From the Deep Mani.”

  [1] See page 86.

  3. KARDAMYLI: BYZANTIUM RESTORED

  KAMPOS by daylight was a hot, characterless little town and we were glad to leave. While we waited for the bus in the market-place, the Deep Maniot with the sorrowful countenance came loping towards us under his giant Mambrino’s helmet of straw. He produced a clean blue handkerchief in which some plums and greengages were knotted. Peeling them carefully with a jack-knife, he dropped them into glasses of retsina to cool and then offered them in turn impaled on a fork. There are times in Greece when you feel you could live with as little forethought about food as Elijah; meals appear as though laid at one’s elbow by ravens. Our benefactor was in the throes of acute melancholia. He hated living in Kampos among all these half-baked Vlachs. He spoke once more of the Deep Mani as a longed-for and unobtainable Canaan. Why didn’t he live there? “Don’t ask,” he said, and made that tired circular gesture with his open hand suggesting a piling up of complications on which it was too tedious and vexatious to embark. “Troubles...” he said. It occurred to me that he was perhaps involved in one of the feuds for which the Mani is notorious and had fled to these ali
en lowlands for refuge.

  “You ought to be there in the autumn,” he said, “when the quails fly over in millions. We spread nets and set traps for them and roast them on spits.... If you gave me your address in London and if God grants me life till the autumn I could get my niece down there to fill up a great can with quails in oil for you to eat as a mézé in London.... We could seal it up at the top with a soldering iron....”

  The bus rattled us along a switchback road above the Messenian Gulf. Twice everybody had to dismount and negotiate bad bits of road, until, after an hour, we came in sight of Kardamyli, a castellated hamlet on the edge of the sea. Several towers and a cupola and a belfry rose above the roofs and a ledge immediately above them formed a lovely cypress-covered platform. Above this the bare Taygetus piled up.

  It was unlike any village I had seen in Greece. These houses, resembling small castles built of golden stone with medieval-looking pepper-pot turrets, were topped by a fine church. The mountains rushed down almost to the water’s edge with, here and there among the whitewashed fishermen’s houses near the sea, great rustling groves of calamus reed ten feet high and all swaying together in the slightest whisper of wind. There was sand underfoot and nets were looped from tree to tree. Whitewashed ribbed amphorae for oil or wine, almost the size of those dug up in the palace of Minos, stood by many a doorway. Once more I wondered how these immense vessels were made. They are obviously too big for any potter smaller than a titan with arms two yards long. As usual, theories abound. Some say a man gets inside the incipient jar like a robber in the Arabian Nights, and builds up the expanding and tapering walls as they rotate on a great wheel; some, that the halves are constructed separately and then put together; others that they are cast in huge moulds; yet others assert that they are built up from a rope of clay that is paid out in an expanding and then a contracting coil until the final circle of the rim is complete; which is made to account for the ribs and the fluting that gird them from top to bottom....I had heard, all over Greece, that they came from Coroni in the Messenian peninsula, only the other side of the gulf. It was strange that, even here, there should be such a conflict of solutions. There were only four men in the little group I asked among the beached fishing boats. If there had been more, no doubt the total of solutions would have risen accordingly.[1]

  For the first time,—in conversation, and over the very few shops,—I became aware of one of the typical Maniot name-endings, one which is found nowhere else in Greece: Koukéas, Phaliréas, Tavoularéas, and so on. The last of these was the name of the schoolmaster, a charming and erudite man, who told us of the vanished temple of the nereids built there to commemorate the time the sea-nymphs came ashore to gaze at Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles—or Neoptolemos as he is called in Homer—when he set off for his wedding with Andromache’s rival, Hermione. The church, dedicated to the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin, now occupies the site. There was a marble rosette in the centre of the floor under which a dowser, some years previously, had divined the presence of gold in large quantities a few metres down; perhaps gold ornaments in some pre-Christian tomb. Strangely, nobody had got busy with crowbars.... In a little room in the schoolhouse was a rose antique funerary slab with a beautifully incised epitaph in Hellenistic characters commemorating the great love and respect that all his contemporaries felt for the deceased, “the Ephebe Sosicles the Lacedaemonian.” The inscription ended with a delicate curved loop of knotted and fluttering ribbon. Above the village, in the burning and cactus-covered hillside, he pointed out two rectangular troughs hacked out of the rock: the graves, after all their vicissitudes, of Castor and Pollux; or so it was thought...they looked far too short for the great boxer and his horse-breaking twin whose constellations shine in the sky alternately. Further on a dark cistern was hewn in the mountain-side surmounted by a roughly carved lion’s head and, yet further, hard by the golden church lay the castellated remains of a fort with dungeons and barred windows and rough-hewn staircases. The little castle and the church, we were told, were built by one of the descendants of the Palaeologi who had sought refuge here from the Turks after the fall of Mistra in 1461.

  A large bell, green with verdigris, embossed with an effigy of a Catholic bishop with mitre and crosier and the legend that it was the “gift of the heirs of the de Bolis family,” hung in the belfry,—a present, perhaps, from the Venetians when the Maniots were their allies against the Turks; or loot from a pirate-raid. The schoolmaster said that Kolokotronis, when he was here with his klephts before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence (for it was here that he foregathered with Mavromichalis and the Maniot leaders before attacking the Turkish garrison in Kalamata: the first act of the war after the standard of revolt was raised at the Monastery of Kalavryta on the 25th March, 1821), would play games of human chess in this very courtyard. The flagstones were chalked out like a board and his pallikars took up their positions in squares—I hope in the cool of the evening—while Kolokotronis, in his kilt and his fabulous fireman’s helmet, would stand on the wall and shout the moves, his opponent doing the same at the other end. The loser was condemned to take the victor for a ride on pick-a-back.

  It was a varied morning’s exploration.

  * * *

  I was alerted and fascinated by the schoolmaster’s mention of the Palaeologi, the reigning dynasty during the twilight of the Byzantine Empire. The last emperor—Constantine XI Palaeologus Vatatses—died fighting in the breach on the day the imperial city was captured by Mohammed II. In another book[2] I have told the story of the tomb of Ferdinando Palaeologus in Barbados, whose granddaughter, Godscall Palaeologue, vanishes from historic record as a little orphan girl in Stepney or Wapping, her father having died at Corunna in 1692. Her imperial descent is based on the supposition that the emperor was survived by a third brother, a shadowy figure called John, as well as by the historically verified Thomas and Demetrius, joint despots of Mistra. There is no point in retracing here the slender putative thread of his line through Italy, Holland, Cornwall, Barbados, Spain and the East End of London. If John existed, which is open to question, this little girl may have been the last imperial princess of the house of Palaeologue. Alas, at the end of the seventeenth century she disappeared forever into the mists and fogs of the London Docks.

  It is the belief of the Maniots, the schoolmaster told me, that the Maniots descend in part from the ancient Spartans and in part from the Byzantines of the Peloponnese, both of them having sought refuge from their respective conquerors in these inexpugnable mountains; in the same way that many of the Byzantine families of Athens sought asylum in the isle of Ae-gina. (As we shall see later, there is a certain amount of colour to both these claims.) The founder of the church and the fortified building, I was told, was a member of the Mourtzinos family, who were reputed to be descendants of the Palaeologues. The Mourtzini were a prominent family, and one of them—Michael Troupakis Mourtzinos—was the Bey of the Mani (a virtually independent prince, that is) from 1779 until 1782, when he was beheaded by the Sultan.

  * * *

  Here I must anticipate a few weeks. Some days after this, in the Deep Mani, a young man gave me the name of his uncle, Mr. Dimitri Dimitrakos-Messisklis, the Athenian publisher, who, he said, had written a book about the Mani. Back in Athens, I sought him out above his bookshop, discovering him at last up a steep flight of stairs: a learned and delightful elderly gentleman in a long cavern of books overlooking Constitution Square. Over coffee we talked about the customs and the history of the Mani, and his discoveries corroborated, amended and increased the information I had by then accumulated about the towers and the blood-feuds and the dirges. How remote, as the traffic roared below us, that stony wilderness already seemed!

  When I left, he presented me with a copy of his book.[3] It is a wonderfully complete account of the Mani, its history and legends and topography and folklore; a model for county-historians anywhere. Here, in the part devoted to the Beys of the Mani, he sets down the traditional genealogy
of the Troupakis-Mourtzinos family. The beginnings are far shakier than those of the Cornwall-Barbados-Wapping Palaeologi. The first one mentioned is a Michael Palaeologus in 1482, only twenty-nine years after the capture of the City, descendant of a branch, it seems, of the Palaeologi of Mistra, who had three sons: Panayioti, Dimitri and Tzanetto. The descendants of Panayioti were known by the surname of Troupaki, either, the book states, because they defended themselves from an ambush by taking up positions in a hole—trypa, or, in dialect, troupa—or because these shadowy Palaeologi, escaping from Mistra through the gorges of the Taygetus to the Mani, hid from the pursuing Turks in remote grottoes, where, like troglodytes, they lived for years.... Finally, when the coast was clear, they all settled in Kardamyli. The nickname stuck and the imperial surname fell into disuse.... The next of the family to be mentioned (perhaps the intervening names have been omitted as they are of little interest to the general reader) is the ruling Bey already mentioned: Michael, whose name of Troupakis is now augmented by Mourtzinos,[4] another nickname, the dialect diminutive of mourgos, a bulldog; the complete name now meaning, roughly, Bullpup-in-the-Hole. The Bey’s son, Panayioti Mourtzinos, was Kapetan, or guerrilla leader, of Androuvitza; his son, Dionysios Mourtzinos, became war-minister of Greece in 1830. George Mourtzinos, the last of the descendants of Michael the Bey, died in 1848.