By normal standards, this is, to say the least, a shaky pedigree; especially at the beginning: those three phantom Palaeologi.... But, just supposing they were verifiable, the rest, even allowing for the gap which seems to precede Michael the Bey, might be authentic. Not only were there no genealogists under the Turkish occupation, but no archives or records, not even a parish register of births and deaths, till a very late date. It is only in the Ionian islands, which were under the Venetians, and among the Phanariot families that reigned in the Danubian Principalities, that Greek family records were kept; and, in those unchronicled centuries of oppression and turmoil and massacre and guerrilla warfare, oral tradition was the only link with time past. Fallible as it is, exposed to every rumour and misapprehension and post-facto accommodation, this is not always as unreliable as it might be supposed. There are many cases where, in the teeth of all likelihood and logical supposition, it has been proved right.
But I knew nothing about the Mourtzini at the time; nothing beyond the tradition that the former inhabitants of the castellated dwelling, the founders of the church, were popularly supposed to have been direct descendants of the Palaeologi....
* * *
The quiet charm of Kardamyli grew with each passing hour. Most unexpectedly, we discovered a little hotel consisting of a few rooms over a grocer’s shop owned by Socrates Phaliréas, the cousin, it turned out, of a distinguished sculptor-friend in Athens. Equally unexpectedly, it was, in its unflamboyant way, very comfortable. No planks were spread here with hair-shirt blankets for a stylite’s penance, but springs and soft mattresses and a wicker chair or two waited for tired limbs in old and mellow rooms; and the kind, deep voice of the gigantic owner, a civilized and easy-going host, sitting down now and then for a chat, induced in all such a lack of hurry that the teeth of time and urgency and haste seemed all to have been drawn.
The same leisurely spell pervades the whole of this far-away little town. Cooled in summer by the breeze from the gulf, the great screen of the Taygetus shuts out intruding winds from the north and the east; no tramontana can reach it. It is like those Elysian confines of the world where Homer says that life is easiest for men; where no snow falls, no strong winds blow nor rain comes down, but the melodious west wind blows for ever from the sea to bring coolness to those who live there. I was very much tempted to become one of them, to settle in this small hotel for months with books and writing-paper; the thought has often recurred. The Guide Bleu only spares it half a line, mentioning little beyond the existence of its four hundred and ninety inhabitants. It is better so. It is too inaccessible and there is too little to do there, fortunately, for it ever to be seriously endangered by tourism. No wonder the nereids made it their home.
Returning from a long bathe beyond the forest of reeds, we saw a boy carrying a large silver fish by the tail: a salpa. (I haven’t discovered its usual name.) I bought it, and, while it was being cooked, we sat under a mulberry tree, whose trunk was whitewashed right up to the start of the branches, on a terrace outside one of the few taverns. Like us, a few fishermen under their great hats were watching the sun sinking over the Messenian mountains, on the other side of which, sixteen leagues away, lay Pylos. A miniature mole ran out, and, alongside it, gently rocking with each sigh of the green transparent water, caiques were tethered a few yards above their shadows on the pebbly bottom. Oleanders leaned over a flat layer of rock across which the sea flowed with just enough impetus to net the surface with a frail white reticulation of foam which slid softly away and dissolved while a new one formed. A small distance from the shore rocks jutted, one bearing a whitewashed church, the other a miniature ruined fort. The sea’s surface was striped with gold which turned as the sun dipped into pale sulphur shot with lilac. Beyond it the unruffled gulf sailed unhindered to the darkening peninsula opposite.
Thinking of our grilling fish, our minds strayed back to Kalamata (now hidden at the gleaming gulf’s end), several years before.
It was midsummer in that glaring white town, and the heat was explosive. Some public holiday was in progress—could it have been the feast of St. John the Baptist which marks the summer solstice?—and the waterfront was crowded with celebrating citizens in liquefaction. The excitement of a holiday and the madness of a heat wave hung in the air. The stone flags of the water’s edge, where Joan and Xan Fielding and I sat down to dinner, flung back the heat like a casserole with the lid off. On a sudden, silent, decision we stepped down fully dressed into the sea carrying the iron table a few yards out and then our three chairs, on which, up to our waists in cool water, we sat round the neatly laid table-top, which now seemed by magic to be levitated three inches above the water. The waiter, arriving a moment later, gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then, observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea, advanced waist deep with a butler’s gravity, and, saying nothing more than “Dinner-time,” placed our meal before us—three beautifully grilled kephali, piping hot, and with their golden brown scales sparkling. To enjoy their marine flavour to the utmost, we dipped each by its tail for a second into the sea at our elbow... Diverted by this spectacle, the diners on the quay sent us can upon can of retsina till the table was crowded. A dozen boats soon gathered there, the craft radiating from the table’s circumference like the petals of a marguerite. Leaning from their gently rocking boats, the fishermen helped us out with this sudden flux of wine, and by the time the moon and the Dog-Star rose over this odd symposium, a mandoline had appeared and manga songs in praise of hashish rose into the swooning night:
“When the hookah glows and bubbles,”
wailed the fishermen,
“Brothers, not a word! Take heed!
“Behold the mangas all around us
“Puffing at the eastern weed...”
* * *
I woke up thinking of the Mourtzini and the Palaeologi. It occurred to me, drinking mountain-tea in the street, that I had clean forgotten to ask when the Mourtzinos family had died out. “But it hasn’t,” Mr. Phaliréas said. “Strati, the last of them, lives just down the road.”
Evstratios Mourtzinos was sitting in his doorway weaving, out of split cane and string, a huge globular fish-trap more complex than any compass design or abstract composition of geometrical wire. The reel of twine revolved on the floor, the thread unwinding between his big toe and its neighbour as the airy sphere turned and shifted in his skilful brown fingers with a dazzling interplay of symmetrical parabolas. The sunlight streamed through the rust-coloured loops and canopies of drying nets. A tang of salt, tar, seaweed and warm cork hung in the air. Cut reeds were stacked in sheaves, two canaries sung in a cage in the rafters, our host’s wife was slicing onions into a copper saucepan. Mourtzinos shrugged his shoulders with a smile at my rather absurd questions and his shy and lean face, which brine and the sun’s glare had cured to a deep russet, wore an expression of dubious amusement. “That’s what they say,” he said, “but we don’t know anything about it. They are just old stories....” He poured out hospitable glasses of ouzo, and the conversation switched to the difficulties of finding a market for fish: there was so much competition. There is a special delight in this early-morning drinking in Greece.
Old stories, indeed. But supposing every link were verified, each shaky detail proved? Supposing this modest and distinguished looking fisherman were really heir of the Palaeologi, descendant of Constantine XI and of Michael VIII the Liberator, successor to Alexis Comnène and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer and Leo the Isaurian and Justinian and Theodosius and St. Constantine the Great? And, for that matter, to Diocletian and Heliogabalus and Marcus Aurelius, to the Antonines, the Flavians, the Claudians and the Julians, all the way back to the Throne of Augustus Caesar on the Palatine, where Romulus had laid the earliest foundations of Rome?... The generous strength of a second glass of ouzo accelerated these cogitations. It was just the face for a constitutional monarch, if only Byzantium were free. For the sheer luxury of cred
ulity I lulled all scepticism to sleep and, parallel to an unexacting discourse of currents and baits and shoals, a kind of fairy-tale began assembling in my mind: “Once upon a time, in a far-away land, a poor fisherman and his wife lived by the sea-shore.... One day a stranger from the city of Byzantium knocked on the door and begged for alms. The old couple laid meat and drink before him...’ Here the mood and period painlessly changed into a hypothetic future and the stranger had a queer story to tell: the process of Westernization in Turkey, the study of European letters, of the classics and the humanities had borne such fruit that the Turks, in token of friendship and historical appropriateness, had decided to give the Byzantine Empire back to the Greeks and withdraw to the Central Asian steppes beyond the Volga from which they originally came, in order to plant their newly-won civilization in the Mongol wilderness.... The Greeks were streaming back into Constantinople and Asia Minor. Immense flotillas were dropping anchor off Smyrna and Adana and Halicarnassus and Alexandretta. The seaboard villages were coming back to life; joyful concourses of Greeks were streaming into Adrianople, Rhodosto, Broussa, Nicaea, Caesaraea, Iconium, Antioch and Trebizond. The sound of rejoicing rang through eastern Thrace and banners with the Cross and the double-headed eagle and the Four Betas back-to-back were fluttering over Cappadocia and Karamania and Pontus and Bithynia and Paphlagonia and the Taurus mountains....
But in the City itself, the throne of the Emperors was vacant....
Stratis, our host, had put the fish-trap on the ground to pour out a third round of ouzo. Mrs. Mourtzinos chopped up an octopus-tentacle and arranged the cross-sections on a plate. Stratis, to illustrate his tale, was measuring off a distance by placing his right hand in the crook of his left elbow, “a grey mullet that long,” he was saying, “weighing five okas if it weighed a dram....”
Then, in the rebuilt palace of Blachernae, the search for the heir had begun. What a crackling of parchment and chrysobuls, what clashing of seals and unfolding of scrolls! What furious wagging of beards and flourishes of scholarly forefingers! The Cantacuzeni, though the most authenticated of the claimants, were turned down; they were descendants only from the last emperor but four.... Dozens of doubtful Palaeologi were sent packing...the Stephanopoli de Comnène of Corsica, the Melissino-Comnènes of Athens were regretfully declined. Tactful letters had to be written to the Argyropoli; a polite firmness was needed, too, with the Courtney family of Powderham Castle in Devonshire, kinsmen of Pierre de Courtenai, who, in 1218, was Frankish Emperor of Constantinople; and a Lascaris maniac from Saragossa was constantly hanging about the gates.... Envoys returned empty-handed from Barbados and the London docks.... Some Russian families allied to Ivan the Terrible and the Palaeologue Princess Anastasia Tzarogorodskaia had to be considered.... Then all at once a new casket of documents came to light and a foreign emissary was despatched hot foot to the Peloponnese; over the Taygetus to the forgotten hamlet of Kardamyli.... By now all doubt had vanished. The Emperor Eustratius leant forward to refill the glasses with ouzo for the fifth time. The Basilissa shooed away a speckled hen which had wandered indoors after crumbs. On a sunny doorstep, stroking a marmalade cat, sat the small Diadoch and Despot of Mistra.
Our host heaved a sigh... “The trouble with dyes made from pine-cones,” he went on—“the ordinary brown kind—is that the fish can see the nets a mile off. They swim away! But you have to use them or the twine rots in a week. Now, the new white dyes in Europe would solve all that! But you would hunt in vain for them in the ships’ chandlers of Kalamata and Gytheion....”
The recognition over, the rest seemed like a dream. The removal of the threadbare garments, the donning of the cloth-of-gold dalmatics, the diamond-studded girdles, the purple cloaks. All three were shod with purple buskins embroidered with bicephalous eagles, and when the sword and the sceptre had been proffered and the glittering diadem with its hanging pearls, the little party descended to a waiting ship. The fifth ouzo carried us, in a ruffle of white foam, across the Aegean archipelago and at every island a score of vessels joined the convoy. By the time we entered the Hellespont, it stretched from Troy to Sestos and Abydos...on we went, past the islands of the shining Propontis until, like a magical city hanging in mid-air, Constantinople appeared beyond our bows, its towers and bastions glittering, its countless domes and cupolas bubbling among pinnacles and dark sheaves of cypresses, all of them climbing to the single great dome topped with the flashing cross that Constantine had seen in a vision on the Milvian bridge. There, by the Golden Gate, in the heart of a mighty concourse, waited the lords of Byzantium: the lesser Caesars and Despots and Sebastocrators, the Grand Logothete in his globular headgear, the Counts of the Palace, the Sword Bearer, the Chartophylax, the Great Duke, the thalassocrats and polemarchs, the Strateges of the Cretan archers, of the hoplites and the peltasts and the cataphracts; the Silentiaries, the Count of the Excubitors, the governors of the Asian Themes, the Clissourarchs, the Grand Eunuch, and (for by now all Byzantine history had melted into a single anachronistic maelstrom) the Prefects of Sicily and Nubia and Ethiopia and Egypt and Armenia, the Exarchs of Ravenna and Carthage, the Nomarch of Tarentum, the Catapan of Bari, the Abbot of Studium. As a reward for bringing good tidings, I had by this time assumed the Captaincy of the Varangian Guard; and there they were, beyond the galleons and the quinqueremes, in coruscating ranks of winged helmets, clashing their battle-axes in homage; you could tell they were Anglo-Saxons by their long thick plaits and their flaxen whiskers.... Bells clanged. Semantra hammered and cannon thundered as the Emperor stepped ashore; then, with a sudden reek of naphtha, Greek fire roared saluting in a hundred blood-red parabolas from the warships’ brazen beaks. As he passed through the Golden Gate a continual paean of cheering rose from the hordes which darkened the battlement of the Theodosian Walls. Every window and roof-top was a-bristle with citizens and as the great company processed along the purple-carpeted street from the Arcadian to the Amastrian Square, I saw that all the minarets had vanished.... We crossed the Philadelphia and passed under the Statue of the Winds. Now, instead of the minarets, statuary crowded the skyline. A population of ivory and marble gleamed overhead and, among the fluttering of a thousand silken banners, above the awnings and the crossed festoons of olive-leaves and bay, the sky was bright with silver and gold and garlanded chryselephantine.... Each carpeted step seemed to carry us into a denser rose-coloured rain of petals softly falling.
The heat had become stifling. In the packed square of Constantine, a Serbian furrier fell from a roof-top and broke his neck; an astrologer from Ctesiphon, a Spanish coppersmith and a money-lender from the Persian Gulf were trampled to death; a Bactrian lancer fainted, and, as we proceeded round the Triple Delphic Serpent of the Hippodrome, the voices of the Blues and the Greens, for once in concord, lifted a long howl of applause. The Imperial horses neighed in their stables, the hunting cheetahs strained yelping at their silver chains. Mechanical gold lions roared in the throne room, gold birds on the jewelled branches of artificial trees set up a tinkling and a twitter. The general hysteria penetrated the public jail: in dark cells, monophysites and bogomils and iconoclasts rattled their fetters across the dungeon bars. High in the glare on his Corinthian capital, a capering stylite, immobile for three decades, hammered his calabash with a wooden spoon....
Mrs. Mourtzinos spooned a couple of onions and potatoes out of the pot, laid them before us and sprinkled them with a pinch of rock salt. “When we were a couple of hours off Ce-rigo,” Stratis observed, splashing out the ouzo, “the wind grew stronger—a real meltemi—a roaring boucadoura!—so we hauled the sails down, and made everything fast....”
There, before the great bronze doors of St. Sophia, gigantic in his pontificalia, stood Athenagoras the Oecumenical Patriarch, whom I saw a few months before in the Phanar; surrounded now with all the Patriarchs and Archbishops of the East, the Holy Synod and all the pomp of Orthodoxy in brocade vestments of scarlet and purple and gold and lilac and sea blue and emerald green: a forest of gold p
astoral staves topped with their twin coiling serpents, a hundred yard-long beards cascading beneath a hundred onion-mitres crusted with gems; and, as in the old Greek song about the City’s fall, the great fane rang with sixty clanging bells and four hundred gongs, with a priest for every bell and a deacon for every priest. The procession advanced, and the coruscating penumbra, the flickering jungle of hanging lamps and the bright groves and the undergrowth of candles swallowed them. Marble and porphyry and lapis-lazuli soared on all sides, a myriad glimmering haloes indicated the entire mosaic hagiography of the Orient and, high above, suspended as though on a chain from heaven and ribbed to its summit like the concavity of an immense celestial umbrella, floated the golden dome. Through the prostrate swarm of his subjects and the fog of incense the imperial theocrat advanced to the iconostasis. The great basilica rang with the anthem of the Cherubim and as the Emperor stood on the right of the Katholikon and the Patriarch on the left, a voice as though from an archangel’s mouth sounded from the dome, followed by the fanfare of scores of long shafted trumpets, while across Byzantium the heralds proclaimed the Emperor Eustratius, Servant of God, King of Kings, Most August Caesar and Basileus and Autocrator of Constantinople and New Rome. The whole City was shaken by an unending, ear-splitting roar. Entwined in whorls of incense, the pillars turned in their sockets, and tears of felicity ran down the mosaic Virgin’s and the cold ikons’ cheeks....
Leaning forward urgently, Strati crossed himself. “Holy Virgin and all the Saints!” he said. “I was never in a worse situation! It was pitch dark and pouring with rain, the mast and the rudder were broken, the bung was lost, and the waves were the size of a house. There I was, on all fours in the bilge water, baling for life, in the Straits between the Elaphonisi and Cape Malea!...”
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