Mani

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  They called at Zante and dropped anchor in the Sicilian straits where they were kept in quarantine under the castle of Messina. So struck were the Maniots by the beauty and wealth of the place, they almost decided to settle there. But as the island was being fiercely debated by Spain and Louis XIV, they sailed on; calling for a while at Malta, which was then in possession of the Knights; then they followed the Barbary Coast some distance before turning north. Their leader, George Stephanopoli, died on the voyage, and Parthenios, Bishop of Maina, assumed command. After wandering for three months they reached Genoa on New Year’s Day, 1676. They were hospitably received by the Republic and accommodated in several palazzi till the winter was out. The terms of their grant—a generous one—were drawn up: the most important of these was the proviso that the Maniots, while keeping their own Greek rite, should submit to Rome and practise their religion in the manner observed by the ex-Orthodox of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples; become Uniats, in fact. The most interesting item was the right to bear any arms they wished and the permission to fly the Genoese flag in warlike expeditions against the Turks. The former condition, which had not been made during their emissary’s visit, they secretly planned to shelve. There is something very stirring and gallant about the intentions which underlay the second condition.

  When spring came they set off. The wide stretch of land they had been granted at Paomia, Revinda and Sagone, in the coast region of western Corsica, was steep and uneven; but the soil, when they could get at it, was good. They pitched tents and bivouacs and plied their bill-hooks to the stifling macchia, the dense growth that blurs all the outlines of Corsica and turns its mountains the dull khaki green of a well camouflaged army lorry. They soon had it clear, walled it off with stones, divided it into arable and vegetable gardens and terraced it for olives and vines. They built a little Cathedral for their bishop, a Parish Church of the Dormition of the All Holy Virgin sprang up; and, in the trim new houses, chapels to SS. Nicolas, Athanasios, George and Dimitri and even a monastery named the Nativity of Our Lady for the small group of monks and novices. It was soon a flourishing community, so much more so than the filthy Corsican villages surrounding them that the natives were gnawed with envy. It appears that the Corsicans were far wilder and more uncouth than the Maniots and their agricultural methods primeval. They learnt the best ways of ploughing and cultivation and the care of vines from their new neighbours, new devices in spinning and weaving from their wives, and, which seems strange, as the poor Mani is no gastronome’s paradise, how to cook food that was eatable at last.[9] One may wonder where among the stones of the Mani the vigorous colonists had learnt these georgic skills. But all disinterested records coincide in praise. They lived peacefully and, in the words of one of their priests, pleasing in the sight of God.

  But religion, their costumes, their language and their ways cut them off from their neighbours. Their prosperity kindled their anger. After three armed brushes, this anger was tempered by fear and respect. This was apparently not reciprocated, for though individual friendships and god-relationships sprang up, the Maniots refused to inter-marry. They disliked the Corsicans and dubbed them, from their shaggy capes, “the goat pelts” or just “the blacks.” (Unless the Mani was very different then, it sounds like the pot and the kettle.) When, half a century after the establishment of the Greeks, the Corsicans rose against the Republic, their envoys sought the aid of the Maniots. But they stayed loyal to their benefactors and sent the insurgents packing with prophecies of seeing their hewn-off heads aligned on the walls of Bastia.

  Despatching the women and children and the old men to Ajaccio, ninety Maniots barricaded themselves on a headland by the ruined anti-pirate tower of Omignia. Then, in April 1731 (according to the lively chronicle of Father Nicolas Stephanopoli) the rebels came back, outnumbering the Maniots a hundred to one. Attempts at pourparlers by the besiegers were again greeted with insults from the battlements, the heralds withdrew and the enraged Corsicans, beating kettle drums and blowing down trumpets and cows’ horns, charged. “Their shouts rose to the sky, a hail of shot poured from the walls, the whole cape was covered with smoke, the sun was hidden and the earth shook with clamour and gunfire!” A cease fire came with darkness. None of the enemy had even got across the low surrounding wall, three hundred were wounded and many killed. The Corsicans threw the dead into the sea and the waves washed them up on the rocks under the tower. None of the Greeks had been hit, “not even their clothes.” Placing sentries, they gave themselves up to laughing and feasting and clashing their cups together and thanking the All Holy Virgin for keeping them safe. They might have been back in the Mani!

  It was Wednesday in Holy Week and from the first light of Maundy Thursday till Holy Saturday the attack continued with growing fierceness. Relief from Ajaccio was cut off on land by the enemy and from the sea by storms. But at last the enemy fire languished. “Take your arms, brave Greeks,” cries Father Nicolas in retrospect, “God and the Ever-Virgin Mary have scattered your enemies! In the town, your priests and your wives are praying for you barefoot!” (For “Greeks” he uses the word “Romioi” throughout.) Loading and firing by turns the Maniots advanced, toppling the Corsicans into the sea from the cliff’s edge and picking them off on land; taking point after point, until at last the enemy broke and ran, many of them leaping into the sea. In ecstasy, Father Nicolas quotes Moses and the songs of Miriam and Deborah. All round him the Greeks were praising God, cheering, weeping and kissing each other. They gathered a vast booty of scattered guns and swords, stacks of victuals, innumerable flocks from the enemy’s commissariat and numbers of saddled horses. Finally, late at night, they assembled, sang the Hymn of the Resurrection, and joyfully ushered in Easter Day: “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” After piously burying all the dead they marched in triumph to Ajaccio. Terror had emptied all the villages on their way. They were greeted as heroes by the Genoese and, concludes Father Nicolas, when the Corsicans wish to curse each other, they still say “May God deliver you into the hands of the Greeks!”[10]

  But they never returned to Paomia, and Ajaccio became their home. During the turbulent years that followed, they fought bravely for the Genoese through the various insurrections and the eight months when the German adventurer, Baron von Neuhoff, was first and last king of Corsica; also during the brief regime of Boswell’s friend, Pascal Paoli. When Corsica, in 1768, passed to France by treaty, they were looking out for somewhere new to emigrate. Their language and their costume and their religion were still a cause of friction. Two small groups set off for Minorca and Leghorn (where they evaporated like the Medici of Volterra) and a third to Sardinia, where most of them were promptly massacred by the Sardinians. But the bulk of them remained and fought for the French and were befriended by the first French governor. He settled them on good land at Cargese in his newly-established Marquisate of Marboeuf, not far from Paomia. Once more their diligence and their energy produced a fine village in the middle of flourishing cultivation and laden vineyards, and their descendants live there to this day. Their troubles were not over, however. The Corsicans were still hostile and envious of these industrious interlopers and during the Revolution they burnt Cargese down. Napoleon was friendly to them and they were reinstated. There was another attack during the Hundred Days, and when the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821 (a century and a half after the Maniots had left Greece) the men of Cargese were forced to chafe angrily at home, instead of leaving en masse to join in the fight, by the Corsican threat to their families and their lands.

  As long as the Maniots helped to quell the disorders of the island their religion was left unchallenged. But when things began to settle, they were held to the letter of their original agreement by the Archbishop of Ajaccio. The last colonist priest died in 1822. A Cargesian Greek was ordained in the Latin rite in 1817 and his church was attended by some of his family and friends, but the rest, though they became Uniats on paper, once more stubbornly refused to have “Corsican priests.�
� They remained seven years without the sacraments, saying the services by themselves, until a Greek archimandrite from Chios arrived and stayed as parish priest, instead of the Cardinal’s nominee, till 1856. He kept their Greek nationalism intact and brushed up their grammar and spelling. His successors, though Greek, were Uniats, celebrating the same rites as those of Grottaferrata in the Campagna. Bit by bit, as history slipped into its more peaceful nineteenth-century rhythm, this fresh allegiance, inter-marriage and the surrounding western culture disarmed their fierce Greek zeal. There were few Greek books and no teachers. The Catholic Church hated these old links with the Eastern schism and when the Greek merchants of Marseilles sent them a Greek schoolmaster in 1885, he was denounced by the ecclesiastical authorities of Ajaccio as a schismatic and women were forbidden to send him their children. He struggled in vain for two years against this boycott and left in despair. Since then all direct contact with Greece had died out. There are now more Corsicans than Maniots among the eight hundred odd inhabitants of Cargese and all strife is over. But the two churches, one Catholic and one Uniat, where the offices are sung in Greek, commemorate the old antagonism of East and West. Those who attend the Uniat church are still known as “the Greeks” and a few old women still speak Greek.[11]

  All travellers are at one in praising the charm, cleanliness and prosperity of Cargese. Sir Gilbert Eliot, viceroy of Corsica during its short English period (1794–6), wrote to his wife describing a ball where they all wore their old costumes and danced holding hands in a long ribbon to the tune of a Greek melopee. It is given an excellent character by Prosper Mérimée, by Edward Lear (who visited it with his Suliot valet), and by Professor Richard Dawkins, the most knowledgeable and charming of neo-Hellenists whose rooms at Oxford, until his recent death, were an Aladdin’s cave of books of Greek history, folklore, language, customs and fairy-tales. In spite of the inevitable modifications of nearly three and a half centuries, the Maniot Cargesians are proud of their Greek descent, which their language, their form of religion, their proverbs and songs and many of their customs still commemorate. The ikons and sacred vessels they carried away from the Mani are still there, and the bell they are said to have lowered from the cathedral tower of Vitylo. The Corsican tide swept into the village to fill a gap, during the last century, when a last restless emigration carried a number of them still further west, to the village of Sidi Merouan, near Constantine in Algeria. There were three hundred of them there in 1900; in 1931, only a hundred and twenty-five. Now they are scattered and lost all over Algeria and the doors of their little Greek church are shut for ever. This was the last adventure of these wandering descendants of the ancient Spartans and the warlike grandees of the Mani and perhaps of the emperors of Byzantium and Trebizond. The sands of Africa have done the same work of obliteration as the fens of Tuscany and the Sardinian guns.

  Their emigration carried these mountaineers from the deadening murk of the Ottoman Empire into the whirlpool of western European affairs. Some of them, intent on getting closer to the heart of this exciting maelstrom, left their little town and went to France. The more time passed, the more convinced the Stephanopoli became of their imperial origins. Much of Father Nicolas’s eloquence was expended on it. Patrice Stephanopoli, who wrote a history of Cargese in polished and flowery French, had no doubts at all; nor had Don Bernardo Stephanopoli, the offspring of a small eighteenth-century emigration from Cor-sica to Grosseto in the baleful Maremma, who was a Catholic priest, Bishop of Antioch in partibus, a favourite of Clement XIV and nearly a Cardinal. Another, Dimitri, who died a general in the French army, even convinced the heralds and genealogists of Louis XVI. He was duly declared Prince Démètre Stephanopoli de Comnène, and his arms—the double-headed eagle of Byzantium aswirl with ermine mantles and topped with a closed crown—blaze from the pages of old armorials. But the most convinced of all was his sister Josephine-Laure Permon Stephanopoli de Comnène, Duchesse d’Abrantes, who was born at Montpellier. Her father had served in the American War of Independence and her mother was a fading beauty when Napoleon was thin and young and, although she was much his senior, he fell more than half in love with her. Her more beautiful daughter, who was intelligent and witty and charming as well, married Junot, who became Duc d’Abrantes after the Peninsula campaign. After quarrelling with Josephine, she was left a rich widow at twenty-eight, and turned Royalist. Her extravagance soon dispersed her fortune, but later in life she made another one with her twenty-eight volumes of memoirs of the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration; they are witty, fluent, indiscreet and most entertaining. As a novelist, however, she failed badly. She died, poor once more, in 1838. One son was a writer, another, who was one of Marshal MacMahon’s generals, fell at Solferino. She not only upheld the imperial origins of the Stephanopoli but launched the theory which was widely accepted for a time of the Corsican-Maniot—thus Imperial—origins of the Bonaparte family. It was, she proclaimed, an Italianization of the Greek name Kalomeros, which means, exactly, buona parte. But there were no Kalomeri among the emigrant Maniots and no such name ever existed in the Mani. The Buonapartes were originally from Treviso and Bologna and they had been established in Corsica long before the Greeks arrived.

  During the campaign of Italy, Napoleon was suddenly confronted by an envoy from the Bey of the Mani. He offered the complete support of the region, and, in the event of a French landing, of all Greece. As Napoleon was seriously thinking of attacking the Turkish Empire in Europe, the help of the ruler of the only part of Greece that was free and the weight of his influence on the rest of his country were not to be spurned. He thought at once of the Stephanopoli of his native Corsica: an ideal link between France and the Mani. On the 12th of Thermidor, the year V, he despatched Dimo Stephanopoli and his brother Nicolo from his headquarters in Milan. The former was already a distinguished botanist, and botanical research was to be the cover story of his mission. They set off to Corfu in the middle of 1798. These two elegant and pseudo-princely citoyens, in the black cut-aways and top boots and the enormous semi-circular bicornes of the Directoire (who were at the same time great Nyklians astray from home for a hundred and twenty-three years), were welcomed by the courageous Zanetbey. They stayed in the Mani several months as the guests of the Bey and numbers of the leaders from enslaved Greece were summoned to meet them, as well as all the kapetans of the Peninsula. Dimo has left an absorbing account of his sojourn, of the customs and sad klephtic songs bewailing the enslavement of Greece, and of the innumerable plants and archaeological remains that he contrived to see between conferences. He was moved to tears by his strange temporary home-coming and the appalling tales of oppression and cruelty. After a battle in which the Maniots routed a flotilla of the Kapoudan Pasha and destroyed an invading force of Turks from Sparta, he pronounced a funeral oration over the dead in perfect Greek. He carried back an ancient Greek statue of Liberty to the first Consul as a gift from his splendid host. But, by the time he reached Paris, Napoleon’s policy had veered in favour of the Turks. Nothing came of this curious embassy, except Stephanopoli’s moving record of the mission[12] and a shipload of arms to the Bey, who, deposed now, had taken to the hills with the Klephts of the Peloponnese.

  There is one last instance of a Cargesian return to Greece. It comes from a Corsican drummer-boy in the Morea expedition, when France lent a force of 14,000 men to the kingdom of Greece in the 1830’s. One day, in the far south, he overheard a group of mountaineers in conversation. He listened in silence, his brow clouded with astonishment, and at last exclaimed, “Tiens! C’est le patois de mon pays!”

  This is the end of a long parenthesis, and we must return to the present-day Mani, about fifteen miles south of the little town from which they all set out.[13]

  [1] See page 38.

  [2] op. cit.

  [3] Amour propre, for the time being. I shall have to enlarge on this complicated word in a later book.

  [4] The barrels of the few I have seen lying about in Maniot villages are abo
ut two and a half yards long.

  [5] See page 61.

  [6] The Greek delta has now a soft th sound, as in thou; the D sound is rather awkwardly indicated by nt, in the same way that the soft Italian ci sound is conveyed by tz.

  [7] This is the account of the Corfiot historian Moustaxidis.

  [8] Their later troubles may thus have been part of an old feud.

  [9] The reader (like the author) can well shudder at the thought of pre-Maniot meals in western Corsica.

  [10] I was interested to read, in Mr. G.H. Blanken’s book on the Cargese dialect, that the battle of Omignia, in spite of “une resistance désespérée” ended in une défaite glorieuse mais complète des grecs. Under the circumstances, one cannot blame Father Nicolas for not mentioning the fact. It is a healthy tendency to make much of victories and forget defeats.

  [11] The best accounts of their dialect, which is still, in spite of the usual infiltration of local words, a pure Greek one of a largely Maniot character, are by the late Prof. R.M. Dawkins of Exeter College, Oxford, and Herr G. H. Blanken of Leyden.