Vasilio, holding all four of the lamb’s feet in one hand, pointed with the forefinger of the other to the tallest of Va-theia’s turrets. “There,” she said, “that’s my father’s tower and welcome to Vatheia.”
It always happens in Greece that encounters with disagreeable people are followed by an overwhelming compensation as though the entire race by an unconscious second sight were in league to compensate the victim and smooth his ruffled spirits. One reads of poisonous leaves and others which contain their antidote fluttering side by side on the same Indian tree. In the case of this small jungle, it was as if nettles and dock-leaves were growing from a single stalk.
[1] The alternative exorcism is to touch one’s pudenda.
[2] Translated by Robert Graves, The Golden Ass of Apuleius (Penguin).
[3] See Gerard de Nerval, El Desdichado.
[4] Djerba?
[5] Hard by, on the edge of the gulf, stands a cliff from which Petrobey ordered a delinquent priest to be flung. Bound hand and foot, he was left, broken on the rocks, to perish. Both deeds have left a curse on their localities.
11. BAD MOUNTAINS, EVIL COUNCIL AND CAULDRONERS
THE NAME of the Evil Mountains—Ta Kakavounia—has infected the inhabitants as well as the range itself: the Deep Maniots are dubbed “The Evil Mountaineers” by the outside world. Alternatively (for these points of naming and derivation are never simple) the name is declared to be Kakovoulia, the Land of Evil Council, a damned region balefully populated by Evil Counsellors. There is even an ingenious third version,[1] based on the diminutive ending—oula appended to kakkavi (which means a small bronze three-legged cauldron); this turns the Deep Maniots into “The Cauldroneers.” It seems that the Maniot pirates, before boarding an enemy vessel, would helmet themselves in these pots, and, with the legs sticking up like three horns, leap in swarms from the shrouds: enough to alarm any Turkish or Venetian merchantman into surrender. But the first two are the everyday connotations. They have done much to confirm the Mani’s sinister fame, which has long been promoted by a supposed hatred of strangers and implacability in seeking vengeance.
Never has a reputation for xenophobia been more convincingly belied than by our welcome to Vatheia. Vasilio, the lamb slung across her shoulders, befriended us with the solicitude of Nausicaa. She led the way through a contorted and bulbous jungle of prickly pear which the dusk was transforming into the most queer of groves and up into the massed volley of skyward-shooting walls. Somewhere among them, directed by her carrying shouts across the valley, the muleteer and his beast had halted at the foot of her father’s tower.
Many things in Greece have remained unchanged since the time of the Odyssey and perhaps the most striking of these is the hospitality shown to strangers; the more remote and mountainous the region, the less this has altered. Arrival at a village or farmstead is much the same as that of Telemachus at the palaces of Nestor at Pylos and of Menelaus at Sparta—so near, as the crow flies, to Vatheia—or of Odysseus himself, led by the king’s daughter to the hall of Alcinöus. No better description exists of a stranger’s sojourn at a Greek herdsman’s fold than that of Odysseus when he stepped disguised into the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus in Ithaca. There is still the same unquestioning acceptance, the attention to the stranger’s needs before even finding out his name: the daughter of the house pouring water over his hands and offering him a clean towel, the table laid first and then brought in, the solicitous plying of wine and food, the exchange of identities and autobiographies; the spreading of bed-clothes in the best part of the house—the coolest or warmest according to the season—the entreaties to stay as long as the stranger wishes, and, finally, at his departure, the bestowal of gifts, even if these are only a pocketful of walnuts or apples, a carnation or a bunch of basil; and the care with which he is directed on his way, accompanied some distance, and wished godspeed.
In the Odyssey, the newcomer often strikes a banquet in progress, and very often a stranger in Greece to-day will find himself led to an honourable place at a long table of villagers celebrating a wedding, a baptism, a betrothal or a name-day and his plate and glass are filled and refilled as though by magic. Often, by a little chapel (dedicated to the prophet Elijah, the Assumption or the Transfiguration on a mountain top, or, outside some built-up cave, to a Chryssospiliotissa—a Virgin of the Golden Grotto—or St. Anthony of the Desert), he will find the rocks and the grass starred with recumbent pilgrims honouring a pious anniversary with singing and dancing, their baskets open and napkins of food spread out under the branches, the wine flowing freely from gourds and demijohns; and here, as at the village festivals, the traveller is grasped by horny hands, a place is made smooth for him on the cut brushwood, a glass put between his fingers and a slice of roast lamb offered on a fork or a broad leaf. This general hospitality on feast days is less remarkable than the individual care of strangers at all seasons. It is the dislocation of an entire household at a moment’s notice that arouses astonishment. All is performed with simplicity and lack of fuss and prompted by a kindness so unfeigned that it invests the most ramshackle hut with magnificence and style.
To-night, however, there was a change in the accustomed Homeric ritual. After drinking ouzo in the walled yard at the tower’s foot, Vasilio’s father said, “It’s a hot night. Let’s eat in the cool.” He took a lantern and led the way into the tower. We followed him up the steep ladders through storey after storey until, breathless with climbing, we were on a flat roof about eight yards square surrounded by a low parapet. Chairs appeared from below and Vasilio took a coil of rope and paid it into the night; hauling it up the sixty-foot drop after an exchange of shouts, with a round tin table tied to the end. She took out and spread a clean white tablecloth and put the lan-tern in the centre, installing a circle of gold in the moonlight. Our faces, which were soon gathered round a roast lamb which I hoped we had not met before, were lit up by an irrelevant glow of gold which changed to the moonlit pallor of silver while jaw-bones and eye sockets were stressed with shadow if anyone leaned out of the lantern’s range. The rope, to the end of which a huge basket had now been tied, was lowered into the dark again and again for more wine and food.
The night was still. As our tower-top was the highest in Vatheia, the others were invisible and we might have been dining in midair on a magic carpet floating across dim folds in the mountains. Standing up, the other tower-tops came into sight, all of them empty and clear under the enormous moon. Not a light showed, and the only sounds were the shrill drilling note of two crickets, a nightingale and a faint chorus of frogs, hinting of water somewhere in the dry sierra. I tried to imagine how this little group, dining formally round a solitary golden star of lamplight on this little hovering quadrilateral, would look to a passing bird. I asked our host if they often had meals up here: “Only when we feel like it,” he answered.
He had been talking of the winter, and the familiar theme of the Mani wind. “It makes a noise that could deafen you, when the tramontana blows through these towers,” he said; and all at once, in the silence and the hot moonlight, I had a vision of that lamentable blast screaming past the shutters, of maelstroms of hail and snow coiling through those perpendiculars. “And when there’s a thunderstorm, you think the world has come to an end with all the noise and the lightning! That’s when the young think of marrying, to have company in bed to keep them warm....”
The table was cleared and lowered swinging into the gulf and blankets and pillows, glasses and pitchers of drinking water laid out for the guests. “I’ll put this on the trap door,” he said, picking up an iron cannon ball from the parapet and cupping it in his palm like an orb, “in case the wind should blow up and slam it shut. It’s all they are good for now.”
We sauntered to the end of the village before going to bed. Beyond the cactuses a few miles to the south, a long row or twinkling lights, sailing westward under an upright pale pillar of smoke, suddenly slid out of the lee of Cape Matapan. It must have been an enormous liner
lit up for a gala night. Could we hear the sound of music? One could almost imagine it. “Megálo,” said our host, “Big”; truthfully enough. It disappeared behind the leaf of a prickly pear and emerged a minute later. I wondered where it was coming from. Beirut? Alexandria? Bombay? Colombo? Hong Kong? I thought of the passengers in tropical mess-jackets and low dresses and comic paper hats, the brandy revolving in balloon glasses, cigar smoke ascending, ship-board romances ripening, cliques cohering and splintering, plans forming and couples pairing off for the sights of Naples and trips to Vesuvius; of the gallant ship’s doctor, of the life and soul of the party, of the ship’s bore and the ship’s vamp. Perhaps they were wearing false noses fitted with burlesque moustaches and large cardboard spectacles? To what tunes were they dancing, and were streamers being thrown? I remembered once, sailing past the southern Peloponnese and Calabria, leaning across the bulwarks as many of the passengers must have been leaning at that moment and wondering what happened in those wild and secret looking mountains to the north. “Look,” perhaps they were saying, “there’s a light up there! How lonely it must be...”
The lights grew smaller as the liner followed the same path as many a Phoenician galley and many a quinquereme; heading northward in the invisible groove of Harald Hardraada’s ships, sailing shield-hung and dragon-prowed from the Byzantine splendour of Mickelgard for grey northern fjords at the world’s furthest edge. At last it shrank to a faint glow and was swallowed up by an immense obliterating cactus.
* * *
There was much, it occurred to me next day, to be said for tower-dwelling, especially in summer. Eating and sleeping on the roof while the lanes below hoard the stagnant air, one catches every passing shred of wind. One sleeps in the sky surrounded by stars and with the moon almost within arm’s reach. Dawn breaks early, and, by chasing the sleeper down the ladder out of the sunlight, solves the daily martyrdom of getting up; and the Bastille-thick walls cool the rooms with a freshness that grows with each descending storey as the layers of ceiling accumulate overhead: six gradations of temperature from the crucifying blaze of the roof to the arctic chill of the excavated cellar. And towers ensure the rare and inestimable boon, that non-existent commodity of Greek village life, privacy. The turmoil of domestic life, insulated by the absorbent vacua of the intervening chambers, swirls and bubbles fifty feet below. Who is going to climb all those belfry ladders? (Alas, no physical barrier can daunt the thirst for company; but for the moment all was quiet.) There was another negative benefit of the Mani, and one which it had taken some time to appreciate: not since Areopolis had there been a single wireless set; nothing but that delightful horned gramophone in Yeroliména. The rest of Greece, even the remotest Arcadian or Epirote village, rings from sunrise to midnight with swing music, sermons in English, talks on beekeeping in Serbo-Croat, symphonic music from Hamburg, French weather reports, the results of chess contests in Leningrad or shipping signals in morse code from the Dogger Bank, and, as the instrument is nearly always faulty, all these sounds, turned on full blast, are strung on the connecting thread of an unbroken, ear-drum-puncturing and bat-like scream. Nobody listens, but it is never turned off. Towns are pandemonium. Every shop and café sends out a masterless, hydrophobic roar. These rabid wirelesses should be hunted out and muzzled or shot down like mad dogs. In the heart of the country, the silence of the most desolate places is suddenly rent by the blood-curdling howl of a rogue wireless set.... But, like religion, it has been late in reaching the Mani, and among the towers a blessed silence prevails. The only sound at the moment, as I sat over my long neglected diary among piles of sacks, was Vassilio half singing and half humming to herself in the room below.
She had demanded, the night before, all the washing which had accumulated since Sparta, and I had seen her foreshortened torso thumping and rinsing before daybreak in a stone trough in the yard and later spreading the laundry to dry on boulders and cactus branches. Now with this soft singing the delicious childhood smell of ironing floated up through the trap door. A floor further down her mother was weaving at her great loom which sent forth a muted and regular click-clack of treadles.
Beyond the bars of my window the towers descended, their walls blazoned with diagonals of light and shade; and, through a wide gap, castellated villages were poised above the sea on coils of terraces. Through another gap our host’s second daughter, wide-hatted and perched on the back of a wooden sledge and grasping three reins, was sliding round and round a threshing floor behind a horse, a mule and a cow—the first cow I had seen in the Mani—all of them linked in a triple yoke. On a bank above this busy stone disc, the rest of the family were flinging wooden shovelfuls of wheat in the air for the grain to fall on outstretched coloured blankets while the husks drifted away. Others shook large sieves. The sun which climbed behind them outlined this group with a rim of gold and each time a winnower sent up his great fan, for long seconds the floating chaff embowered him in a golden mist.
The sun poured into this stone casket through deep embrasures. Dust gyrated along the shafts of sunlight like plankton under a microscope, and the room was full of the aroma of decay. There was a rusty double-barrelled gun in the corner, a couple of dog-eared Orthodox missals on the shelf, and, pinned to the wall above the table, a faded oleograph of King Constantine and Queen Sophia, with King George and the Queen Mother, Olga Feodorovna, smiling with time-dimmed benevolence through wreaths of laurel. Another picture showed King Constantine’s entry into re-conquered Salonika at the end of the first Balkan war. On a poster, Petro Mavromichalis, the ex-war minister, between a pin-up girl cut-out from the cover of Romantzo and a 1926 calendar for the Be Smart Tailors of Madison Avenue, flashed goodwill from his paper monocle. Across this, in a hand unaccustomed to Latin script, Long live Uncle Truman was painstakingly inscribed. I felt like staying there for ever.
* * *
What sort of life went on in these towers in the palmy days of the Mani? When the great Nyklians, kind in tower and fierce in fray, were still supreme? The few travellers’ reports are very conflicting. Many of them praise their love of liberty and their courage, others strengthen the adverse legend. “Famous pirates by sea, pestilent robbers by land,” one calls them;[2] another, Lord Sandwich,[3] after praising their irredentist spirit, says much the same. A third,[4] without a shred of evidence, accuses them of cannibalism: “It is probable,” he says, “that the Maniots of Laconia have likewise in their fits of fanatical fury, devoured several Mahometans of the Morea.” Not even Leconte de Lisle, in a poem of most bloodthirsty fustian, beginning, Les Mavromichalès, les aigles du vieux Magne, goes as far as this, though he describes the battle between the Mavromichalis and the Turks near Pyrgos, and how the chief of the clan nailed the heads of the Turks round his tower until it was studded with skulls. Captain Stewart, coasting the region in 1807, pronounced them “the most savage-looking animals I ever saw, very dark coloured and ill-clad.” Haygarth, the contemporary of Byron, in a rather fine poem written very slightly before Childe Harold but in a strain of pure Byronic philhellenism, compares them with their Spartan forbears:
...still their spirit walks the earth.
Their martial shouts are heard from Maina’s rocks,
Where, still unconquered, thousands rally round
The spear of Grecian freedom...
Indeed, their Spartan descent, their legacy from the time of Lycurgus, was the theme of many writers. But before the War of Independence few actually went there, not even Byron, alas. Almost the first traveller to say anything pleasant about the Maniots in a non-heroic key was John Morrit of Rokeby. A Whig squire aged twenty-one just down from Cambridge, he made a leisurely journey through Greece from 1794 to 1796 (about thirty years, that is, before Greece was free), and wrote some charming letters home. He was stuffed up with the usual forbidding tales about the region, and (though he never penetrated into the Deep Mani) what a pleasure it is to hear someone writing in so natural and unstilted a vein! “If I see any danger of not gettin
g out (of the Mani),” he writes, “it is not from banditti, but from the hospitality and goodness of the Maniots.” The mountains were poor in antiquities, but the Ancients “survive here in a bolder manner, since certainly these people retain the spirits and character of Grecians, more than we had ever seen.” He obviously had a great deal of fun on his travels, and talked flippantly of marrying and settling here as chief of a Maniot band. He bought a Maniot costume for his sister: “a muslin chemise and a blue silk pair of trousers,” and suggests that they should both, on his return, go to Ranelagh dressed up as Maniots. All this is a great relief after the inflated sentiments of most previous travellers to occupied Greece, the ignorance, the bombast and the false and patronizing comparisons of the glorious past to the humiliating and servile present; the elaborate academic misapprehension by which all the Greeks were either demigods or crawling bondsmen: extremes to which poor Greece had been subjected for centuries by western travellers.
The thing that everyone seems agreed upon, including modern Maniot writers, was the lack of education and the comparative illiteracy of the region. But, in the first house he stayed in, Morrit found a copy of Belisarius and Rollin’s Ancient History translated into Romaic, and his host “talked to us a great deal about ancient Greece, of which he knew the whole history as well or better than us...and his eyes sparkled with pleasure as he talked of the ancient Spartans.” Well, well! But then, of course, it was only the Outer Mani....
As far as I can discover, apart from Leake and Pouqueville, few people from the West came here. The society they portray is a primitive one. (A very black picture was to be painted of it, as we shall see later, by the only poet the Mani ever produced; but, again, he was not a Deep Maniot.) They were, of course, much richer then, thanks to piracy, but most of their cash went in forcing the growth of their towers and in personal adornment. In old prints of the Mani, women who are out of mourning are magnificently dressed. A thin white wimple of silk or muslin was arranged round their heads over a small cap and their plaits ran across their brows in a band. A long-sleeved dalmatic, heavily embroidered and fringed, fell to the knee and covered the top part of a long flowing dress which reached the feet. Under this were flowing shalvaria—oriental trousers—slippers adorned with gold wire, or, among the poor, rawhide moccasins. The men’s costume was not unlike that of the islanders and the Cretans: baggy trousers with many pleats ending just below the knees with legs either bare or greaved in embroidered gaiters, their oriental slippers sometimes turning up at the tip. Over their shirts they wore a short bolero as stiffly galooned with bullion as a bullfighter’s jacket. (Petro Mavromichalis, when Leake visited the Mani, wore a coat of green velvet charged with gold lace.) Their great moustaches would sometimes measure eight inches across and their hair fell in thick black waves over their shoulders. At a raffish angle on the side of their heads was perched the soft, “broken” fez with its long black tassel of heavy silk. Over the sash their middles were caught in with belts equipped in front with a slotted marsupial flap of leather to hold their arsenal of weapons: the almost straight pistols whose butts tapered and then swelled into knobs at the end like wrought silver crab-apples; khanjars, those long knives with branching hafts of bone or ivory that spread like two out-curving horns; and, their chief weapon for close-quarter fighting, the yataghan, its ivory hilt dividing like the khanjar, the long subtle blade curving and straightening again as fluidly as a flame. Often, too, they would carry cross-hilted scimitars whose blades described a semicircle. The steel of many of them was beautifully damascened and arabesqued and they were scabbarded in silver and silver-gilt and plum-coloured velvet. In full array, they were equipped with splendidly mounted powder horns and with intricately worked pouches for shot made of hammered silver from Yanina. Their long-barrelled guns, which resembled Afghan jezails, were so heavy that they could only be aimed when resting on a rock or a branch. This made them useless for hand-to-hand battles but valuable at a distance or for an ambush. These had a euphonious name, which sounds more like a flower than a gun; indeed, very like the Greek for both carnation and clove: karyophylia. This strange and musical word is an uncouth Hellenization of the name of an Italian gunsmith’s shop whose wares were highly prized all over the Levant: Carlo e figli.
Mani Page 17
