Mani

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The juxtaposition of “Byzantine” and “Phanariot” is not fortuitous. The old elective thrones they occupied, however perfunctory and, as it were, simoniacal their elections, were those of the old Roumanian Orthodox monarchs; of the Mushats, the Bogdans, the Bassarabs, of Stephen the Great, Michael the Brave, Peter the Cruel, Vlad the Impaler; and the atmosphere that surrounded these mist-enfolded Dacian-Latin potentates was half Byzantine, half Slav, a last faint echo in the snows beyond the Danube of the last faint whispers of imperial Byzantium.[8] This conjunction of influences was reflected, until well into the nineteenth century, in the astonishing titles of the various dignitaries at the courts of the hospadars—the Great Ban of Craiova, the Grand Logothete, the Grand Spathar, the Grand Vornic, the Vestiar, the Hetman, the Paharnic; and so on. Until the war, the stucco and chandelier-hung palaces of Bucharest and Yassy and the labyrinthine country houses of the boyars—stranded like great ships in the flat landscape—were full of portraits of these most peculiar figures. A few of them were painted by Liotard, who came to the east as the travelling artist of the wicked Earl of Sandwich. Their beards—blue-black or ashy white, very occasionally a flaming carroty red—descended in billowing cascades to where their tapering white fingers rested indolently on the jewelled hilts of ceremonial daggers stuck in their sashes. Necklaces of pearls and gems sometimes hung round their necks. The long thick folds of their braided and fur-edged caftans widened over their shoulders to a great expanse of fur. Dim under the varnish in the background, the blazons of Wallachia and Moldavia impaled each other under the ermine and the pearl-studded hoops of closed crowns. The lips that nested in those cataracts of beard were voluptuously curved and red as cherries or clenched in a hermetic and ruthless line and their thick linked eyebrows, arched over eyes that peered forth from under hawk’s eyelids, wore expressions of wickedness and arrogance and Olympian calm. Above, springing and expanding from hollow temples, the stupendous headgear climbed.

  There were two different kinds. One of them, a smooth white which had faded on the canvas to the colour of a mushroom, ascended for several inches in a cylinder of equal diameter with the head of the boyar it was adorning and then began gradually to swell like a balloon, spreading at last to a huge pale globe two feet or more in diameter, the summit of the dome the best part of a yard from its wearer’s brow. The other was an enormous edifice of thick fur, roughly cylindrical, but with a perpendicular ridge down the front springing from just above those arched eyebrows (which the hat’s edge repeated in a widow’s peak of fur), and ascending almost as high as a guardsman’s bearskin, thickening slightly on its upward journey to end in a flat top at the summit of the ridge. A projecting bulge of coloured stuff—it was hard to discern whether this, the actual cap inside the fur cylinder, was velvet or silk—over-topped the rim of this amazing structure, which was sometimes still further heightened by a spreading aigrette nodding from a heavy diamond clasp. These elaborate achievements must have enlarged the stature of a medium-sized man to eight feet and turned a tall man into a titan.

  What is the origin of these sartorial freaks? Not Turkish, certainly, as nothing similar appears among the wonderfully swathed pumpkin-turbans of the Turks—like the headgear of the Gentile Bellini portrait of Mohamed II and the still stranger garb of the janissaries (many were almost certainly inherited, after the fall of Constantinople, from the Byzantines)—in the museum in the Grand Seraglio. The huge Phanariot fur hat, the gudjaman, probably derives from Persia, Byzantium and Muscovy in equal parts: Slavonic fur covering those expanding cylinders worn by the Byzantine dignitaries on the bronze Filarete panels, depicting the retinues of John VIII Palaeologue, on the doors of St. Peter’s in Rome, and by the Byzantine warriors in Piero della Francesca’s battle between Heraclius and Chosroes on the walls of Arezzo. The Byzantine passion for strange hats, which also appears on Filarete’s doors, is well illustrated in the famous Pisanello medallion of John VIII: something resembling a cap of maintenance from which the crown, ribbed in segments, shoots upward like half a cantalupe melon. But the other Phanariot hat, that wonderful white sphere called the ishlik, is of the purest Byzantine provenance. There is a magnificent example, in the mosaics of the Kahrie Djami in Constantinople, on the head of Theodore Metochites, Grand Logothete to Andronicus II Palaeologus, who died in 1332. Engravings of Roumanian soirées in early Victorian times show, among the piped overalls, the frock coats and epaulettes of young men and the crinolines and Louis Phi-lippe coiffures of the ladies, the reigning prince and the great boyars still attired in these ancient Byzantine canonicals. Pillars of fur and brocade and jewellery, their headgear soars towards the elaborate plaster ceilings and the hanging lustres in monuments of plumed fur and in pale floating globes. Outside, in the snow-muffled streets, Arnaut bodyguards stamped to keep warm and strings of six Orloff horses from Bessarabia fidgeted with their postilions in the traces of splendid emblazoned sleighs driven by bulky Russian eunuchs from the self-castrating sect of the Skoptzi. In the eighteenth century Greek was the polite tongue, but in the nineteenth, as with Slav high life in St. Petersburg and Warsaw, French was the language of this strange nobility. (It remained so till World War II.) Educated at the Sorbonne, at the universities of Padua, Vienna or Moscow, or all four, they spoke several languages to perfection, and would spend their evenings discussing the writings of Chateaubriand and the poems of Vigny and Lamartine.

  These obsolete sartorial baubles, of which under a century ago there must have been hundreds, have all vanished. The implements of ancient British beaker-men survive, but these have followed the three-legged helmet-cauldron, the chibook and the pogo-stick into non-existence. I have sought them in vain through the dust of many a Roumanian attic.

  They, or rather their attendant associations, are not as irrelevant as they seem, for a number of these Greco-Roumanian boyars took part in the struggle for Greek Independence. One of them, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, the head of the Philiki Hetairia, even hoped to assume the throne of a Greece reconquered with Russian help. Another, Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, Byron’s and Shelley’s friend and the dedicatee of “Hellas,” was one of Greece’s first premiers. They were disliked by the fustanella’d klephts of Roumeli and the Morea and, in the Athens of King Otto when Greece was free at last, the rough native heroes resented the sophistication and the polished French of these strangers, their use of titles in a state which had banned them, their superciliousness and their European culture. They made them feel bumpkins. These two elements—the great guerrilla leaders, largely of simple origin in the mountains and islands, and the civilized Phanariots—were the dual components of Athenian society for many decades. They were incompatible to each other at first. But the breach diminished with time and was healed at last by the marriage of the son of Kolokotrones with a Phanariot princess Caradja, soon followed by the marriage of another Caradja to the beautiful daughter of the great Souliot hero, Marko Botsaris. The Phanariots, though socially exalted, have never attained, in the eyes of Greece at large, the supreme laurels which fell to the great generals and sea captains who played the leading rôle in Greek resurrection. But the two strains became interwoven and indistinguishable and formed the nucleus round which diplomacy, politics, the services, the professions, banking and foreign enterprise were to form Athenian society, which is fortunately one of the least exclusive, the most painlessly assimilative and, on the whole, the most scorchingly intolerant of pretensions in the world.

  The sounds of feet coming up the ladder put to flight these musings on obsolete headgear and their sociological implications (“and about time too,” I can hear the reader murmuring). A section of the floor creaked open as my host’s head appeared through the trap door. He sat down with a sigh, laying aside his sickle to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He had a kind and friendly face with all the recesses of its bone structure scooped hollow by past illnesses.

  “How is the work going?” he asked me.

  “It’s going well,” I answered; untruth
fully, for I had mooned the morning away pleasantly without writing a word.

  The conversation drifted inevitably to politics. Like most of the Maniots, he was a firm Royalist. I pointed to the poster of M. Petro Mavromichalis and asked if he had voted for him.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I think we ought to change our deputy. The government is always promising to build a road here and it never gets done.”

  The vision of a metalled highway snaking through the hills appeared; blocked by a column of motor-lorries, each of them loaded with a howling menagerie of wireless sets for the silent Mani. I silently heaped blessings on M. Mavromichalis’ head. I asked him who he would prefer to represent the constituency: it was sad to contemplate this uprooting of traditional allegiances. He looked surprised. “Who? Why, Kyriakos Mavromichalis of course, his brother. Who else?”

  [1] Put forward by Prof. Kouyeas of Athens University and quoted by Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis, op. cit.

  [2] George Wheler in 1675, A Journey into Greece.

  [3] The discoverer of both the sandwich and the islands.

  [4] Cornelius de Paneo.

  [5] This village, largely inhabited by shepherds who are semi-nomadic between there and the Preveza area, also produced the poet Krystallis.

  [6] Tourloti is a dialect corruption of the word “Troulloti” which means “cupola-ed.” Troullos is a cupola, the same word as trullo, which southern Italians apply to those strange beehive dwellings cohering in scores in the Apulian villages of Alberobello and Casarotonda near Bari, the old Byzantine capital of Magna Grecia. They are one of the minor phenomena of architecture and the only things that I have seen at all similar are the beehive shepherd huts high on Ida and the White Mountains in Crete.

  [7] From the Phanar quarter of Constantinople, round the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the spiritual headquarters of all Orthodox Christianity, and the centre of all the financial and intellectual life of the Sultan’s Greek subjects.

  [8] The Cantacuzene family—the most nearly verifiable of all surviving Byzantine dynasties—took root and reigned in Roumania long before the arrival of the Phanariots, thus escaping the tainted adjective. The most representative of the Phanariots are the families of Ghika (of southern Albanian origin), Mavrocordato and Soutso (from Chios), Ypsilanti and Moruzi (both of whom originated in the fallen Comnenian empire of Trebizond) and Mavroyeni from the Aegean and Rosetti (reputedly of Italian origin). Cantemir the historian and the Callimachi family were Hellenized Moldavians and the Caradja are presumed to have come from Ragusa in Dalmatia. The Rakovitza, Sturdza, Stirbey, and Bibesco families were of Roumanian stock. But all through the eighteenth century Greek was the court language, and it was Greek Constantinople that shed its glow on their little provincial capitals. All of them possessed immense estates in Roumania, many of which existed till a few years ago.

  12. A NEREIDS’ FOUNTAIN

  ONE COMPENSATION of this kind of travel is the unchartable and unregimented leisure between the rigours of displacement. Letters build their vain pyramids on some table in Athens; weeks pass; their mute clamour dies down unanswered; dust and oblivion enshroud them and the flight of months makes them obsolete and strips them of all but antiquarian interest. This vacuous and Olympian sloth is made more precious still by the evidence all round of arduous and boring toil. Here, too, in the absence of lofty theories about the intrinsic virtue of work regardless of results, no northern guilt comes to impair its full enjoyment. Such mephitic ideas cannot long survive the clear and decarbonizing sun.

  Now and then one finds oneself, in the dilettante fashion of one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting, helping in some pleasant and unexacting task: gathering olives onto spread blankets in late autumn, after beating fruit from the branches with long rods of bamboo; picking grapes into baskets, shelling peas or occasionally, in late summer, helping to tread the grapes. I remember one such occasion in Crete, in a cobbled and leafy yard in the village of Vaphé at the foothills of the White Mountains. First we spread deep layers of thyme branches at the bottom of a stone vat which stood breast-high like a giant Roman sarcophagus, then a troop of girls hoisted their heavy baskets and tipped in tangled cataracts of white and black grapes. The treading itself is considered a young man’s job. The first three, of which I was one, had their long mountain boots pulled off; buckets of water were sloshed over grimy shanks and breeches rolled above the knee. “A pity to wash off the dirt,” croaked the old men that always gather on such occasions. “You’ll spoil the taste.” This chestnut—which I imagine to have existed for several millennia—evoked its ritual laughter while we climbed on the edge and jumped down on the resilient mattress of grapes. Scores of skins exploded and the juice squirted between our toes.... In a minute or two a mauve-pink trickle crossed the stone lip of the spout, and dripped into the waiting tub; the trickle broadened, the drops became a stream and curved into a splashing arc.... We were handed glasses of the sweet juice which already—or was this imagination?—had a corrupt and ghostly tang of fermentation. When the stream slackened, the manhood of the treaders, shuffling calf-deep in a tangled slush by now and purple to the groin, was jovially impugned.... For days the sweet heady smell of the must hangs over the village. All is sticky to the touch, purple splashes and handprints on the whitewash and spilt red rivulets between the cobbles and the clouds of flies suggest a massacre. Meanwhile, in the dark crypts of the houses, in huge grooved Minoan amphorae, the must grumbles and hits out and fills the house with unnerving fumes and a bubbling noise like the rumour of plots, a dark conspiracy of whispers. For as long as this vaulted collusion lasts, a mood of swooning and Dionysiac laxity roves the air.

  How different from the vineless and unleafy Mani! But still, leisure has its rewards here as well: idle mornings of meditation in upper rooms and saunters through a maze of towers and now, lying and smoking after a happy sleep in the cave-like shadow of a carob tree, above a landscape scattered with harvesters, I could watch the glint of their sickles as they felled the sparse corn. Under their yellow loads animals minced up the lanes on delicate hoofs. Threshing teams rotated on the gleaming dials of stone like the bustling minute-hands of eccentric timepieces and the winnowers plumed the middle distance with golden geysers of chaff. Strange that the word cereal should conjure up no vision but that of an overfed northern brat with a scarlet cheek crammed with breakfast food; never Ceres, whose rites were being celebrated below. But the Greek name—Demetriaka—immediately suggests the kind goddess of the sheaves with her chaplet of wheatears, her torch and her poppy.

  Common words derived from the names of ancient gods in modern Greek are more evocative of their origins, perhaps by their freshness on a foreign ear, than their Latin equivalents in English. “Venereal,” for instance, never suggests Venus, but “the Aphrodisiac diseases” in modern Greek are immediately and painfully suggestive of baleful aspects of Aphrodite Pandemos. “Erotikos” merely connotes “pertaining to love,” and summons up the innocent and youthful Eros; unlike the word “erotic” in English. But there is no English equivalent of divine Latin origin—it would be “cupidinous”; Amor’s derivatives strike a more suspect note; and, strangely, though “Mercury” is the fluid metal compound in English, the Greek word hydrargyros (watersilver) fails to commemorate Hermes. He only survives, as he does with us, in the word “hermetic,” recalling not so much the messenger of the gods’ swiftness and volatility, as Hermes Trismegistus or the Egyptian Thoth and all that is sealed up initiate and arcane.

  The cavernous shelter of this carob tree, these branches dangling with horny locust beans, was the right asylum from the afternoon sun for this Maniot pastoral. As the oven-like heat began to languish, the beckoning figure of our old host appeared below. Joining him, we made our way along a lane that circled like a contour-line the flank of two tower-crowned hills and led away to a cleft in the limestone mountain-side unexpectedly filled with green plane trees and figs and sycamores and a sudden insurrection of pink and white oleander: a green an
d leafy dell on the flank of the Mani. It was all due to a tinkling thread of water so cold that a mouthful made one shiver, which fell from the rock face into a rough stone tank whose inner walls fluttered with dark green water-weed. Neolithic channels and bamboo conduits led the precious liquid into hollowed tree trunks; and a similar system of flimsy and primordial irrigation had conjured up, over strips of earth banked in miniature tiers on both sides of the descending cleft, the green of tomato leaves and chickpeas and beanstalks. It soon petered out and the rock descended in great steel sweeps to the sea, interrupted now and then by a crescent of yellow stubble. The place had the unexpectedness of an oasis. The old man slipped two bottles into the tank and joined us at the low wall that overhung the bright layers. “There!” he said, “my garden.”