[11] Letter to Dorotheus the Deacon. This way of mystical thought became endemic in the West. See especially the contemplation In Caligine of Jiacopone da Todi (Lauda LX), and, of course, the Cloud of Unknowing.
[12] See page 39 n.
[13] See my “Monasteries of the Air,” The Cornhill Magazine, No. 986.
[14] My mind flies to the Zantiot painters Doxaras and Katouni.
[15] It was vividly described to me by the late Professor Dawkins, who visited it in the early years of the century.
[16] In this context, I would like to recommend most strongly Mr. Philip Sherrard’s remarkable book, The Marble Threshing Floor (Vallentine Mitchell), on Greece’s five greatest poets since the War of Independence: Solomos, Palamas, Sikelianos, Cavafy and Seferis.
[17] The fragments of St. Gideon, when retrieved, immediately cohered in an outburst of the odour of sanctity and they have been credited since with many miracles. It must be remembered that Thessaly and Epirus, and all of Greece to the north, were in Turkish hands until the First Balkan War in 1912.
[18] Another odd peculiarity in Greek churches: though men are allowed behind the three-doored iconostasis, it is, at any rate usually, out of bounds for women. I could never understand what this discrimination and suggestion of defilement was based on. Shortly after the war an old priest was showing three people—a woman and two men, of which I was one—some frescoes in a church between Kozani and Kastoria. The best, he said, were in the sanctuary. I pointed to our companion and asked if she could come. He scratched his beard in puzzlement and whispered a question. I didn’t at first understand. At last I grasped that exceptions could sometimes be made; they depended, rather embarrassingly, on feminine physiology and the phases of the moon, a gloomy veto that must go back to the fifteenth chapter of Leviticus. Rare mentions in ancient literature put this matter in a wholly different light. In fact the philosopher and physicist Democritus, echoed by Pliny and Columella, held that if maidens, at the appropriate times, ran three times round a field that was about to be harvested, the standing crops—whose early growth may perhaps have been fostered by sprinkling with ashes mixed with the urine of centaurs—were guaranteed against the onslaught of noxious insects. The contrast between Hebrew jurisconsults and kind Demeter needs no underlining.
16. AN AMPHIBIAN MATRIARCHY AND A MANIOT POET
THE WINE that washed down this late and long-drawn-out second breakfast seemed to attach wings to our heels. We flew along the side of the rocky coast at mercurial speed, in spite of the sun’s ascent.
There is a lot to be said for starting the day like this. In dashing households in many mountain villages the day begins with a minute cup of Turkish coffee, a doorstep of black bread, a handful of olives, hunks of rank and excellent goat’s cheese, and a glass—or several glasses—of fiery distilled spirits. In Epirus, northern Thessaly and Macedonia, slugs of bracing tsipouro often usher in the day and in Crete, where the practice is more widespread, down, each one at a single swashbuckling gulp, go several glasses of tsikoudia, the Cretan raki distilled from the stalks, skins and pips after the grape-treading, sometimes deliciously flavoured with crushed mulberries. Each shot drops to its destination with the smoothness of a tracer-bullet and the somnolent organism is roused with the same shock as that of an oyster under the lemons, summoning startled gasps from the novice and making his eyes leap from their sockets. “One more,” says the flask-wielding host, “just to kill the microbe. Dia na skotosome to mikrovio.” And so the gnawing worm of death’s sister, sleep, is scotched anew each morning and up one starts ready to tackle whatever the day may bring with the optimism, the vigour and the dauntlessness of a giant. There is a great deal of ritual drinking-terminology and singing and inter-weaving of toasts in Greece, and it is in Crete that they reach their most elaborate flowering. Often it is an antiphony of challenge and response. “May we become as rich as the Sultan Amurath!—Sta Mourátia mas!” they cry in some villages on Mount Kedros, and “May the All-Holy One scour the rust from our guns.” It is only there that one hears, with great astonishment, on the morning after a long dionysiac vigil, an exact echo of a certain well-known English phrase: “Of the dog that has bitten you,” they say, “throw in some of the fur.” “Sk′yli pou se dángose, vále ap’ to malí tou.” And then comes the soft glou-glou of pouring fur....
There is a tendency to drink in unison after a concentric clink of glasses, a solitary drinker usually giving a ritual tap to the glasses standing nearest. How often have I heard this clinking explained: how the fifth sense of hearing, not only taste, sight, smell and touch, must be requited! Then, purely for fun, there is drinking kalogerístika—monkishly: grasping the little tumblers in the palm of their hands the drinkers muffle the impact of glass on glass by only touching knuckles (“so that the abbot won’t hear us”). Not that there is any need of secrecy in Greek monasteries. Many of them are famous not only for their vineyards and their lavish hospitality, but for the jovial and Friar Tuck-ish capacities of the brethren. There is a rare and charming Cretan custom of drinking “like little frogs”—ta vatrachákia, it is called or, in the deeper dialect, t’aphordakákia. Two drinkers hold their glasses lightly by the upper rim furthest from them, and swing them gently together so that the bottom edges intershock, bounce away and strike again with a series of light impacts that mimic a soft and far-away croaking. It is repeated thrice. “Vrekekekex!” murmurs one. “Koax!” the other; and at the third time both murmur a final “Koax!” in unison. Wine glasses are never filled more than half, on the principle that one drinks more that way; it goes down in one gulp and needs restocking at once.
Some of the old “black” and amber-coloured wines of Crete are followed next day by an aftermath which is only to be allayed by a glass or two of the same fur and the delicious frothing egg-and-lemon soup which is the pan-Hellenic nostrum for hangovers. Retsina, however, tipped into the little tumblers from carafes, or better still, from chipped blue enamel mugs which are replenished again and again from vast barrels, seems to possess the secret of inducing high spirits and rash and uninhibited conduct with no sad retribution, as though a plenary absolution accompanied every gulp. This, for those lucky enough to like it as I do, places retsina high on the list of the manifold charms of Greece. Nobody seems to know when the Greeks first treated their wine with resin. Certainly it was known in Byzantine days. Some place its origin much further back, basing their assumption on the pine-cone, which, in old sculptures, sometimes tops the vinewreathed thyrsus of Dionysius. It is assumed that the taste began fortuitously with the custom of caulking the leaks in barrels and wine skins with lumps of resin. The vine- and pine-clad slopes of Attica are its true habitat, but many other regions are famous. Perhaps the two most celebrated sources, both for drinking on the spot and for export to regions and islands less generously blessed, are the ancient town of Megara, half-way between Athens and Corinth, and Karystos in Euboea. Bad retsina can be excruciatingly nasty; the best—and Athenian tavernas, except for a few which remain unswervingly reliable, show an alarming tendency to degenerate in this matter—is incomparably good. It should never, to my mind, be drunk outside Greece, for one of its secrets is drinking it with unstinted abundance. It seems to have an alliance with the air in the promotion of well-being. Many people think that it bestows the gift of bodily health as well; a belief I accept at once without further scrutiny. A year after the war I told Mitso, a boatman in Poros I hadn’t seen since 1938, that he looked browner, haler and younger than ever.
“It’s the air,” he said, pausing over his oars, “and not only that. What with the brine outside and the resin in, it pickles us. If I died now and you were to bury me, I wouldn’t start stinking for ten years or more.”
Such themes occur often in his conversation. When I saw him a month ago on the way to Hydra, he said: “Why not stay in Poros? There’s nothing but bare rock on Hydra. Why, they say they even have to bring earth from the mainland when they want to bury anyone....”
* * *
The hill-side over which we sped, charioted by Bacchus, was utterly bare. Scarcely a thistle, not a trace of thorn or cistus, no withered stalk of asphodel, not even those onion-like bulbs of the bitter sea-squill which punctuate the sternest terrains with dark green explosions, jutted through the rubble; nothing, indeed, all day, but the turmoils of prickly pear running amok along the empty village lanes. We passed an isolated house which had fallen into ruin, and Vasilio told a macabre tale that admirably corresponded to the insanity of the landscape. Not long ago, she said, a boy from a nearby village, married for a year but incensed and goaded by his mother about some hanky-panky in the payment of the dowry, burst into this very house and murdered his father-in-law. He was promptly arrested, whereupon the bride, abandoning her newly-born child, sought out her husband’s father, killed him with an axe, decapitated the corpse and flung the head down a steep slope. Vasilio described the bounces with loops of her forefinger. The bride was arrested too, and the upshot was still sub judice. Far-away mountains are rich in these fierce eclogues.
* * *
What a powerful link god-relationship is! Koumbariá! A Koumbaros[1] is anyone who has stood sponsor, as best man or godfather, at a wedding or a christening. The link is considered as close as blood-relationship, and it links the families concerned with an indissoluble tie.
Thus, when we descended the steps and passed through the arched doorway of one of the few houses of Kypriano, a minute un-towered hamlet that only a few yards of pebble separated from the sea, our pretensions to hospitality were backed by the fact that Vasilio’s family and the newcomers who suddenly surrounded us in the dark living-room were bound in this manner. Tall figures unlashed our stuff from the mule and soon, after farewells, I watched Vasilio zigzag up the slope, whacking the great mule in the direction of a village further inland to which she was taking the two sacks of corn.
The koumbara was a widow, a tall grey-eyed woman of amazing distinction and the remnants of great beauty. Eight of her nine sons, ranging from the ages of five to twenty-four (one was away on his military service in Macedonia), lived with her under the same roof. Lying half asleep in a late siesta, I watched their random comings and goings. The youngest was huddled on the steps with his head in his fists listening raptly to his immediate senior reading aloud to him from an Epirote tale, The Brave Katzandónis, Veli Ghega and Ali Pasha of Yanina, one of many blood and thunder pamphlets, the equivalent of Robin Hood, which, with Karaghiozi, Nasr-ed-Din-Hodja and the Arabian Nights, are the staple reading among children in the country. Every so often, with a sound of bare feet on the earthern floor, another son would appear from the sunlight lugging a sack of newly threshed corn or with a fish, fresh-caught and hanging Tobias-like from his fist, and ask for food. Their mother would then lay aside her distaff and spindle, sticks would crackle as small fry were poured into the pan, a ladle full of lentils was doled into a tin plate and a titanic wedge of dark bread was sawn from a loaf like a millstone. Taking the tight clump of thorn from the neck of the bulbous jar—it is placed there as a barrier against thirsty flies—she would fill a tumbler, throw the water out into the sunlight in a deft and glittering arc, wipe it with her apron and fill it up again. Putting the bright cylinder by his plate, she would say “Eat, my child,” and pick up her spinning things again. The entire family was so good-looking and of so patrician a bearing that they resembled a rustic aristocratic matriarch surrounded by a brood of dukes. From my somnolent vantage point, sheltered on the ledge running down one side of the room, it was a great pleasure to watch them, their mother especially. Every gesture was performed with a deftness and ease and lack of fuss that amounted to very high style indeed and her conversation with her sons had a bohemian note of affectionate banter and irony. It was punctuated with laughter on either side, a not unusual relationship between women, especially widows, with a number of high-spirited sons.
The house was a large, empty barrel-vaulted room half sunk below ground level. It was blessedly shadowy and cool after the clanging afternoon. One could see the glare through a deep-walled window sub-divided into smaller squares by thick iron bars and through a blazing half-circle at the far end under an archway at the top of a flight of shallow steps. The healing penumbra, the glaucous and stone-walled emptiness transformed the room into an empty underwater cavern, a haunt for tritons. It was only empty in the Western sense; free, that is, of the immovable archipelago of furniture with which European rooms are encumbered; except for the invariable great loom as unwieldy and rooted as a fourposter bed. Otherwise tables, chairs and stools are tidied away when not in use. The floor space is a blank agora in which any newcomer looks queerly isolated and momentous, the protagonist of a few seconds’ drama until he subsides on the stone ledge. For the household gear is centrifugal; it gathers round the walls and piles up in corners, under the twinkling ikon lamp, the photographs of King, Queen, Plastiras or Venizelos or the faded tuppence-coloured posters of Petrobey and his klephts or fireman-helmeted Kolokotrones or scimitar-wielding Athanasios Diakos and his kilted pallikars at grips with turbaned and blaspheming Turks. These pictures are absorbing. Often they depict cavalry charges in the Balkan wars or a ferocious evzone actually burying his teeth in a kalpacked and moccasined Bulgar green with panslavism and wickedness and fright. They have recently been joined by a crude and magnificently uninhibited crop of reconstructions of the glories of 1940 in Albania: evzones again, this time bayoneting bersaglieri, who are always (as indeed they were) on the run. Hoisted on hill-tops by sword-wielding officers, the blue and white Greek flag is blown taut by the wind of war and the whole battlefield—Koritza, Tepeléni, Argyrokastro or Premeti—is plumed, as though by an irregular bed of crimson tulips, with exploding shells. Among them on the wall, touchingly preserved under glass but dark with dust nevertheless, one can often see the white petals of old marriage crowns intertwined, and, pinned across calligraphic citations, faded medal ribbons from one or other of Greece’s tragically frequent wars. Here, too, are vast cloudy enlargements, retouched with sepia, of daguerreotype ancestors: coiffed women and bearded men with yataghan-stuffed belts and guns across their knees, and more recent émigré relations: plump figures in straw boaters, high stiff collars, bright tiepins and macassared hair and moustaches, signed by photographers in Chicago, Detroit, Alexandria, Khartoum, Odessa or Dar-es-Salaam.
The walls of this dim chamber, except for the twinkle of a solitary ikon-lamp, were almost bare of pictures. But the edge of the floor, which was trodden as hard as marble, was a forest of paraphernalia. A cooking-oven and a bread-oven tunnelled subsidiary caves into the walls, three great grooved amphorae and a congeries of smaller jars crowded together. Oars, a small mast dislodged from its socket, fishing rods and bamboo poles stood in sheaves. There were great extinct acetylene flares fitted for a boat’s prow, and glass-bottomed metal cylinders, both of them for gri-gri fishing; loops of net, cork- and gourd-floats, rolls of twine, patched sail cloth and unshipped rudders; various baskets and maze-like osier fish traps and a couple of rusty anchors. This maritime apparatus mingled with mule saddles and harness, sieves and sacks of corn just threshed and winnowed. There was chopped wood and thorn-faggots for kindling. A ploughshare, spades, sickles and adzes were assembled like an arsenal of burglars’ tools for extorting a livelihood from the iron-hard Mani. Long tridents and fish spears for sea quarry, two double-barrelled guns for quadrupeds and avifauna and a rifle for bipeds lent against or hung from the walls. Ropes of onions and garlic and of dried tomatoes, threaded and strung for making that dark russet sauce called belté, dangled from the beams. Various sons, two dogs and a number of cats and hens in ones and twos pecking jerkily indoors after dropped wheat grains and now and then an enormous lop-eared nanny-goat, wandered in and out. Husks of chaff floated in the shadowy air and the warm and dusty smell of the wheat and the tang of brine told of a hard, amphibious life. The water’s edge was only a few yards away and the faintest splash was captured and magnified
by this concavity as though every so often the slow summer sea were rippling through the house. Through sleepy lids I watched my hostess spinning; her left hand pulling and twisting a thin thread from the hank of wool on the end of the distaff she wore tucked into the top of her apron, the gyrating spindle sinking floorwards from her nimbly flickering right forefinger and thumb and then slowly rising again like a slow-motion yo-yo. She looked a beautiful, sardonic but benign underwater potentate. It was plain that the door was never shut except in winter, for two swallows’ nests hung among the beams and vaulting in the dark nether end of the room. A swish and a flutter marked their exits and their entrances and a momentary breeze from their wings would brush one’s cheek or forearm.
* * *
It has been said that the Mani is, poetically, the least fertile area of Greece. One exception to the Maniot sterility in folk poetry—the dirges—has been discussed. But there is also a single exception—a modest one, it is true—to the general lack of formal poetry. It is only formal, really, in the sense that the author’s name is known: The History of the Whole Mani, its Customs, Villages and Produce, by Nikitas Niphakos. It is written in the “Political” metre, the usual peasant metre, that of nearly all klephtic ballads. It is so called, not from its contents but because the origin of all Greek fifteen-syllable-line poetry—a decapente-syllabic heptameter with a feminine ending—is attributed to Constantinople, the Polis or City. This verse-scheme has been the vehicle of some of the greatest of “modern” Greek verse—The Epic of Digenis Arkitas, for example, in the Middle Ages, the Erotokritos in seventeenth-century Crete, and in modern times The King’s Flute by Palamas; but it is prone in careless hands to degenerate into banality and tedium. The tradition is so instinctive that any Greek, literate or illiterate, seems able to turn it out as faultlessly and easily as breathing. It is as natural and indigenous to modern Greece as the hexameter must have been to the Greece of Homer. No doubt the shift of tonic stress, a process as imperceptible as soil erosion, which occurred in the early centuries of the Christian era, accounts for this important vernacular change.
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