Part XI
Greek Apulia
48
The Byzantine Terra d’Òtranto
...that abode of Greeks, that unreassuring land.
Virgil, “Aeneid”
THE TERRA D’ÒTRANO was the last part of Apulia to be conquered by the Normans and still has something unmistakably Greek about it. After losing Ravenna in the eighth century, Byzantine Italy, re-organised as the Theme of Lombardy, was ruled from here by a strategos (or general) until 975 when the catapanate was established at Bari. The strategos worked closely with the archbishop, who sometimes represented him. In the tenth century Archbishop Vlattus of Òtranto led an embassy to the Zirid sultan at Mahdia in Tunis to buy the freedom of Apulian slaves – inspired by his sister being in the sultan’s harem – but when he returned privately to redeem more of them he was put to death.
The navy of Nicephorus Phocas (963–69) routed the Arabs. “I alone command the seas”, claimed the Emperor, who began the Greek colonisation of southern Italy, settlers flooding in under Basil Boiannes during the next century. Discreet contact with Constantinople lingered on until the Turkish conquest of Greece, while Mass was said in the Greek rite up to the Counter Reformation. Even today, although the language has almost ceased to be spoken, certain Greek customs survive south of a line from Ostuni to Tàranto . The most obvious example is harvesting olives in the Greek way. The trees are barely pruned so they grow very high and the ripe fruit is left to drop into nets spread on the ground below instead of being picked by hand as in the Terra di Bari.
The underground churches contain some of the Byzantine frescoes that are among Apulia’s greatest treasures. During the eighth century Byzantium forbade celibacy and the veneration of icons. When monks were ordered to marry or lose their eyes, 30,000 fled to Italy, founding small monasteries in caves, especially in Calabria and the Terra d’Òtranto. Sicilian monks, refugees from Islam, joined them in the ninth century. They decorated the churches they carved into the rock with frescoes of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints. The tradition continued for centuries.
The grotto church of San Biagio near San Vito dei Normanni owes its preservation to an enlightened landowner putting a door over the entrance. This was the church of a group of hermits and, judging from its size – over forty feet long – served a large community. Signed by the artist Daniel with the date 1197, the frescoes are unmistakably Byzantine, and Charles Diehl thought that, to-gether with the magnificent Archangel Michael at San Giovanni nearby, they were the most important in the Terra d’Òtranto. He blamed the destruction of many other frescoes on the navvies who built the railways. Using the cave churches as shelters where they could light fires, they seem to have taken a fiendish enjoyment in disembowelling the painted saints or gouging their eyes out. San Biagio had a lucky escape.
Converted to the Latin rite during the seventeenth century, few surface (as opposed to underground) churches in Apulia retain any traces of their Byzantine past. The exquisite little church of San Pietro at Òtranto is an exception, with drums and cupolas, and some of the Greek cycle of frescoes – the Last Supper and the Harrowing of Hell. The fifth century church at Casarano has been enlarged and its walls redecorated with Western frescoes, but the brilliantly coloured Byzantine mosaics are still in the dome and chancel, the dome dotted with stars. There is also the Romanesque abbey of Santa Maria di Cerrate, south of Brìndisi, which although built by Normans belonged to the Eastern rite, as you can see from its frescoes and from an altar inscribed in Greek.
On the other hand, there are Greek grotto churches throughout the stony hinterland of the Salentine peninsula, secret, haunted places that are often very hard to find, sometimes underground, sometimes dug into a bank or the side of a cliff. They stretch in a diagonal band twenty-five miles wide from Roca Vecchia in the north to Poggiardo and Ugento in the south. Some are locked, the key kept by a seemingly mythical custodian, while others have frescoes that are visible only by the light of a powerful torch. Often it is difficult to recognise them as churches or chapels, especially when they are used as cattle-byres or tool-sheds. Among the most important are those at Vaste, Giurdignano and Supersano. The earliest frescoes, from the tenth century, are in the church of Sante Marina e Cristina at Carpignano Salento, while the most beautiful are in a small museum in the public gardens at Poggiardo – having been taken from the nearby grotto chapel of Santa Maria under the town centre, discovered when a lorry fell into it in 1929.
You can best see the slow transition from Byzantine to Western above ground, however, at Soleto, near Galatina, where the tiny chapel of Santo Stefano is filled with frescoes, mostly from the mid-fourteenth century. The Last Judgement was obviously done by a Greek, but others could have been painted by some obscure follower of Giotto. The Byzantine saints are westernised – St Nicholas, St George, and St Onophrius with his loin-cloth and long white beard.
In contrast, the campanile of the chiesa madre at Soleto, built in about 1400 for Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, is totally Latin. Although Raimondello had been all-powerful here, Janet Ross was told that his campanile was the tomb of “some great king, whose name is not known, he died so long ago.” She thought Soleto “so eastern-looking with its one-storied, flat-roofed, white houses, that I expected the people to speak Arabic.”
Early Greek settlers from Tàranto called Gallipoli on the Ionian coast the ‘beautiful city’ and it still has enormous charm. It fell to the Normans in 1071 but was not totally subjugated for another sixty years, the Greek rite being used in its churches until the sixteenth century. It rose against Charles of Anjou in 1268, 34 rebellious barons being besieged in its castle for six months and hanged as soon as they surrendered. It beat off the Turks in 1481 but was occupied by the Venetians four years later, although briefly. The Spaniards gave the castle four great round bastions; mounting heavy cannon, these guarded the harbour and the landward side of the island on which the city is built. The last siege was in 1809, when the castle stood up to a bombardment by the British Navy.
“Here are fish and exquisite meat of every sort,” we are told by Abate Pacichelli, who says that English and Dutch ships put in to Gallipoli every day to buy olive oil. According to de Salis, in the eighteenth century the streets were narrow and dirty, and harbour facilities virtually non-existent, although the port was a centre for exporting oil from all over Apulia, stored in rock cisterns. Keppel Craven thought it “the most opulent and gayest town upon the coast. The inhabitants do not succeed six thousand in number; but they are easy in their circumstances, lively and merry, and in general well informed.” However, “Consumptions and spitting of blood are rather frequent here, occasioned by the great subtlety of the air, which is ventilated from every quarter.” He liked the pleasant suburbs on the mainland, now under ugly modern buildings, their gardens reminding him of “those so often seen round English ornamented cottages”, with “plants that will scarcely live out of a hothouse in our climate.”
Craven also noticed good paintings in Gallipoli’s churches. The cathedral still has a fine collection of pictures by a local artist, Giovanni Andrea Coppola (1597–1659), whose work was admired by Riedesel. Coppola’s house can be seen in Via Nicetti, a yellow corner building with an ornate doorway, which Riedesel visited to see more of his paintings.
Gallipoli is joined to the mainland by a bridge built in 1603, fifty years after cutting the isthmus to make the city impregnable. It is possible to drive round the old walls, but better to walk since it is no more than a mile and the view marvellous. You can see the island of Sant’ Andrea and, on a clear day, the Calabrian mountains across the Gulf of Tàranto.
In the triangle formed by Gallipoli, Òtranto and Lecce, Griko is spoken at a few places. Greek visitors have difficulty in understanding this Italiot Greek, which is really a separate language of its own, with many Italian words. It has no literature although poems and songs are sometimes published, printed in the Latin alphabet. As late as the 1970s, 20,000 people spoke it at Calimera a
nd the surrounding villages. It is odd to hear young women talking Griko in the early twenty-first century.
In addition to the descendants of the Greek colonists of the tenth and eleventh centuries and of the refugees from northern Apulia in Norman times, Greek speaking Albanians settled on the vast estates in the south granted by King Ferrante in 1460 to their leader, George Castriota Skanderbeg. A street in Gallipoli is still named after his soldiers, Via Stradiotti – the famous ‘stradiots’ or Albanian light cavalry.
49
The Castle of Otranto
...send for the chaplain, and have the chapel exorcised,
for, for certain, it is enchanted.
Horace Walpole, “The Castle of Otranto”
ONE REASON WHY early travellers came to the Salentine peninsula was to see Òtranto, because they had read Horace Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto”. Published in 1764, the first “Gothick” novel, full of ghosts and horror, for many years it was enormously popular, translated into fourteen languages. But its author had never been to Apulia, let alone to Òtranto.
In his preface, Walpole says, “The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529.” The title page claims it is “A story translated by William Marshall, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St Nicholas at Otranto.” Yet while there was a church of St Nicholas here, it was staffed by monks, not by canons, and Onofrio Muralto never existed. Finding the name “Otranto” in an atlas in his library, Walpole decided that if the second syllable were stressed, wrongly, it would sound nice as a title. His “castle” was modelled on Strawberry Hill, his house at Twickenham.
“The Castle of Otranto, a name calculated to awaken feelings of pleasing recollections in an English mind, is far from realising the expectations created,” grumbled Keppel Craven. Even so, the castle’s real history was hair-raising enough on more than one occasion.
The Normans occupied Òtranto in 1071, Isaac Contostephanos, Grand Duke of the Fleet, unsuccessfully trying to retake it for Byzantium a few years later. It was an important port throughout the Crusades for all those preferring to stay on land as much as possible when they travelled to Palestine. The Byzantine citadel was replaced with a castle by Frederick II, who waited there with Queen Yolande while his fleet was at Brìndisi during the abortive Crusade of 1227. King Ferrante rebuilt the castle, much as it looks today, after his son had recovered it from the Turks. A dry moat filled with wild chrysanthemums lies behind the massive walls.
Consecrated in 1188, the cathedral has a splendid Norman crypt with forty-two columns, each with a different capital; Classical, Byzantine, Egyptian and even Persian. A capital with four birds that Riedesel thought were harpies probably symbolised Mahomet’s ascent into heaven.
The cathedral’s Norman floor is the most important mosaic in Apulia, its theme the struggle between good and evil. A Tree of Life starts at the door, filling the whole nave. In its branches are animals representing virtues and vices, with figures from the Old Testament. King Arthur is here too, clean-shaven like a Norman and riding on a goat, the earliest pictures of him since the floor dates from 1163–66. So is Alexander the Great, in a chariot drawn by two griffins. The middle part of the floor has the signs of the Zodiac with each month’s activities. The farmers of Òtranto kept sheep, goats and pigs, worked in vineyards and cornfields, ploughed with oxen – and apparently spent March picking their feet with an iron scraper normally used for cleaning hoes.
The ruins of the church of San Nicola de Càsole are on a hill south of the city. Bohemond, Prince of Tàranto and Lord of the coast between Bari and Òtranto, rebuilt the monastery here, destroyed in 1032 by Saracens. Its monks followed the rule of St Basil, growing corn and vegetables, fishing in the bay below, or working in the famous library. Scholars came from all over Italy to study Greek. Although their rule and their liturgy were Byzantine, they accepted the Pope’s authority, which gave them unusual influence after the schism between East and West. When Pope Gregory IX contemplated compulsory rebaptism of those baptised in the Greek rite, Abbot Nettorio dissuaded a tribunal of cardinals, while a later abbot went to the Council of Florence, trying to reconcile Catholics and Orthodox. However, the community was wiped out in 1480.
In July that year the Turkish Grand Vizier arrived before Òtranto with a hundred ships. Both castle and city fell after a fort-night, 12,000 out of a population of 22,000 perishing during the sack. Among them were 800 men and women who refused to renounce Christianity, so impressing their executioner that he was converted and died with them. But Sultan Mehmet II died before he could invade Italy, and at the news of his death the Turkish garrison surrendered. They had converted the cathedral into a mosque, white-washing the walls and using the campanile as a minaret. When it was reconsecrated the martyrs’ bones were enshrined in a chapel. Hundreds remain in cupboards behind the altar, one near the entrance holding mummified feet and hands, shrivelled intestines, and skulls with eyelashes and scraps of hair.
The martyrs had died on the Hill of Minerva, once dedicated to Apulia’s favourite goddess, their corpses rotting next to a pyramid of their skulls for a year until King Ferrante ordered their burial. A church on the summit has a tablet inscribed with their names and the name of the converted executioner, Berlabey. Every 14 August Òtranto commemorates their death.
The stone cannon-balls lining the city streets are reminders of the Turkish occupation. Janet Ross heard from the station master how memories of the massacre lingered, mothers warning disobedient children that the Turks would come back and “get them”. The city never recovered; by 1600 its population had dropped to 3,000 and by 1818 to 1,600. Every watch-tower along the coast had once had its own small settlement, but all were abandoned. The reason, however, was not so much “fear of the Turk” as malaria.
On a clear day, you can see Albania’s snowy mountains from the Hill of Minerva. Eighteenth century travellers say that snow was brought to Òtranto by Albanians and landed on the beach. Plague and cholera being common in the Balkans, payment was left on the sand to avoid physical contact. The snow was stored in cisterns in the tufa and used to cool medicines.
Visitors admired the country around the city for its gardens and citrus groves, but they have gone beneath modern housing or have been replaced by rough grazing for sheep and goats. Inland, there are forests of unusually tall olive trees, vineyards and plots of corn or tobacco. Many olive trees are so gnarled that it is easy to suspect they were alive in the days of the Caesars – undoubtedly some of them witnessed the sack of Òtranto.
South of Òtranto, towards the Capo di Leuca or Finibus Terrae, the land is fertile and hilly. It has always been thickly populated despite the destruction of whole villages by Saracens and Turks, putting de Salis in mind of a garden, instead of the bare rock he had expected to find at the “End of the Earth.” The tip of the Salentine peninsula, a dazzling white finger of low cliff, is topped by a church built over a temple to Minerva. The Sanctuary of Santa Maria di Leuca houses a Byzantine icon of the Virgin; a pilgrimage here has been considered a passport to Heaven since pagan times – those who do not come in their lifetime must do so after death. Capo di Leuca was thought by Ramage and Hare to be the harbour described by Virgil in the “Aeneid” when the Trojans sailed past the Terra d’Òtranto on their way to found Rome. They did not land because it was “an abode of Greeks.”
50
Manduria
Manduria is a nice, clean town, very oriental looking with its flat-roofed
houses, and the inhabitants seem well-to-do, old-fashioned people.
Janet Ross, “The Land of Manfred”
BETWEEN TÀRANTO AND GALLIPOLI, Manduria is one of the Terra d’Òtranto’s most interesting cities. In its great days, in Classical times, the inhabitants were not Greeks but Messapians, who have left impressive remains. After being sacked by the Saracens, the city lay deserted for cent
uries until re-founded in the thirteenth century as “Casalnuova”, only reverting to its ancient name in 1799.
Whether Manduria or Casalnuova, it was on every educated traveller’s itinerary, as the site of Pliny’s uncanny well. “In the Salentine, near the city of Manduria, there is a well full to the brim, whose water is never reduced by any quantity withdrawn nor ever increased by any added,” says Pliny. Still in existence, this never runs dry, not even during the most blistering Apulian summer. Inside a grotto within the walls of the ancient Messapian city, the well seems to be just as it was when Bishop Berkeley, Swinburne, Keppel Craven, Ramage and Janet Ross saw it.
Swinburne was amused by the citizens’ reputation as dog-eaters:
Casalnuova contains about four thousand inhabitants, noted for nothing but their taste for dog’s flesh, in which they have no competitors that I know of, except their neighbours at Lecce and the newly discovered voluptuaries of Otaheite (Tahiti). We did not see one animal of the canine species in the streets; and woe be to the poor cur that follows its master into this cannibal settlement. I could not prevail upon my conductor to own whether they had any flocks of puppies, as of sheep; or took any pains, by castration or particular food, to fatten or sweeten the dainty, before they brought it to the shambles.
He adds that dogs were kidnapped by tanners, their skins making fine “false Morocco” leather, their meat food for under-nourished workmen.
An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia Page 24
