Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  No one on Samothrace had heard of the sect and Daoud’s friend Suleiman did not believe they existed. But in the town of Drama they found a beer-seller, who knew someone in the village of Mavrolefki who was a Nistinari. The beer-seller had also heard whispers that they held wild orgies, at which blindfolded men and women coupled with whoever they bumped into.

  On 10 October, Paddy and Joan set off to the village of Mavrolefki. Here they had been told to wait at the café, and Uncle Mihali Zoumis would come and meet them. But someone wanted to register their hostility to the Nistinari, and to the unhealthy interest they had aroused in the foreigners. When Uncle Mihali turned up, he was distraught: the icon of St Constantine had been stolen, and he had a pretty good idea it was the work of the mayor or the priest. In the early 1950s, the Greek Orthodox Church and local government were agreed that certain ancient customs should be stamped out: Greece was transforming itself into a modern country, and these primitive, backward, heretical traditions created a bad impression.

  They spent that night with Uncle Mihali and his daughter, and the following day he took them to meet Grikou, an elderly devotee of the Grandparents who was very upset about the theft of the icon. ‘Everybody hates us, and despises Grandpa,’ she said, wiping her eyes on her scarf and crossing herself frequently. She went on to describe the joyful old days when several villages would get together to dance and sing. ‘We used to dance in the fire for hours, holding the saints in our hands. The saint gets hold of us, and leads us like a rider leads a horse – we can’t help ourselves.’5 As far as he could tell, the old woman’s feet looked neat and undamaged. Paddy did not dare broach the subject of orgies.

  That afternoon the Mayor took them to visit a Sarakatsan encampment nearby, and by the time they returned the icon had been found: but its frame was broken, the faces of the Grandparents defaced. ‘The Mayor fingers [the icon] disparagingly,’ wrote Paddy, ‘[he] obviously hates it, and I hate him.’ Back in Drama, they paid a visit to the Archimandrite and asked what he thought of the Nistinari. ‘He leant back and stroked his beard. “Idolaters, my child. Good people, but idolaters.”’6fn1

  Paddy’s second notebook devoted to this journey begins in Ziakas, in Macedonia, which they reached on 20 October. This was the time of year when hundreds of Vlachs left their summer pastures in the Pindus mountains, and began their annual migration to the winter pastures in Thessaly, which lay between Elassona and Tirnavos. ‘Vlach’ is one of those difficult words that Paddy enjoyed turning over and over. Greeks will sometimes use it indiscriminately, when referring to herdsmen who are either settled or semi-nomadic. When they speak of true tent- and hut-dwelling nomads, they will use the word ‘koutsovlach’ – though this should apply only to a group of Latin-dialect-speaking Arromans. Vlachs are far more numerous than the Sarakatsani, who think of themselves as the elite of the nomadic world.

  On the way to the Vlach village of Samarina they passed empty villages, gutted by the civil war. ‘The whole population has gone, the broken houses might have been empty 100 years ago, only the white gigantic slogans, the hammers and sickles, snarl with life. EVERY BOY AND GIRL TO THE COMMUNIST YOUTH MOVEMENT; OUT WITH THE ENGLISH and LONG LIFE TO GENERAL MARKOS. Men, women, children all gone.’7 These were the scars of a civil war that had left over a hundred thousand people dead, and a quarter of a million homeless.

  Grevena was full of Vlachs on the move. It was a five days’ journey for the families, but a trek of twenty or thirty days for the men driving the flocks. ‘Black-hooded old men, talkative children, hens, sacks of blankets, many cats either under children’s arms or with heads projecting from bags … More than ever convinced, listening to Vlach conversation (“Dumnetzeu”, “Dracu”, “Ceapa” etc) that resemblance between Vlach and Rumanian more than a coincidence, terminal augmentations etc …’8 Kalabaka too was crowded with Vlachs, and here Paddy saw the Abbot of St Baarlam, whom he had last seen eleven years before. They followed him back to the monastery where he lived alone with Father Bassarion, and spent the next few days exploring the monasteries of the Meteora. Scarcely a dozen monks and even fewer nuns still perched on the steep crags; many of the monasteries were abandoned altogether, some no longer accessible. ‘They disintegrate in mid-air, empty stone caskets of rotting timber and slowly falling frescoes that only spiders and owls and kestrels inhabit …’9

  Then they crossed the plain of Thessaly to Larisa, and wandered down the vale of Tempe, where the river ran a pale green between plane trees turning gold. Back in Athens, a finished copy of The Traveller’s Tree was waiting with the Nortons at the British Embassy. On 1 December, Paddy wrote to Jock from Delphi: ‘I think the Tree looks magnificent, and everybody I have shown it to is most impressed … I can hardly believe I am connected to such an impressive tome!’10 He was sad not to come back for the book’s publication on 6 December, but the next leg of the journey would take him south into the Peloponnese, all the way to its southernmost point at Cape Matapan, at the very tip of the Mani. Then he planned to go north again, into Epirus.

  I’ve already filled several notebooks, and it’s pretty unusual material, most of it, which I don’t think has been covered before. Joan’s photographs are splendid. I think that it ought to turn out a pretty interesting book. Joan returns to England for a month, during which time I may retire somewhere to write a chapter or two. Murray’s Guide [to Greece], for which many thanks, will be most useful. Do you think you could discover one for Turkey, to cover those parts of Macedonia, Epirus etc that belonged to the Ottoman Empire till the Balkan Wars?11

  The reviews of The Traveller’s Tree were everything Paddy could have hoped for. The Times Literary Supplement wrote that ‘Mr Leigh Fermor never loses sight of the fact, not always grasped by superficial visitors, that most of the problems … of the West Indies … are the direct legacy of the slave trade.’12 It also praised his tireless zeal in tracking down any minority whose ancestry, dialect or religion bore witness to the tumultuous history of the islands. Both the Evening Standard and the Scottish Daily Mail called it the best travel book of the year, though the latter did remark that the exuberance of his style was sometimes too much of a good thing: ‘Only now and then … does a wild tangle of images and epithets seem to call aloud for the editorial brush and comb.’13

  Joan quizzed Cyril Connolly on what he had made of The Traveller’s Tree. To Paddy Joan reported that he was, in general, very enthusiastic though he felt the book lacked shape and, ‘unprompted by me, that you had some of Norman Douglas’s less good tricks – that you seemed to be influenced by him and it was a pity as when you were really yourself it was the best and very good indeed … Don’t mind me telling you any criticisms – you will see so much praise – and it may all help.’14 Douglas’s ‘less good tricks’ presumably refer to his long and elaborate sentences as much as his love of digressions.

  Paddy spent that Christmas in Athens, and in early 1951 met Louis MacNeice, who had just been appointed British Council Representative there. They had many Gargoyle friends in common, most notably Dylan Thomas. Over the coming months Louis and his wife Hedli, a professional singer, spent many evenings with Paddy, reading aloud and talking about poetry with friends such as George Seferis, the classical scholar Professor E. R. Dodds, and Kevin Andrews.

  Andrews, who was half American and half English, was a classical scholar who was equally familiar with modern demotic Greek. On a fellowship from the American School of Archaeology in Athens, he made a study of Crusader ruins of the Peloponnese at a time when Greece was going through the final stages of the civil war. Andrews took no sides; but in remote mountain villages he knew people who had undergone appalling brutalities at the hands of their fellow villagers, and witnessed the revenge and recrimination that followed the war. None of this altered his love of Greece, which he looked on as his adopted country – even to the extent of dressing as a Greek shepherd, and living as they did. As Paddy put it, ‘Andrews always brought a tang of curds and woodsmoke back with him to At
hens.’15

  Paddy and Kevin Andrews introduced the MacNeices to the tavernas of Athens, ‘where’, as Paddy recalled, ‘the minstrels with violin, accordion and lute wandered from table to table singing mountain songs which one could join in’ (he never failed to do this) ‘or old ironical and romantic numbers from long-forgotten musical comedies’.16 This was the mainstream end of taverna life. But Paddy also wrote of visits to less respectable haunts, where the songs, known as mangika, were very different:

  urban, low-life and dockside with a special rather apache-like delivery, originating among Asia Minor refugees, accompanied by long-necked mandolins … and short, tortoise-shell-bowled baglamas, accompanied by very intricate dances scanned against the beat … with hands linked on shoulders while the words recounted some hard-luck story or feud or ill-starred love … I had a passion for such haunts, felt I was plumbing the mysteries of the east, merging the Ottoman world and Byzantium and intrepidly advancing into a maze of louche and delinquent life.17

  Towards the end of January, while still in Athens, he spent an evening with Michael Powell, one half of the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film partnership. Powell was keen to make a film of Billy Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight; Paddy was not so convinced by the idea, but he did not want to spoil any opportunity that might bring money to Billy and glory to the Cretans. ‘I sent him to all my old friends [in Crete],’ he told Jock, ‘who dragged him all over the mountains, filling him with wine and playing the lyra and firing off rifles. He came back, after three weeks of footslogging, wild with excitement, and determined to start shooting in May.’18

  Powell’s description of Paddy, on the night he took the film-maker on one of his marathon taverna-crawls, approaches hero worship. ‘We ate very little and drank a great deal … Everywhere Paddy had friends. Everywhere, he was greeted as Mihali! … Except for Lord Byron, I don’t think that any foreigner has captured the love and imagination of the Greeks so much …’ This was especially true in a Cretan tavern, where ‘Paddy got a boisterous welcome. Someone was playing a bouzouki … They started to sing an interminable song’ (a round of mantinades), ‘each man capping the other with a verse, arms flung out, fingers pointing, eyes flashing, as the point of the joke was made. Paddy was very good at this …’ Walking under the walls of the Acropolis at about two in the morning under a full moon, Powell suggested they scale the cliff on the north side and creep in. After a hundred feet of scrabbling they were on top of the hill, and headed for the main temple. ‘We heard voices, and the quick steps of soldiers. “Sit down in the shadow,” said Paddy. “In the bright moonlight they can’t see us.” Years of hunting and being hunted, years of narrow shaves were in these simple words. Two armed soldiers passed us without seeing us, about fifty feet away …’

  Their luck did not last. As they left the temple, the two interlopers were apprehended and marched off to the guardhouse. But when it emerged that the officer on duty that night was a Cretan from Rethymno, another round of jubilant celebration began. ‘We drank to the eternal friendship between Britain and Greece. We drank to Lord Byron. We drank to John Murray, Paddy’s publisher, as well as Byron’s (“Murray, my Murray”). We drank to Major Patrick Leigh Fermor, DSO. We even drank to General Kreipe.’19

  Paddy did not like this time of year in Athens. ‘For the last three weeks I’ve been in the throes of a real attack of chronic solitary gloom … sloth and lassitude hang in the air, hot blasts from Africa … alternate with icy winds, filling one with depression and sloth …’20

  He took the advice of an Athenian friend and headed to the island of Salamis, where he hoped to find shelter and a place to work in the monastery of Panaghia Phaneromeni. Much to his astonishment, the monastery was now inhabited by nuns. The Abbess allowed him to stay for two days but dared not have a man in the convent any longer, for fear of getting into trouble with the bishop. But surely, she asked, he knew the poet Sikelianos? He had a house just outside the convent walls.

  Angelos Sikelianos was one of Greece’s most celebrated playwrights and poets, and is associated with Delphi where he inaugurated a short-lived Delphic Festival. His house on Salamis consisted of a single thick-walled room with a high ceiling, containing little more than a bed, a washstand, and a huge table covered in books. Paddy, who had met him in Athens, telephoned Sikelianos who was delighted to lend him the house, and asked the nuns to look after him. ‘A nun trots along three times a day with bread, rice, cheese etc. They’re sweet.’21

  From here Paddy despatched an SOS letter to Jock, asking for a further £100. ‘I knew it would take some time before I actually got any royalties,’ he wrote, but he was expecting some dollars, sooner or later.22 This last was no boast. Cass Canfield of Harper & Row in New York had seen an early copy of The Traveller’s Tree and enjoyed it: ‘While the book is somewhat overlong for American readers, Fermor writes with great distinction and charm,’ he reported to Jock Murray.23 He was very keen to see the Greek book.

  On 6 March Joan wrote to say that Jock had stumped up £100, and ‘I’m asking for another £200 from the Bank of England. I can’t ask for more but I think we’ll manage.’24 By now Paddy was once again in Thessaly; and on 12 March, he took a bus from Larisa to Tirnavos.

  It was the Monday before Lent, known as ‘Clean Monday’, and he had come to see the traditional bourani celebrations, for which the town was famous. Bourani is the name of a soup made of spinach, herbs and beans to which no oil is added. Though sounding rather austere and penitential, side by side with the Lenten ritual went a fertility rite dating back to the worship of Dionysus. Bourani is made in huge cauldrons, and stirred with phallus-shaped ladles of wood and clay. Before the war, the women of the town were forbidden to leave their homes on the night of Bourani; if they did so, they risked being subjected to dreadful indignities.

  At first Paddy was told that all such primitive customs had been stopped, condemned by Church and state. But after lunch he followed a general movement to a hill outside the town. Here were gathered most of the town’s population, including women and children, and a group of about fifty young men who were drinking and dancing. ‘Then a giant clay phallus was produced, filled with wine and everybody drank out of it, after which it was placed on the grass and blessed with signs of the cross, kisses and prostrations’25 – though Paddy noticed that it was quickly hidden when the police turned up.

  Paddy joined the young men on a drunken drive on two tractors, to the village of Ambelona. As night fell, the men began brandishing small clay phalluses and shouting obscenities. They stopped men on the road and obliged them to ‘kiss the cock’. Then everyone returned to Tirnavos, to a drunken evening with much singing and dancing in the taverna.

  Paddy stayed the following night in Tirnavos, where people told him more stories of the campaign against Bourani. Only the week before, a preacher had attacked the custom in the public square, saying that anyone caught participating in the abominations would be exiled. ‘Is all this progress?’ wrote Paddy. ‘… mangika songsfn2 being stamped out or castrated, persecution of the Anastenari, no masks at carnival … Do they want to turn Greece into a milk bar?’26 This was what Paddy feared most: Greece losing its ancient identities in an all-pervasive, industrialized Americanization, her music drowned by the constant homogenized pap of the radio. He need not have worried: movies on You-Tube show that neither the Anastenari’s fire-walking nor Clean Monday with the Tirnaviots is in any danger of being stamped out.

  From Tirnavos he made his way westwards to Metsovo and so to Yanina, the capital of Epirus, which ‘looks wonderful at the moment – brilliant spring weather, with Aly Pasha’s domes and minarets reflected in a bright blue lake’.27 This was part of the landscape of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and from the Zitza monastery, where Byron and Hobhouse had stayed twice in October 1809, he wrote to Jock: ‘It’s a very beautiful derelict thing, on top of a hill north of Yanina near the Albanian border, surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Pindus. The region teems with me
mories of Byron, some rather disconcerting …’28

  Paddy travelled south to Missolonghi, then along the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth. At Naupaktos (Lepanto) he headed into the Aeolian mountains, ‘to an extraordinary remote valley where all the villagers have been professional beggars from time immemorial … I filled a notebook about them, also with their curious secret language.’29 Although in Roumeli Paddy refers to them as the Kravarites, this term refers only to the Kravara, their barren and mountainous homeland. They called themselves boliárides, and their secret language, ta boliárika; boliarévo meant, more or less, ‘outwitting the mugs’. They were skilled at conjuring and trickery, and as children were taught to twist their limbs so as to look severely maimed. ‘Can you blame them?’ said the villagers. ‘Nothing grows here, you couldn’t graze a mouse!’30

  Paddy describes his experiences among the descendants of the boliárides in Roumeli, but never tells the reader exactly where he is: partly because he is condensing more than one encounter, and partly out of tact. Among the villages known for these ancient skills were Aghios Dimitri, Platanos and Symi, but in 1950s Greece begging was seen as something shameful. Yet once the subject is broached (the face-saving formula being that it all happened a long time ago) the villagers produced old ‘Uncle Elias’, who was delighted to tell him how his forebears made a living, wheedling money out of gullible foreigners who should have known better. For this craft was not practised in Greece: the boliárides, with their traditional woven bag and hollow staff for carrying coins, travelled north to find their prey in Albania, Bulgaria, Russia and Rumania.