Something about Stavros’s suddenly earnest manner brought to mind a snippet about Thrakonisos that I had picked up from one of Montague Summers’ books, The Vampire in Europe:
Greece too has its Vampire tradition. Commonly known as katakhanadhes or vrykolakes they inhabit mostly the mountain villages and the islands. One island in particular, Thrakonisos, is famous for its vampires, so much so that “vrykolakes to Thrakonisos” is their colloquial equivalent of our “coals to Newcastle”.
It was 1971 when all this happened, a time when the Colonels were ruling Greece. In those days the state-owned Xenia Hotels were clean, cheap places, often run with an almost military efficiency. The staff at this particular establishment was exclusively female: pasty-faced, unattractive middle-aged creatures, all dressed in identical blue overalls. The woman on the reception desk told me that I could only stay one night. This surprised me as the place seemed deserted, but I was offered no explanation. I was shown to a room of simple comfort that faced the sea.
I did not spend much time in my room as I was determined to get out and explore the place before supper. The Xenia was perched on a small hill facing the sea. To one side of it there was a broad, shallow valley where lay the remains of the Ancient Greek sanctuary. The sun was getting low in the horizon, and making the crystalline marble slabs and columns that lay about shine like gold. Further up the valley the authorities had reconstructed four Ionic columns of an ancient temple, thus providing the focus for a scene that otherwise would have looked entirely chaotic and desolate. Across the valley on another bluff overlooking the sea was a little white chapel. Apart from this, the hotel, and a distant farmhouse on the hillside beyond the Sanctuary no other habitable buildings could be seen. I decided to save my exploration of the Sanctuary for the following morning and walk to the chapel instead.
I wandered along the steeply raked shingle beach. There was not a boat, let alone a bather, in sight. I could see far into the sea’s clear blue depths. Then I climbed a sheep track that snaked around the bluff and up to the chapel.
Like many Greek Island chapels this one seemed improbably small, incapable of holding any sort of congregation. It was entirely white on the outside, but within it was painted an intense cobalt blue. Western light shone in through tiny deep-set lancet windows. Apart from a brass sanctuary lamp suspended from the ceiling and two blackened icons, there was no decoration. There was a plain stone altar, and on it was a coffin.
I was so shocked by this unexpected encounter with death, that it was some time before I noticed that there was something odd about the coffin itself. No flowers rested on it. Instead it seemed to have some thing or things wound around it, rather like the straps round an old-fashioned trunk. I approached the altar just near enough to determine what they were. They were long strands of brambles or thorns, tightly plaited together. It looked as if someone had taken a great deal of trouble to bind the lid to the box, as if to prevent anyone or anything from getting into it, or out.
I can’t say that I was deeply affected by the sight. I simply made a note of it, as a picturesque local detail that I must remember to put into the travel journal I was keeping.
By the time I had got back to the hotel it was supper time, and before going into the dining room I loitered for a while in the entrance hall, curious to see if there were any other guests. There were not. I studied the rack of picture postcards at the reception desk, most of them dull, deckled-edged black and white images of the excavations. There was also a slim paperbacked book on sale in two piles, one labelled GERMAN, the other ENGLISH. The cover was grey with the image of an ancient Thakonisian coin printed on it in black, but there was no writing on it to tell me what the book was about. I took one from the ENGLISH pile and opened it at the title page:
A Guide to the Excavations of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Thrakonisos by Dr Dietrich Leichenfeld, Honorary Doctor of Ancient Languages at the University of Tübingen
It was not perhaps the most thrilling of titles, but I bought a copy because I would feel safer with it when I entered the dining room. I had found on my solitary voyage round Greece that reading at meals in restaurants not only protected one from unwanted attention, but was a pleasure in itself.
The dining room contained some twenty tables gleaming with stainless steel, glass and pristine white napery. I was firmly directed by one of the blue-overalled women to a particular table in a far corner, in spite of the fact that all but one of the other tables were unoccupied. In the opposite corner of the room to mine sat the man and woman whom I had seen outside the bar in Chora. They were looking at me intently. I smiled and nodded at them; I may even have waved. They immediately pretended not to have noticed me, suddenly taking a great interest in each other’s conversation, pouring out orange-coloured retsina into glasses, crumbling bread rolls. I felt no inclination to challenge their unsociability, so ordered my food and a carafe of the orange-coloured wine (surprisingly drinkable) and settled down to the book I had bought.
The frontispiece was a photograph of its author, Dr Dietrich Leichenfeld. This assertion by the writer of his own personality in an archaeological monograph impressed me. Leichenfeld was shown standing in the ruins of the Sanctuary, one foot on the earth, the other on a slab of masonry, as if it were the neck of a lion and he an Edwardian game hunter. He had one of those big, squat Germanic heads with small regular features, glittering currant eyes, and a long thin mouth turned down at the corners, of the kind frequently called “cruel” by lovers of the cliché. His toad-like face reminded me a little of photographs I had seen of Göering at the zenith of his grotesque power; but Leichenfeld’s look was more intellectual, more formidable even.
Most of the book was taken up with a rather dry description of the various structures found on the site and the artefacts discovered in them. It was illustrated with foggy black and white photographs, one or two plans and several speculative elevations of the buildings. I skipped through much of this, but there was a short final section that looked more promising. It was headed:
THE MYSTERIES OF THE GREAT GODS
The word mystery derives from the Greek word muein, to be silent or blind. If it was true of the Mysteries of Eleusis that this silence was preserved by its devotees, it was even more closely guarded by the Initiates of Thrakonisos. The penalties in both this life and the next for divulging the mysteries were said by Diogenes Laertius to have been of the utmost savagery, though he did not specify what they were. For this, and no doubt for other reasons, the secrets of the Great Gods were faithfully maintained throughout antiquity.
What little is known of the cult can be summarized as follows.
Traces of a religious site have been found dating from as far back as the middle of the Bronze Age, around 1500 BC.
It was a chthonic cult, probably of Phrygian, certainly of Middle Eastern origin. The earliest cult objects found are small votive images of the god who appears to be hermaphrodite. By the end of the Bronze and beginning of the Iron Age (around 950 BC) the deity (or deities) has become a strange creature with a somewhat amorphous but bestial body and two heads, one bearded and masculine, the other female. Until well into the fifth century this image remained on Thrakonisian coinage.
We know for certain that from around 600 BC these deities became associated with the Hellenic Gods of the underworld, Hades (or Pluto) and his consort Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, goddess of fertility and the seasons. A recently discovered papyrus fragment from Oxyrinchus associates these deities directly with Thrakonisos. The fragment, written in hexameters, appears to be part of an Orphic hymn. Language and style dates it to the late epic period of literature, around the time of the composition of the earliest Homeric Hymns. Some have even boldly ascribed these lines to Hesiod:
. . . the trim-ankled daughter of yellow haired Demeter
Gathering flowers in a soft meadow of sea-girt Thrakonisos.
With her, her companions, the lovely white-skinned daughters of Okeanos
&n
bsp; Picked violets and roses, and the sweet-scented hyacinth,
Beautiful to behold . . .
There the Son of Kronos, he who has many names, saw her,
And longed to embrace the white-armed daughter of Demeter.
He caught her up, reluctant, into his dark-hued chariot.
Bitter pain and fear seized her heart as she cried out
To her lady mother who was distant and did not hear,
But the dusky horses of the dread son of Kronos
Bore her down into the empty halls beneath the earth,
And he seized her with violence, and held her down on the black earth
With his death-dealing arms. Three times her terrible cries
Echoed across the wide plains of sea-girt Thrakonisos,
And the pale-skinned daughters of Okeanos heard the pitiful lament,
As they gathered flowers, but heeded it not . . .
Neither Pluto nor Persephone is mentioned by name in these fragmentary verses in accordance with the ancient superstitious dread of naming the deities of the underworld. From these verses we may assume that the tradition, mentioned in Pausanias, that one of the entrances to the Underworld was in Thrakonisos had become well-established by the sixth century BC. The rest of the poem appears to follow the well-known version of the legend. Demeter complains to Pluto’s brother Zeus and obtains a reprieve for Persephone whereby she can spend four months of the year above ground with her mother. The only departure from the common version is that the Daughters of Okeanos in the Oxyrinchus fragment are punished for their failure to heed Persephone’s cries by being made to become her perpetual handmaidens both below and upon the earth.
The priesthood at the Shrine of the Great Gods in Thrakonisos was all female. Like the legendary Daughters of Okeanos, these priestesses were known as the leukoparthenoi or “white maidens” because of the exceptional whiteness of their skin. This pallor, says Herodotus, may be attributed to the fact that “in ecstatic states the Priestesses frequently cut themselves with knives and bleed upon the altars of the Great Gods”.
At breakfast in the dining room the next morning the only other person present was the woman with the headscarf, Chanel suit, and dark glasses. She ate nothing but drank large quantities of black coffee.
It was another cloudless, crystalline Greek day, as I set out, Leichenfeld’s guidebook in hand, to explore at leisure the Sanctuary of the Great Gods. I found a rather listless Greek official lounging by the little museum and bought a ticket to the site: ten drachmas, and Eleusis had only been five.
Wandering over the site, I could occasionally see where there had been excavations, but for the most part the place was green and overgrown. It was May and the vegetation had not yet turned yellow in the withering heat of a Greek summer. The place was larger and more complex than I had expected. I saw the foundations of innumerable buildings: colonnades, temples, treasuries most of them built in honour of the Great Gods by some Hellenistic despot or other. The Sanctuary had had powerful friends.
One of the last buildings I came to was a large round structure which, according to my guidebook, was the Tholos of Olympias. Though the walls had not remained standing to a great height it was somehow impressive, unusually large for a circular classical building. Beside it a series of steps led down into a space surrounded on all sides by finely-cut dressed stone: “possibly a ritual bathing area”, said the guide. On these steps sat the man I had seen at the bar in Chora and in the dining room of the hotel. He had a large drawing board on his knees and a neat array of sharpened pencils, rubbers, pens and ink bottles by his side on the step. He was drawing a long rectangular slab of masonry on which a number of human figures had been carved in low relief. They were women in flowing robes, either processing or dancing in one direction. The leading figure carried what looked like a small curved knife.
The draughtsman looked up at me, shading his eyes against the sun. His normally pink complexion flushed even pinker.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to disturb you.”
“No, no no! Not at all!” The voice was high, cultivated and a little pedantic with its clipped enunciations. “I thought you were English when I saw you arriving at Chora. The way you negotiated your way through those dreadful Greek schoolchildren – ‘blood will tell,’ I thought!” He gave a short nervous laugh.
There was a pause and I wondered if he was going to apologise for not having offered me a lift up to the hotel the previous day. He must have heard me asking how to get there.
“Are you and your wife involved with the excavations then?” I asked.
“What? My wife? Oh, I see! Oh, dear me, no! Oh, good lord no! Oh, no! Oh, no!” Again, the nervous laugh; but this time it was longer, and even more nervous. “No, I am a confirmed bachelor. For my sins! Ha ha! No, the lady you saw was . . . is . . . Madame Leichenfeld. The widow of . . . er . . .”
“Dr Dietrich Leichenfeld who wrote this?” I said, holding up the guidebook.
“Exactly so! Yes. You’ll see some of my drawings in there. Let me show you.” I handed him the book, he searched through it, then gave it back to me open at a half-page illustration. He nodded several times, obviously proud of his achievement. It was a reconstruction of the large sacred enclosure known as the Temenos of Seleucus, complete with sculptures and a solitary woman in classical dress walking in the shadow of its long colonnade. She too carried a knife. The drawing was meticulous, elegant, a little soulless. In the bottom left hand corner he had left his signature in tiny capital letters: S.P. WHITTLE.
“Mr Whittle?” I said.
“Yes! That’s me. I also teach Classics at Sedburgh. This is more . . . what you might call . . . a holiday task. Interesting enough. Rewarding in its way, but it has its frustrations. It’s extremely irritating having noisy Greeks and their even noisier children scrambling all over the place and peering at my drawings. Then one of their brats goes missing and they come back and start jabbering at me as if I’m to blame. You’d think it’s a quiet life being an archaeological draughtsman, wouldn’t you? Believe me, it’s not. Take up a nice peaceful profession, like road mending with a pneumatic drill. At least nobody will want to ask you dam’ fool questions in a foreign tongue.”
Having unburdened himself of this, he sighed and asked me a few questions about who I was and what I was doing here. There was another pause after he had taken in all he wanted to hear. I asked him whether “Madame” Leichenfeld was in charge of the excavations.
“‘Oh, goodness yes! You see Leichenfeld – he died just over a year ago – was a rich industrialist. I expect you’ve heard of Leichenfeld Pharmaceuticals? He always had this passion for archaeology. About ten years ago he left his sons by his first marriage to look after the business and came out to finance the diggings here. He became very involved. He met his second wife in Thessaloniki actually, but Madame – her birth name is Aspassia Aidonides – actually comes from Thrakonisos.”
“Did Leichenfeld die out here?”
Whittle looked away. “I believe so. I wasn’t around at the time. Oh, no! I was at Sedburgh. For my sins! Yes. He was a good archaeologist, I think. Full of enthusiasm . . . full of ideas . . .” A pause followed during which Whittle seemed to be debating with himself whether to confide in me. He looked at me once more and spoke, this time in a subdued tone, as if afraid of being overheard.
“He became obsessed with the existence of what he called the koile aguia.”
Whittle was searching my face for signs of curiosity and I obliged him.
“A couple of years ago, six months before he died, we uncovered a midden which contained a large number of potsherds – black figure calyxes and amphorae mostly – dating from around 500 BC The midden was situated not far from the great Temenos of Seleucus and was obviously a dump where they had thrown all the vessels containing offerings that were no longer required or had got broken. There were one or two interesting inscriptions incised on them. The most complete of these ran somethi
ng like this: ‘Hipponikos made this offering, having returned from the koile aguia.’ And again, on another: ‘the Great God (or Goddess)’ – then something, indecipherable – ‘may he (or she) bring me back safely from the koile aguia.’ And there were other more fragmentary inscriptions on several of which parts of the words koile and aguia could be made out.”
I had been searching the very inadequate Ancient Greek Dictionary in my head, and had come up with a rough translation. “Koile Aguia . . . Empty . . . Street?”
Whittle made a pedantic face: I knew I had not got it right. “Hmm, yes. That is a perfectly adequate literal translation, of course, but it can also mean . . . well, we puzzled over it for some time until Dr Leichenfeld – I think it was – suddenly remembered Pindar . . . Ah, yes! You haven’t gone up to Oxford yet, have you? You won’t have read any of the Odes of Pindar. Tricky stuff. Look at Olympian Nine, lines 33 and following; translates roughly as: ‘Death keeps not the rod unshaken wherewith he brings down men to the hollow city of the dead.’ Koile aguia in Pindar’s highly poeticized language translates as ‘hollow city’, you see.
“Of course, this was tremendously exciting, because Dr Leichenfeld believed – and I think I follow him here – that those potsherd inscriptions were actually referring to the secret mystery rites of the shrine, mysteries that had remained unrevealed for nearly 2,500 years! Well, Leichenfeld became a man possessed. He conceived all sorts of theories about this hollow city, but the one he became fixated with was this. I won’t give you all his reasons but here it is. He was convinced that there was an actual hollow city underground, in subterranean caves, carved out of the rock beneath our feet, and that its entrance was somewhere to be found on this very site. This would account for the legend about the entrance to the Underworld . . . Persephone and so on . . .
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 Page 35
