Most of the Government experimental farms will be closing down, for despite their own apparent prosperity they never formed an integral part of the island economy. Nor, unluckily enough was much learned from them by the peasant farmer who might have profited by Italian experience. For example, the Rhodian peasant has not yet learned to grow his own forage crops; yet the government farms have been growing their own stocks of vetch, lucerne, trifolium incarnatum, and so on. A knowledge of this skill would have had an important effect on the Rhodian economy, not only on the rotation of crops, but also on the fate of the heath land and forest—at present grazed promiscuously and indiscriminately. The present day village rotation is variable but in general consists of 1 to 2 years straw crop and from 2 to 4 years fallow.
Soil erosion, too, is far advanced, though the Italians did much to preserve the topsoil of the greener areas of Rhodes. The peasant is intransigent, however. One of Gideon’s problems is to persuade him that all the soil preservation measures initiated by the Italians were not baleful infringements of Fascism upon human liberty.
By the post of England on the medieval walls—so broad that six horsemen could gallop abreast upon them—we spend the afternoon lounging. We can overlook the whole town from here, as well as the shrill private lives of a dozen families who live directly under the towering walls, in gardens picked out with palms and bushes of red hibiscus. A windmill turns, creaking, and from the invisible marketplace rises the surf of human bartering—the vibration of business. On the wall itself two armies are fighting with wooden swords—a dozen children in paper hats against half a dozen bareheaded ones. They are not Knights and Saracens, as one might think, but British and Germans. The battle sways backwards and forwards. Nobody dies or is hurt, though one of the shock troops has started crying. Their shouts marry the thin keening of the swifts by the walls, darting against the blue. High up against the sun an eagle planes above us, watching history plagiarizing itself once more upon these sun-mellowed walls.
* Of the Greek Sacred Legion.
* In fact my brief was political and not artistic. Later I founded Techni, the first Greek literary weekly in the islands to which Manoli tried often to contribute.
The Saint of Soroni
“A VILLAGE WITHOUT AN icon: a head without an eye,” says a proverb more comminatory than most, for the psychic life of these small Aegean communities is healthiest where it can be focused upon some such arbiter of fate. Lines of force radiate outwards from the shrine of a patron saint like holiness from a halo and, none the less real for being invisible, they play their part in the common adventures of the fisherman, herdsman and farmer, easing the burden of his conduct—not in the narrow theological sense, but in the sense of faith in acts.
A journey by water may be dedicated to the protection of the saint, just as an illness may be placed, so to speak, on his knees. He is a help against the brute adversities that face simple folk in these islands. But it is not only in adversity that one turns to him, it is also in joy. One’s precious male child is dedicated to him. After a successful harvest, who can forget to offer the shrine a measure of oil for his lamps? Oaths both good and bad are uttered in his name; while no material object is too small to commend to his care—a sick child, a sickly lamb, or a tattered fishing net. He stands at the confluence of those two great rivers, man and the unknown, and his job is to domesticate each for the other. He remits the temporal pains.
I am not speaking now of the more famous ones whose medicine has become a cult, and whose sphere of influence is no longer regionalized—located in some small tumbledown church, whose cracking gesso backgrounds bear the half-obliterated faces of forgotten Byzantine divinities. I am not thinking of Tinos where the little hanging offerings of crutches, bandages and paintings testify to the miracle having taken place, and remind one once again that here, as in the ruined and forsaken shrines to Aesculapius, healing and divination are one.
The little saints of local fame are those who keep the broad current of everyday life flowing in the right direction. Often they are only names without a pedigree the peasants understand; their faces are kissed with no less reverence for that. Often fragments of contemporary history have become entangled in the legend.
The Aegean saint is not an object for contemplation, of self-enquiry in the western sense. He is not remote enough for that. His role is like that of an ordinary mortal over whom he enjoys the advantages of several special faculties; he is in touch with God on the one hand and man on the other—standing between them rather as a Platonic daimon than as anything else. He is an extraterrestrial being domiciled on earth as a sort of heavenly vice-consul with the powers of a chargé d’affaires. This is a status that suits him perfectly for in it he commands reverence without servility; prayers and petitions to him have a man-to-man quality. And it is right that he should wear this half-human aspect—for has he not taken up his position upon the very altars of the Greek gods he supplanted and has he not inherited some of their more human and endearing characteristics? Sometimes like them he may find himself ever so slightly disposed to accept a bribe for his services—a silver dish for his altar, a candelabrum, a taper the size of a human limb. And where is the harm in all this if the influence he exercises is over a journey which does no harm to anyone, over a marriage prejudiced by illness, over a small business deal in contraband tobacco? Somebody has to lend us a hand with these problems. The three most venerated relics of Rhodes—the hand of St. John the Baptist (cut off by Luke who found the exhumed body too large to carry off whole); the cross made from the True Cross; and the picture of Our Lady of Phileremo—were carried off to Malta, whence the last Grand Master took them in 1798 to Russia. Of these I have little doubt that the wonder-working portrait of Our Lady was the most famous. Its history, unlike that of St. John’s hand, is obscure; the Knights apparently found it in place on their arrival in the island and its reputation antedated the more general publicity it enjoyed when the eyes of all Christendom turned upon the famous Order’s battles against the Saracens. Phileremo, to judge by the accounts of earlier travelers, was a well-established place of pilgrimage before the time of the Knights, and the picture had doubtless served generations of petitioners before the standard of St. John flew over Rhodes. In time of danger it was customary to carry it into the city, where it lay in St. Mark’s, a church which had been founded by the Venetians; here, during the siege of 1522 a cannonball burst over the altar where the picture stood, killing several people, and the Grand Master, fearing for the safety of the relic, ordered it to be placed in the chapel of St. Catherine which was inside the palace. As far as I know, nearly as much mystery surrounds it as surrounded the Colossus; there does not seem to be any record of how she looked—this latter-day Artemis—nor have any details of her miracles been preserved.
The little modern chapel on the summit of Phileremo is a ruin today, its battered walls still heaped with mountains of discarded Italian ammunition, water bottles, bayonets and grenades; a few heavy carcasses of anti-tank guns lie about forlornly under the trees, already so thickly overgrown that one might believe them to be all of a piece with the few fragments of Hellenic and Byzantine stone in the once sacred precincts. The architecture of the modern church is adequate but uninspired. In the single habitable room of the monastery lives a solitary Franciscan—a strange bird-like youth who rides a borrowed motorbike and uses a piercing hair oil. He peddles a leaflet setting forth in brief the history of the church and carrying on its cover what purports to be a representation of Our Lady of Phileremo. But the whole business smells of premeditation and of unction. One feels the long arm of the propaganda office on one’s shoulder, as one does in Capri.
Nevertheless, in Greece there is room for everyone; travelers have already noted that in the neighboring village of Kremasto the church is dedicated, unusually enough, to the Panaghia Katholiki, and there seems little doubt that the great panagyri of August is a faded memorial to the powers of Our Lady of Phileremo. Our Lady in absenti
a she should be called.
Is she descended from Artemis or from Athene Lindia—who was once the most venerated Goddess of the island? It is hard to tell. Artemis crops up quite frequently today in the folklore of the peasantry, and I am reminded as I write that not far from here, beyond the grey stone slopes of Profeta—the road winding upwards through clement forestland carpeted with red and white cistus, anemone, and great peonies—there is still a small monastery site called Artamiti where, to judge by an inscription found thereabouts, once stood an ancient temple. She, like Athena, was a daughter of Zeus, and the loveless puritanism of the one perfectly matches the qualities of her step-sister, the giver of the fruitful olive.
But if Rhodes has lost her Lady of Phileremo she has gained another local saint whose fame is growing daily and who is well on the way to supplanting her in the general veneration. No literature has grown up around this new figure as yet, and no critical apparatus; the Orthodox Church itself seems a little puzzled as to where he fits in—at any rate no hagiographer has come forward with an explanation as to how Saul, a footsore apostle of Paul, managed to win himself a shrine in the shallow hills around Soroni.
Saint Soulas (as he is called in demotic) is supposed to have been a member of the party which, headed by Paul, was washed up in Rhodes on the way to Palestine. (At Lindos a little cove is still pointed out to one today as the actual landfall.) During his short stay in Rhodes, Paul walked for miles each day, expounding the scripture to whoever would listen. His disciples followed his example, and among them Saul, who must have been something of a walker to reach Soroni, which is by no means near to Lindos. At any rate, here he found an ancient shrine with a warm spring—though unluckily legend has not preserved the name of the original tutelary God. The neighboring villagers seemed to him in need of testimony as they were all heathens of the darkest dye; he tried adjuration, exhortation, and peroration without any success at all. They clave to their folly. He talked till he was hoarse, but they regarded him with the unmoved skepticism that we should all feel if a small, hairy foreigner with a beard, dressed poorly, with dusty feet and a funny pronunciation, tried to undo in one afternoon what had taken centuries of pious mumbo-jumbo to create—a complex of belief, comforting, homely as a salt lick. Saul was at his wit’s end to know how to cope with these obstinate and semi-literate peasants. Much against his will he was compelled to resort to a miracle. There were a number of people with sores about. He healed one out of hand by dipping him in the spring. “Can your God do that?” he asked. The villagers took his point and came over to the true faith in a body.
I am not happy about this story; in the first place it seems to me that peasant belief has really muddled the issue. It seems to me that St. Paul himself must be the hero of this widely-held belief—for his name was Saoul, or, in its ancient Greek form, Saulos. That the warm spring was already famous for its cures there is little doubt. Even today the locality is called in Greek Furthermore the most common kind of sore in the Aegean seems to be caused by a parasitic substance which is contained in the bag at the root of the sponge; it is a common enough affliction among sponge divers and can be cured only by bathing the sores in some mild astringent. The spring could have been famous for these cures long before St. Paul appeared on the scene. In this context we should perhaps remember that Heracles was the common patron of hot springs and his name is connected with Lindos from times of the remotest antiquity; according to the ancient legend he, like Paul, arrived in Lindos one day, hungry after a long journey. With him was his son Hyllos. He asked a passing husbandman for food for the latter but met with curses. He therefore helped himself to one of the oxen with which the man was ploughing and breakfasted thereon with Hyllos, while the infuriated owner watched the pair from a safe distance and cursed them. This is said to have been the origin of the strange form of Heracles worship which once prevailed at Lindos. While the actual sacrifices were offered the officiating priest heaped curses and abuse on the name of the Hero, not haphazard but according to a fixed ritualistic order. There was apparently nothing like this in the rest of Greece and the saying “Like Lindians at their sacrifice” became proverbial for all who used profane language in sacred places. Does a tenuous thread run through these detached fragments—or is it just that history itself, conditioned by place, repeats characteristic and familiar gestures, as a friend might?
It was however something more than the spirit of disinterested enquiry which led Gideon and me to embark on an expedition to Soroni on the day of the saint’s panagyri. For one thing the whole of Rhodes town would be there, and certainly all those among our friends who were not bound by administrative preoccupations. We decided to travel in the old town bus with the staff of the printing house, who had all booked tickets one way, intending to sleep or dance away the night under the pines.
By nine o’clock the first buses have begun to rumble off down the blue road to Trianda, each loaded to the brim with holiday makers, laughing, gesticulating or singing songs. Three big lorries, packed with Italians who are due for repatriation to Italy next week, pass through the town with streamers flying. These are Sienese farmers from the state farms around San Benedetto and they sing beautifully as they rumble by; a sharp, poignant singing which has something almost valedictory about it. This will be their last fiesta on the island, and the buses travel so slowly that one imagines they want to draw out their last view of Rhodes, to pack their memories with its green landscapes which will continue to haunt them perhaps in their own graceful homelands. Italy is beautiful, but it lacks the wild pang of the Greek landscape; it is tamed and domesticated—an essay in humanism. It is not the cradle of tragedy.
Our departure is not until midday. In the far corner of the square behind the marketplace stands the machine in which we are to travel—a package-like municipal bus which at this moment is surrounded by an extremely angry crowd. One sight of those waving arms and flying fingers, and my heart sinks. It is obvious that something is wrong. Familiar faces loom up out of the dense press. The Baron Baedeker stands in his severe black clothes, clutching his stepladder grimly, and shaking his head. Christ, the author, dressed in a white boater and a composition collar an inch wide is repeating something despairingly and waving a ticket. His voice cannot be heard above the hubbub. On the step of the bus, guarding the doorway, stands the conductor, viciously repelling boarders with his elbow. The crowd has clenched itself around him like a fist. At the head of it stands Manoli the linotype setter, his eyes gleaming through his spectacles, his hands flying. He is obviously in charge of the boarding party. Every few seconds, overcome by impatience, the crowd gives a lunge forward and he is driven like a battering ram into the conductor’s side. The conductor, half-turning, fends him off with an elbow shouting “I tell you no.” The argument is resumed until impatience sets in again and the crowd rears like a wave, only to break in vain against the sides of the dusty bus. Small eddies of violence are thrown off from inside the crowd itself—some of which have nothing to do with the main argument. For instance in one of these frantic lunges a man with a guitar has got himself entangled with his neighbor’s coat buttons; these have wrapped themselves round the guitar strings which are in danger of being broken. The press is so great however that the men cannot disengage and at every lunge they are carried forward in unison, one crying “My guitar” in tones of anguish and the other crying “You fool.”
Reluctant to get caught up in this battle scene we hang about on the outskirts of the crowd trying to get a clue as to the nature of the argument. It seems hopeless, so great is the noise and so continuous the flood of invention and rhetoric. Occasional snatches rise above the general uproar. “I tell you I have got.” “Everybody knows what it.…” “You should… police would soon …” Another heave forward and another shuddering impact against the bus. A melancholy long-withdrawing roar of “I tell you no” from the conductor.
Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes Page 17
