Europe

by Jan Morris

  34 Serbian high spirits

  Most minorities tend in their exile to become more than naturally themselves. However at Szentendre in Hungary there is a small community of Serbs, perhaps a couple of hundred of them, who have created down the generations a town which seems to me the utter antithesis of everything we think of as Serbian nowadays – everything, that is, warlike, obdurate, dour. Szentendre stands beside the Danube a few miles north of Budapest, and the Serbs settled here in the late seventeenth century as refugees from the Turks who still occupied the Balkans. They brought their own patriarch with them, to be the head of a Serbian Orthodox Church in exile, and they made the little riverside village a showplace of their religion and enterprise. Two centuries later it became a favourite artists’ hangout, and it is now the first place foreign tourists visit when they want an excursion out of the capital. It is an exquisite little town running down a hillside to the river, where the ferries put in from Budapest, brightly coloured, with cobbled alleys full of art galleries and souvenir shops, fine old houses of the Serbian merchants, half a dozen onion-domed Serbian churches and a lovely baroque square, in the centre of the town, where they stage plays on summer evenings. I discovered this light-hearted place at a time when the Serbian homeland was plunged in misery, threadbare in the aftermath of a civil war and presided over by a disagreeable neo-Marxist bully. Heaven knows the Serbs of Szentendre have known troubles enough, during their three centuries in Hungary, but still how lucky, I thought as I pottered around those beguiling touristy streets in the sunshine, pausing to look at a water-colour here, an embroidered blouse there – what a stroke of luck it was that those fugitives of long ago chose such a happy destination to escape the furies of the Turk!

  35 Islands

  Now consider the islands of Europe. Just think of them, for ever distracting the diplomats and confusing the cartographers! There are thousands upon thousands of islands in Europe. Two of them are outside my window in Wales: one of them the traditional burial-place of 20,000 Celtic saints, the other inhabited only by sheep. There are said to be 80,897 islands off the coast of Finland alone, and another 20,000 at least in the Swedish archipelago. There are Greek islands in the lee of Turkey. There are British islands twenty miles off France. The Norwegian islands of Spitzbergen are inhabited mainly by Russian coal-miners. Cyprus is ruled half by the Greeks, half by the Turks. The Scottish island of Barra is a Catholic enclave in a sea of Protestantism. The very last place the British Empire annexed was the island rock of St Kilda, in the Atlantic; one of the first it voluntarily abandoned was Heligoland in the North Sea (swapped with the Germans for Zanzibar). The island of Monte Cristo, of the eponymous Count, is an uninhabited nature reserve. On the sweet nuns’ island of Fraueninsel, in the German lake Chiemsee, is buried General Alfred Jodl, executed for war crimes after the Second World War. And especially curious among so many curiosities are the Åland islands, in the Gulf of Finland. There is the true essence of islandness! When I saw them from an aircraft flying in from Helsinki they seemed to lie so thick and green upon the surface of the sea that it looked as though a whole continent had been fissured by some appalling calamity and was drifting about in bits down there.

  I knew something of the Åland islands already, because although only 25,000 people live there, the islands are famous for their shipowners – the last of the ocean-going merchant sailing-ships were owned by an Åland company, and many of the great ferries which ply the Baltic now are Åland-registered. What makes the islands special, though, is their peculiarly satisfactory constitution. Most of the islanders are Swedish by descent, speaking Swedish, and in the redistribution of Europe after the First World War they mostly wanted to join Sweden and live their lives in the Swedish language. Finland, however, was the de-facto sovereign of the island, and the matter went to the League of Nations for arbitration. A favourite Åland picture shows a dozen whiskered and cravatted statesmen, sitting in a room with Lake Geneva and the Alps showing theatrically through the windows, decreeing the future of the Ålanders. They did well. They ruled, in 1921, that while the Finns should retain their sovereignty, the Ålanders should keep their language, and the islands should form a demilitarized autonomous province within the State of Finland. So they have remained. The big modern building in the middle of Mariehamn, their capital, is not as you might expect a municipal leisure centre, but the Åland Parliament. The civic museum is full of national symbols, relics and trophies, including a huge metal representation of the island constitution, as proud as the American Declaration of Independence in its shrine at Washington, and a very large version of those bigwigs in Geneva (who were presided over by a Japanese). The Ålanders have their own flag and postage stamps. They are excused all military service. They own all those ships. They are terribly patriotic, as well they might be, and when I once came across an Åland schooner about to sail home from the Swedish island of Gotland, its crew urged me to come with them rather as though they were beckoning me away to the Autonomous Province of the Hesperides.

  36 And talking of Gotland …

  Talking of Gotland, come with me now to one of the medieval churches that are scattered through that big Swedish island of the Baltic and are its special glory. The church rises above the flatlands like a mailed knight, burly and muscular, and close beside it stands a fortified tower, garrisoned by rooks. Around the building a glorious meadow extends, in a flourish of cornflowers, daisies, buttercups, dandelions and cow-parsley, all among the fresh grass as in meadows long ago. The parson’s trim manse may be nearby, together with a cottage or two and a church hall, but there is no sign of any village. The church is its own settlement, and in neat order around it lie the generations of its congregations – row upon row of Bergströms and Ericssons and Angströms. The church towers above them implacably, and often rooks fly restlessly about it, in a raucous symbolical way.

  Open the tall wooden door, though (Gotland churches are seldom locked), and instantly we feel ourselves in some benevolent old homestead. There is a smell of old books. The box pews are brightly if simply painted, and there may be ancient frescos on the whitewashed walls – saints, angels, Christ in glory, the Last Judgement, a humiliated dragon perhaps. A sailing-ship model hangs from a rafter; beside the reading-desk of the high wooden pulpit stands an hourglass, to keep clerical verbosity in check. The altarpiece is painted in muted medieval colours. There are ancient gilded memorials to local families. A chair for the verger is draped with a comforting sheepskin. At the chancel arch there stands a magnificent wooden crucifix, ten or twelve feet high, exquisitely carved, nobly painted, and attended on each side by heartrendingly poignant figures of mourning.

  What d’you say, now? Stirred and touched as we are by our visit – oh, and wait a moment, we must put a few kronor in the collection box by the door – shall we find a roadside café and have a saffron pancake? Saffron pancakes are another Gotland speciality.

  37 Smouldering still

  I first set eyes upon the Greek island of Crete from the deck of a passing troopship soon after the Second World War, and it seemed to me then to be positively smouldering with the furies of battle. Thirty years passed before I set foot on the place, thirty years in which tourism had penetrated every last cove of the Grecian seas, and ancient lifestyles had been whittled away from Tenedos to Ithaca: but, by God, I found it a furious kind of island still. The mass of it looked hacked all about with ravines, twisted this way and that, and the deep shadows scored in its mountain flanks made everything seem more tremendous. I thought it brutally built. What could be more violent than the mighty gorge of Samaria, a chasm of Dantean suggestion flapped about by strident birds and frequented by the great goat which the Cretans magnificently called ‘The Wild One’? I admired Crete most of all when the clouds that hung so often about its mountain summits spread over the island as a whole, swirling among the defiles with their mists and rainstorms. Sometimes then, when the driven cloud was tinged with sunshine from below, the place looked all afire: the w
inds rushed up the valleys like jets, and when it thundered the crack of it sounded among the highlands as though caves were there and then being split in the mountain face. I have been back to Crete several times since then, always expecting to be disillusioned, and finding it more littered with tourism every time I go: but I have never quite got over my first reactions, and it seems to me to be smouldering still.

  38 A dance and a gate

  One evening, not so long ago, I came across a dance in a Cretan courtyard. The lights were very bright there. The deafeningly amplified music was a quavery sort of oriental theme. A high gate closed the yard, but along the wall of the road above, from windows and shadowy terraces all around, a crowd of villagers watched. Beneath the lights inside, a long circling line of Cretans – men and women – danced a strange dance. I was bewitched. Gracefully, jauntily, thoughtfully, swankily, the dancers tripped their complex steps, and the music blared through the pergola. Round and round they went, to and fro, and sometimes the man at the head of the line, detaching himself momentarily from the rest, threw himself into a spasm, leaping, kicking his feet together, twirling about in an ecstasy of conceit and accomplishment, before the convulsion left him and he subsided into the music’s rhythm. I was reminded sometimes of a revivalist meeting and sometimes of a fairy ring, and when I tore myself away the half-tone music of the loudspeakers tracked me into the night.

  The timber gate of my yard at home in Wales is a ramshackle old monster of a gate, patched here and there, nailed all over with bits of wood and iron, sagging on its hinges rather, kept together by a heavy wooden latch which doesn’t quite fit. The cat Jenks can squirm underneath it. I keep it only because it reminds me of gates in Crete, the storms and bad things they exclude, the mysteries they keep in.

  39 The café with two doors

  It was in 1974 that the island of Cyprus was forcibly divided into two republics by a Turkish invasion – the Greek Cypriot Republic of Cyprus in the south, the generally unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the north. Long before that, though, the island was horribly split between the two peoples, and for most of my years in journalism it provided what used to be called in the trade a running story. The British were still half-heartedly governing the island in those days, and when the news did not concern Greeks and Turks massacring each other it concerned Greeks in revolution against the British (they wanted union with Greece itself then – it was only later that they decided upon a republic of their own). All was skirmish and threat, armoured cars and ambushes. Terrorists lurked in mountain caves. Steel-helmeted soldiers patrolled city streets. I was standing in the doorway of my hotel in Nicosia one morning, waiting to go and interview the Governor, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, in his palace along the road, when a boy came by on a bicycle and threw a sheet of paper at my feet. It was signed by the Greek guerrilla leader who called himself Dighenis, and it said that the guerrillas had captured ‘a Briton named CREMER, who is a high-ranking officer of British military intelligence’, and that if the dictator HARDING did not cancel the death sentences imposed on the freedom-loving patriots ZAKKOS, MICHAEL AND PATATSOS before twelve noon the next day, CREMER would be executed. ‘There will be no further warning.’

  I gave the paper to the dictator HARDING when I met him later that morning, but I am ashamed to say I can’t remember what happened either to the high-ranking intelligence officer or to the freedom-loving patriots. It was the summer of 1956, and to tell the truth the British were getting rather tired of the whole business. At that time the walled city of Nicosia was bisected by a barbed-wire barrier, separating the Greeks from the Turks: but at one place along it there stood a small corner café with two doors, one opening into the Greek quarter, the other into the Turkish, and through its grubby dining-room there moved a casual succession of housewives and businessmen, moving from one implacably hostile territory to the other. They seemed to see nothing strange in the arrangement. They came and they went, clasping their shopping-bags and order-books, in at one door, out the other, with only a nod of the head to the proprietor, or a pause to rearrange their bundles. It was as though the barbed-wire barrier were no more than a political pretence, nothing to do with real people.

  I deceived myself that summer that this was a reflection of the island’s condition as a whole – that the Greeks and Turks themselves were getting sick of their enmities. I thought the island had a constipated feel. But the Cypriots were like the people of Northern Ireland, and did not tire of quarrel. On and on, down the years, the conflict simmered and flared. The British Government left. The Turkish Army came. The café with two doors was only an illusion, and the Greeks and the Turks went on furiously resenting one another.

  40 Un-Homeric

  Most Mediterranean islands project powerful images. They are gloriously suggestive, like Corsica, where in every dozen bottles of the local wine one is likely to be fragrant with the sweet flower-smells of the maquis. They are ominous, like Sardinia, where the international rich live in luxurious villas on the shore, cap-à-pie against kidnappers. They are tourist-blighted islands of the Aegean. They are celebrated for their residents – Napoleon (Elba), Chopin (Majorca), Tiberius (Capri), Ulysses (Ithaca?). However, there is one at least which seems to have no popular image at all: the Italian island of Ischia, in the Gulf of Naples. Most foreigners, I find, think it is in Greece – ‘Well it sounds Greek, doesn’t it?’ Ischia has no high-flown connotations. It is the Mediterranean smoothed down rather, with none of the hazards and few of the excitements: rather a middle-class, middle-aged kind of island. Its shape is elegant and its countryside is pleasant, and as it happens the entire island is curatively volcanic. Healing steams and boiling waters burst out everywhere: out of springs and conduits, out of holes in the ground or sands of the beaches, spouting through pipes, filling swimming-pools. The island’s white wine, far from tasting of wild blossoms, is said by connoisseurs to have a recognizably volcanic flavour, and to be very good for rheumatism.

  Ischia is a Thermal Paradise, say the publicists – has been since Greek or Roman times – and there are hundreds of spas in the island, incorporated in hotels or half-hidden beneath palm trees and bougainvillaeas in hillside terraces. Thousands of pilgrims go there in the cause of good health, and give the island its manner of complacently bourgeois respectability, so curious to encounter in those blue salacious seas. An almost palpable satisfaction hangs over Ischia, and makes me feel that the very substances of the place are reasonably happy to be there. I was loitering one evening along a beach where sulphurous steam actually comes up through the sand, at the very edge of the sea, and childishly fancied to myself the sensations of one of the gentle waves which came rippling ashore with the evening tide. In it comes, I thought, fresh and inexperienced from the Tyrrhenian Sea, hoping for Capri perhaps, or the far Ligurians, and in a trice it finds itself running away into a hole in the volcanic Ischian sand. Mamma mia, it’s hot down there! A stunned moment or two among the volcanic ardours, and that little Tyrrhenian ripple is hot enough to boil an egg in. It does not complain, though, I like to suppose. It may not have found itself any Homeric strand or romantically stormy foreshore, but it must be snug enough down there, in the bowels of the Thermal Paradise.

  41 A chance meeting?

  On a bus in Capri I chanced to meet, I can’t remember how, a man who introduced himself as Boris Alperovici, the third husband of Gracie Fields. She was a famous star of the past, a Dame of the British Empire, formerly a household name in her native England but somewhat diminished in the public eye by having gone off to America at the start of the Second World War. By then she was living in elderly retirement in her villa on the island. Boris took me along to visit her, and she received me graciously, and told me anecdotes of her theatrical life, and had coffee served to me by her seaside swimming-pool. It was just as though the old lady were some great Hollywood actress at the height of her career, and she evidently enjoyed it all as much as I did. Afterwards Boris gave me a lift back to my h
otel: and when I got home to Britain I was surprised to meet other people, too, who had chanced to encounter Signor Alperovici on the Capri bus, they couldn’t quite remember how, and had sat gratefully drinking coffee at the feet of Our Gracie.

  42 Presidency of the mavericks?

  All islands are unique, of course, but some are uniquer than others, and one of the uniquest is undoubtedly Malta, variously described by its visitors down the centuries as the Head, the Heart, the Navel and the Arsehole of the Mediterranean. Almost within sight of Sicily yet further south than Tunis, less than 125 square miles in area but crowned with a capital worthy of a Great Power, Malta is a true loner, and has a marvellous history of sieges, grandees, Admirals of the Fleet and knights of chivalry. Half a century ago it was still a British colony, the main base of the British Mediterranean Fleet, and I thought it at once touchingly and painfully British. The mostly Italianate proletariat of Valletta seemed to me almost indistinguishable from the British tabloid public, talking blurred varieties of regional English and keenly concerned with football pools, while the Maltese aristocrats I came across were ornamentally Anglophile, despite their long exclusion from the Union Club. The food was overwhelmingly cabbage and Brown Windsor: warships lay magnificently in the harbour.