by Jan Morris
41 The Quandary
Do the Greeks, I once asked a Greek acquaintance of mine, consider themselves a Western or an Eastern people? ‘That,’ he replied, ‘is our Quandary.’ He said it with a palpable capital Q, and with reason. By the 1990s Greece had become a full member of the European Union, but for myself I still doubt whether Greeks are temperamentally, instinctively, even stylistically Europeans. In the days of classical education John Murray’s Handbook to Greece, 1884, could observe comfortably that any visitor ‘with the usual knowledge of ancient Greek’ might read the Athenian papers with ease. The knowledge is not so usual now, and the universal links with Greece, fostered by generations of teachers, theologians and art historians, have long since weakened. For every Winckelmann or Byron, devoted to the ideas of Hellenism, there are a dozen scholars and artists dedicated to the culture of Africa, the Incas or the Australian aborigines. As for me, there are few places in Europe where I feel abroad these days, so intimately related are this continent’s languages, histories, approaches to life and love, but in Greece almost everything is foreign to me, from the script to the cuisine to the manner of thought. In Greece I feel hardly more among ethnic relatives than I do in Bangkok or Zagazig.
42 A pasha
‘Is the hotel open?’ I innocently asked in the deserted off-season lobby of the posh Xenia Palace in Nauplia. ‘It seems to be,’ said the receptionist unpleasantly, ‘since you’re inside it.’ Greek functionaries can be very disagreeable, and even in the 1990s I take this to be an echo of the long centuries of Turkish occupation – we were within sight of the castle of Bourdzi, where the executioners whiled away their old age back on page 64. The Xenia receptionist was like one of the obstructionist pashas one reads about in old travel books, perpetually making things as difficult as possible, and there is a good deal in Greece which smacks to this day of Ottoman orneriness, together with those suggestions of slyness and conspiracy that now seem as native to the country as ouzo.
43 Europe or not?
Let us visit any run-of-the-mill provincial town in the last years of the twentieth century in Greece. The sea is in front of it, the hills are behind. Architecturally it is mostly pure Balkans: flat roofs, flowered concrete, busts of national heroes, and rival cafés across a cement-flagged square. Technically it seems to be in a condition of semi-suspense, so that we can never be sure whether any given traffic-light is working or not, and half the buildings appear to have been abandoned before completion. Our brand-new hotel smells of cement, and we are woken in the morning by a rhythmic banging from the quayside outside its windows, where a fisherman is slapping a large octopus on the ground to soften it for the pot. The town’s manners vary unpredictably from the sweet to the curmudgeonly. In the least forbidding of the restaurants we are given the choice of mutton, fish stew and thick pasta, all bubbling in their cauldrons in the kitchen. The beach, pictured in brochures pristine as anything, is in fact scummed with rubbish, pecked over by carrion crows and scavenged about by cats. In the evenings the cafés are taken over by the Greek Army, hundreds of uniformed conscripts sitting about doing nothing in particular, while up at the market quarter all is a souk-like vividness of commerce and vegetables, lightly touched with tourism. The voices of this town are very loud. The air is exhilarating. The temper is generally cordial. Are we in Europe or not? It is a Quandary.
44 The charm of it
But it can be a Liberation, too. The easy individualism of the Greeks is fine – if there is anything the contemporary Greek is not, it is downtrodden or standardized. For one of my tastes the general sense of incipient anarchy is a stimulant, and the effervescent variety of life, the feeling that you never know what is going to show up round the corner, is a welcome antidote to the growing homogenization of everything elsewhere. One minute there is the spectacle of a scudding hydrofoil out at sea, thundering in a blur of spray towards some Homeric isle, the next a dissonant clanging of bells fixed to the axle of a horse-drawn cart. A hurrying truck blows a horn like a fairground carousel. From the little glass-fronted shrines that line the highways there is an atavistic glint of trinkets, coins and bottles. There must be more beehives in Greece than in the rest of the world put together, and at Delphi they sell the honey in tins, with peel-off tops like beer cans or cat food. On the Byzantine slopes of Mistra I once encountered a nun picking olives halfway up a tree, attended by her goat at the bottom.
Sometimes it seems to me astonishing that anything works at all in Greece, so slap-happy does its populace seem, but this is perhaps as much a matter of personality as of capacity. More often I feel that if it comes to an emergency a kind of makeshift efficiency will prevail – Levantine guile combined with the chewing-gum-on-the-carburettor improvisation that used to characterize the resource of rural America. One night at a hotel in Euboea I found myself without my passport, carelessly left behind several hundred miles away in the Peloponnese. A few extremely loud telephone calls, a complex mobilization of taxis, buses and family contacts, and somehow or other by the next morning it had found its way to Khalkis. ‘I am going to make you very happy,’ said the hotelier as he produced it like a conjuror from beneath his desk, and he knew of course that I was about to contribute to his happiness, too.
45 Drunk in Monemvasía
I have only twice been properly drunk in Europe – tipsy ten thousand times, really sozzled only twice. The first time was at Catterick Camp in the north of England, when I was just eighteen. The second time was at Monemvasía, in the Peloponnese, when I was fifty-two, was working on a book and should have known better. I had taken a room in a private house on the outskirts of the village, and in the evening I walked a mile or so to a tavern for my supper. It was very full, and very lively – local people mostly, with some merry Americans. We drank large amounts of furiously resinated draught retsina out of metal mugs, and I seldom had a happier evening. In the small hours I staggered up the road again to my lodgings, and I can still see the face of my landlady, in a flowered housecoat over her nightdress, as she pulled back the bars and undid the chains of her front door to let me in. I expected her to be tight-lipped and disapproving: instead she greeted me with a sly and knowing smile of collusion, very nearly a wink, as if she had been enjoyably up to no good herself. I went to bed incoherently whistling, and awoke in the morning fresh as a daisy.
46 Euro-Hellene
Europe? Would my landlady have been so conspiratorially forgiving if we had been in Germany? Do Greek truck-drivers really keep to the European tachometer rules? Are the scrawny Greek sheep of the mountains really dipped and vaccinated to Brussels standards? Do any Greek fishermen, thumping their octopuses on the quay, take any notice of European laws about keeping their hair covered while processing seafood? But there we are, the Greeks are officially Westerners now, and their admission into the comity of Europe suggests to me something raw and vital put into a vat to help the fermentation: a rough organic agent, with plenty of bacteria in it. This is a different metaphor indeed from the classical visions of my youth – gone from the Greek image is the bounding grace and elegance, the gravitas of the philosophers, the style of the clean-limbed athletes with their curls and chiselled noses. But who knows? Perhaps the people of ancient Greece were really Levantine all the time – dark-skinned, stocky and evasive like second-hand car dealers in Piraeus.
In 1993 I spent a day at Epidauros, where the temple of Asklepios once offered its cultists the hope of eternal life. The marvellous theatre, cradle of stage drama, was swarmed all over by visitors of a dozen nationalities. Sometimes people standing in the orchestra whispered, or rustled pieces of paper, to demonstrate the famous acoustics of the place. A tour guide mounted a block and quoted some verse, instantly recognizable to anyone with the usual command of ancient Greek. An Italian performed ‘O Sole Mio’. A tall young man and an elderly lady half his height sang with much feeling and to great effect some kind of romantic ballad – a touching performance, in a tongue which none of us recognized, but which moved us a
ll to applause.
What language were they singing, I hastened to ask the performers, there in the theatre of Sophocles, Aristophanes and Euripides? It was Finnish, they said, and the song was a folk-melody from Europe’s remotest north. I was exuberant. ‘Viva Europa!’ I cried in my adolescent way: but nobody responded much, beyond a sheepish laugh or two.
47 Mirësevni në Shqipëri!
‘Mirësevni në Shqipëri’ is what it said on the immigration forms when I arrived in Albania – ‘Welcome to Albania.’ They must have been printed after 1992, because until then Shqipëri was the most inflexibly, disagreeably, alarmingly and indeed insanely unwelcoming country in Europe. For most of my fifty European years I had contemplated it in bewilderment from outside. Its blue-grey coast looked back at me tantalizingly across the Strait of Corfu, inaccessible as a bank vault. I gazed upon its silent mass, as upon a morgue, from the mountains of Montenegro. As I pursued the tracks of the British Empire in the Ionian Islands, I remembered with a shudder the hired executioner who used to come over from Albania (no Greek would do the job) wearing a face-mask and a particoloured costume like a jester. The case of the Corfu Strait, when Albanian mines sank two British destroyers with terrible loss of life, rumbled through my early years in journalism, and for decades I could hardly turn on my short-wave radio, wherever I was, without hearing the monotonous dogmatic voice of Radio Albania, telling us of Comrade Hoxha’s latest achievements in revolutionizing chemical production, or eliminating religion. Comrade Hoxha – Friend Hoxha, as his subjects were supposed to call him! Of all the unhinged despots in the Europe of my time, Enver Hoxha was undoubtedly the most deranged. He was madder than Ceauşescu. His people were cut off from all outside sources of information whatever, and for years they were conditioned to think of him as all-but-magical. He could cause the rain to come! Flowers blossomed in his footsteps! Many of his subjects really did believe that he had made Albania uniquely successful and enviable among all the nations of the world, whereas in fact it was uniquely unsuccessful and unenviable. Hoxha quarrelled successively with the Western democracies, with Yugoslavia, with the Soviet Union, with Communist China, with God himself (‘the only religion in Albania is being Albanian’), until in the end his country was all alone, friendless, destitute and paranoically nasty to everyone.
48 Hoxha lives!
Hoxha had been dead for six years when at last I reached Albania, and his irrational brand of Communism had been rejected for four. Almost at once I made a pilgrimage to honour a far older champion, the warrior-chief Skanderbeg – Alexander Bey – who had famously held the predatory Turks at bay in the fifteenth century. For Albanians Skanderbeg was undoubtedly the No. 1 Albanian of history, and he was the one Albanian who, with his heroic beard and his goat-horned helmet, had been known to me all my life as a face on a postage stamp. The scene of Skanderbeg’s most celebrated exploit was the ruined fortress of Krujë, in central Albania, epically sited on a mountainside looking across a plain to the distant Adriatic. The place was fine, I thought. The view was tremendous, shimmering with heat-haze down to the sea. The citadel was properly defiant in its wreckage. The bazaar down the hill sold fox-skins. But even then, even in 1996, even in the presence of Skanderbeg himself, Enver Hoxha lived! For all across that wide landscape, much the most compelling feature of it, were the thousands and thousands of concrete pillboxes, egg-shaped, like so many grey-white igloos, which the dictator had caused to be constructed throughout the length and breadth of his country. I was told there were 800,000 altogether, big and small, and there seemed to be no strategic or even tactical pattern to them – they just popped up wherever you looked, sometimes in twos and threes, sometimes in dozens, and only now that Hoxha was dead were they beginning to crumble. Some had been broken, or upturned, or were used as houses or hay-stores, and down on the holiday coast one or two had recently been turned into cafés.
49 The great release
When I asked whom these defences had been to defend Albania against, they said ‘Everyone.’ Having spent much of his young manhood as a guerrilla partisan, Hoxha apparently feared invasion by the Americans, the Russians, the Yugoslavs, the Greeks, the Italians, and for all I know the Libyans too. One man I asked about the pillboxes in Krujë merely put his finger to the side of his head and twisted it. I don’t know how persuaded most ordinary Albanians had been by Hoxha’s persecution complex, but now that he had gone it was as though they were awakening from some awful nightmare, shaking their heads to be rid of the memory. His was a fearful tyranny. Scores of thousands of Albanians had been murdered or worked to death in his prison camps – forty-eight of them, in a country the size of Wales or Maryland. Every kind of freedom had been abolished. Censorship had been absolute. Secret police and Government informers were everywhere. Beards, blue jeans and rock music were forbidden. Just as nobody could enter the country, so nobody could leave either. Babies’ names had to be chosen from an officially approved list, changed each year.
Six years after Hoxha’s death, when his body had long been exhumed from its tomb of honour, the sense of release was still palpable, and infectious. Poverty was still cruel in Albania, industry was ramshackle, politics were corrupt. The usual post-Communist mafia was rampant – Albanian gangs were a byword as far away as Germany. Nevertheless it seemed to me, in 1996, a remarkably exuberant country. All the symptoms of capitalism were sprouting then – Western-financed hotels, Arab-financed tourist developments, Italian restaurants, backstreet boutiques, service stations, car-washes, glossy propaganda magazines for visiting foreign executives. I went down to the coast one weekend, and the beaches around Durrës were jammed with cars and coaches, festive, noisy and sticky. All among the seaside pine-woods, full of picnickers, those pillboxes abjectly lurked.
50 En fête
In 1992, when the Albanian Communist regime came to an end, there were only fifty cars in the capital, Tirana, and pictures I had seen of Skanderbeg Square, the heart of the city, showed it all but empty, with only a few disciplined pedestrians crossing its enormous ceremonial space. By the time I got there 40,000 cars swarmed the Tirana streets (a third of them Mercedes, almost all of them second-hand, most of them stolen in Germany) and Skanderbeg Square was a sort of maelstrom. It contained a mosque, a clock-tower, a museum, a cultural centre, a functional-modernist hotel, a national bank, a fountain or two, sundry Italianate government offices, dozens of street stalls, an equestrian statue of Skanderbeg, and two extremely noisy funfairs. Countless men of all ages wandered around offering black-market exchange rates. Innumerable children rode the funfair rides. Around the edges of the place scores of cafés were in a perpetual kind of frenzy, and round the back an immense street market pullulated in a welter of fish-stalls, butcheries, vegetable-carts and stacks of old bicycles. It was rather as though the great square of Marrakesh had been worked over successively by Atatürk, Mussolini and Stalin, and then handed over to the management of the Tivoli gardens in Copenhagen.
In the evening the entire population of Tirana seemed to emerge for the twilight passeggiata, strolling up and down the main avenue, sitting on the edges of fountains, milling around the funfairs, wandering haphazardly across highways apparently under the impression that there were still only fifty cars in the city. The noise seemed to me then a supremely Albanian noise – the hooting horns of a thousand newly acquired and uncertainly driven automobiles, the whistles of distraught traffic cops, and the deafening beat of mingled rock, rap and Balkan folk-music. I loved the louche insouciance of it all, ever-ready smiles from the citizenry, inescapable suggestions of roguery, the immense hum over everything, the quirks and surprises. Sometimes I felt a small dry kiss on my arm, and turned to find a Gypsy child irresistibly importuning me for cash. When I testily shooed off a young man in a T-shirt and jeans, supposing him to be yet another currency tout, he shyly introduced himself as one of the President’s bodyguards, trying to warn me away from the presidential front gate.
I walked one night into the huge pyra
midical structure which had been designed to be a museum of Enver Hoxha – in his own lifetime! – and was now converted to more secular uses. It was strikingly lit up after dark, and swarmed all around by numberless crowds of idlers, up and down its ceremonial steps, in and out of its basement café, eating ice-creams and loudly talking. Irrepressible urchins climbed its smooth concrete buttresses in order to slide down again. What should I find in the main hall of this tumultuous building, this hilariously discredited monument of egotism, but four young people exquisitely performing Ravel’s string quartet?
51 Positive identification
Poor old Hoxha! What would he think? Ogre though he was, I rather regretted his posthumous elimination from Tirana. For most foreigners, after all, Hoxha rather than Skanderbeg was Albanian No. 1. I did visit his house, in the formerly sealed-off official quarter known as The Block – a respectable suburban-style part of town from which, in Hoxha’s day, ordinary citizens were entirely banned. Even in 1996, as I wandered the tyrant’s garden paths I was followed always by an armed guard, and when I stooped to pick a flower from a bed of Michaelmas daisies I thought I heard behind me (though perhaps I was fantasizing here) the click of a safety-catch. Was it OK to take a flower? I asked the young man over my shoulder, just in case; but instead of shooting me he made an expansive gesture of permission. Take the lot, he seemed to be saying. They were only Friend Enver’s.
I wished Hoxha’s museum were still his museum, and in particular I wished that his immense bronze statue still stood in the main square (where its plinth did remain, beside one of those funfairs, and was tottered over by enterprising infants in need of parental guidance). So I was excited when somebody told me that the statue still existed in Tirana, preserved in the Monuments Factory where it had originally been cast. In a flash I was there, accompanied by a young Albanian engineer of my acquaintance. Like most Albanian factories the Monuments Factory had gone out of business, and at first the watchman took us to the wrong statue – that last public statue of Stalin, as it happened, which I noticed on page 79. ‘Oh, you want Enver,’ the watchman then said (everyone in Albania still called him Enver): ‘Enver’s in there’ – and he directed us to a windowless warehouse apparently sealed off for ever. We circled this gloomy mausoleum searching for keyholes to look through or doors to peer under, and in the end I found a spyhole between the bricks.
