Roumeli
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PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR (1915–2011) was born of Anglo-Irish descent and raised in Northamptonshire and London. After his stormy schooldays, followed by the walk across Europe to Constantinople that begins in A Time of Gifts (1977) and continues through Between the Woods and the Water (1986), he lived and traveled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. His books Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. He lived until the end of his life in the house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani. He was knighted in 2004 for his services to literature and to British–Greek relations.
PATRICIA STORACE is the author of Heredity, a book of poems; Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir about Greece; and Sugar Cane, a children’s book. She lives in New York.
ROUMELI
Travels in Northern Greece
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
Introduction by
PATRICIA STORACE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
ROUMELI
Dedication
Author’s Introduction
1 The Black Departers
2 The Monasteries of the Air
3 The Helleno-Romaic Dilemma and Sidetrack to Crete
4 North of the Gulf
5 The Kingdom of Autolycus
6 Sounds of the Greek World
Appendix I: Derivations of Sarakatsán
Appendix II: Glossary of Boliaric Vocabulary
Index
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
“CAN YOU speak Greek?” an officer of the occupation interrogated a suspected Egyptian insurrectionist in the year 57. As recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, 26:37, a swift and fluent response in Greek saved Saint Paul and secured him his release from prison. A language and the civilization it embodied became a ransom for a man’s life. For Paul, Greek was not only the language of civilization, but also the language of salvation, the speech of immortal life embodied in the Gospels.
Close to two millennia later, in 1941, knowledge of Greek was once again a matter of life and death, this time for the young Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British officer in the Second World War. He and a circle of fellow philhellene soldiers had made an “obsolete choice of Greek at school,” in Leigh Fermor’s words, which, as a bizarre consequence, had placed them in the thick of the Cretan resistance. Disguised as a shepherd, Leigh Fermor found himself living out of caves in the mountains of Crete, spying on the Nazi occupation forces and helping to organize and equip the local resistance bands. The story of his audacious kidnapping of the German General Kreipe, a division commander quartered in the Villa Ariadne, alongside the site of the Palace of Knossos, the central symbol of Minoan culture, lives in the form of song as well as in history books; it is commemorated in at least one Cretan heroic ballad, like some fragment of ancient epic adapted to modern décor and manners.
These two stories, of the saint and of the soldier, illustrate a kind of alchemy that Greece practices on lived experience. One of the characteristic gifts the Hellenic world bestows is a sense of an unobstructed passage through time, as if time had grown uncannily permeable, fluid, and transparent, as if one could dive through time like water. In Greece, encounters between the living and the immortal are a quotidian reality.
Even the icon stores in every neighborhood provide opportunities for this heightened perception. It is perhaps best represented by the popular icon known as the Metamorphosis, which records the scene of Christ’s transfiguration, when he reveals himself to his disciples as both God and man, present equally in time and in eternity. It is impossible to travel inside Greece without traveling beyond it, through memory, scholarship, and dream.
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli is just such an account of travel, for it takes him to a region of Greece that, as he writes, “is not to be found on maps....Its extent has varied and its position has wandered rather imprecisely.” Roumeli, first published in 1966, was the second of Leigh Fermor’s two books about Greece, a country that has been his part-time home since his war years. The earlier book, Mani, described the people and culture of the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese, an area geographically and culturally isolated from the rest of Greece by the Taygetos mountains. Roumeli, by contrast, moves well to the north, to the land of the “Rumis,” the Greco-Roman empire that eventually fell to the Turks.
For Leigh Fermor, however, Roumeli is not so much a geographic designation as a metaphor for Hellenism. The book is a journey through landscapes and, above all, among people, in which the author explores aspects of what it means or has meant to be Greek. It is also a delicately elegiac record of ways of life that were vanishing even as Leigh Fermor encountered them, peoples and places that we now know about chiefly through his accounts of them. In this way, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writings on Greece have themselves become an in-dispensable part of the Greek world and its lore.
The communities Leigh Fermor describes in Roumeli are labyrinthine; they have the atmosphere of secret societies. Over the centuries Greeks have perfected the art of living without getting caught at it. This skill is celebrated in the Klephtic songs of heroes of the Greek struggle against the Ottoman Empire, and practiced in the famous and still savored Klephtic cooking, a technique in which food is cooked sealed so as to produce no smoke that might alert enemies to an encampment. The Greek gift for camouflage has made the country, and especially its mountain fastnesses, a refuge for clans, customs, idioms, and ways of living that seem neither to flourish fully nor to disappear irrevocably. In Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor holds these vestiges to the light, as if they were encased in crystal globes.
In the course of his journeys through and about the ever-elusive Roumeli, Leigh Fermor introduces us to the monasteries of Meteora, where a dwindling population of monks celebrate the liturgy in churches perched on mountain pinnacles—an architecture of the miraculous. Here, clouds can be so thick at the summit that two monks will collide while singing the office.
A visit to Lord Byron’s temperamental and imperious great-granddaughter inspires an attempt to recover a pair of the poet’s shoes that are rumored still to be at the provincial town of Missolonghi, where that secular saint of Hellenism met his death. Leigh Fermor undertakes the quest, much as in the world of antiquity travelers would set out seeking the very oars that propelled Jason and the Argonauts toward the Golden Fleece and Medea. Arriving in Missolonghi, Leigh Fermor finds that the shoes have become a Greek family treasure, a talismanic element of a local bride’s dowry. Byron would have loved the thought of his slippers poised in an immortal proximity to a wedding bed.
The villagers of the Kravara region are renowned for their cunning, and Leigh Fermor is the ideal audience for their tales of trickery. Without betraying a flicker of incredulity, he listens as they regale him with the tale of Panos, a traveling grifter who had mastered the art of appearing dead:
“It was the custom of Charis,” he said, “to arrive in a Russian village carrying Panos on his back—Panos was the lighter of the two—then he set him down under a tree and knelt beside him wringing his hands and weeping bitterly. A crowd would gather and ask what was wrong. Then Charis said: ‘My poor brother is dying!’—and Panos really looked like it, all grey in the face, with hollow cheeks and glazed eyes—like this.” Uncle Elias’s own features for a second mimicked a moribund rictus of alarming verisimilitude and then sprang as abruptly back to normal—“‘Here we are,’ he would moan—‘Grtzki! Pravoslavnik!—thousan
ds of miles from home!’ All their hearts melted. They would be taken into someone’s house and that night, Panos would die.”
“Die?”
“Die. Some of the old ones had the secret. He could stop his breathing, turn white and cold: everyone would have said a corpse. They laid him out, put a clean suit of clothes on him, covered him with flowers, dug the grave and, as the custom is, all the village would contribute to a collection for the family; that is to say, for Charis; they filled his hat with roubles as he wept and mourned beside the bier. Charis explained that, in Greece, only the family must attend the vigil. So, the night before the funeral, they left him alone there lamenting. When the village was asleep, he gave the dead man a shake, and Panos sat up scattering the flowers and stepped from the candles. Then, hop! they were out of the window and away over the steppe with a new suit and a hat full of cash to the good! After a hundred versts or so, on the outskirts of a new village, Panos climbed on Charis’s back again and they headed for the market place...They were very fond of Russia.”
Our response was noisy. When it had died down, the tavern-keeper said, “Travel broadens the mind.”
Leigh Fermor is no less graceful as a guest at nuptials, full of archaic beauty and terror, celebrated by nomadic shepherds, through which a bride becomes “a slave to her husband” and to her husband’s family.
Roumeli tells the story of communities and customs poised between life and death; it might be described as a sequence of still lives: nature morte. One of the most powerful of the book’s still life scenes is of lambs roasting for an Easter meal; no one who has turned a spit at a Greek Easter feast will fail to relive what Leigh Fermor describes here:
Whole lambs were being flourished sizzling and smoking on their spits....Helpings of brain are delved from heads which have been bisected lengthwise and opened like a casket....The sheep’s eyes...are highly prized by mountaineers but for all but the most assimilated travellers the message they flash from the prongs is one of harrowing reproach.
It is less and less common to read prose with a Ruskinian flourish and flavor, but Leigh Fermor’s work glistens like silver stamped in the same atelier. Like Ruskin, too, Leigh Fermor is a master of the tableau, and relishes a love of costume. The nineteenth-century prose stylist who wrote of the transforming authority of the velvet of his Oxford academic gown would himself have relished Leigh Fermor’s appreciation of traditional Cretan dress, of high boots, baggy trousers, eight-foot-long sash, dagger, slung gun, bandoliers, and walking stick, “a garb in which, as I well know, it is impossible not to swagger.”
Ruskin recalled in his autobiography, Praeterita, that his writing was formed by hearing books read aloud; it seems likely that Patrick Leigh Fermor’s prose was nurtured in much the same way. The grandeur and nuance of his language, its coloratura-like ornament, its relish of eccentricity and digression, the quality of attention unabashedly asked of the reader, make us realize we have yet to grasp how profoundly television and movies have altered the way books are written.
Patrick Leigh Fermor remains a craftsman for whom the world begins with words. He writes with the consciousness that words are themselves symbols, creating images, not accompanying or captioning them. This is speech which in itself is a form of experience, fit to communicate and to shape a full encounter with existence, which, he writes, is “a torment, an enemy, an adventure and a joke which we are in league to undergo, outwit, exploit and enjoy on equal terms as accomplices, fellow-hedonists and fellow-victims.”
—PATRICIA STORACE
ROUMELI
For Amy and Walter Smart
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
ROUMELI is not to be found on maps of present-day Greece. It is not a political or an administrative delimitation but a regional, almost a colloquial, name; rather like, in England, the West or the North Country, the Fens or the Border. Its extent has varied and its position has wandered rather imprecisely. A few centuries ago it meant roughly the north of the country (as opposed to the Morea, the archipelago and the Greek-inhabited provinces of Asia Minor) from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic Sea and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth. After the War of Independence, the name shrank to designate the southern part of this great area; the mountainous strip of territory lying between the Gulf and the northern frontier that separated the new Greek Kingdom from the unredeemed lands that still remained, politically, part of the Ottoman Empire. The line stretched from the Ambracian Gulf to the Gulf of Volo. The Balkan Wars and then the Great War advanced Greece’s frontiers in two great northward leaps and doubled the extent of the country; but, on modern Greek lips, Roumeli is still limited to that part of it between the Gulf and the superannuated line. Rather arbitrarily, rather high-handedly and with some misgiving, perhaps seduced by the strangeness and the beauty of the name—the stress falls on the first syllable, turning Roumeli into a dactyl—I have reverted, as cover for these wanderings, to the earlier and looser application of the name. This obsolete and elastic use simultaneously provides an alibi from the strict modern sense and an illusory semblance of unity to these random journeys. Better still, the trisyllable itself is full of echoes and hints and buried meanings which are deeply relevant to the book’s main theme.
Greece is changing fast and the most up-to-the-minute account of it is, in some measure, out of date by the time it appears. The record of these journeys, then, undertaken a few years ago and all of them prompted by abstruse private motives, would be a deluding guide. Commodious charabancs have now replaced the ramshackle country buses, great roads cleave their way through the heart of remote villages and quantities of hotels have sprung up. Monasteries and temples which, almost yesterday, were only to be reached by solitary and exacting climbs are now the brief staging points of highly organized and painless tourism in multitudes. For the first time since Julian the Apostate, fumes drift through the columns, and a traveller must retire deep into the hinterland for the wireless to be out of earshot. All this is a source of direly-needed revenue and a joy to many; the occasional Greek or foreign dissenter can always stalk off petulantly into the wilderness and out of range. Indeed, it is into this contracting wilderness that these pages for the most part lead.
A list of all the Greek friends who have helped with advice, guidance, hospitality, criticism and every conceivable support would be impressively large; but not nearly as large as the debt I owe them for many years of kindness, stimulus, and delight. I would also like to thank other allies for their patience and forbearing during a long gestation. The only sad aspect of the task of rendering thanks is the thought that this book will only reach one of the two friends to whom it was dedicated at the outset.
—P.M.L.F.
St. Fermin—Passerano nel Lazio—Forio—Locronan—Lismore—Dumbleton—Branscombe—Sevenhampton—Kalomitsi.
1. THE BLACK DEPARTERS
ALEXANDROUPOLIS is a large town, but there is nothing overpoweringly urban about the Alexandroupolitans; rather the reverse. Athenian civil servants groan when they are nominated here and young officers, faced by this Thracian exile, look at each other askance. (It was not always so. In the tales of my friend Yanni Peltekis, who lived here in Turkish times as a child, it sounds as full of adventure and mystery as a city in the Arabian Nights.) I had taken a strong liking to it, perhaps because it was my first Greek town after a few years’ absence. But I could see that too long a sojourn might wither its delights.[1] Many of the limitations of a new provincial town pervade it, and the evening hours of the officers and civil servants are spanned by familiar anecdotes and yawns and yet another coffee and the click of amber beads falling through fingers that refrain from raising a cuff to reveal the time; they know full well that it is still too early for bed. The tedium of unchosen and unchanging company lurks there. If a joke is worth making, it is worth making often, think some; other more fastidious ones suffer acutely from the Inbite of Agenwit.
All at once, however, the yawns of the evening boulevard were halted by the passing of
a wild, solitary and alien figure that no streets or houses should ever have confined: a man as inappropriate in these tame surroundings as a wolf in the heart of Athens. A rough black pill-box was tilted askew on his matted and whiskered head. His black double-breasted waistcoat of homespun goats’ hair was tucked into a black sash below which a hairy and broad-pleated black kilt jutted stiffly to his knees. Black tights of the same stifling stuff covered his long legs and he was shod in those Greek mountain shoes that turn up at the tip and curl back in a broad canoe-like prow and end in a wide black pom-pom covering the front of the foot. The thick soles were clouted and the nails grated underfoot. He loped along the middle of the road, gazing ahead as though to avoid the contaminating houses. A long shepherd’s staff, whose crook was a carved wooden snake, lay across his shoulders. He had looped his arms over it in the flying and cruciform position in which many mountaineers carry their crooks and their guns. He was, in fact, a Sarakatsán. Heads turned under the dusty acacias as he passed and the smack of cards and the clatter of backgammon counters died down for a few moments. I got up and dogged his steps at a discreet distance.
Sarakatsáns have always filled me with awe. I first saw them years ago when I was walking across Bulgaria to Constantinople. A gathering of beehive huts was scattered over the wintry hills slanting to the Black Sea; brushwood folds ascended the green slopes and thousands of shaggy black goats and sheep grazed over the rainy landscape, their heavy bronze bells filling the air with a many-toned and harmonious jangle. Here and there like dark monoliths under the wheeling crows herdsmen leaned on their lance-long crooks, their faces almost lost in the deep hoods of high-shouldered goats’ hair capes reaching to the ground; capes of so coarse a weave and so stiff with rain that their incumbents could almost step forth and leave them standing like sentry-boxes. Riding across Greek Macedonia the next year, I saw them again and even stayed a night in one of their smoky wigwams. Later I met them often, all over northern Greece: in the plains in winter and in the mountains in summer; always on the skyline or in the middle distance. True nomads, these self-appointed Ishmaels hover on the outskirts of ordinary Greek life as fleetingly as a mirage; they manifest themselves to mortals in faraway glimpses. Suddenly, in the high mid-summer Pindus and Rhodope and in the Roumeli sierras, a ravine’s twist lays bare their impermanent hamlets of cones. In winter, from the snows that have banished them, one can discern their clustering huts in the plains, the ascending smoke and the grazing flocks. In spring their beasts and their long caravans of horses, laden with all they possess, wind into the thawed mountains, halting at night in a brief village of sombre tents; autumn sends them streaming downhill to the withered plains which the rains will soon turn green. One discovers them binding lopped branches and osier twigs into the hemispherical huts which will house them for the season; shelters whose blackened and moulting thatch will later mark where they settled for a few months and then vanished. Sometimes a far-off barking and the murmur of bells hints at their presence deep in the ilex woods or along a dazzling canyon where nothing stirs but a pair of floating eagles. They are nearly always out of sight. Except for these rare apparitions, this fugitive community—about eighty thousand souls with flocks amounting to several million heads—has the gift of invisibility.