Roumeli

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Unlike the semi-nomads of Greece—the Koutzovlachs and the Karagounis, who all have mountain villages from which to migrate and to which they return after their half-yearly journeys in search of pasture—the Sarakatsáns have nothing more solid than their abodes of wicker and rush. All of them, however, look to some range of mountains as their home, some fold or cordillera where they have grazed their flocks for centuries of summers. Their lowland pastures are more variable; these uncertain sojourns have few claims on their allegiance. The Sarakatsáns of the north had the widest range. The sudden cage of frontiers which sprang up after the Balkan Wars failed to confine them and they fanned out in autumn all over southern Albania and across the lower marches of Serbia as far as Montenegro and Herzegovina and Bosnia and into Bulgaria to the foothills of the Great Balkan. Those who thought of the Rhodope mountains as their home—the very ones, indeed, in the highlands that loom above the Thracian plains—were particularly bold in the extent of their winter wanderings. Not only did they strike northwards, like those I saw by the Black Sea, but, before the Hebrus river became an inviolable barrier, their caravans reached Constantinople and up went their wigwams under the walls of Theodosius. Others settled along the shores of the Sea of Marmara and spread over the rich green hills of the Dardanelles. Many crossed the Hellespont to pitch camp on the plain of Troy. Bold nomads would continue to the meadows of Bithynia and winter among the poplar trees or push on into Cappadocia and scatter their flocks across the volcanic wildernesses round the rock monasteries of Ürgüb. The boldest even reached Iconium, the home of Jellalludin and the metropolis of the whirling dervishes. They never looked on these enormous journeys as expatriation: until the deracination of the 1920’s, much of Asia Minor was part of the Greek world; and even beyond its confines there were ancient Greek colonies. Established for thousands of years but reduced by the later tide of the Seldjuk Turks to scattered islets of Hellenism, they still survived and prospered. The invisible frontiers of nomadism overlapped and dovetailed with those other pastoral wanderers, the Yürüks. These Anatolian shepherds, nominally moslems, grazed their flocks in the hinterland of Asia Minor for centuries before the Seldjuks came; they even paid return migrations, now and then, as far as Macedonia. No wonder, then, that some of the aura of a fable hangs about the Sarakatsáns.

  A quarter of an hour after sighting him I was sitting at a table next to this isolated nomad. Round us were the smithies and harness-makers of the outskirts; old artisans had settled down to quiet narghilés after knocking off work. I watched him order and drink a coffee, pondering how I could get into conversation. Soon, with a clap of horny palms, he was summoning the kafedzi and preparing to depart. The kafedzi came with an armload of elaborate gear and a boy leading a horse. The Sarakatsán mounted and laid his crook across his lap, the kafedzi handed him two six-foot candles adorned with white satin bows and ribbons; then followed the snowy baubles which, as I know to my cost, a koumbaros—the groomsman, sponsor or best man—contributes to the crowning of the groom and his bride at an Orthodox wedding. There were smaller candles, lengths of satin in brown paper, parcels of sweets and finally the box containing the tinsel wedding-crowns themselves. My luck changed: as he gave his horse a kick and moved off, a muslin bag of sugared almonds slipped and fell into the dust. I dived for it, ran after him, and, my luck still holding, remembered as I handed it over, to utter the ritual phrase of a wedding guest to a koumbaros; it is adapted either from the tenth chapter of St. Luke or the First Epistle to Timothy: “Axioi tou misthou sou!,” “May they be worthy of your hire!” He reined in, placed his right hand over his heart and bowed his head in a ceremonious gesture of thanks. Then, after a glance up and down and a pause, he asked in a thick rustic accent where I was from. I told him and asked him where the wedding was to be. “Tomorrow at Sikarayia,” he said, “two hours from here.” After another pause, he said, “Honour us by coming.” He repeated his graceful bow and, bristling with his crook and his candles and fluttering with satin ribbons, clattered off.

  Next day the rail ran parallel to the Aemilian Way, the legions’ road from the Adriatic to Constantinople: a thread on which Alexandroupolis and a dozen more ancient cities are strung.

  The carriage that bore us along a narrow-gauge track seemed obsolete as an equipage in a museum. High and narrow, the coachwork was painted to mimic the graining of yellow wood and upholstered in threadbare tasselled velvet. This delightful carriage, fit for two travellers out of Jules Verne, carried us swaying through the Thracian sky and over the gorges and forests of plane trees, the rocky river beds and the scrub-mantled mountainsides at an abnormal height. The ancient Thracians used to hold their mares with their heads downwind in order that the wind might put them in foal. Over which of the Rhodope passes did this invisible stallion come snorting? Every so often we passed solitary police posts and lookout platforms on stilts, each one a pedestal for an armed and helmeted soldier; reminders of the nearness and the danger of the Bulgarian frontier. Asprawl among trees and bracken, blown there by guerrilla mines, the rusty remains of carriages were gloomy mementoes of the civil war. The country shook in the noonday.

  As though its owner were flying alongside, a jovial, unshaven face appeared in the tall frame of the window. It was the ticket collector. When he had climbed in and pocketed our tickets, we watched him work his perilous way along the duckboard of the corridorless train like a cat-burglar. An open cattle-truck was hitched to the rear: raucous singing was wafted to us and a blue flag whirled overhead on a pole. The conductor, now settled in our carriage for a chat on his return journey, confirmed what we had surmised. “Yes, it’s a Sarakatsán bridegroom on his way to a wedding at Sikarayia. They’ve been drinking for days....” When we pulled up at the next wayside halt, the whole party, with the banner aswirl, leapt shouting and singing to the platform and bore down on a small group under an acacia tree. The groom and his cronies returned a few moments later carrying the bride. This figure, dressed in a stiff black and white costume of angular and Aztec strangeness and borne aloft in her captors’ arms, sailed the length of the train with the immobility and the silence of a sacred image translated from shrine to shrine. As it careered past, I saw that the shaft of the standard-bearer’s banner was topped by a pomegranate. Another carried a ribboned wooden cross with another pomegranate affixed to the top and two more to either end of the crossbeam. When they were aboard, several of the groom’s party fired their guns into the sky: singing and intermittent firing accompanied the rest of the journey. “Paráxenoi anthropoi” vouchsafed the conductor, after clicking his tongue censoriously a dozen times. “Odd people....” They did seem a contrast to the lofty Victorian stateliness of our carriage. The groom, we learnt, was the son of a great tsellingas—the head of a clan, as it were, of Sarakatsán shepherds—an architsellingas, in fact—called Kosta Zogas, who wintered at Sikarayia and pastured his sheep in the Rhodope mountains in summer; the bride’s father, another architsellingas called Vrysas, grazed his flocks on the same summer grass, wintering near Souphlí by the banks of the Hebrus. “You’d think,” he went on, “when you see them in their rush hovels and their old capes, that they were poor. Not a bit of it! They’ve got pots of money. Literally pots: they fill pitchers with gold sovereigns and bury them, no one knows how many. Whole fortunes hidden in the ground....”

  We came to a standstill in Sikarayia. It was an entire village of beautifully thatched Sarakatsán huts, giant beehives swelling and tapering in tiers of cropped reed which overlapped with the precision of the plating on a seven-banded armadillo. They were topped with wooden crosses near holes in the thatch through which thin blue smoke curled. Black-clad Sarakatsáns crowded below the nuptial truck, the bride was hoisted to earth, and, in a chorus of shouts and greetings and a rattle of musketry, the whole mob headed for the little white church. The train, expelling a whistle and an answering obligato of steam, dwindled swaying down the valley.

  Inside, two rows of columns sustained the white barrel-vault o
f the basilica. A gilt iconostasis blazed; overhead hung a great candelabrum formed by double-headed Byzantine eagles joining their brass wing-tips in a ring and from the centre an ostrich’s egg was suspended.[2] The noise and the heat were considerable and thonged wooden flasks full of warm red wine circulated freely among the congregation. The loose blue-black hair of the celebrant—a commanding and raven-bearded man in a white dalmatic crossed by a broad blue and silver stole—cataracted to his waist with the ampleness of Rapunzel. His chanting soared heroically and effortlessly above the hubbub. All the faces were scorched, many were aquiline and blue-eyed and the hair of several shepherds was bleached by the sun to a flaxen fairness. Apart from the priest’s, the only grave faces there were those of the bridal couple. The bride’s withdrawn expression, her downcast eyes under her flowered headdress and the small blue cross which was strangely pencilled or painted on her brow, never changed. The groom was dressed in a gold-embroidered red velvet waistcoat, a silk sash with the blue and white Greek colours, jutting white fustanella and tights and, disappointingly, pointed black townee shoes. His face, rather a commonplace one for a Sarakatsán, was a mask of confused virile earnestness. In only one thing did his outfit differ from the full-dress Greek mountain costume: black woollen armlets, embroidered with specifically Sarakatsán geometric zigzags, encased his forearms below ample white sleeves which ended at his elbow. In spite of the chaos the service evolved unperturbed. On either side of a portable altar erected in the nave, two little shepherd boys held the tall ribanded candles like the lances of heraldic supporters. The koumbaros switched the flimsy white flower-crowns from head to head and arranged and rearranged their hands and bound them with ribbon and performed yet more complex manipulations with the ring; he followed them in kissing the bossy silver binding of the proffered missal. Hand in hand, led by the priest under a fusillade of flung rice and sweets, he accompanied them thrice round the altar in a slow and dignified dance. More than any other stage in the solemnization—for the offered wine is merely a commemoration of the wedding at Cana of Galilee—this hieratic pavane hallows and confirms the sacrament.[3]

  Out in the sunlight, all was levity, flourished banners and gunfire again. We made our way through the wigwams to the house which the groom’s father, striking up-to-date roots in his winter-pastures, had recently built. As the newly-wed couple reached the threshold, someone handed the groom a sieve, which he threw over his shoulder: a measure which is said to forfend marital discord. They both kissed the hand of the groom’s father, laid it reverently to their foreheads for a second and vanished under the lintel. My friend of yesterday, Barba Petro, introduced us to this pastoral dynast. He welcomed us with the same graceful inclination of his hand laid on his breast and led us indoors.

  Guests were seated on the low divan all round the room and crowded cross-legged on the mats which padded the floor. As each new guest arrived they intoned a welcoming song while black-swathed aunts and grandmothers offered the newcomers saucers with a spoonful of jam, a glass of water and a thimbleful of raki: “Mother, our friends have come,” they sang, “our bidden guests. Bid them welcome with honey and sugar and with golden words.” The room was filling with dark figures, sitting with their thick-shod legs crossed beneath them or with one, wide outflung, rearing a clouted shoe at an odd angle and here and there a tufted brogue, the other leg grasped round the shank. Some sat with hands linked round their doubled-up knees, others leant back against the wall or the divan with a knee cocked up to support an outstretched arm whose fingers released the amber beads of a komboloi at intervals of a few seconds. All were luxuriously asprawl and akimbo. The company bristled with crooks; they lay across their laps or tilted at a slope over their shoulders; some were held bolt upright in gnarled fists with their butts on the floor. Others leaned against the wall, the tip of the shaft of each well-worn staff slotting into a different twirling summit carved in the shape of a dolphin, a dragon, a ram’s head or a snake. Two of them, as though they were the property of two hedge-prelates, had crosier-like hooks of steel. Only a few of the guests were dressed in black kilts. The others were hosed in rough, hairy, black jodhpurs. One or two of the wildest and shaggiest were shod in rawhide moccasins tilting up in canoe tips and worn over swathes of white wool and bound and cross gartered over padded ankles with wide thongs. All of them wore their soft and rakish black kalpaks askew. Except for the white and pleated bridegroom standing by the door to receive horny handshakes and whiskery embraces as the guest ambled in, nearly all the people in the room were of advanced or middle age. Some were deeply stricken in years but all were hale and weatherbeaten: tall, beetling, white moustached, venerable and indestructible patriarchs, tsellingas and architsellingas and substantial shepherds from all over Thrace. A couple looked inappropriately scholarly in steel-rimmed and wire-mended spectacles. The old men endowed the room with the aura of an august and exclusive club.

  I could scarcely believe that at last I was sitting with several score of these evanescent and almost mythical men. They conversed in a roar. Used to shouting against the wind to each other from hill-top to hill-top, they find it hard to modulate their voices at close quarters; the smallest talk is stentorian. (The only alternative is a collusive and almost inaudible whisper, to which they suddenly resort if they detect a look of suffering on their interlocutor.) The aroma of the folds hung thick and the smell of raw tobacco. Every so often, a savoury whiff of roasting drifted in from outside. Now and then, too, there was that faint reek of singeing cloth produced by the dried fungus which they use as tinder. They hold a pinch of it against a piece of steel shaped like a magnet, which they strike with a flint until the fungus catches fire; then they light their rolled cigarettes or lay it on the rubbed leaves in the bowls of their home-made pipes. When the elaborate business is over, they wrap up all this gear in a goat-skin wallet and stow it in the folds of their sashes.

  I am not very accurate in picking out regional Greek accents, but their thick rural tones did not sound the same as those which I had so far noticed in Thrace. They resembled, rather, the dialect of Roumeli and of parts of Epirus, much farther west; an accent which suppresses the final vowels and most of those in the middle of words as well. It makes speech sound oddly chopped and consonantal. Their talk was even harder to understand, as the Sarakatsáns have a vast and arcane vocabulary for the minutiæ of their calling: for different kinds of springs and qualities of grass, for ways of hut-building and bell-tuning and for breeds of sheep and goats and horses and watch-dogs. They have their own expressions for all the tupping, lambing, weaning, shearing, carding, spinning, milking, seething, scalding, straining, basket-weaving, path-finding, tent-pitching, camp-striking, trough-scooping and weather-divining round which their whole life turns. How should a layman know that a reddish or dark-faced sheep is called a katsnoúla or that belling them is called “ironing” or “arming” them? Óti siderónoun i armatónoun tes katsnoúles, in fact? Or how many okas of bronze, and of what pitch, should be slung round the neck of a bell-wether? Or that the best time to arm the flocks is at the Feast of the Annunciation, “when the first cuckoo is heard”? Such were the topics that boomed about the room.

  This squatting on low divans or on the mat-strewn floor gave a new angle to life. It was strange to stand up all at once and look across the empty upper part of the room through two shafts of sunlight (split up by the window-bars into three-dimensional smoke-blue parallelograms slanting down into the throng) to the flickering ikons at the other end: and then down at the black kalpaks and the bristling crooks of the hundred nomads below.

  Barba Petro pointed out the celebrities: “Uncle George over there, with only one eye—he’s one of the biggest tsellingas in the Rhodope: over ten thousand sheep and goats he’s got and I expect this is the first time he’s been inside a house. The one talking to him is ninety-three; he used to pasture his flocks near Saranta Ekklesies or Forty Churches—Kirk Kilisse, the Turks call it—away, away, beyond Adrianople. Then after the Balk
an Wars the Turks closed the frontier, so now he has his winter huts along the coast, west of here, below Xanthi. The other one, with a scar on his forehead, used to winter between Haskovo and Stara Zagora—wonderful grass!—but now, what with the Bulgars, the hornwearers, he’s had to look elsewhere....I had a few, but good ones. I used to graze them not far from Kios, in Bithynia, near Nicaea on the Asian coast. That was years, years ago....Caïques sailing past in the Sea of Marmara could hear my bells....But the Rhodope is where we all belong....” I asked him what the name Sarakatsán meant, saying that I had heard it was really Karakatchani, a Turkish word meaning “the black ones who depart” or “the black departers.” He shut his eyes and flung back his head, clicking his tongue in the negative, “Tk, tk! That’s not right. We don’t know, but some people say we get our name from the village of Syrako, in Epirus. They say Ali Pasha burnt the place down and drove us away and left us wandering ever since.” I said Syrako was a Koutzovlach village.[4]