But there was something more, and at once. Yorgo, the old man’s grandson who had taken my horse and me under his wing (planning to guide us next morning on a short-cut over the hills to a point where we could swoop down on the army again), fished out a long bone flute. The music that began to hover through the hut was moving and breathless. It started with long and deep notes separated by pauses; then it shot aloft in patterns of great complexity. Repeated and accelerating trills led to sustained high notes which left the tune quivering in mid-air before plummeting an octave to those low and long-drawn initial semibreves. Notes of an icy clarity alternated with notes of a stirring, reedy, and at moments almost rasping hoarseness. After a long breath, they sailed again into limpid and piercing airs of a most touching softness; the same minor phrase recurred again and again with diminishing volume, until the final high flourishes presaged the protracted bass notes once more, each of them preceded and followed by a lengthening hiatus of silence. One can think of no apter or more accurate reflection in sound of the mountains and woods and flocks and the nomads’ life.
Less lulling music cannot be imagined. But, overcome at last by the day’s doings, I must have fallen asleep in the middle of it. Someone threw a cloak over me. I woke up an hour after midnight to find the hut in the dark except for the embers of the fire and empty of all but the lightly snoring patriarch the other side. Yorgo’s hooded departing back was outlined for a moment in the doorway against the stars. A murmur of voices sounded in the cold outside as the shepherds, like monks before the Night Office, assembled for the first milking; this was the equivalent of matins in their pastoral Book of Hours. Then silence fell and after a minute or two, the faint stirring of bells and waking flocks was hushed by the returning currents of sleep.
If I Sarakatsáni had been written then and if I had read it I would have looked more attentively at Yorgo’s flute. Apart from the Greece-wide wooden flute, there are, or used to be, two kinds among these wanderers. One, with a deep and booming note, is a sawn-off gun barrel into which holes have been bored at the appropriate intervals. The other, says I Sarakatsáni, is made from the longest bone from an eagle’s wing. We know that this bird is abominated. I think Yorgo’s flute was one of these. After shooting the eagle and cleaning the wing-bone by burying it, he would have had to neutralize its wicked mana by leaving it under an altar for forty days of purification and exorcism before daring to drill the stop-holes and put it to his lips.
To the names of Hoeg and Hadjimichalis, a third must now be added, and this time, an English one. It was this spring, in fleeting refresher-visits to encampments in distant Epirus, that I first started to hear of “Tzon” and “Seela.” Always uttered with proprietary affection, these syllables were names to conjure with among the nomads. It took some time to connect these mysterious and almost mythical beings (who, the nomads told us, had lived for years among them in a hut they had built for them, spoke the dialect and accompanied their migrations) with John Campbell[28] the social anthropologist, and his wife Sheila. But so it was, and, later on, I was lucky enough to find them in Athens. We talked about the Sarakatsáns for many hours, and, to deck this chapter, already reeking of larceny, I have borrowed several precious fragments of knowledge from their Aladdin’s cave. Former books, and even these pages, have been at pains to prove some theory of historical origin. This makes a purely anthropological study of the Sarakatsáns, such as John Campbell’s, of unique importance and one which students of modern Greece will neglect at their peril.
Almost the last Sarakatsáns I have seen are an encampment above Rizani in the foothills of the Thesprotian mountains in western Epirus. The poplars and the shingly bed of the blue-green Kalamos wind westwards through Byronic ranges towards Igoumenitza and the Ionian Sea. The outline of Corfu traverses the jagged V of the foreground mountains like the log that holds the jaws of a captive alligator asunder. It was windy and long after dark when Joan and John Craxton and I reached the little settlement of the Charisis family. Here the password of the name of Campbell did the trick at once and soon we were settled in our stockinged feet on the mat-strewn floor and on divans of blanket-padded brushwood and bracken beside the hearth at the end of the rectangular hut of Yanni the tsellingas. It stood among the cones like a small basilica of reeds. The end round the hearth was divided from the rest by a sort of plaited wicker rood-screen. The men all wore black homespun jackets and tapering trousers; their wives, alas, had abandoned their angular and bi-coloured garb for the universal and funereal black of most Greek peasant women, from which only the stiff pleating of their skirts and the metal buckles of their belts now distinguished them. The strange outfits of the older ones were now stowed away and only produced and admired, once in a while, as precious but obsolete heirlooms. It was another sign of the times that this settlement had become a semi-permanent winter sojourn. On the way, our torch had picked out a couple of rows of onions and a few olive saplings: fell totem-poles of impending stability. In another month they would be migrating to their mountain pastures above the village of Vitza, high in the bleak and splendid Zagora mountains between Yanina and the Albanian border.
In spite of all this there was no mistaking the utter difference of our host and of his many brothers and their wives and offspring—all of whom somehow packed into this bright alcove—from the rest of the world; in dialect, manner, looks, bearing and turn of phrase. Their hair was fair and unkempt, their faces hollow-cheeked and aquiline, their blue-grey eyes wide with alertness and high spirits. The decisive and delicate finish of jawbone, nostril, nose, cheekbone and brow, all lit from below like the faces of the apostles at the Feast at Emmaus by the burning ilex branches and an oil-dip on an iron tripod, looked almost preposterously patrician. (They were to make the citizens of the gloomy little town of Igoumenitza, afterwards, seem plebeian and even brutish in our spoilt eyes.) The reckless tempo of their talk, the dash, humour and ease and the friendliness and lack of fuss of their welcome, were high style indeed, a text-book example of what Castiglione, in Il Cortegiano, calls sprezzatura, the ultimate distinction of manners. The same held good of the children—the shadows were argus-eyed with beautiful progeny—and the women who stood in the threshold, frequently chiming impulsively and un-hierarchically into the general chat. I noticed that only the husbands called the women by their Christian names; the others addressed them by the feminine form of their husbands’, “Yánaina,” “Andónaina,” “Nicólaina,” “Yórgaina”: she-John, she-Antony, she-Nicolas, she-George, and so on.
After bread and milk, the ouzo glass was soon whizzing round at a great rate. To do us honour, they were bent on killing one of two very young kids which had been brought into the camp that morning. We refused (probably to their real sorrow, as they long for an excuse to eat meat); firstly to avoid being a nuisance—mistakenly—and secondly, because we had seen the two kids with their dam in a small hut next door; attractive little piebald creatures that we had not the heart to condemn. We used Lent as a pretext, and they all turned to each other in wonder and sadness, saying, “Look at that! See how pious foreigners are; not like us!” Knowing how severely they fast, and realizing too late how welcome would have been a breach excused or sanctioned by the laws of hospitality, we felt overcome with embarrassed shame at our hypocrisy, and wished we could unsay our refusal. Andoni, the tsellingas’s youngest brother, the handsomest and most spirited of the lot, showed us the cylindrical metal cover, a yard in diameter and exactly fitting the round raised clay ramp of the hearth, under which they baked their bread and their pittas and lambs and kids when they got them. We were joined by a dashing boy called Christo Gogola; wintering in a stani fifty miles away, he was a neighbour in summer, and had come to invite them all to his wedding soon after Easter. More ouzo circulated, and soon songs in praise of Katsandóni, Tzavellas and other Klepht heroes filled the hut. In time this turned into a session of story-telling, mostly by Andoni, in a thick and intricate dialect with a ruthless docking of final vowels and a slurring of
those in the middle that was almost Russian. One had to strain every faculty to follow the drift.[29] They were fairy tales, rather like those of Grimm, in which talking snakes and wolves and dogs played a great part; there were shepherds who understood the language of animals, too, and enlisted the help of the kingdom of beasts—cocks, donkeys, dogs and swallows—in the settlement of their marital quarrels. Yes, they hated eagles, Andoni said when I asked him, and for the usual reasons. Cuckoos, pigeons and swallows were their favourite birds; they represented summer and the mountains, absence from which in the plains always seems like banishment: “Once the lambs hear the cuckoos, we know we’re all right.” They spoke of snakes coming to drink milk by the fire; you must never hurt such a one—he’s the stoichion, the genius or daemon of the dwelling, just as he was in ancient times, and he brings good fortune to the household. Apart from fairy tales, some old men were said to understand the language of beasts, and a case was cited of an ageing shepherd knowing exactly when he was going to die by overhearing a conversation between a dog and a cock outside his hut.
“That’s all talk,” the tsellingas said, a man with a rationalist turn. “I’ve never come across it. Years and years ago, perhaps, in our grandfathers’ time. Not now....”
Wolves, especially up in the Zagorochória, were a permanent threat, you could see them trooping among the rocks there in packs of twenty or more, and their howling struck a chill to the heart. Anyone who shot a wolf cut the head off and took it round the huts and even down to the villages, and collected presents of money or eggs or wine. Andoni had come upon a nest of wolf-cubs three years ago, and tried to bring them up, in vain: “Beautiful little creature, but you could tell by their eyes they were bad....” Jackals, too, were a danger to young lambs and kids. There were lots of foxes, but they only went for chickens, so they didn’t worry about them. They sometimes saw deer on the mountains, but you only got bears much farther east, among the Koutzovlachs on the Mace-donian flanks of the Pindus. “And then there are two-legged wolves,” the tsellingas darkly announced. “And they don’t only go after sheep and lambs. Some of them stole six horses of mine that I had hobbled and set to graze on the hill over there. Perhaps it was the villagers, we’re always having trouble with them. Or Vlachs. I chased them for days but never saw hide nor hair of the horses again. They probably sold them in Yanina, or even far away in Thessaly. To the Vlachs perhaps.” They knew all about Shadowy Ones and Demons, Skiasmata and Daoutis; they were a rotten lot. Andoni touched on something even worse. Through the sierras of the Zagora, beyond Vitza and Monodendri where they grazed their flocks in summer, runs the narrow and terrible gorge of Vichou, falling sheer in a chasm to great depths: a dark chaos of boulders and spikes through which, when it is in spate, a tributary of the Aoös river foams with a noise like faraway thunder. “When you hear flutes and instruments playing down there,” Andoni said, with his long fingers spreading in the firelight to conjure up this baneful minstrelsy, “violins and guitars and mandolins—there is no one there, no musicians at all, mind you—it’s bad, bad, bad. Bad for the flocks, bad for us, bad for everyone....” The others all nodded in thoughtful and melancholy assent, as though they were sorry the subject had been brought up. Yanina, the provincial capital of Epirus, which, though they had passed nearby with their flocks scores of times, few of them had visited, cropped up in their talk in bated breath, as though it were London or Paris or Babylon, a hotbed of untold luxury and a theme for wild conjecture and hearsay. But whenever their talk veered to their summer pastures in the Zagora, all their eyes lit up like those of the children of Israel at the thought of Canaan, and all spoke at once. That’s where we should come and stay with them. What pigeons, what hares! You didn’t need wine there—the air made you drunk; and as for the shade, the grass, the trees and the water—why the water came gushing out of the living rock as cold as ice, you couldn’t drink it it was so cold, and you could drink it by the oka, and feel like a giant....Words failed them.
They implored us to stay. They longed to enlarge on the wonders of their mountains and they were hot for news, too, about the outside world—they so seldom had strangers to talk to. “Listen to the wind!” they said. But once more, as at Sikarayia, some tiresome reason beckoned us on to Igoumenitza and the sea. We got up to leave at first milking time in the small hours, bidden in chorus, as we emerged, to share their paschal lamb at Easter and to come to the Gogolas wedding and, above all, to visit them in the mountains. Half the company made ready to accompany us back to the main road, “to keep us clear of the rocks and chasms.” The moon was hidden by a milky mackerel sky. A strong wind blew and a wrack of long silver-rimmed cloud hung in the sky above the sea and the ghostly shape of Corfu. From the hut next door we could hear the two kids bleating piteously. Andoni laughed. “Listen!” he said, “they know they’ve been spared, they’re saying thank you! We’ll kill a lamb when you come up to the Zagorochória and we’ll shoot some hares too, and some pigeons, and some partridges. They are wonderful birds, fatter than the ones they fatten up in cages in Yanina for generals and governors and judges and lawyers and merchants and bishops....”
Next day we headed south through the Thesprotian mountains that tower from the Epirote coast between Igoumenitza and Parga, a secluded region full of stony villages with broken minarets and ruined mosques where Albanian beys and agas used to live in lordly halls among plane trees; many of the villagers talk the Cham dialect of Albanian. It is an almost inaccessible world, enclosing sudden grassy plateaux with wild irises and anemones and meadows of narcissi and conical hills and secret lakes with swamps and reeds and flocks of waterbirds. Beyond the steely eastern barrier, the mountains shoot down to the Acherousian plain, where, under the shadow of the great mountain stronghold of Souli, the Acheron and Cocytus meet, two rivers of Hades. Many Vlachs and Karagounis pasture their flocks in this hermetic region. Below a collection of dismal and moulting wigwams on a bleak slope we fell in with some Sarakatsáns from the northern Zagora with a large flock of black goats. Here and there among the flocks near the huts and the folds stood mysterious tapering piles of boulders about eight or ten feet high, over the top of each of which was draped a hooded nomad’s cloak. They looked odd and sinister. We asked one of the shepherds what they were for.
“To frighten the wolves away,” he said.
“Do you get many of them here?”
“Ah,” he said sadly. “That’s the sort of place it is. Tétios éinai o tópos....”
It looked it, too.
Now, a bit reluctantly, I must call a halt to these flashbacks and postscripts—high time, perhaps—and retreat several years, a few hundred miles in space and a score of pages, to the main thread of this narrative, from which we began to deviate among the tassels and the buttoned upholstery of the carriage rocking back with us through the Thracian darkness between Sikarayia and Alexandroupolis.
Not many minutes had passed before the guard worked his perilous way along the duckboard outside and climbed in; not to punch our tickets, but for a chat. We were his only passengers. He was a dark, jovial, round-faced refugee from Smyrna.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, offering cigarettes, “did you find out where they hide their pots of gold? Any for me? I could do with it, at this job.”
We told him about the wedding. As I had already absorbed one or two hazy notions about the possibility of the ancient descent of the Sarakatsáns, I asked him what he thought about it.
“I don’t know,” he said amiably, “and, what’s more, I don’t care. I hate the ancient Greeks. We had to learn all about them at school: Plato, Socrates, Pericles, Leonidas, Aristotle, Euripides, Homer—Andra mi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon os malla polla and all that stuff. No, I don’t hate them: that’s too strong. But what have they got to do with me? Perhaps we descend from them, perhaps we don’t, what does it matter? And who did they descend from, pray? Nobody knows. They were Greeks and so are we, that’s all we know. I come from Smyrna—there’s an ancient Greek city
for you—and I may be more Greek than the Greeks in Athens, more Greek than your Sarakatsáns, for all I know. Who cares? Greece is an idea, that’s the thing! That’s what keeps us together—that, and the language and the country and the Church—not that I like priests particularly, but we owe them a lot. And those old Greeks, our celebrated ancestors, are a nuisance and I’ll tell you why. They haunt us. We can never be as great as they were, nobody can. They make us feel guilty. We can’t do anything, people think, because of a few old books and temples and lumps of marble. And clever foreigners who know all about the ancients come here expecting to be surrounded by Apollos and gentlemen in helmets and laurel leaves, and what do they see? Me: a small dark fat man with a moustache and eyes like boot buttons!” He laughed good-naturedly. “To hell with them! Give me the men of the War of Independence, who chucked out the Turks, give me Averoff, who presented us with a battleship out of his own pocket, give me Venizelos, who saved us all and turned Greece into a proper country. What’s wrong with them? If we weren’t such fools and always quarrelling among ourselves, if we could have no wars or revolutions for fifty years—fifty years, that’s all I ask—you’d see what a country we’d become! Then we could start worrying about the Trojan Horse and working out our relationship to Pericles and finding out whether the Sarakatsáns descend from the ancient Greeks!”
I saw his point. For some, the ancients are a source of inspiration and vague pride; the outside world sets so high a price on them; to others they are a perpetual irritation. What about Byzantium? that’s where our traditions date from, a modern Greek may think; not from Pericles holding forth on the Acropolis, not from Diogenes’s barrel or the tent of Achilles.
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