The eclipse of Romiosyne will carry off some bad old ways, but much that is precious and venerable. There is something patronizing and unfair in the opposing spirit. It lays claim to all that is virtuous in rustic Greece; all that is backward, superstitious, lacking in scruple, unpolished or uncivil it groups under Romaic things. This creates an insipid picture of Greece, reducing rustic life to innocuous folklore and whittling the countryman down to an evzone doll. The Greeks are very conscious of foreign opinion: they tend to shepherd foreigners towards the conventionally acceptable things and away from the backward and the obscure. They need not have these fears. The strangers who form the deepest regard for Greece are not the ones who are bear-led; they are the solitaries whose travels lead them, through chance or poverty or curiosity, along the humble and recondite purlieus of Greek life. The monuments of the past evoke their deserved wonder, but it is not these that finally win pride of place in the memory and affection; it is the live Greeks themselves: not the Greeks as they were two-and-a-half thousand years ago, nor as they will be or could be or should be one day, but as they are.
“Really!” I can hear some Athenian exclaim at this point. “Are we to stop progress for the sake of an occasional eccentric traveller? Undo the work of a hundred-and-fifty years? Bring back piracy and reinstall the brigands, encourage armed faction, civil war, assassination, malaria, illiteracy? What else? Sloth, bribery, dirt, disease, poverty; lawlessness, superstition, stone-age agriculture, the whole wretched inheritance of Ottoman times—all to supply a refreshing change from the sophistication of the West? You seem to forget how poor the country is. Are we to call a halt to industry and tourism? Stop building roads, opening up communications? What about the mountain people for whom you profess such fondness? Ask them what they think...!” Were I engaged on the task of demolishing my own argument, I would begin on exactly these lines; for he is right, and his questions are unanswerable.
“And,” the hypothetical Athenian might continue, a little wearily, and with equal justice, “there is little sympathy, I notice, or only a few grudging and perfunctory words, for the terrible difficulty that confronted us; little praise for the efforts of the Neo-Hellenists, the Modernists, the Westernizers, or whatever we are, to deal with it all. You seem to forget the size of the task when we got rid of the Turks. We needed whatever inspiration we could find: why not Ancient Greece? I think”—and here I detect a tolerant smile behind the voice—“we have as good a right to it as the rest of the world. And we are not really quite the philistines or pedants you imply. It is true that many things of value are being sacrificed. We know it and we regret it. It is inevitable, and the same is happening everywhere. But surely the gain outweighs the loss...?”
His words are true and as they die from the air I realize how severely they damage my case. The civilized tones of this imaginary Athenian also remind me of the growing number of Greeks who are sadly aware of the predicament: men who must feel the hopelessness of the imbalance with an anguish far deeper than anything that can affect a foreigner. I remember, too, painters like Ghika, poets like Seferis, and a whole world of literature and the arts which has not only assimilated the ancient world and tapped deep sources of inspiration in the world of Byzantium and Romiosyne, but absorbed all that the West has to offer as well. They have almost—though not entirely, I hope, in the interests of human variety—reconciled the Helleno-Romaic Dilemma.[8] But, above all, the invisible speaker brings home yet again the ineluctable doom of Romiosyne; by underlining the blessings that accompany its passing, he almost reconciles me to it.
And yet...
And yet, stubborn, unregenerate and irreducible, the pro-Romaic bias lingers. It can be condemned as backward and selfish and dismissed as obsolete; but it thrives as robustly as a field of tares planted by years of wandering and too deep-rooted to uproot. Those distant ranges and archipelagos instilled me with the conviction or the illusion of approach to the truest and most interesting secrets of Greece. Every region has contributed to this: the great temples and ruins and the famous summer islands which are the common experience of all visitors; but also Macedonia, the Pindus, the Rhodope mountains of Thrace, the midwinter cordilleras by the Albanian border, the rocky hamlets of the Zagora, jagged Epirus, the Thessalian foothills, the hinterland of Roumeli, the Peloponnesian watersheds, roadless Tzakonia, the ultimate wilderness of the Mani and a whole solar-system of islands. They are not only the background for dilettante wanderings in summer and spring, but for winter too, when life, tormented by wind and rain or hushed by snow, shrinks from its autumnal expanse to huddled lamplit circles in huts and caves: at moments it is a world of wintry chaos, exhilarated by advances and victories and racked by defeat, occupation and discord.
These regions are not empty landscapes but the mineral backcloth—stage, stage-wings and proscenium—of a theatre flung up for the Greeks themselves: diminished when the cast withdraws, validated by their entry. Piranesi and Lear place figures about their scenery for scale or decoration or local colour or corroborative detail. It is not so here. Each pair of eyes and each voice is anarchically distinct. Isolated against horizontal and zigzag, magnified by a lens of light, sharpened by the sun’s behaviour, fragmented above blazing thorns or transfigured by lightning, every face in turn is the protagonist of its own drama.
Crete gave my retrogressive hankerings their final twist. In spite of the insular pride of the inhabitants, their aloofness from the mainland and the idiosyncrasy of their dialect and their customs, this island is an epitome of Greece. Greek virtues and vices, under sharper mountains and a hotter sun, reach exasperation point. It is, in the unpejorative sense with which I have been trying to rehabilitate the word, the most Romaic region of all; the last region the Turks relinquished. In another sense it is the least; Crete fell to the Turks two centuries later than the rest of the Byzantine Empire. This reprieve was the last half of four hundred years of restless subjection to Venice. In 1669, after a long siege, Candia fell to the Turks, and for two hundred and forty-six years Crete was the worst governed province of the Ottoman Empire and the one where the conquering race was thickest on the ground. It was the fault of the Great Powers, not Crete, that her liberation was so long delayed. Revolts against the Venetians had been leavened by interregna of literary and artistic activity. But her history under the Turks was a sequence of insurrections, massacres, raids, pursuits and wars almost without a break. Enosis with Greece was only achieved in 1915.
Like certain ranges of Epirus and the Mani, the Cretan mountains were never entirely subdued. The struggle could only have been carried on in a land of wild mountains by people of exceptional vitality and determination. There is hardly a village where the old men are unable to recall at least one rebellion and remember with advantages the deeds they did. (Until a few years ago, an old woman in the nome of Retimo still survived from the siege of the Abbey of Arkadi. Having turned it into a fortress and refuge against the besieging Turks, the abbot, when supplies at last ran short, touched off the powder magazine and sent himself and his fellow-defenders sky high.[9] One tiny swaddled girl, blown a couple of furlongs, landed in a thicket and lived....) The memory of these times was still fresh in 1941, when the island was invaded by the German parachutists. Following the instinct of centuries, the old men and boys and women (for the retreat had marooned nearly everyone of military age on the mainland) leapt to arms and fell on the invaders alongside their allies. Instead of three years of docile subjection these acts ushered in bitter resistance.
The grandeurs and miseries of the occupation are well known. But that is not, here, the point. It is this. When, with a scattered handful of other Englishmen, I found myself involved in these doings, the ranges strung between Ida and the White Mountains were our refuge; the people we lived among were mountaineers, shepherds and villagers living high above the plains and the cities in circumstances which exactly tallied with the life and the background of the Klephts in revolt at any time during the past few hundred years. M
odern life had only found the most hazardous foothold; many of the blemishes of lawless mountain life ran riot. There were leaders of guerrilla bands who were paragons of courage and unselfishness; a few, equally brave, were as ruthless and ambitious as Tamburlaine. The habit of centuries, as we have seen, impelled resistance to the occupation at all costs. It had also bequeathed lawless customs which now wreak havoc among the Cretans themselves. They are virtually weaned on powder and shot; every shepherd goes armed, and a worship of guns and great skill in handling them dominate the highlands. The rustling of flocks, though it is on the wane, still goes on. Marriages sometimes begin by the armed abduction of the bride by her suitor and his friends, and blood feuds, initiated, perhaps, by one of these two causes or by an insult, by rage or an exchange of shots, can decimate opposing families over a space of decades and seal up neighbouring villages in hostile deadlock. Harsh and terrible deeds are done in the name of family honour. The wildness of the country puts these things beyond the reach of the law and fills the mountains, even in peacetime, with a scattered population of outlaws; in war, when all shadow of authority except the hostile and impotent writ of the enemy was swept aside, lawless ways doubly prospered. In spite of the occupation, in which these mountaineers were so resolute and determined, private vengeance (especially in Sphakia and Selino) laid many villagers low.
All this is confined to a few regions and it is on the wane. Obviously, it is the duty of the state to stamp out these fierce customs. Yet I can never hear or read of a Cretan mountaineer being hunted down and brought to book for participating in one of these mountain feuds without a feeling of compunction: the juxtaposition of modern law and those eagle-haunted wildernesses seems somehow as incongruous as the idea of Orestes bundled into a Black Maria. For many of these tragedies are, by age-old standards, innocent; they are prompted by feelings of duty and conducted with honour.[10] There was much to deplore; much more, however, to admire; in particular their courage and the compassion that prompted them to shelter, clothe and feed the straggling army of their marooned allies. For this hundreds of Cretans were killed in reprisal massacres, and scores of villages were burnt to ashes; and, when their protégés were safely spirited away to Africa, their ardour was poured into resistance, and, most mercifully for us, into backing up the handful of foreign emissaries who had been dropped into their midst to help carry on the secret war. It was no mean thing for these solitary allies in their midst to feel that they had the support of a dozen mountain-ranges and of several hundred villages; indeed, if need be—and there was need, now and then—of the whole island.
But, apart from these general qualities, so propitious to the struggle which was afoot, it was the detail and the structure of their life—in which we aspired, in speech and manner, to drown ourselves—which invited fascination and respect.
Little in these crags and ravines had changed for centuries. One felt that each village must have existed since Minoan times. There was little there but a church filled with flaking Byzantine frescoes and a slanting maze of stepped and cobbled lanes; but there were subtle differences in the weave and the pattern of blankets and knapsacks and the way that men tied their fringed head-kerchiefs, and in the cut of their hooded capes, and in some of them, a distinguishing accent, a variant of the Cretan dialect, and even of physical appearance. However often these villages had been sacked and burned they were always built again and according to an unbreakable formula. I remember sitting on the flat roof of a friend’s[11] house in Anoyeia, on the slopes of Mount Ida, and, as I gazed at the moonlit jig-saw of roofs and houses all round, calling to mind Aristotle’s ideal for the capitals of the Greek states: cities small enough to hear the voice of one herald.
We seldom stayed in villages; not through fear of treachery, but lest innocent garrulity should endanger them. The houses contained little: a semi-circular arch across the living-room, a smoke-blackened hearth, a low ledge of divan round the walls spread with coloured blankets, a loom, a wooden table and stools, the ikons and their lamp and a pitcher with thorn twigs in the mouth against flying insects. Onions, garlic and tomatoes hung from the cobwebbed beams; faded pictures of Venizelos looked down from the walls and enlarged sepia photographs of turbaned grandsires armed to the teeth. Hens, pecking their way indoors, were always being shooed out, and swallows dived to and from their nest in the rafters with a swish; when we were there, rifles leaned in the corner and lay across the tables; some were adorned with silver plaques and cartridge-belts heavy with flashing clips festooned them. The thick embrasures of the windows and the doors framed downhill cascades of olives and a canyon twisting between dovetailing scarps; often these vistas ended in a triangle of the Aegean or the Libyan Sea; they were nearly always commanded by the upheaval of Ida or the White Mountains. Sometimes, with sentries posted, after a banquet with the Olympianly bearded priest, the mayor and the village elders, we would stay the night. At these meals, the women, coiffed and clad in black—saviours of numberless British, New Zealand and Australians—served and stood near with arms akimbo; they joined in the conversation spiritedly but, in this masculine and patriarchal society, seldom sat with us. In villages like this I was treated for small maladies now and then—for rheumatism, due to constant sleeping out in wet clothes—and for persistent headaches. The universal remedy of cupping was followed, in every case, by darker therapies administered by clever old women: many candle-lit signs of the cross were performed over the afflicted part; incantations accompanied them, and oil dropped slowly into a glass of water in ritual quantities. Once a beautiful young witch knotted a pinch of salt in one corner of my turban and murmured spells for half an hour. Impossible to discover the words: “mystiká prágmata! Kalá prágmata! Vaskaníes!” was the only answer, through lips across which forefingers were conspiratorially laid; words followed by peals of laughter from the women and the girls who gather at such times: “Secret things! Good things! Charms...!” They worked at once.
But the high mountains, for nearly three years, were our real home. It was there, at the end of hours climbing and higher than the dizziest village, that devotion to the Greek mountains and their population took root. We lived in goat-folds and abandoned conical cheese-makers’ huts and above all, in the myriad caverns that mercifully riddle the island’s stiff spine. Some were too shallow to keep out the snow, others could house a Cyclops and all his flocks. Here, at ibex-and eagle-height, we settled with our small retinues. Enemy searches kept us on the move and it was in a hundred of these eyries that we got to know an older Crete and an older Greece than anyone dreams of in the plains. Under the dripping firelit stalactites we sprawled and sat cross-legged, our eyes red with smoke, on the branches that padded the cave’s floor and spooned our suppers out of a communal tin plate: beans, lentils, cooked snails and herbs, accompanied by that twice-baked herdsman’s bread that must be soaked in water or goats’ milk before it is eaten. Toasting goats’ cheese sizzled on the points of long daggers and oil dewed our whiskers.[12] These sessions were often cheered by flasks of raki, occasionally distilled from mulberries, sent from the guardian village below. On lucky nights, calabashes of powerful amber-coloured wine loosened all our tongues. Over the shoulders of each figure was slung a bristly white cloak stiff as bark, with the sleeves hanging loose like penguins’ wings; the hoods raised against the wind gave the bearded and moustachioed faces a look of Cistercians turned bandit. Someone would be smashing shells with his pistol-butt and offering peeled walnuts in a horny palm; another sliced tobacco on the stock of a rifle: for hours we forgot the war with talk and singing and stories; laughter echoed along minotaurish warrens.
Few of the old men could write or read, those in middle age found reading hard and writing a grind; the young were defter penmen, but, owing to their short time at school and the disorder of the war, they were not advanced in the craft, apart from an occasional student on the run from the underground in one of the towns. A by-product of this scholastic void was a universal gift for lively and origina
l talk; the flow and style of their discourse were unhindered by the self-consciousness which hobbles and hamstrings the rest of us. They had astonishing memories. These often reached back to their great-grandfathers’ day, and, by hearsay, far beyond. In an island of long lives, this made all the past seem recent: compelling proof of the continuity of history. It reduced the war to just another struggle, the worst and the most recent of many, with which we were perfectly able to deal, and, though the Germans had overrun Greece and driven the British back to El Alamein, win. “Never fear, my child,” some greybeard would say, prophetically prodding the smoke with a forefinger like a fossil, “with Christ and the Virgin’s help, we’ll eat them.” All agreed, and the conversation wandered to the First World War and Asia Minor and arguments about the respective merits of Lloyd George and Clemenceau, to Bismarck and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or the governments, constitutions and electoral systems of different countries. Then the level of this far-ranging chat, much of it far beyond the scope of their literate equivalents in England, might suddenly be reduced by another old man, simpler than his fellows, asking, and evoking general derision and amusement by his question, whether the English were Christians or, like the Moslems, polygamous....Intelligence, humour, curiosity, the rapid assimilation of ideas and their quick deployment, an incomparable narrative knack, arguments resolved by a sudden twist, the inability to leave facts and ideas undeveloped—they are objects to play with like nuggets—all these graces flowered in this stony terrain. The Cretan dialect, with its ancient survivals and turns of phrase and a vocabulary that changed from valley to valley and an accent unpolluted by the metropolis, was an unstaunchable fountain of delight and fascination.
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