Their clothes, however ragged and patched, were emblematic of the dash and spirit they prize so highly: black boots to the knee, baggy, pleated, dark-blue trousers—breeches among the young[13]—wasp-waisted at the middle by a twisted mulberry silk sash eight feet long in which was often stuck a long dagger with a branching ivory hilt and an embossed silver sheath; above this came a black shirt and sometimes a blue waistcoat as tight as a bullfighter’s, stiff with embroidered whorls. A black silk turban with a heavy fringe was twisted at a rakish tilt round every brow. Bandoliers and a slung gun came next—fittings which often accompanied the frocks of abbots, monks and priests—and over them, in winter, the white hooded cape. A curly handled stick, never a crook as on the mainland, with as many wriggles along its shaft as could be found, finishes everything off. All, however tattered and frayed by mountain life, is taut and streamlined, a garb in which, as I well know, it is impossible not to swagger. This bravura was accentuated among the old men by the odd archaic cut of their beards; shorn under the jaw-line, they jutted from their chins like the beards of ancient warriors on vases. This look was underscored by their deceptively frowning eyebrows and the high hawklike bridges of their noses. The ferocity of those swooping brows was contradicted by the eyes beneath. These are seldom wary and reserved, as they are in the Mani: alert, confident, wide, humorous and unguarded, they blaze like lamps.[14] Everything about these men spells alacrity and vigour. They are lean, sweated to the bone, strong and resilient; the old are as hard as the limestone that surrounds them, the young as fast across the mountains as Hurons, as untamed as ibexes. Nowhere in Greece is the quality of leventeiá so clearly manifest. This attribute embraces a range of characteristics: youth, health, nerve, high spirits, humour, quickness of mind and action, skill with weapons, the knack of pleasing girls, love for singing and drinking, generosity, capacity to improvise mantinades—those intricate rhyming couplets sung with a sting in the second line—and “flying like a bird” in the quick and violent dances. Leventeiá often includes virtuosity on the lyra: it is universal zest for life, the love of living dangerously and a readiness for anything.
Rather unexpectedly, this supercharge of energy and extroversion is shot with a most delicately poised sensitiveness, sometimes by a touchiness, where a mishap or a slight, even an imaginary one, can turn the world black and drive its victim into melancholy and languor, almost to pining away. It is the task of friends to diagnose the anguish and exorcize it; not always an easy task. This lurking demon, resembling the tribulatio et angustia of the Psalms, the Greeks call stenachoria. But the problem acts both ways: should distress assault one, they recognize its symptoms with an almost feminine intuitiveness and try, with tact and solicitude, to resolve it; and even if they are mistaken about the cause, this kindness may allay the effect. Their need and their talent for friendship is the obverse of implacable hatred for enemies.
Stenachoria finds them helpless; but, with the major calamities that shower down upon them, they are better fitted to deal; ancestral reactions come to the rescue. The loss of a kinsman in a mountain affray or a reprisal holocaust would unloose grief and rage which, ungovernable at first, the longing for vengeance would channel and the anodynes of fatalism slowly allay. The Cretans see life in tragic and heroic terms. This being so, it is fortunate that their feeling of comedy is also pronounced. They are preternaturally quick at locating the ludicrous aspects of things; they seize the point and throw it back in a different shape. (The gift for laughter in Greece becomes still more remarkable when we think of her neighbours. Turkey, the Slav states, Albania and Southern Italy weave a dark garland of literalness and scarce jokes....) This blessing lightened many of our troubles. It gave a marvellous zest to those long troglodytic sessions which, especially in winter, often kept us pent.
These were the times when one heard how to foretell the future by dreams and by gazing at the markings on the scraped shoulder blades of sheep and learnt about the superstitions and beliefs which still survive there; about gorgons and nereids and vampires; of the “light-shadowed ones,” who can see more than ordinary mortals; of how an ancestor of the Manouras family fought with a dragon outside his village, and how, at each anniversary of the Battle of Frangokástello, phantom hosts of Greeks and Turks—“the people of the dew”—complete with guns and cannon and banners, are seen to fight the battle all over again. The hours were often whiled away with singing mantinades. Some of us even learnt to improvise them ourselves, which was considered a feat for strangers, and hailed with applause. There were many songs. But ta rizitika, “the foothill ones,” were far beyond our scope, so intricate are they, so unseizable in key and rhythm and changes of tempo. One called Chelìdonáki mou gorgó, “my swift little swallow,” especially sticks in my memory....The lyra often accompanied these songs; it is a three-stringed instrument a foot-and-a-half long, propped upright on the musician’s knee and played with a bow. Beautifully hollowed and carved out of walnut, this smooth and polished instrument is light as a feather and capable of a great range of moods. Exciting and violin-like, the melodic line swoops, soars, twirls, laments and exults with a manic-depressive fluidity. It was good luck to have a lyra-player in one’s party, not only for the sake of the music; the players are great fun, as a rule, fast runners, and crack shots; nonpareils of leventeiá, in fact.[15]
The lucid memory of the old men made a century or two ago sound as recent as yesterday. Take the Erotókritos! This poem was written by a shadowy figure called Vincentios Cornaros from the east of the island. A Cretan, in spite of his august Venetian name (perhaps, but not certainly, of remote Venetian origin), he lived in the early seventeenth century during the last decades of the Venetian occupation. The poem, nearly twelve thousand lines of fifteen-syllable rhyming hexameters, is written in deep and wonderful Cretan. Romantic and epic in style, its Arcadian and mediaeval background suggests Orlando Furioso and the dream region of Shakespeare’s wood near Athens. Mountains tower, seas rage, battlements frown from crags, horns resound, glades echo to the cry of hounds, hawks hover, throne-rooms glitter, bowers and chambers are lulled by lute strings, swords clang together, lance after lance is splintered in ceremonious and deadly tournaments. It is the background for the thwarted and ill-starred loves of the hero, Erotókritos and Aretousa, the king of Athens’ daughter; illstarred, that is, until the happy ending, by which time fabulous beasts, witches, spells and terrible steel-clad rivals and a thousand hazards in castles, ravines and forests have all been overcome. This chivalrous and magical world of fable was just as remote from the author’s period as Cervantes from the books that Don Quixote read. Unknown outside Greece because of the deep vernacular that enshrouds it and its daunting length for a translator—though many, including me, have longingly toyed with the idea—it is one of the great epic poems of Europe.
In Crete, this tremendous metrical saga plays the part of the Homeric cycle in Dorian times. Everyone knows it, all can quote vast tracts, and, astonishingly, some of the old men in the mountains, though unable to read and write, could, and still can, recite the whole poem by heart; when one remembers that it is nearly a thousand lines longer than the Odyssey, this feat makes one scratch one’s head with wonder or disbelief. They intone rather than recite it; the voice rises at the caesura and at the end of the first line of a couplet, and drops at the end of the second; now and then to break the monotony, the key shifts. During our winter vigils, it continued for hours; every so often another old man would take over; listening, I occasionally dropped off for an hour or two, and woke to find Erotókritos in the thick of yet another encounter with the Black Knight of Karamania. (He symbolized, at the time the poem first saw the light, the threat of the Ottomans; Turkey had already conquered the rest of Greece, and was soon to submerge Crete itself.) The rhythmic intoning might sway on till daybreak, with some of the listeners rapt, others nodding off or snoring; or until a runner broke in from the dark like a snowman in a gyre of flakes; the news of arrests in Herakleion, Retimo or C
anea or the alarm of a mountain battalion advancing up the valley jerked us all into motion.
Life was not always dark and speluncar. When the snows melted we would pitch our ephemeral quarters on ledges of rock among cedars twisted by the wind, or in high and lonely folds of the mountains far from the eyes of all but initiate shepherds. We exchanged the hut roofs and the cave ceilings for a low and enormous procession of stars or a moon so bright that when it was full the colour of the sea, the mountains, the trees, the thorns and the faces of our companions all showed, as in a reduced daylight, darker replicas of their diurnal colour. The valleys, the foothills and the answering ranges beyond had the gleam of sheet-metal hammered into angles. A blink and a refocus of the eye would bring them close and interleave and volatilize them into a floating and insubstantial universe where only the shadows looked solid: shadows that rocketed in wide spikes up the flanks of the peaks, zigzagged down ravines and spread like immobilized forked lightning along the torrent beds; rock-faults, invisible by daylight, slanted in stripes; the void between the beetling sides of chasms rose in dark obelisks; tapering clefts pitched illusory pyramids: convex and concave changed places. The shade thrown by the nearby fissures, grottos, branches, eyebrows, rifle barrels and scabbards loomed from the insubstantial radiance in geometric figures. They were bars, parallelograms, triangles, lozenges and polygons of darkness; Cubist scenery in which each clump of aloes and cactus rose in a still vortex.
This night life is lodged all the more firmly in my memory because for a long time it was only then that we could move about the island. Night became day. “Look,” a Cretan said, as the upper rim of the moon appeared behind a screen of hills, “our sun is rising. Time to set off!”; and another nocturnal journey began. This was sometimes a caravan of mules loaded with arms and explosives dropped from the sky or disembarked in a lonely cove; sometimes we headed for plateaux where, after days of postponement, the momentary quincunx of our bonfires would bring fresh supplies thudding round us; unless, that is, no miscalculation or sudden wind or confusion of land-marks in the pilot’s eye scattered them among the enemy. More often these travels were undertaken alone except for one companion. Cavemen released, free to leave the mountains at last, and bound for some faraway meeting or gathering of guerrillas, we would descend to the foothills and lose height down glimmering staircases of olive and vineyard. The villages through which we stalked with our guns cocked were silent and unreal as fictions of snow and ivory. We tiptoed under their arches and down lanes that twisted round the corners in paper fans of steps. Sometimes we stopped with circumspection at the shutter of a friend’s house, and after a brief entry and whispered confabulation, continued on our way. Metallic chestnut woods gleamed; the oleanders and poplars were doubly silver by the beds of shrunk streams. The water had dwindled to a net of quicksilver in a waste of boulders that Venetian or Turkish bridgebuilders had spanned with pale arcs of masonry. At a loop in a valley, hundreds of frogs drowned the nightingales, the drilling of crickets and the little owl’s hesitant note. We heard dogs in the villages and brief jangles as flocks woke and fell asleep again in folds half-way to the sky. These sounds strung a thread of urgency and collusion through the peace of the night. Sometimes we would lie flat with held breath in a cactus clump or among the rocks or flattened against a wall under an archway till the footfalls of an enemy patrol died away; noticing that the boulders, the dust and the white plaster were still warm from the daylight hours of midsummer basking. The smell of many herbs filled the air. (A fragrance so powerful that it surrounds the island with a halo of sweet smells several miles in radius; it told us when we were stealthily approaching Crete by sea on moonless nights from the stinking desert, and long before we could descry the great silhouette, that we were getting near.) Advancing through the warm night, we had the sleeping island to ourselves and a thousand charms hung in the air. We reached our rendezvous before dawn; a broken-down water mill, a small monastery thinly monked by warlike brethren, a solitary chapel, a circular threshing floor, or a lonely goat-fold on a high ledge. There would be challenge and answer, a scrape of hobnails on rock and a clinking of arms as dark figures rose gleaming from the shadows into the moonlight; then salutations and fifty whiskery embraces. When the moon set, the sky lifted a wing of radiance at the other end of the heavens. The shafts of the sun sloped up into the air from many clefts between the eastern vertebrae of the island. When the beams fell horizontal, our meeting place was anchored like a flying carpet in the line of their advance. We killed the microbe of the night with swigs of raki and watched these massed prisms of light shooting beyond us for overlapping leagues until they hit and ignited the white ibex-haunts in the west. The peaks all round us sent darker volleys of shadow along their path, all of them streaming westwards and tilting down into the canyons until the whole intervening labyrinth was filled with early light.
The Cretans have many backgrounds. Visions, accumulated over nearly a thousand nights and days, drop into the brain and replace each other with the speed of lantern slides: darting scattered through olive trees, firing from behind rocks and walls, then running forward again; cursing at wounds, stoically dying; in flight from blazing and exploding villages, uttering promises of vengeance through their teeth; executing, on a lonely plateau, apprehended traitors; sitting, at peaceful moments, relaxed under the great plane tree of a village; gathering grapes into giant baskets; treading out the wine; watching the women harvest the olives by beating the branches with poles of reed and bringing the berries pattering on the bright blankets spread below; loading mules with cheeses like millstones; raising dust clouds at the dance to the lyra’s frenzy; assembling at midnight in a church set about with sentries while some proscribed foreigner stands godfather to the child of a friend; feasting afterwards on a roof and emptying their pistols into the air to bring luck to the newly-baptized little girl.[16] There are battle scenes, dramas, genre pictures, conversation pieces, kermesses and eclogues, all subdivided into close-ups which pin this world down and make it jut and recede in its proper dimensions.
Were my feelings for the island planted by insufficient and subjective causes? The circumstances of war and the exhilaration of youth have much to do with it; also, perhaps, some chance affinities with the Cretan temperament, abetted by an interest in remote communities and language. The emotions of gratitude and of brotherhood-in-arms and community of purpose all play a part; the Greek bent for hospitality, too, and the universal wish to please. My sentiments may have been affected by our position in their midst. After all, we were isolated links with the headquarters on which all of our military fortunes depended, lonely swallows presaging summer; magicians, almost, who could summon arms and gold from the sea and the sky. But any straggling allied soldier, from whom nothing could be expected but death and destruction as the punishment for harbouring him, was welcomed and cared for as warmly; and all their sacrifices were prompted by an imperious sense of duty; some of them were, quite literally, saints. They not only risked everything to help their solitary allies; they made them members of the Cretan family. Best of all, they forgave our mistakes.
In a place where all is violent and extreme, faults must abound. The passion for arms, the dashing costume, the immense and articulate local pride sometimes degenerate. A damaging minority of pallikarádes, as they are called—armed braggarts or bravos, as opposed to pallikária, or warriors—and of pseudokapetanaioi—“false captains”—does exist. Some of them proved, surprisingly, as good as their wildest boasts. Others vapoured about the foothills on their own or attached themselves until they could be got rid of to the fringe of guerrilla bands; useless mouths to fill and a burden to their commanders. (It is a type of Cretan which, in Athens or on the mainland gives a bad name to the island in communities that do not know Crete itself.) Mistrust of the truth clouded matters now and then, and the ravines were smooth channels for rumour—it murmured there as unreally, sometimes, as the noise of the sea in the whorls of a shell. Internal suspicion and j
ealousies were frequent stumbling blocks. Collaboration with the enemy was miraculously scarce, treachery rarer still. Headstrong wills sometimes collided, anger flared, the canyons echoed with ultimata. “Ah, Micháli mou,” an old Cretan said to me at such a moment. “We’ve only got to put a glass roof over this island, and there’s a first-class lunatic asylum for you....” But in spite of all these things, there must be a deep underlying wisdom that guides the island in time of stress: the resistance in Crete, under an occupation of great savagery, was one of the best organized in Europe. It was resolutely maintained and unanimously backed; and, in spite of the island’s name for discord and insurrection, it was one of the few parts of occupied Europe which was not, after the liberation, mangled by civil strife. Political differences were sunk. The movement was launched beyond recall from the moment the Cretans took up arms at the invasion; it absorbed all the best in Crete. All that was good, brave, wise, tough, enterprising, spirited, dangerous or amusing was on the same side; every Odysseus and Pheidippides, all the Hectors, Ajaxes, Nestors, Lancelots, Merlins, Rowlands, Herewards, Robin Hoods, Maid Marians, Friar Tucks, Dick Turpins, Hiawathas, Kims and Mowglis, were ours. Communist organizations wrought chaos on the mainland; when, later on, they attempted to do the same in Crete, only the scum was left for them to recruit. Negligible in numbers and deplorable in quality, they were soon scattered.
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