Roumeli

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  “That’s it,” Andreas said. He dropped his voice to a drawling rasp in imitation of mánga speech. “Ekonomizeís mavro, ré aderphaki?” (“Do you economize any black stuff, little brother?,” i.e. Have you got any hashish?) We both laughed. “You should have seen them when I was young. Peg-top trousers they wore, and long, pointed boots with elastic sides; red sashes, narrow brimmed black republikas”—trilbies—“or caps, pushed back; oiled quiffs over their foreheads and heavy moustaches; and their jackets were slung across their shoulders with the sleeves loose. They walked with a roll, one hand behind the back flicking a string of amber beads with a tassel, very small ones, not like mine.” Andreas pointed to his own komboloi, swinging from the choke plug on the dashboard. “They also carried knives in their sashes, noses as they called them, and they weren’t slow to use them. Talk about touchiness! Pride ate them hollow. At the slightest insult—even if somebody trod on the end of their sash or in their spit on the pavement—out came the noses! Their main hang-out in Athens was the plateia Psirí, beyond Monastiraki. Respectable citizens used to avoid it, even the police only went in couples. They had something! It was a sight to see two or three of them swaggering down the streets with their sleeves and beads swinging and roses stuck between their teeth if they were in the mood.

  “But their great days were over before I was born. The really tough ones were known as koutzavákides.[1] They carried nobbly sticks that they twirled in their hands. Bad politicians hired them at election times—you know, to vote several times over and stop the other side getting to the polls; breaking up meetings, smashing the urns, and so on. Chaos! Then a new chief of police was appointed, a really hard-boiled man called Baïraktáris. Guess what he did? After a bad outbreak he called out the whole police force, surrounded the Psirí quarter and rounded up every single koutsavákis he could find and marched them off to police headquarters. Hundreds of them. He made them hand in their boots and a policeman with a chopper cut off the long toes and handed them back. Another sliced off the hanging sleeves. Then he set them free—I don’t think he even disarmed them. Ever since then the favourite oath of the koutzavákides has been: Gamó to Mpaïraktári sou!—‘I...your Baïraktáris!’ And they meant it this time! They only stuck to the sou (the ‘your’) out of habit. Some old boys still mumble it when they pass a policeman. Under their breath, of course.”

  He was an enchanting companion. His lank frame, long hands and the large eyes behind their spectacles gave him a look of Aldous Huxley. Was I frightened, he asked, when he took his hands off the wheel? I had been at first, but no longer. A sweeping skein of gestures beat time to the flow of his discourse.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve driven this road a thousand times. You know what the Greeks are like; we can’t talk without using our hands. When I was a gunner in the Asia Minor campaign in 1920, we captured a Turkish bimbashi in the hills outside Eskishehir. Our lance-bombardier came from a village near Serres in Macedonia. ‘It’s Galip bey!’ he shouted. ‘Petro!’ the Turk shouted back. They nearly embraced! The Turk was the son of the owner of a tchiflik—a farm—near Petro’s village!” (Macedonia was under the Turks till the First Balkan War in 1912.) “They’d known each other as boys. The Turk was very smart: astrakhan fez, khaki tunic, leggings, sword, pistol, binoculars—we soon had those off him—and a little lacquered moustache.” Andreas’s forefingers planted two inverted commas in mid-air. “He and Petro sat up all night smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee as if they were back in Macedonia. The bimbashi’s job was interrogating prisoners. Sometimes they were marched in with their hands tied. He questioned them for hours. Dead silence! They were dumb! Then he saw what was wrong and told the guards to untie their hands and out streamed a flood of words! All lies, of course.” Andreas laughed. “The first time he found this out the Greeks knocked over the guards and ran for it.” The fingers of Andreas’s left hand rippled over the valley outside the nearside window. “They vanished like the dew! So you see! But it was a terrible war. Appalling things happened. Nobody fought with kid gloves on, believe me.”

  On the windscreen under the anti-blasphemy notice was pasted a half-naked platinum-blonde on roller skates cut out of a magazine. Beside her, on a blue ribbon, swung a small ikon of St. Andrew the Apostle holding the saltire cross on which the Romans martyred him in Patras. Andreas indicated the saint and the girl. “Sacred,” he said, “and profane: perhaps they cancel each other out....They used to have his head in the cathedral in Patras, but when the Turks captured the Peloponnese, a Byzantine prince ran off with it to Rome and sold it to the Pope. One of the Palaeologues, I think. It was a sort of a passport.”[2] The ikon’s ribbon also suspended a little chaplet of those blue beads that repel the Evil Eye from cattle; the corollas of purple plastic convolvulus nodded from the green-wrapped wire spiralling round the windscreen and a cone of tin screwed to the dashboard held three paper roses; yellow, magenta and pink. A celluloid cockatoo sprung to a rubber sucker on the pane bobbed to and fro with the jolting and the dozen cutout bluebirds glued at random about the glass completed a decor that trembled and winked like a jungle between our eyes and the stark crags into which we were climbing. Rich in modulations and orchestrated by gestures, the voice of Andreas moved from theme to theme with a smoothness surpassing any change the hoarse gears of his vehicle could attempt.

  We had set off from Navpaktos soon after dawn and headed deep into the hinterland of Aetolia. The road followed the eastern flank of a high ravine at the bottom of which, seldom visible owing to the steepness of the slope, a torrent twisted. But, looking back, I could catch the gleam of the Evinos river as it strayed out of the mountains towards Missolonghi in a litter of boulders to join the Gulf of Corinth, whose shores we had just left. As we gained height the Gulf expanded to an inland sea, contracting as it moved westwards to the straits where the castles of the Morea and of Roumeli, advancing from either shore on the tips of peninsulas, almost joined: Rion and Antirion, dimly discerned through the early haze. Beyond the Straits the Gulf widened again to form an antechamber to the Ionian where the liquid battlefield of Lepanto shone. South, dominated by the white giant of Mount Panachaïkon, range after range revealed itself, rising in step with our own ascent until the whole Peloponnese seemed on the point of levitating into the sky. Slowly the accumulation of our own mountains effaced the lower world and the Gulf as the ravine lengthened and narrowed and interposed buttresses of rock between us and all but the topmost of the Morean spikes. At last a turn in the track clenched the canyon behind and shuttered them away. We were locked in the heart of grey cordilleras and smoky shadows that slanted into the chasm.

  We had passed a couple of meagre hamlets and the bus had emptied of all but Andreas and me and, in the seat behind us, a pretty mountain girl whose face was alight with candour and happiness. A voluminous black kerchief swathed her head, thick chestnut plaits fell down her back, and she was encased in one of those coats of homespun goats’ hair, flaring from the waist and gallooned round the hem and along the perpendicular pockets with dark red braid, that they call a segouni. Round silver plaques as big as saucers fastened her woven belt. A swaddled baby in a hewn cradle like a little trough rested across her lap; it had been slung across her back like a papoose when she got in. She looked about fifteen. As she listened to Andreas her eyes grew wider still and laughter covered her face with the spread fingers of one brown hand.

  There was plenty to marvel at. Andreas was telling the story of a friend who had worked as guide and companion to an English botanist. They explored the mountains of Aetolia and Acarnania and worked their way north to the Pindus, scrambling from sierra to sierra until one day they found themselves at the top of a gorge whose sides dropped sheer to a rushing river. (It sounded rather like the Aoös ravine in the Zagori.) One rare plant grew only on the side of this cliff and the Englishman insisted on making a rope fast to a tree and lowering himself down. His guide, prone on the cliff’s rim, watched anxiously. All of a sudden there was
a flurry and a shout and a loud noise! “Kraa-Kraa!” There below (“Come, Christ and the Holy Virgin!”) was the botanist swinging on the end of his rope and beating with his vasculum at a golden eagle which was flapping round and pecking at him! She had been sitting on her nest on a ledge hidden by an overhang. Worse still, suddenly, with a noise like an aeroplane, there was the husband! The guide had a rifle with him, on the off-chance of shooting a wolf or a wild boar—or perhaps a bear. But how was he to avoid hitting the man? He was swinging like a pendulum, twisting and flailing and keeping himself on the move by kicking each side of the cave’s mouth in turn. Saying a prayer, Yanni fired (“N’tang!”) and mortally wounded the hen-bird; she sank fluttering down the cliff face. The cock flew up into the air and floated there for a moment, about to plunge on the intruder. (Andreas’s arms, held wide across the interior of the bus, indicated the enormous wing-spread.) He aimed, pulled and (“N’tang!”) killed it stone dead! With an explosion of feathers, the bird dropped like a stone, moulting and spiralling faster every second till it bounced off the mountain-side and into the torrent, which whirled it out of sight. “When the botanist reached the cliff top—untouched—he said quietly, ‘I’ve got it.’ ‘Got what?’ said Yanni, mopping his brow. ‘The plant.’ He showed it, a small green thing. Then he said: ‘Well, Yanni, what about lunch?’ Psychraimos anthropos! He was a cool one!” (I always foster the myth of English psychraimia. There are lots of comic stories about it in Greece, not all flattering.) “After lunch, he went down again to get the eggs. ‘We can’t leave the orphans,’ he said. Months later, from Scotland, he sent Yanni a photograph of the only bird to hatch out. It had wicked eyes! The botanist used to feed it on....” Here the girl let out a cry of alarm; rapt in the story, she had been carried past her destination. We helped her out with a small sack of corn, which, after re-slinging the papoose, she balanced on her head; then she stuck a distaff into her belt. Teasing a wisp out of the grey cloud of wool in the distaff’s fork, she pulled and twisted it into thread and notched it in the spindle, which was soon rotating on its own at the end of the lengthening twine. She set off up the mountain with her back hollowed like a caryatid’s to steady the load on her head. “Thank God she’s got shoes,” Andreas said. “They are bad mountains: all up and down, hilltop and valley, stones and thorns all the way. It’s a five-hour climb to her village. A miserable place, poor devils.” As we paused in the road to light cigarettes, we could hear her singing, already some distance above.

  Andreas put me down at a group of huts where the road came to an end and shrank to a mule track, not far from the saddle which led into the Kravara. I had told him that was my destination and he burst out laughing....

  I heard about the Kravara years ago. Then George Katsim-balis lent me Karkavitza’s book, O Zitiános (The Beggar); it is the adventures of an itinerant Kravarite just before the Balkan Wars; and during the following years a score of cross-references had converged and at last impelled me, as I was in Aetolia, to catch that battered blue bus. The kapheneion-grocery was the terminus and assembly point for all the mule traffic of the roadless region ahead. The kaphedzi echoed Andreas’s laughter when he learnt where I was going; they were both grinning as I set out. I had only gone a few paces when Andreas shouted after me: “Take care they don’t boliarize you!” Boliarize? It was a word I had never heard. He repeated the phrase, grinning still more widely: “Prosoché na mi se boliarépsoun!”[3]

  “What does boliarépsoun mean?”

  “You’ll soon learn! Kalo taxidi!”[4] My brow, as I went on my way, was puckered with conjecture.

  Villages, towns, regions and islands all over the country have cornered professions. The dwellers along the banks of the Hebrus cut the reeds and strip and bind them into brooms. The closeness of vineyards to pines in Attica and Southern Euroea singles the inhabitants out as the best retsina-vintners. The olive-groves of Amphissa and Kalamata have made their oils famous. Sultanas and currants come from Cretan Malevizi and Corinth. The hardness and workability of the local rock makes Leros in the Dodecanese the source of most of the mill-stones in Greece. The clay at Coroni provides an endless supply of enormous oil-jars and Siphnos equips most of Greece with water pitchers that have changed little since ancient times. (Yes, but why does Siphnos also abound in cooks? Tselemendé, the Greek Mrs. Beaton, was from Siphnos. And in janitors? This humble office is the goal of many unambitious Siphniots. The remainder of the population are poets.) As of old, Paros quarries marble. Athenian houses are full of maids from Tinos and the smaller Cyclades: the Catholic communities surviving from Frankish times maintain convent schools where the girls learn household skills. The village of Ambellákia on Mt. Ossa soared to prosperity on the strength of a local root providing a colour in which the uniforms of the whole Austro-Hungarian army were dyed: ships set sail from Trieste and Fiume and unloaded their white bales at Ragusa; strings of camels crossed Dalmatia, Albania and northern Greece, and came back a month later with their burdens all sky-blue. (The discovery of aniline dyes sent the hamlet into a decline.) There are interesting reasons why Chios became so prominent in international banking; good reasons, too, for the old allegiance of Crete, Epirus and the Mani to the blood-feud. But why were the great cotton fortunes of the Nile amassed by villagers from Mt. Pelion and Vlach emigrants from Thessaly? Why are the distillers of Constantinople mostly from Tsakonia, a Dorian-speaking mountain-pocket in the eastern Peloponnese? Abundance of timber accounts for the skill of the Zagorochória, near the Albanian border, in carpentry and lathmaking. The intricate wood-work and the florid altar-screens of the Pindus belong to a wider geographical phenomenon: at a certain height all over Europe the convergence of long winters, early nightfall, soft wood and sharp knives surrounds the mountaineers with shavings and chips. History accounts for Hydra and Spetsai being almost entirely populated by admirals; but why was Hydra, and why is Kalymnos today, the home of most of the sponge-fishers on the Lybian reefs and in Florida? Was it local toughness that made Roumeli the traditional recruiting ground for the Evzone regiments? Why were the Lydian inhabitants of Ai-Vali such famous smugglers? When did Salonica first become known for koulouri-baking and why are boys from Yanina their nimblest vendors?[5] Yanina is also famous for silver-work and filigree, and Paramythia, in the Souli mountains farther south, is deafening with coppersmiths. Thessalian Tyrnavos is the Mecca of ouzo; but what is the origin of the ribald wielding of earthernware phalluses, with which, on Clean Monday, the young men of Tyrnavos mark the end of Shrove-tide? When, and why, did Pharsala first become the metropolis of halva, that delicious flaky sweetmeat of sesame and honey; or Levádeia, of those small sugar-dusted puffs of pastry called kourabiédes? What prompted Syra to concentrate on nougat and loukoum? A generation ago, all the boot-blacks of Athens came from Megalopolis in Arcadia; (this humble and amusing community is still the élite of this calling, but their old supremacy is challenged by interlopers from all over Greece). Volo is taxed with tight-fistedness and the islanders of Mykonos with their proneness to exaggeration and their belief in ghosts. The aptness at procuring with which the Corfiots are teased is a joke rooted in the long Venetian occupation of the Heptanese. (Italians are slanderously thought to be pimps to a man. Why Kalamata, with equally little truth, should share this fame, is more mysterious. There is no steadier population.) The juxtaposition of Patras and pederasty is no more than comic alliteration; the vulgar as well as the classical word begins with a P. The islanders of Naxos, when neighbours banteringly call them thieves, smile tolerantly: this reputation springs from the feat of a Naxian who is supposed to have stolen the silver bridle, the gold-embroidered saddle and the ceremonial pistols of King Otho the moment he dismounted after a state entry. Now the Zantiots...

  This could go on for pages; but my real concern is the Kravara. Its fame springs from the prevalence, real or supposed, of professional mendicancy.

  The odd part is that there are scarcely any beggars in Greece. Sellers of jasmine, violets, combs and pis
tachio nuts are constantly breaking into café conversations and sellers of lottery tickets wend from table to table with their many-pennoned lances; fiddlers scrape tunelessly for a few minutes then take the saucer round; but all these are legitimate. Still more so are the wandering boot-blacks with their brass-bound tabernacles slung on baldricks and the sea-food peddlers with baskets of oysters and clams. (For some reason, many of them are pock-marked as though in sympathy with the rugous shells of their stock.) Sponge sellers are the grandest of all. Ringed like Saturn by their merchandise and sometimes invisible under a cumulus of perforated globes, they float about the city crying “Sphoungaria!” When rival clouds appear in the sky, they hover near the arcades and a single raindrop sends them scuttling for shelter: they know that a brief shower turns their buoyant wares to lead. A nocturnal and terrible old Cappadocian drifts from tavern to tavern selling toys and practical jokes made of celluloid, cardboard, twisted rubber-bands and gunpowder and a device he invented himself, which, released by an unsuspecting victim, mimics the protracted report of flatulence.

  Perhaps begging was not always so rare; but it jars with Greek ways and the pride that makes tipping difficult. Doors are opened and tables spread for any stranger arriving in a village; this surely spikes the guns of mendicancy as a skilled profession. The few beggars one does meet are pathetically amateur and innocuous; an old woman out of luck, a down-and-out whose modest demands are made with little conviction; sometimes a jovial old card with breath like a blow-lamp, a bloodshot wink as he points thirstily down his throat and a mock salute as he dives, clutching his winnings, into the nearest drinking-hell for his fifteenth ouzo of the morning; each dawn finds him, to the despair of his dear ones, snoring in a different doorway: the sort of figure, in fact, that we could all become. There is nothing to set against the rest of the Mediterranean, no competition with the infernos of Naples and Palermo. The only real professionals are the gypsies. Their single-mindedness overrides flight and rebuff with a patient erosion of whispers and plucked sleeves that exalts their takings from alms to danegeld. Where and how did the Kravarites deploy their skill?