Roumeli

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  A pathway to the eastern skyline of the canyon led to a notch that the kaphedzi had pointed out: the gates of the Kravara. When I reached it, the treeless hills sank northwards, a cauldron enclosed by the limestone summits of Aetolia and blurred by landslides of shale and scree. A triangle of mountain barred its nether extremity and the Eurytanian ranges rippled away beyond in a dim and scarcely discernible overlap: a gaunt, stricken, rather beautiful region where the shade was already shrinking under the mid-morning sunlight. A few small clouds loose in the pale air towed their bending shadows over the salients and ravines.

  The Kravara covers, I think, about fifty square miles, but the figure has no meaning in such a terrain. A score of villages lurk there; not one was visible and there was no hint of the presence of man or beast, not a leaf or a grass blade. Under a sharp sky where late winter was turning into early spring, the sphinx-like region was replete with enigmas.

  The first village came so abruptly that I had dropped into the middle of it only a minute later than my first plunging glimpse of its roofs. It slanted up and down the ravine’s edge from an untidy quadrangle of dust and stone. Under a couple of acacias outside the magazi—the bar, café and grocer’s shop where the heart of a Greek community beats—a handful of villagers were languidly conversing over a tin mug of wine and its brood of thick, squat tumblers. Further elongated by the soaring of his black cylindrical hat sat an amazingly tall priest with his hands folded over the crook of a bulky umbrella. Silence fell except for the growl of a dog worrying some shameful trove nearby. Greetings were guardedly exchanged; the stranger must speak first; then, “you are welcome” evoked its response of “you are well found.” Back came “be seated” as a rush-bottomed chair was brusquely freed from its dreaming tabby and the priest filled a new glass of wine. I had been so intrigued by the kaphedzi’s recent injunction that the question leaped prematurely from my lips: “What does boliarévo mean?” The silence thickened; ambiguous glances were exchanged. An old man at last said: “Are you an Athenian?” When my distant habitat was explained, their brows began to clear. A stranger from Europe! They were congenitally on their guard against compatriots, as though wary of ritual teasing. Suspect on Greek lips, the word boliarévo became guileless curiosity on a stranger’s. A long time ago, the old man said—palaia! palaia!, corroborated the priest with a wave—the villagers of the Kravara were great travellers....They used to wander all over Greece, and abroad too. They invented a secret language—all nonsense, the old man declared—in order to be able to talk without other Greeks understanding. These wanderers used to call themselves boliárides, and the language they spoke was ta boliárika, and boliarévo meant—the old man paused here. “Was it,” I asked, “anything to do with the old tradition of begging—ages and ages ago?”

  Everybody looked happier. “Yes, that’s right!” they all said. “You’ve heard of it?” Relief spread through the company. The old man went on. “That’s exactly it! They used to earn their living by wandering about and begging. Can you blame them? Look at these mountains! Nothing grows here, you couldn’t graze a mouse! So off they went. Some of the old ones were not very scrupulous; they didn’t mind what they said or did. A few used to pretend to be lame or mad or holy men—anything to extort alms. This was what boliarizing meant: outwitting the mugs.” Everybody laughed. “But it all died out long ago.”

  I began to conjugate the verb: boliarévo, boliaréveis, boliarévei. “We boliarize, ye boliarize,” the others chimed in to complete the present indicative, “they boliarize.” The priest went off for more wine. His robes were a jig-saw of patches. The silver hair and beard, the wide blue eyes and the delicate moulding of nose and temples combined in a saintlike distinction. His quiet conviviality was more manifest as the glasses succeeded each other; it robbed his gait of its sureness but left his dignity unimpaired.

  But where did the word boliárides—boliáris in the singular—come from? Nobody knew. It is inexistent in Greek. The only similar word I could think of was bolyar. The bolyars, linguistically akin to the boyars of Russia and Rumania—were the warlike noblemen of the mediaeval Bulgarian Empire. What had this obsolete Slav word to do with this community so close to the gulf of Corinth? The early Slav invasions of Greece left many place-names but only a handful of words and this is not one of them; and the Bulgarian-speaking “Slavophone” villages of Macedonia, as they are discreetly called, were hundreds of miles away. As we talked, a possibility dawned. Many Kravarites set off for Europe through Albania, Serbia or Bulgaria, mainly the last. They picked up a smattering of these tongues; perhaps this was how boliáris found its way to the Kravara. But in what circles in Bulgaria would a foreign beggar learn the word for a mediaeval noble? Doubt returned. (There are one or two ordinary Slav words in boliárika—tzerkva, for instance, is “church”—and perhaps people with more than my stale and swiftly diminishing supply of Slav words will recognize more. Another—gaïna—sounded familiar: it is Rumanian and Koutzovlach for a “chicken,” descending from the Latin gallina.)[6] But most of the words were fabricated. Everyone knew the small mysterious vocabulary by heart. It is like the thieves’ cant of Alsatia in old London or Villon’s in Paris, the Shelta of Irish tinkers and the jargon of highwaymen, in which a pistol was a barker, a lantern a glim and a baby a lullaby-cheat.

  The table burst into a hubbub; strange words came showering out. The laughter and the gobbledygook made me wonder for a second whether the odd sounds were being improvised as a joke. Apart from one or two Slav, Vlach (or Rumanian) words, a sound here and there had a Turkish ring; others might almost have been Romany, but I don’t think they were. The reader may spot and trace more words than I have; most of them, I think, are pure invention. I pointed to objects in turn, or said the words in everyday Greek and out leaped an emulous chorus of boliaric equivalents.

  Q. (pointing to my eyes) “What are these? Ta matia?”

  A. “Tziphlia!” “Otsia!”—the last plainly Slav, from otchi.

  Q. “And this?” (pointing to my head) “To kephali?”

  A. “Koka! Karoni!”

  Q. “And these?” (waving my hands) “ta khéria?”

  A. “Tchogránia!” they managed the “tch” sound, inexistent in Greek, with ease.

  Q. “And that? I yénia?”—pointing to Father Andrew’s beard.

  A. “Máratho!” Fennel...

  Q. “A foot? To pódi?”

  A. “Vatso!”

  Q. “Moustaki, a moustache?”

  A. “Douki!”

  Q. “Door? Porta?”

  A. “Tchapráka!”

  Outlandish words! Back they boomed in unfaltering unison, only halted by an occasional brief bicker about the pronunciation. We were off.[7]

  At this point food—liópi—appeared on the table. It unleashed a fresh swarm of syllables: bouzouróno, “I eat”; boudjour, “bread”; hasko (Slav?), “fresh bread”; sarlagaïn, “oil”; bourliotes and solínes (literally “tubes,” Why?) for “olives”; prasino, “flour” (“green”—again why?); lópia, “vegetables”; yanitza, “an egg”; gnoshi, “salt”: beligrídia,[8] “grapes”; ripo, “fish”; mazarak, “meat”; koukouroúzo, “sweet-corn” (pan-Balkan, outside Greece, for “maize”); patlísia, “cherries”; and benir, “cheese.” Mleko and voda for “milk” and “water,” are plain Slav; but water is also kaoúri....The catalogue closed with karaméto and daró; coffee, that is, and a cigarette....

  Gnóshi...sarlagaïn...tchapráka...dervó...tchogránia...havalóu...tcharmalídi...lióka...hálpou...the alien and the un-Greek ring of these wild syllables filled me with wonder. It was as though each villager, as a word was uttered and corroborated by the rest, were throwing a strange object on the table in a mysterious and insoluble Kim’s game. A few were remotely familiar, the linguistic equivalents of rusty pen-knives, bus tickets of vanished lines, flints from a blunderbuss, snuffers, glove stretchers, a broken churchwarden, the cat’s whiskers from a crystal set, a deflated million-mark note, the beer labe
l of a brewery long bankrupt, a watchman’s rattle. Others were familiar objects misapplied, latches used as bottle openers, ping-pong balls riddled with airgun slugs, cartridge-case ferrules, newsprint twisted into bottle stoppers; then foreign objects—a kukri, the stub of a Toscana, a medal from Lourdes, a Samoan blowpipe, a voodoo charm from Haiti....

  Others resembled scraps from newspapers in unknown tongues, nuggets of freak mineral and coins with the legend all but effaced which a trained linguist, geologist or numismatist perhaps, but not I, would identify in a flash. But most were puzzles of twisted metal gleaming enigmatically in the Aetolian noon.

  Unearthing this stuff, abetted by the wine which had lulled Father Andrew asleep, had sent all our spirits soaring. (A wine splash still blurs the pencilled page in front of me and may have misplaced an accent or two.) I read the list out loud and amended it. Then my companions began to glue the words together in sentences. “Phóta pou spartáei to houmouráki mou!,” one cried, pointing to his daughter trotting down the road. “Kitta pou phevgei to koristaki mou,” I would laboriously work out. “Look at my daughter running away.”

  Another, spotting the gendarme strolling our way, whispered in mock concern: “Stíliane! Mas photáei o bánikos pátellos!”

  “Prosochi!” I construed. “Mas kittázei o megálos choroph′ylax!” (Beware, the important policeman is watching us!) The gendarme was bewildered by the laughter as he sat down.

  “Don’t tell him!” everyone cried, pouring him some wine. “It’s a secret!” The gendarme, a nice man from Amorgos, accepted this mild chaff with a tolerant Cycladic smile. I had the agreeable feeling of being in league with outlaws.

  The session turned into an exam. Darting about my notes, I slowly put together the following: “Tchekmekiazei o verdílis sto koutióu”—but it will shorten matters to put the actual Greek into English: “The virdil tchmekizes in his box while the matzoukas, stílian-wise, manes the houmouraki’s klítzino. The maláto pulls his fennel and anyrizes, but all the maletchkos, including the gotopoules, are gaskinning in the dair and mandaring the skarlaimdjis. The banic patello koupons the boliar to the gavin where he eats dervo and calls on his Markantonies. The phlambouri sinks and it starts to kranize as halpou comes...!” “The father sleeps in his house,” that is, “while the beggar furtively steals his daughter’s ring. The priest pulls his beard and grows angry but all the children, including the young gents, are laughing in the street, and making fun of the peddlers. The great policeman takes the rascal to the prison where he gets the stick and calls on his saints. The sun sinks, it starts to rain and night comes on.”[9] Impossible, without seeming to boast, to describe the success of this gloomy little story! Best to set off for the inner Kravara on this note of triumph. I stood up, exchanged farewells and reached for my stick. My elderly instructor grabbed it first and held it out of reach: “What’s it called in Boliaric?”

  “Straví.”

  “And?”

  “Kaníki.”

  “Another?”

  “Dervó?”

  “And another?”

  “Grígoro.”

  “One more?”

  “Matsoúka.”

  “One last one?”

  I was stumped. “You can’t have it till you remember,” the old man said. At last it came.

  “Láoussa!”

  He handed it over amid applause and laughter. I set off, followed by cries of well-wishing and invitations to return; followed also by the injunction to stílianize in the next sielo as it was stuffed with boliars and shoreftis.

  The village of Platanos had turned up trumps. How vain the kaphedzi’s warning had proved! No boliarization there. In fact, I might almost be said to have boliarized them, as I hadn’t been allowed to pay a single lepta. “It’s paid for,” they said. “Your turn when we come to England,” or “Put that cash away, Mihali. It has no currency here....”

  One of them accompanied me out of the village to put me on my way. The poverty-stricken ranges soared reproachfully all round....Something my companion said deflected our talk from secret languages. We had been speaking of Father Andrew.

  “Yes,” he said, “he’s even taller than his brother—and he was enormous. Did you never see him? Archbishop Damaskinos?”

  I halted, amazed. How could one relate our tattered and delightful drinking companion to the gigantic figure of the famous Archbishop? A vision of that beetling titan, robed in the canonicals of the Archbishopric of Athens and the Primacy of all Greece, shot through my brain; his breast was ablaze with pectoral ornaments, his huge hand grasped a pastoral staff, and the veils which, on state occasions, are draped from an orthodox dignitary’s headgear, fluttered about his enormous trunk like black plasma. He was vested in the temporal as well as the spiritual leadership of the country; Regent of Greece until the return of King George II, it was as a Head of State that he negotiated with Churchill, Eden and Macmillan. Once, on a rainy morning in London, when the Regent was there on a state visit, I went to see him celebrate High Mass in the Greek Cathedral in Moscow Road. Under a globular gold tiara a foot high and armed with a crosier glittering with gems and twisting serpents, the majestic colossus intoned the liturgy in a voice of modulated thunder: the thurible, as he censed the iconostasis and the congregation, was reduced by his tremendous size to a toy. At the end of the service, he emerged into the drizzle and the crash of presented arms and an escort of motor-cyclists and a Rolls Royce a-glitter with gold-fringed pennants wafted him back to Grosvenor Square....

  The slight coarseness of feature of the huge and controversial Archbishop—the “wily mediaeval prelate” of Churchill’s famous phrase—was no match, I thought, for the mandarin looks of his humbler brother. Haloed by the spun silver of his hair and beard, those noble and transparent features were, plainly, proof against any Dionysiac onslaught and safe from the stigmata of power.

  My companion left me on the brow of the gorge. A canyon yawned and the downhill path between the boulders and black-berry clumps and the occasional tufts of bracken must have been a foaming torrent when the snow melted. Now it was only to be picked out from the havoc all round by a hardly-discernible pallor which the hoofs of goats and pack animals had chipped on the rocks’ surface and by the precious scattered clues of their droppings. Paths like this, even with half a gallon of midday wine raging in the blood-stream, are best descended at speed: leaping helter-skelter from rock to rock and bouncing on one foot to land with the other on the next boulder in a breakneck concatenation of parabolas. The rate of such descents and the fixity of one’s gaze, blinded to all but the random staircase underfoot, lands one at the end of them—panting, with temples pounding, salty-throated and glittering with sweat—in a world that the violent interval has utterly transformed. I slowed up in the nethermost depths among bleached stones by a clump of trees. Deep-probing sunbeams revealed a thread of water snaking from a cranny of rock and expanding for a foot or two among fine pebbles and cress, then trickling away under the trees. Here, sheltered by an oleander, with his head on a haversack, his beret over his eyes and the red and blue ribbon of the Greek Military Cross on the breast of his battledress, a second-lieutenant reclined with his combat-booted ankles crossed, the image of young martial repose. But he wasn’t asleep: one eyelid and an eyebrow like a rook’s feather were lifted to take in the newcomer.

  “I saw you coming down,” he said with a smile. “You look thirsty. It’s remarkable water.”

  I swallowed long draughts of this wonderful liquid, chewing it as a horse does then letting it sink to its goal like an icicle.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” he said, looking pleased as I extolled it. “From Crete?” he added, pointing to my old knapsack: those faded yellow and scarlet stripes, woven years ago in Anoyeia on the slope at Mt. Ida, betrayed its origin. I explained myself and we exchanged names and formal handshakes. I took one of his offered cigarettes and lay under the next oleander, propping my feet on a stone to tip the blood into a more level irrigation and
watched the smoke climb to the lanceolate green criss-cross that a month or two would deck with pink flowers. I fell asleep half-way through the delicious Papastratos No. 1; but only an inch below the surface, subliminally floating and still aware of the afternoon, the leaves, the lattice of their shade and the trickling water.

  The springs and wells parsimoniously scattered about the mountains leave memories of their blessings for years. Occasional waterfalls, plunging down the rocks and opening private rainbows across a soaking jungle of leaves, seem almost immoral in their spendthrift opulence. Sometimes they drop to a forgotten mill that laces the freshness with a whiff of weeds and toadstools and the waterlogged timber of mute wheels. The hollow dens of Cyclopes yawn among the rocks under ilex-shade, the gape of their lower jaws barred by stones and thorns to form a goat-fold; the water spills from the limestone through a funnel of twisted leaf and the hollowed tree trunk that catches it is tressed inside with dark green weeds. The rocks are mattressed by a thousand years’ accumulation of pellets riddled by the slots of cloven feet; a spiralling goat’s horn lies there, moulted from a skull stuck on a branch to ward off the Eye: the roving bane that can fascinate the ewes and rob them of their milk and their kids and the rams of their vigour. Some of these springs emerge in the darkness of the caves themselves at the end of long climbs into the heart of a mountain-range. Others drip in high clefts dedicated to the Assumption, St. Antony of the Desert or the Prophet Elijah to quench the thirst of an extinct line of hermits.