The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  Coming out of the dark church into the market he will be almost blinded by the light, for the sun is up; and it is now that the impact of this extraordinary phenomenon will begin to intrigue him. The nagging question, ‘In what way does Greece differ from Italy and Spain?’ will answer itself. The light! One hears the word everywhere, ‘To Phos’, and can recognize its pedigree – among other derivatives is our English word ‘phosphorescent’, which summons up at once the dancing magnesium-flare quality of the sunlight blazing on a white wall; in the depths of the light there is blackness, but it is a blackness which throbs with violet – a magnetic unwearying ultra-violet throb. This confers a sort of brilliant skin of white light on material objects, linking near and far, and bathing simple objects in a sort of celestial glow-worm hue. It is the naked eyeball of God, so to speak, and it blinds one. Even here in Corfu, whose rich, dense forestation and elegiac greenery contrasts so strangely with the brutal barrenness of the Aegean which he has yet to visit – even here there is no mistake about the light. Italy has no such ray, nor Spain. Flowers and houses and clouds all watch you with a photo-electric eye – at once substantial and somehow immaterial. Each cypress is the only one in existence. Each boat, house, donkey, is prime – a Platonic prototype of a sudden invention; maybe an idle god’s quite arbitrary invention, as if he had exclaimed, ‘Let there be donkey.’ And in each donkey (by now they are braying all along the Esplanades, waiting for their children) one sees the original, the archetypal donk: the essence, the quiddity of the idea of donk.

  He is not of course the first visitor to be electrified by Greek light, to be intoxicated by the white dancing candescence of the sun on a sea with blue sky pouring into it. He walks round the little town of Corfu that first morning with the feeling that the island is a sort of burning-glass.

  Later, sitting in a tavern built out over the Venetian mole with its sombre lions of St Mark, he thinks of other light-drinkers in the past who have, like himself, suddenly felt that they were moving about in the heart of a dark crystal.

  The first impression of the country, from whatever direction one enters it, is austere. It rejects all daydreams, even historical ones. It is dry, barren, dramatic and strange, like a terribly emaciated face; but it lies bathed in a light such as the eye has never yet beheld, and in which it rejoices as though now first awakening to the gift of sight. This light is indescribably keen yet soft. It brings out the smallest details with a clarity, a gentle clarity that makes the heart beat higher and enfolds the nearer view in a transfiguring veil – I can describe it only in these paradoxical terms. One can compare it to nothing except Spirit. Things might lie thus in some wonderful intelligence – so alert and so lulled, so divided and yet so closely linked. Linked by what? Not by mood; nothing could be more remote from that floating sensuous soulful dream-element: no, by the Spirit itself.

  Pondering these words of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the traveller feels within him the first premonitory signs by which the heart recognizes the onset of a great love affair – the light in the eyes of the beloved. He is falling in love.

  *

  Enough of our hypothetical traveller; once he was myself, or one of my Victorian ancestors. Today and tomorrow he will be yourself, gentle reader. And how glad you will be to discover that in spite of tales of tourist ravages the island’s real beauty and vitality are still there, still palpable. From now on, all day long you will wander about in a delightful daze, drinking in the light. Evening will find you once more seated at your little café – you will already have adopted one – drinking ouzo.

  Now the sunset-gun booms from the tower of the citadel, and a faint military music sounds within, recalling the garrison to its duties or to some unspecified recreation. The gun of course is a Crimean echo, though the fortress is Venetian. You sit, as so many before have done and as so many will do after you, quite still and silent over your drink, watching the dusk fall, veil on magical veil, over the blue gulf which itself will soon be turned to lead and then to silver under the visiting moon. You will have heard stories by now of people who came for an afternoon and stayed for a lifetime, or who came for a week and stayed a century and a half; and you will realize the danger of your position. Moreover there is a sacred spring, Kardaki, on the other side of the town which, if drunk from, will clinch things, ordaining a return to the island. ‘Yes,’ you will find yourself saying, ‘I will stay one more day, just one more …’

  After this first radical experience with the Greek light, you will be surprised at the ease and simplicity with which the island surrenders its charm. Like the great courtesan she is, a real Circe, she leads one first among the sweet inland valleys thickly carpeted with wild flowers and studded with old gnarled but silver-hale olives, or to the dense groves of black brush-strokes, the self-seeded cypresses which seem like something out of prehistory – remember that ancient Greece was densely wooded and watered by broad rivers and rich springs. An exceptional winter rainfall, tropical in intensity, must explain the paradisiacal lushness of everything. You begin, without sophistry, to re-live the arrival of Odysseus here. There is so much to see, but distances are mercifully short and the whole island can be inspected at leisure (as it is today) by motor-scooter or by car: it is some sixty kilometres long, with a tenuous thread of navigable road uniting the choicest places. In the north a stout, blunt mountain and a bare land of limestone hafts and grimly poor villages. Even the peasant dress is magpie-sombre in the north – just black and white; by contrast, in the midriff and south of the island it is rich in its variety and range of plumage.

  There may well be a village wedding in progress in some small hamlet near the town of Corfu, and you will marvel at the vivid and sumptuous island costumes from the various villages. The old hieratic circular dances are there too. The dancers look as vivid as a pack of playing cards, circling in the deep dust of some swept threshing floor. You will be assailed by profuse free drinks in honour of the bride, and exhorted to tread a measure – which you will find yourself timidly trying to do, overwhelmed by all the good humour and warmth. Coming from an island with an inexplicable, built-in xenophobia, you will have a pleasant initiatory shock of delight at finding yourself forcefully adopted. And when you see whole oxen or swine turning on their spits in a deep trench full of glowing charcoal, you will recall the Homeric sacrifices of old.

  There are astonishingly few harbours on the other side of the island – indeed only one really meriting the name. That is at the famous Paleocastrizza, now half ruined by the tourist-promoter, though the old monastery on its hillock is still a dream-place and the magnificent cliffs upon which Lakones stands offer stupendous views worthy of Taormina. One can imagine what Villefranche must have been like a hundred years ago. But though the whole of the south of France was laid waste by urbanism by about 1930, Paleocastrizza, then largely unknown except to travellers like myself (i.e. not too well off), only had two little taverns in the bay. It rejoiced in an enviable solitude and unapproachability until after the last war; and even now much is left to admire, despite the crowding and the noise. Yes, the sea is left, thank goodness, and if you take a boat ride down the coast a little way you will be rewarded by some of the most dramatic beaches, cliff-bound and majestic with an untamed tide running down on them at express speed from invisible Cape Drasti to the north. But you will have to watch the weather: for once pulled down below Myrtiotissa, there is nothing for it but to continue due south and try to swing round the southern butt of the island and so into the relative calm of the great bay which is crowned by the town.

  Odysseus must have met Nausicaa at Paleocastrizza; it is not possible to believe otherwise. One of the many talking points among the scholars is that much discussed word, Polytropos. It means ‘many-sided’, ‘adaptable’, ‘resilient’, ‘up to any eventuality’, ‘apt for everything’ … and a thousand other things. It is curious to read that Odysseus almost monopolizes the range of epithets beginning with poly. He is arch-everything, super-everything. Nor doe
s his physical appearance seem constant. Sometimes he is blond with a black beard; at others he is broad-breasted, a little swart man, slightly bandy-legged and hairy. Yet it is amazing how clearly his total personality swarms out at once from the text: wise, adaptable, cunning, sage – all that, yes; but also with a sense of humour and a common touch. He was no courtier, did not try to charm. Perhaps that is why the grey-eyed Athena was so fond of him. Odysseus was, among other things, an imp.

  Another, not less speculative, line of mad reasoning has suggested that Corfu is the site which (perhaps by mere hearsay) Shakespeare chose for his last play The Tempest. You may groan as you read this. Is it not enough to have one’s brain criss-crossed and fuddled with the attributes of Greece’s great acepersonality? Must the British shove their alchemical Prospero into the island? Again you can only look at these green glades, these crystal cliffs and coves, and the whole play enacts itself before your eyes. Is not ‘Sycorax’ an anagram for Corcyra – the ancient name of Corfu?

  What about the history of the island saint? His enormous prestige and influence in the island to this day would justify discussing him here. The relic – and he is a real mummy, a funny little old man like Father Christmas – lies in a chased silver casket in the church of his name which was built in 1589. His original provenance was not local, and for some centuries he belonged to the Bulgaris family. But finally the miracles he wrought proved him to be something more than the lares et penates of a single household. He belonged to the island, and the family was only too happy to accede to the request of the authorities to present him to the church. Whoever has seen St Spiridion make a progress round the town is not likely to forget the pomp and magnificence of the strange and baroque procession – the monks and priests like a moving flower-bed with their brilliant gonfalons raised on high. The little figure of the saint lies sideways in his sedan chair, pale and withdrawn, as if in prayer. There are four such processions a year; they take place on Palm Sunday and Easter Saturday, on 11 August and on the first Sunday in November. Naturally the summer appearances benefit from the light – that of August being the most sumptuous and colourful.

  Another thing becomes clear as you sit over your afternoon ouzo watching the sunlight decline among the green cones and vales of the Ten Saints Mountain. If the scenery has a certain plumpness, a Venetian rotundity (this is what the Athenians will always say about Corfu: but they are jealous because here is limitless shade and water) then the plumpness is corrected and prevented from becoming too sweet by the ravenous white light playing over people and things. It has a queer X-ray impression, as if the sea were really a dark negative of itself against which the swimmers move, burned to the brown of coffee-beans. It has a red-filter photographic effect that one sees sometimes in Alpine photography. But here it is the lens of the eye that drinks it in.

  Exactly what are the priorities for a proper appreciation of this captivating place? Obviously perfect Greek would be useful; but you are probably no better placed than Shakespeare, possibly managing a smatter of Latin. If you can learn the Greek alphabet, start by spelling out the shop-signs which are among the most picturesque decorations in the surrounding scene. It is interesting how many words are of ancient provenance (Bibliopoleion, Artopoleion – Bookshop and Breadshop – for example); words which must have been familiar to Plato or Socrates, and which must have been scribbled up everywhere in the ancient agora of Athens. But in the spoken tongue, the demotic, bread has become psomi. It is curious that if you learn modern Greek with a teacher, he will kick off with the ancient Attic grammar. It is the first memorable lesson in the perenniality of the old Greek tongue. In contrast, you could not teach a Greek English if you started him off with Chaucer. The Attic grammar is that from which Socrates must have learned his letters. Is there, then, something indestructible about Greek?

  Among the most venerable words still extant you will come across words like ‘man’ – anthropos means ‘he who looks upwards’. In common use also are earth (gee), sky (ouranos) and sea (thalassa). Then, somewhat paradoxically, many of the commonest modern words, though they appear to have no ancient Greek roots, prove on examination to derive from perfectly legitimate ancient Greek sources. Water, for example, (nero) has the same root as Nereid – even the freshwater nymph of that name still haunts the springs in remote places. Ask any peasant. Bread also (psomi) comes from the ancient Greek word opson, anything eaten with bread. Even an apparently modern word like pallikar (young blood of the village, or buck, as you’d say in English) comes from two words which mean ‘one who tosses a proud head like a horse’. But the most common of all come straight from ancient Greece and remain unchanged today: ti nea? (which means ‘what’s new?’) and chairete (meaning ‘bye-bye’ or ‘be happy’). And of course both thanatos (‘death’) and even Charon are still on duty.

  A glance at the synoptic history of the place will do nothing to decrease the sense of being out of one’s depth, submerged by too much data. But as time goes on, as sunny Greek mornings succeed each other, you will find everything sinking to the bottom of your mind’s harbour, there to take up shapes and dispositions which are purely Greek and have no frame or reference to history anywhere else.

  It is important not to care too much.

  One of the magical things in The Tempest is the way the atmosphere of the island is experienced and conveyed by ship-wrecked souls when they come ashore. The sleep – the enormous spell of sleep which the land casts upon them. They become dreamers, and somnambulists, a prey to visions and to loves quite outside the ordinary boundaries of their narrow Milanese lives. This sedative quality, its bewitched disengagement from all concern, is something you will not be long in feeling here. The air around you becomes slowly more and more anaesthetic, more blissful, more impregnated with holy sleep. You will realize that this is exactly what happened to the conquerors who landed here – they fell asleep. The French started to build the Rue de Rivoli but fell asleep before it was finished. The British, who had almost a hundred-year lease on the place, decided that it needed a seat of Government and built a most elegant one with imported Malta stone, as well as a Chapter for the Ionian Parliament which they planned to create (for once, memorable and apposite architecture – is there any other British colony with buildings as fine?). But they fell asleep and the island slipped from their nerveless fingers into the freedom it had always desired. Freedom to dream.

  Everything absurd, everything tragic, and everything gay seems to have happened here. The place has been a dowry for kings and queens. Richard Coeur de Lion passed this way. Napoleon planned to run a frigate aground on the fort and attack from the rigging. (Lucky he didn’t – the plan is madly impractical.) Byron, Trelawny, and the Greek Liberation Committee brought their squabbles here and were met by arch-eccentrics like Lord North, dressed in a chlamys and crowned with laurel. Solomos (the first great poet of free Greece), the author of the national anthem, was received with acclaim by the British when they ruled Corfu in their graceless and rather bluff fashion. (They made up for their manners by ennobling everyone and marrying the prettiest and most talented girls.)

  When the French, in their spiteful fashion, burned the Venetian Golden Book in which the names of the great Venetian families were inscribed, the aristocracy did not die – as it was intended to; it was in fact reborn phoenix-like in titles stiff and unreal as old brocade. They live on, these beautiful titles, even today.

  Of the troubles and exactions of Venetian rule we know little, but the island as a whole prospered under Venice. Why? The Venetians gave ten gold pieces for every grove of a hundred olive trees planted. When they in their turn fell asleep and left, Corfu possessed nearly three million trees. They are still her pride and her dowry. Not to mention the income derived from an oil as famous now as that of Delphi. It is indeed due to the Venetians that Corfu strikes the casual visitor as being one vast olive forest – it is. Edward Lear, who spent some years in the island – and wrote some of his funniest letters from here – was
quite haunted by the olive groves, as witness his marvellously buoyant engravings of the various sites. When the north wind comes drumming down, this whole Prosperine extent of trees shivers and turns silver. In contrast to most other olives these have never been pruned, and they climb to unusual heights. Some are said to be six hundred years old. The Venetians were a long time here (1386 to 1797) so there was plenty of time to carry out an extensive re-afforestation. The peasantry not only got a bounty for planting but could pay their taxes in oil. In the late 1960s a census of the trees was taken which showed that Corfu alone had 3,100,000 trees.

  The ideal subtropical climate is another factor which favours the olive; its rather delicate flowering is seldom disturbed in spring. Despite the abundant winter rainfall, the highest in Greece (1300 mm) a year, there is comparatively little or no snowfall. On the other hand the Albanian mountains which girdle the landward coast are snow-capped all winter, so that the island, despite its Tibetan-looking foreground, enjoys mildness and becomes a veritable sun trap.

  In classical times, Corfu and the opposite mainland were famous for their flourishing oak trees (remember that Dodona is only 130 kilometres east); but this is no longer the case. The uplands on both sides of the straits are bare and rocky; they have been stripped. In Corfu itself, what the Venetians gave with one hand they took back with the other – their shipyards in Govino Bay were once extensive; now only a few ruins remain. On the Epirote Hills, the damage was mostly due to the Napoleonic wars. Both British and French Governments bought great quantities of wood from Ali Pacha in order to fit out their fleets. When you think that at least two thousand oaks (not counting other trees) were needed to build one ship of the line … Whole forests were swallowed up in this way.