The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  But there is little point in reciting the long bead-roll of visitors and those who called here because they were en route for somewhere else and found the island on their way; Nero, heading for the Isthmian Games, at which he was to bestow all the first prizes upon himself, and end by ordering the Isthmus of Corinth to be dug, is a case in point.

  It would be fair to consider his case as an early form of islomania. His concern with the Corinth canal was neither aesthetic nor utilitarian – he simply had a fancy to turn the Peloponnesus into an island. It would be more to the point to speak of Tiberius, that specialist in choice holiday places, who actually made a villa at Cassiopi upon the rocky northern point. Strangely enough, he did the same in Rhodes on a similar point with roughly the same exposure: a headland over the water, situated in a gulf crowned with tall mountains. Cato, Pompey, Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra … to the devil with the lot of them! In a later epoch came a visitation which aroused many an echo – The Duse and D’Annunzio chose the island as a place in which to consummate a somewhat stagey love affair. The villa is still pointed out. Noël Coward was devoured there by a flea, or so he told me.

  The first sea battle in the history of ancient Greece took place between the Corinthians who had settled Corfu and the Corfiots themselves. The latter won; but it was like the closing bars of an overture which ushers in the long senseless chain of invasions and attacks, plagues and famines which have followed right up to this day. At the outbreak of the last war the Italians used the island for target practice and did the town a great deal of damage; but the saint reacted in characteristic fashion, and it is said that during the greatest raid the citizens of the town (or as many as could) huddled into the church and escaped unscathed, for it was almost the only public building to escape a hit. For a long time Spiridion had not done very much except make routine cures for epilepsy or religious doubts. But this was a return to full form, and it once again reminded the people of Corfu that this same old saint had once dispersed fleets, riding upon the afternoon mistral to do so, and even repulsed the plague more than once – it whisked off with a shriek in the form of a black cat. Perhaps it is really due to him that the merciful sleep of nescience descends on all who come here? The fact remains that even the Turks when they landed 30,000 troops and ravaged the island in 1537 felt something equivocal in the air which made them nod. They too retired after a while, though they took 15,000 islanders with them as slaves.

  The Ionian Islands were, even in modern times, a bone of contention between the great powers. By the Treaty of Tilsit the French were authorized to assume their jurisdiction. They stayed from 1808 to 1814, outfacing the severe British blockade. Indeed they only left after the Treaty of Paris was signed which placed the islands under the jurisdiction of Britain. The British suzerainty was ended only in 1864, when Britain ceded the islands to the newly born Greek kingdom.

  The British occupation, which lasted for so long, yielded a rich harvest of memoirs and official dispatches, and a richer gallery of notable eccentrics and famous figures like Gladstone whose infectious Philhellenism was not echoed a century later when the Cyprus issue raised its head. More’s the pity. There is no place in the world where the English are more enjoyed and admired than on the island of Prospero.

  As for what they left behind, the cricket comes upon one as rather a shock – the noble sweep of the main Esplanade with its tall calm trees is suddenly transformed into an English cricket field, though the pitch is one of coconut-matting. Under the charmed and astonished eye of the visitor a marquee is run up and two teams dressed in white take possession of the ground. It is highly professional and would do justice to Lord’s.

  What is singular is the deep and pensive appreciation of the game in an audience very largely consisting of Greek peasants who have never had the chance to play it. They have presumably come in to town to shop from some nearby village, and now here they are, apparently deeply engrossed in this foreign game while their fidgeting mules are tied to trees on the Esplanade. The audience for the match, apart from them, consists of young soldiers from the garrison, tourists, waiters, an occasional bank-clerk playing hookey, a dawdling postman. On all their dark, intent faces you see a deep concern, a quiet appraisal and appreciation of the game in progress; its white ritual, and its measured cadences seem to sit well with a Mediterranean rhythm. Moreover, they applaud in the right places, and catch their breaths at any notable stroke with authentic delight. Perhaps, in all their dark intentness, what they really see is something like the white-clad figures racing upon some Minoan vase-painting to soar over a rearing bull. There is a tie between sport and ritual, for one must have grown out of the other.

  From almost everywhere in the town one can hear the characteristic click-clock of the ball on the bat, and the rounds of applause. Once upon a time it was mingled with the stately popping of ginger-beer bottles, which as ritual objects, together with drop scones, lingered on in the coloured marquee until about 1937–8. But cricket is not yet just a dead ritual; it is still flourishing among the children of Corfu, for everywhere in town you will find the chalked up practice-wicket on the walls of the houses, for all the world as if one were in the East End of London.

  Yet, after your first adventure with the Greek light and your initial rapture at the beauty of the landscape, you may feel slightly restless. The lack of classical remains will probably be the cause of it. The shop front, the foreground of the picture, so to speak, is most vividly filled in with an Offenbach-like array of historical remains – eloquent of France, Britain, Venice, Turkey; but with the advent of Byzance, history seems to lose its outlines. Everything becomes submerged in myth and in poetry. (How did Odysseus find the place?) Somehow the fine tomb of old Menecrates seems rather a slender offering.

  At this stage, you should go and visit the Medusa in the Corfu Museum. For she, the mother of the Gorgons, was obviously the warden to the chthonic Greek world just as St Spiridion was the warden of the Byzantine world and the modern. The Medusa, more than life-size, is something which profoundly hushes the mind and heart of the observer who is not insensitive to myth embodied in sculpture. The insane grin, the bulging eyes, the hissing ringlets of snake-like hair, the spatulate tongue stuck out as far as it will go – no wonder she turned men to stone if they dared to gaze on her! She has a strange history, which is not made easier to understand by the fact that several versions of it exist. It is somehow appropriate that in her story we should come upon the name of Perseus, who performed a ritual murder on her, shearing off her head with a scimitar provided by Hermes. It was, in fact, a murder performed with the full complicity of the Olympians; the equipment for such a dangerous task (one glance and he would have been marmorealized) consisted of a helmet of invisibility (courtesy of Hades), winged sandals for speed (the Graiae daughters) and a sack for the severed head. However, it is with Perseus that the confusion of the myths begins and the traveller starts swearing at the unrelieved prolixity of the material, its vagueness, and indeed its incomprehensibility.

  Two factors come into play here which are very Greek. The richness and incoherence of Greek myth arise because successive waves of invaders brought new versions, or even different grafts, with them to enrich a composite already extremely old, which had filtered by slow osmosis from places as far away as India, perhaps even China: a vast palimpsest of myths and tales to which real people had become attached, in which real figures had become entangled. Men became kings, and then gods even in their own lifetimes (Caesar, Alexander, for example). When Pausanias came on the scene – already terribly late in the day (the second century AD) – he was shown the tomb of the Medusa’s head in Argos and assured that she had been a real queen famous for her beauty. She had opposed Perseus and … he cut off her head to show the troops. In Apollodorus’s version, however, she upset the touchy Athena, who organized the revengeful killing out of spite – and also because she wanted the powerful, spine-chilling head for her own purposes. Perseus (Athena was almost as affectionate t
owards him as towards Odysseus) skinned the Medusa as well, and grafted the horrid relic of the insane mask to the shield of Athena. This is a different story.

  There are several other episodes among the different biographies of our Gorgon. In Hesiod’s poem, she fell in love with the rippling blue hair of Poseidon and gave herself to him in the depths of the sea. The trouble started there. Of the two children born, one was Pegasus, who afterwards flew to Olympus to live on at the side of Zeus – a symbol of aesthetic fancy, creative invention. However, in the Hesiod version too Athena guided the hand that performed the deed; Perseus turned away his face for fear of the eyes, letting Medusa’s head mirror itself in the shield he had been given.

  The prolixity and apparently basic inconsistency of so much polytheistic material is exasperating, and tends to give travellers in Greece a kind of vertigo. Prolix without precision, self-contradictory more often than not, these gods and goddesses simply confuse one. When monotheism came into being and imposed the rigid rules of its beliefs upon this chaos, much of the old religion went underground, only to re-emerge in new forms. Far from conquering paganism, the new dispensation only succeeded in shoring up the old tattered and patched fabric of the ancient beliefs. Looking at the Corfu Medusa and reflecting on her Greek origins (she is dated 570 BC) one is inclined to think that she would be better interpreted in terms of Indian yogic thought than in any other way. It is not necessary to ask if some new, free interpretation like this is valid – in this domain it is every man for himself. Increasingly one is forced to read one’s own fair meanings into all this stratified jumble of myths.

  The belt of snakes Medusa wears is significant and would provide the yogic interpretation with a point of departure – for they are bearded, and look like sacred hamadryad king-cobras – a symbol of the ancient yogas of the highest grade, Raja Yoga. This path to the perfected consciousness was known and expounded long before the Medusa came. To the Indian sages, the source of this perfected consciousness lay slumbering, coiled like a spring at the root of the spine in the vestigial and obsolete bone called the os coccyx. (Curious that in the Jewish holy books the same bone is described as the bone of prophesy.) Anyway, the art of yoga is to awake this slumbering snake and let it rise, like mercury in a thermometer, to the skull, where it realizes the alchemically perfect consciousness – the highest consciousness of which man is capable. The two snakes of man’s basic (even genetic) dichotomy spiral round the central column and pass the holy influence up through a number of stations. (Perhaps the Stations of the Cross in Catholicism descend from here?) Yoga means yoke, and the two primordial forces are yoked and, when perfectly married, reach simultaneously the ultimate experience – the blinding zenith of Nirvana. Our modern medicine still retains the symbol of the caduceus, though the meaning has long since been forgotten. (The pine cone which tops the white wand in Greece once represented the all-seeing pineal eye.) But where the devil is Medusa in all this Jungian rigmarole?

  Not far to seek. All the sacred writings emphasize how delicate and how dangerous this procedure is. When it fails, as perhaps it has done very often in the past, because the stress on human nerves is too great, or the techniques perhaps faulty – the result must have been madness. On the distorted face of the Gorgon we see something like an attack of acute schizophrenia. (She foundered in the ocean of the subconscious as symbolized by her love affair with Poseidon.) The hissing hair symbolizes a short circuit, a discharge of electricity – ideas which have overwhelmed her mind. In fact the mask of Medusa is something to propitiate, to conjure away, a dreadful failure of this yogic process. The scared boy hero, Perseus, head turned away, performs a clumsy act of exorcism; today they try electro-convulsion therapy for such terrifying hypomanias. But the old fear of madness is still there, still rivets us; the glare of a lunatic still turns us to stone. Can we see her then as something like our modern charms against the Evil Eye – the blue beads we find affixed to the dashboards of taxis or the prams of small children? It is suggestive too that in Medusa’s case Athena received not only the head and skin, but also two drops of blood – one of which caused instant death, and the other of which was life-giving. The latter found its way into the hands of Aesculapius the healer, and with it he performed wonders, even raising the dead. We see then that certain notes are struck which chime with the ideas of duality, and healing. The old Gorgon reminds us of the ancient methods men chose to perfect themselves, and of the dangers which must be faced in order to achieve full selfhood.

  Weighed down with these thoughts and quite unprovable theories, one sits in the little museum and allows the emanations of the Gorgon to sweep over one. The first shock of the insane grin is over. She is there not to cause madness but to avert it. And in the greyness of the approaching evening her smile hangs upon the wall full of tragic resonance. The severed head found its place on the shield of Athena, and was used in battle to shock and dazzle the foe. The skin, like the skin of the snake in all ancient beliefs, was a symbol of renewal after death, a symbol of immortality.

  There are other good things in the little museum but nothing which has such a strong vibration; Medusa is indeed the second warden of Corfu, and her existence provides an insight into the nature of the ancient Greek world which one continues to encounter as one journeys on among the islands. In all the various extant versions, her attributes are rather stylized – there are versions of the head in Sicily (from the temple of Selinus) and also among the sculptures of the Acropolis. The little horse, Pegasus, the winged fancy of the creative spirit, was the only creature to escape the general carnage and take refuge among the Olympians; dare we suppose that it represents, as a saving grace, that part of her gift which (all madness purged or refined away) realized itself in high poetry and invention? We cannot be sure, but it seems a likely interpretation.

  Yes, it is here, face to face with the Corfu Medusa, that you begin to realize the almost unimaginable antiquity of the Greek land and the Greek tongue. The roots of key words like anthropos are lost in the mists of the past, all interpretations remain tentative, halting. Presumably one day it became necessary to define the sort of ape which no longer walked on all fours, no longer sported a tail. The ‘man who looked upwards’ must have been the ‘man who walked upright’. From this sudden shift of the spine came the whole of a new sky-piercing attitude for man – the best and the worst features, but everything vertical, like architecture, astronomy, tomb building and temple building. The birth of a new consciousness, no less. The cave, the burrow, the barrow yielded place to constructions made of clay and stone. The arts followed, with leisure …

  Modern Greece is only one hundred and fifty years old by today’s reckoning; the three hundred years of Turkish rule seem to have had only a superficial effect. But what a very ancient modern little country it is – for one can see the shadow of the ancients shining through the fabric of modern Greek life. The Romans for all their marvellous engineering could not help feeling that they were hollow copies of something better. They became antiquaries rather than historians, and we are glad of it. How much of our knowledge of Greece do we owe to Pausanias who documented all he saw as late as the second century AD? But by the time he came on the scene, how much had disappeared? We do not know, but what vestiges remain speak eloquently of origins as remote as India (the metaphysics of Pythagoras?). In this earthquake-ridden land the inhabitants seem to reflect all the calamitous instability of the nature around them. Nothing lasted more than a few generations; ruin overtook whole cultures, whole continents, whole towns. In a flash.

  These are thoughts to be pondered as you wander about in the soft dusk of the old Venetian town, with its odours of magnolia and sudden draughts of garden scent. The little capital is most bewitching at dusk, and a walk about the battlements will end at some café where you can dine and watch the moon rise over the mainland – as brilliant as it is serene. It will be shining through the toplights of the museum on to the staring face of the Gorgon and her two watchful lions.
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  Yes, this is Greece!

  Moreover, the scale of things is reassuring: within the span of three or four days you have visited all the chief beauty spots in the island and all the principal monuments. Tomorrow your journey will be resumed; but already you will have drunk a glass from the famous fountain.

  Paxos · Antipaxos · Lefkas · Ithaca Cephalonia · Zante

  The days dawn fine and cool at this time of the year, and the memory of countless Greek dawns over the land and sea are something which every traveller will value and treasure long after he has returned to the mists of the north. Their crisp, dry felicity is almost shameful. Wilde would have said something nasty about nature imitating art; but in truth the Greek dawn puts words to flight, and throws painters out of business. I am not the first writer to ask whether it is the vertigo caused by this light which bequeathed a sort of colour-blindness, or at least a loss of plastic sense, upon the ancient Greeks. Could a nation which painted its statues really have a sense of plastic values such as we understand them in our modern world? For us the lust of the eye comes from the able manipulation of matter; to paint statues seems supererogatory, almost an insult. But perhaps the old Greeks were content with the sense of anecdote? These are questions to ponder as the old steamer wobbles and dawdles across the green crescent of the bay towards the southern opening, where the marshy end of Lefkimi points out the channel, to the open sea beyond.

  One moral injunction must be made, however, for the benefit of future travellers. Do not take a camera nowadays – the photos you can buy are better than any you can take. Instead take a keen pair of binoculars; they are really worthwhile. Even now, standing at the rail, you can turn your eyes on the far lagoons where the Battle of Actium was fought, and see herons flapping about, or the white star of a rising pelican, or the shape of a family of golden eagles moving in slow gyres on the blue. On the other side of you there are two islands of little note – Paxos and Antipaxos. Corfu is falling away to the right, and the thud and swing of the open sea begins to make itself felt. It is here, though, in mid-channel, that a momentous historical event took place.