The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  While on the subject of holidays in the remoter corners of Greece, there are some bits of important advice to give to travellers.

  It will be a long time before Greece becomes sophisticated in the bad sense, and in the remoter country places old-fashioned manners and a cast-iron sense of hospitality, as ancient and as sacred as any in classical Greek tragedy, are the order of the day. Inevitably since tourism came within the reach of every man, there have been influxes of the wrong sort of tourists who did their own country’s reputation little good, and whose manners shocked the peasants. There are also problems of travelling alone (especially if you are a woman) or being timorous because you don’t speak the language. Nevertheless, hospitality is still sacred to Greek people. In any of the above cases, the thing to do, in order to establish your bona fides as a serious traveller who merits respect and assistance, is to call on the mayor of the village in which you have a mind to stay; if he does not speak French or English, he will produce the village schoolmaster, who usually smatters in one or both. Ask the mayor to direct you to a family of decent standing in the village which rents rooms. It is not simply a question of finding a room; the simple act of enquiry not only proves that you are serious, but also puts you under the official protection of the village. From then on, woe betide anyone who lets the village down by disrespectful behaviour of any sort.

  The second point worth labouring, for those who come from the north, is that for the most part you will be eating in taverns, not in smart restaurants – which anyway only exist in the very centre of Athens. The taverna is cheaper; you can eat well and usually outdoors, and it is as friendly as a club. It is like a seventeenth-century ‘ordinary’. The thing to do is to march straight into the kitchen to inspect what is being cooked. Nobody takes this amiss; indeed it is expected. Nor will any fuss be made if you should find the lunch or dinner not sufficiently interesting and decide to go elsewhere. At first this procedure may seem to the traveller embarrassing and rude, but he will rapidly accustom himself to it.

  It is Ithaca that prompts this short, and I hope not superfluous, homily; this offering of simple tips that never seem to figure in official guide books, and that make a difference to one’s peace of mind and well-being in Greece. Ithaca, the home of Odysseus and therefore of hospitality, is a good place to start this procedure, especially as there is not an over-abundance of hotel accommodation there. The pretty little town of Vathy was savagely knocked about in the big earthquake of 1953, which accounts for its curiously disembodied air; the rebuilding has been haphazard and tentative.

  What would be the basic requirements for a sea-dog’s lair – the central citadel where the faithful Penelope might spend so many years yawning at her loom? An eminence, first of all, to give as good a view as possible of the surrounding country. The command of one or more harbours. Lastly a place with a bit of green land nearby or round about it where, in times of peace, one could farm a little, pasturing cattle or goats. Alas! These somewhat meagre requirements are satisfied by more than one site on the island – which proves that we still need archaeologists, however exasperating they may seem.

  The great journey of Odysseus in the poem by Kazanzaki takes on a heroic and semi-mythical flavour, as if it were an ancient chronicle or a sort of collective poem; its mammoth size creates this feeling. Nor is Kazanzaki the only modern master to write about Ithaca; of all unlikely poets, C. P. Cavafy pitched one of his finest longer poems here – though in his hands and mind the journey was more a metaphysical adventure than anything else. It was a journey through the whole of his life, and as much an interior journey as anything else:

  As you set off for Ithaca

  Pray that your road will be a long one,

  Full of adventures and discoveries.

  Lestrygonians, Cyclops, rough Poseidon

  Don’t be afraid of them, you’ll never find

  Such apparitions if your thoughts are high

  As long as the great adventure stirs

  Spirit and Mind.

  Lestrygonians, Cyclops and rough Poseidon

  You won’t encounter them unless your thought

  Has harboured them and sets them up.

  It unwinds slowly and beautifully, suiting the measure to the meaning. ‘Take it easy, don’t hurry your journey, better take years, so that at last when you arrive you are old, not expecting Ithaca to make you rich. She gave you a marvellous journey, and now has nothing left to give. And if you find her poor, well Ithaca won’t have deceived you. By now you will fully understand what all these Ithacas of men can mean.’

  A correspondent, wrote:

  On Ithaca I was once accosted by a little man on a donkey who addressed me in good American with the flat vowels of Detroit, where he had lived and worked for half a century. Though old, he was extremely spry, and dark as an olive with clever, twinkling eyes. He said he had come back to die at home, and was proud to show me his humble cottage in a small olive plot. His attitude was extremely aristocratic and he made Turkish coffee and offered me, in regal fashion, a spoonful of the traditional viscino – a cherry jam. All he owned apart from his house and a donkey and a couple of suits of clothes was a machine which, by the turn of a handle, could shred down corn cobs. He had planted some corn in a pocket nearby. He said that he was utterly happy to be home and missed nothing and nobody in the new world. He looked indeed blissfully happy to be home at last and I thought of Ulysses. (1971)

  The less said the better about the site which popular local folklore describes as being the ancient schoolhouse where Homer learned his alphabet … though the view is pleasant enough. This time it is the village folklorists who are being tedious. And yet, so vexing is this whole business that one would not be surprised one day to find out that the obstinate village tradition has a glimpse of truth in it.

  *

  If one wishes during the calm season to take a passage from Pissaetos across to the island over the way, Cephalonia, there will be time for a farewell drink on the top of Mount Aetos. By now amateurs of classical Greek will have been delighted to see how many place names are marked with an ancient Greek name. (Aetos, Eagle; Korax, Raven) and so on. Whatever the puzzles and problems of ancient history in Ithaca there is something attractive, even bewitching about the little island, which looks so like a Henry Moore sculpture thrown down anyhow in to the sea.

  Nor will the contrast with its bigger brother do anything to qualify its undoubted charm, for Cephalonia is the complete opposite. Superficially it has many of the charms of Corfu; wonderful landscapes, spacious bays. And yet, a sort of reservation rises in the mind even as one is enjoying a swim at one of the finest of all Greek beaches. The landscape is large, massive and kindly – and the hills look polished like a Swiss sideboard. The inhabitants are kindly, if somewhat brusque, and have a fine, long reputation for political intransigence and the will to freedom which endeared them to the heart of Byron. They are good mountaineers and good soldiers, and against them the suavity and smoothness of the Corfiots savours a little of Venetian softness, brought about by the cloying beauty of their island. Here all is rough and energetic. True, there are no sites to visit, and nothing much to do except admire the scenery, but even this is sometimes rather a relief after too much slavery to the guide book. No, there is something which renders it rough and rocky like the accent of the inhabitants. First of all, it seems to have harder winters than the other Ionian Islands – snow really lies on the top of the mountain range where Mount Aetos rises to some five thousand feet. Then the big, raw-boned valleys seem awkwardly disposed, running from north-west to south-east. The island is about thirty miles long, and very broad at the southern butt, while in the north it narrows to a mere three miles opposite Ithaca. There is no doubt about its handsomeness, which makes any reservation sound preposterous. But atmosphere is important, and Cephalonia has not much. It is big-boned, lost, a little wistful; although those who stay become very attached to it, and its natives are the most violently patriotic of all Greeks,
reminding one in temperament of the Cretans.

  In the folklore of the island, Sir Charles Napier ranks among the demigods; indeed his local fame chimes with the national fame of Byron. The two men got on well during Byron’s stay on the island, for they were both warm-hearted. The poet was waiting for his cue from the mainland, while Napier was a servant of the Ionian Islands Administration – a most unenviable job, as he found to his cost. The governors were as foolish as they were pig-headed and, despite the fierce agitation of Napier, managed to frustrate the best of his schemes for improving local conditions. It was not only on the mainland that battle was joined – Napier took on the Corfu administration in a vain attempt to secure approval for his development plans. Meanwhile, he bent his energies to the task of building roads, and the present road system is largely what remains from his devoted work. He is, of course, the Indian hero, famous for his telegram, peccavi, which being interpreted meant: ‘I have Sind’; but fame meant nothing to him beside his passionate Philhellenism and his love for Cephalonia, and he reverted to the island again and again in memory, and in his extensive correspondence with other ‘exiles’ from the Ionian.

  ‘The merry Greeks’, he wrote, ‘are worth all the other nations put together. I like to see them, to hear them; I like their fun, their good humour, their paddy ways – for they are very like Irishmen. All their bad habits are Venetian; but their wit, their eloquence and their good nature are their own.’

  Wandering about Cephalonia, one gets the deep impression of a large raw-boned island without much centre of gravity – but this uncertain feeling is largely due to the last earthquake’s fierce devastation. (Zante is an even worse case.) The last really big tremor was as recent as 1953; and much of Napier’s work, and the stylish buildings of the Venetians before him, disappeared in dust, to be replaced by ugly modern cubes of prestressed concrete whose only merit is that it is quake-resistant. The shock runs along the same earth-fault as that which passes through Sicily and ends with a bang at Paphos in Cyprus, after having ripped through the southern Ionian group. Corfu gets the secondary impact in the form of an occasional attack of the shivers, but so far has not had the same bad luck as Zante.

  There is nothing imperative to see in Cephalonia except the magnificent scenery; although a few places will earmark themselves in the mind as excellent holiday spots – Assos is one. What is memorable, apart from a few churches of moderate interest and a Venetian fortress or two, is the actual ride by bus up the mountainside – climbing towards the peak of Mount Aetos, the dominating feature of the whole rocky spread. Looking down, one does, in fact, see fertile valleys and rushing streams which belie the feeling of barrenness. And, of course, in ancient times the whole mountain was covered with a dense forest of silver fir which is special to the island – it is dark green in colour; the wood was much prized for its resilience and lightness, and furnished the hulls of ancient triremes and then galleons, right up to Venetian times and after. Presumably the craft of Odysseus was made from this famous wood, if we but knew. There are a few Homeric quibbles around sites like Sami, but one has the right to ignore them, because there the ancient remains are so scanty and uninteresting that it is obvious that such theorizing will not stand against the wealth of evidence in favour of Ithaca.

  Something interesting and strange in the island is a sort of deep circular cauldron about a hundred and fifty feet or more in diameter, situated about two miles from Sami on the eastern coast. At the bottom lies a deep blue lakelet. For a long while there seemed to be no way for one to descend to lake level, and then in the sixties an underground cavern was discovered (rather, re-discovered, for the ancient Greeks knew it), and an access was plotted through the cave known as Melissani. This is now a tourist attraction. What is still more curious, however, is that this lakelet, which is brackish, communicates with the sea near Sami and also, by an underground channel, with the Gulf of Argostoli itself, eight miles away, right on the other side of the island. It was long known that a stream of seawater flowed inland in the Gulf of Argostoli with enough force to turn a couple of sawmills, but nobody could understand where this water went. Now we know that in reality it flows eastwards and, passing by the Melissani lakelet, comes out again in the Gulf of Sami, a singular topsy-turvy journey. Everything about the island and about the island character is obstinately contrarywise, even the streams. But this reversal of flow carries it right under the so-called Black Mountain (Aetos) which is 5341 feet (1624 m) high.

  Subject to wind and weather, the traveller comes at last to Zante (Zacynthos), the younger sister of Corfu. Zante, in the past, enjoyed a reputation for even greater natural beauties than Corfu and for the splendours of her Venetian architecture which, despite the frequent earthquake tremors, manage to keep a homogeneousness of style that made the capital one of the most splendid of the smaller towns in the Mediterranean. Only in Italy itself could one find this sort of baroque style, fruit of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century mind. Then, in 1953, came the definitive earthquake which engulfed the whole of the Venetian past and left the shattered town to struggle to its knees once more. This it has done, in a manner of speaking; but it is like a beautiful woman whose face has been splashed with vitriol. Here and there, an arch, a pendant, a shattered remains of arcade, is all that is left of her renowned beauty. The modern town is … well, a modern town. The thirteen-thousand-odd inhabitants have still however the splendid setting – the sweep of the great bay, with its striking crown of fortress, is as fine as anything in Corfu. The verdant richness of the climate, the fruitful earth, the thrust and colouring of natural beauty are all still there; although for the historian and the lover of the past the present Zante is sad, exhausted, lacking in echoes. One must go to books to recover that past now. The fine Lear engravings of Corfu are matched by those of an artist of less renown but of equal technical finish – Joseph Cartwright, whose Views In the Ionian Islands deserves to be available again for travellers. Indeed, a fine album could be made from the work of both men.

  The real Zante – famous for its beauties since Pliny first mentioned them – has been replaced with a vague and shoddy provincial town. It is the fault of an age which values riches more than beauty. Yet any regrets may be misplaced, for they centre upon a very recent period, historically speaking. Before Venetian opulence – what?

  The ancient Zante was first celebrated as an ideal naval station, from which to keep an eye on the Peloponnesus and the other islands. It lies just outside the mainstream of events, to its great advantage, whether one thinks of corsairs or of the Turkish occupation. In ancient times, all the Greek thrust went into seafaring. When some 140,000 Greeks from 171 city states sailed for Troy to rescue Helen, they sailed in 1186 long ships, according to Homer. It was a huge fleet. The traditions of sea power were already ingrained, and they have never changed much. The big fleet built for Alexander the Great numbered 1800 vessels of every size, and its safe return under the command of Admiral Nearchus was the most famous naval exploit of the day.

  World War II took a heavy toll on Greek merchant shipping, but when peace came the Greek fleets once more expanded, with astonishing speed, so that in 1976 the Greek-owned merchant fleet mustered some 4529 ships, 49.9 g.r.t. as the shipping magnates put it, ranking Greece as the leading maritime nation of the world. The bias of Greek history has been continuously in this direction since the Argonauts set off to hunt down the Golden Fleece.

  The Greek has lived for so long cheek-by-jowl with not simply adversity, in terms of a poor and rocky land, but with catastrophe, that he has learned how to shrug off the caprices of the merely historic, and hang on to his own internal fibre of spirit which will let him happily dance a dance older than Byzance to an American juke-box on a sandy spit. It is this terrific insouciance and resilience which one feels in the air. Over andover again the country has been stripped by earthquakes, wars, pestilence. For example, we have the names of some one hundred and fifty tragic writers of classical times, but they survive for us in
little scraps, fragments cited in essays of anthologies. Only three fifth-century Athenian poets remain to us in any quantity. Of the eighty-three plays Aeschylus wrote, we have only seven full texts; we have seven plays out of the one hundred and twenty-three written by Sophocles. From the ninety-two plays of Euripides, we have nineteen … and so on.

  Such reflections are appropriate for the wanderer about the streets of the modern Zante with its modernities. The site is marvellously romantic, and the little town, which faces the Peloponnesus, stretches southward along the shore to terminate where the rising ground cradles it, while to the west the wooded steeps shelter it from too much wind. It is an enviable site, and already nature has begun to try to disguise the poverty of the new architecture with its flowers and creepers. Here, in this domain, the island is still a match for Corfu; and indeed the lover of solitude will find better excursions, and a genuine village life quite unspoilt by townism in places like Zante rather than in those which have received their baptism of fire from organizations such as the Club Mediterranée. Moreover, he will realize more clearly what different characteristics the Ionian Islands have from the rest of Greece; they had nearly a hundred years of rest and stability while the rest of Greece, torn with dissensions and sporadic actions against the Turks, enjoyed not a moment of respite in the steady attrition of civil war and internal violence. The seven islands basked in their sunny independence, with a great mercantile power to secure their sea communications, and (with whatever reservations) a fairly indulgent and honest administration to look after their welfare at home. The result was not only commerce, at which the Greek excels; it was also culture in the broadest sense. It was all the furniture of the good life, starting with beautifully furnished and appointed houses and palazzi and country properties, and ending with carnivals, masked balls, and a distinctive musical tradition which lingered on in the shape of visiting opera companies that played the three bigger islands every winter almost until the outbreak of the 1939 war. The intellectual life in this small Garden of Eden that was old Zante, if on a more modest scale than Venice, nevertheless had the same lively quality. Three major poets were born here – Solomos, who wrote the national anthem, and was the first national poet of the land, then Calvos and Foscolo. What is even more remarkable is that the Greek of Solomos was learned, for he had been brought up abroad.