The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  When Byron left for Missolonghi, it was like someone during World War I leaving Paris to go up to the front line. Back here in the islands, all was sunshine, and music – strangely enough even today the musical tradition of the Ionian Islands is, harmonically, obstinately European; the Turkish quartertone has, of course, made its way into the picture, thanks to the radio and the popular band, but the real Ionian folklore music smells more of Padua than of Athens.

  Zante has all the melancholy charm of that long-lost epoch and, unlike Corfu, has not kept even the frame of reference which made it possible – its architecture. But the land is rich and full of sap, and one could live life fully in this verdant and fruitful countryside. The raisins and olives of the island were well known to the Elizabethan housewife, and there was a steady commerce between the Ionian Islands and London. Zante is shaped rather like a parrot – Cape Skinari in the north being its beak; and the main mountain mass runs down like a sort of spine dividing the inner and outer seas, more definitively than in Corfu. For the landward side (facing the Peloponnesus), there is an adequate road system which enables the visitor to take advantage of the marvellous beaches the island has to offer. Moreover, if he has a mind to visit the unspoiled villages of the interior, he will find that the life of the ordinary peasant has hardly changed since the Middle Ages. The modern inhabitant of the big cities is so used to baths, running water and automatic heat, that he finds the older, slower life-style fascinating; for in a Greek village, water still comes from the spring, and a spring can also serve as a refrigerator (butter and liquids are lowered into wells and cisterns, in baskets). Of course, there is electricity now almost everywhere, but it is still fearfully expensive and usually only the village tavern uses it. The ordinary peasant has paraffin lamps with a wonderful, restful yellow light, and wood charcoal for heat, which is deadly slow; half an hour to boil a kettle in cold weather, one hour for almost any feat of cookery. That has not changed. For campers, the gas bottle is a godsend and also the Primus stove of old, but these are luxuries on the peasant budget. The first thing children learn to do is make a nightlight for themselves with a bit of thread and spoonful of olive oil in a saucer – an ancient Greek light which is still used in nurseries and monasteries.

  In the museum there is an architect’s maquette of the Opera House of the island, and one can see and imagine the musical splendours which have vanished. There are also some excellent prints which deal with past glories, and maps which enable one to site the island in context. It is the third largest in the Ionian group, and is only twenty-five miles from north to south, though about thirteen broad at its fattest point. The northern massif of rock – and the heights of Mount Scopus which reach some sixteen hundred feet above the sea – have a moderating effect upon the rough north winds, which in winter blow down from the snow-clad Albanian steeps opposite Corfu.

  The patron saint of Zante is St Dionysios – anything Spiridion can do for Corfu, he can do better for Zante. He should be visited and candle-primed with respect – one should not play about with the spring weather in the Ionian. Both saints are, in terms of Greek history, relatively young ones, though the Zante one had a long and acrimonious career, including stages spent in Aegina, and then a battle royal to obtain the episcopal nomination in Zante itself. He retired in a huff after having failed in this laudable enterprise and secluded himself in the uplands – a convent called Anafonitria, dying in 1622. His remains are buried in the atolls called the Strophades. In 1703, he was admitted officially to the register of fully fledged saints. Inevitably enough, his history is intermingled with accounts of Turkish piracy – the convent was pillaged by marauding Turkish pirates and, according to the tourist bulletin available in the island, they put ‘some monks to death and others to rapture’. In other words he has seen hard times and is a seasoned island saint, despite his relative youthfulness. It only remains to add that the ancestry of St Dionysios is Norman. By reputation he occupies himself to the exclusion of other preoccupations with the fishermen of the island, and every year he is presented with a pair of new shoes on his feast days.

  How to say farewell? It is as difficult a problem as ever Corfu presented; but one should not leave without two memorable excursions – one to the wide-sweeping bay of Laganas, and the other to the mysterious and poetical beach called Tsillivi. Years later, in the pages of a book, the traveller will find a grain of sand from this spot, and perhaps a pressed flower or leaf to remind him of something he has never really forgotten.

  The Southern Aegean

  *

  Crete

  To the Greeks Crete seems the most authentically Greek of all the islands because of the length of its history and its relative remoteness from the ancient centres of war and diplomacy. Crete, for example, played no part in the Persian or the Peloponnesian wars, during which the rest of the Greek dependencies were almost bled to death; with her crack fleet, she had time to take stock of things from the neutrality of her perch in the main deep of the Aegean.

  ‘The big island’ Crete is always called in the colloquial tongue; and big it is, spacious and full of the brooding presence of its four groups of mountains, which have more or less divided it into four countries with four chief towns. The mountains are high enough to be snow-tipped throughout the dour winter, and very often the traveller in the lowlands will have the feeling he is crossing a continent rather than an island. In almost any direction his eye turns, it is halted, not by a sea-line as in the smaller islands, but by a land sky-line, often massive and forbidding. It is sumptuously rocky, though the verdant and bounteous valleys that open everywhere offer no lack of water or shade or greenery; indeed Crete has quite a lot of high mountain pasture, unlike many islands of the same size.

  Once you round the broad butt of the Peloponnesus and enter the Aegean, you have turned a new page in the strange, variegated album of Greek landscapes – quite different from those of the romantic Ionian islands. The Aegean is pure, vertical, and dramatic. Crete is like a leviathan, pushed up by successive geological explosions. It is also like the buckle in a slender belt of islands which shelter the inner Cyclades from the force of the deep sea, and which once formed an unbroken range of mountains joining the Peloponnesus to the south-west Turkish ranges. The valleys are the deep faults between eminences. After Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Cyprus, it is the largest island in the Mediterranean. In continuity of history and purity of bloodstock, it is probably true to say, as the Greeks do, that it is ‘the most Greek’ of the islands.

  Though beautiful in its spacious style, its ruggedness and its sudden changes of weather make it a disquieting place for the visitor. It strikes a minatory note, which is echoed in all the enigmatic and somewhat vexatious folklore it has accumulated around figures like Zeus, Minos and others – not to mention the famous Minotaur which must still lurk somewhere underground today, like the Loch Ness Monster, waiting to be discovered by television. Yes, it is a strange place, full of echoing wind-haunted valleys and grand glades, of plains full of secret villages which lie baking in the noonday sun, of mountains with holm-oak forests where the charcoal burners stand, like black demons, over their fuming pits.

  Its shape is rugged as well, for Crete has been sculpted by a conflict of tides which forever range and gnaw at its cliffs. From the air, it looks something like the case of a violin that has been absent-mindedly cut about with a hacksaw by a retarded child; the whole northern part is heavily indented, yet poor in big harbours. Suda Bay, next to Chanea, is to some extent an exception, but even that is not a really fine commercial harbour. However, smaller craft and yachts will generally find a lay-by, though it is more difficult on the southern coast, for there the mountains rise iron-bound from the deep sea and form great walls against which the sea pounds and shocks and explodes all the year long. The best way into the island and the mood of the island is, as always in Greece, by sea, which gives the pace and the dimension necessary for the traveller to take in what he sees.

  But today
the traveller who harbours romantic notions of a sort of Greek Tibet will find himself in for a shock. The air-time from Athens is under an hour, and tourism has swamped the island with summer sun-lovers – which has had an inevitable effect on prices, urbanization, and morals. The whole of the northern coast – or a good two-thirds of it – is turning itself into a playground, a place of summer habitation, for sun-hungry Nordics. However, we must make the best of what is left. The Cretans remain dour and gay, which makes one feel slightly better about it; and who could say they are wrong to pine for a higher standard of living – as we all so quaintly call it? In the thirties, when we stayed in a village or camped, we managed without such indispensable things as washing-machines and fridges. Our fridge was the nearest well, or the sea even, into which we lowered bottles and perishables; the village granny was our washing-machine, an excellent one (and glad of the money), even if sometimes we caught trifling children’s illnesses like ringworm or Dobie’s itch from badly washed clothes. All Cretan housewives would agree that among modern amenities there are real godsends like Buta-gas, insect spray, and washing soaps (it is odd to realize how recently these have appeared on the scene; and even DDT, penicillin and the sulfa group of drugs only date from the end of World War II). Life was quite different without them in remote places like Greek islands. For my part, I would site the island telephone as a worthwhile modern amenity; today you can ring from one island to another, from one hotel to another. You never could before; even pre-paid telegrams did not work. You just had to hope you would find a room when you arrived at your destination.

  The Cretans have seen everything – the collapse of the Minoan Empire, the rise of Venice, the slave markets of Turkey, Nazi parachutists and American hippies – nothing has been spared them. If they remain a trifle sceptical and shy, brusque and censorious, it is hardly surprising. One must also realize that they have only belonged to Greece since 1913, though the last Turkish soldier left the island in 1896. The intervening years were years of fragmentation and neglect; they were pawns of the great powers and Crete was split up, as Berlin is now, into sectors and sections. The transition was abrupt, and today one sees new and old rubbing shoulders everywhere. The costumes in the market, at the airport, in the harbour, are a wild mixture of ancient and modern; the music of the juke-boxes is similar, pouring out bouzouki music and modern jazz.

  Four mountain clumps loom around if one comes by plane into the modern airport. (‘Bones of the elephant and the pygmy hippopotamus have been found in geologically recent cave-deposits while deer only became extinct in historic times.’) What must it have been like in Homer’s day? About this we know a little from the way he doffs his hat to the island in the Odyssey, hailing it as a land famous for its hundred cities, its rich and numberless buildings. But the feeling he conveys is that he had not personally touched down here, that he was citing a ready-made descriptive compliment: a tourist handout of the day perhaps?

  On the other hand, St Paul (who got into trouble almost wherever he went) had a particularly hard time in Crete, for he told Titus (the first Bishop of Crete) that, to quote a poet, the islanders were ‘always liars, evil beasts, and slow bellies’. It is clear that he had gone into a bar in Chanea for an ouzo, with a mass of contentious epistles under his arm, and had naturally received what the New York bartenders would call ‘the bum’s rush’. Much the same thing happened in Cyprus. As for the phrase ‘slow bellies’, this needs checking with the original; it surely must be a bad translation. How could the saint so assail the digestive tract of the Cretans? Cretans eat faster and more than most islanders. I suspect the passage means something different – perhaps that they were slow to kindle to the faith. At any rate, it is clear St Paul thought the Cretans had not been sent on earth to charm; which suggests he must have been badly treated. The truth is that the Cretans are the Scots of Greece; they have lived through countless crises to emerge always just as truly themselves – indomitable friends or deadly enemies. If their hospitality wavered under the scandalous begging of the hippies, it soon reasserted itself. And even today it is dangerous to express admiration for something, for you will certainly find it in your baggage as a farewell gift when you leave. You cannot refuse. They are adamant. I knew a lady who got a baby this way.

  Everyone will have special corners of Crete to which he or she is specially attached, but I think the travel-people are right to insist that the three atmospheric places which one would most deeply regret missing are Knossos, Phaestos and Mallia. The shipping companies have worked out an ingenious weekend manner of ‘doing’ the two former and finding yourself back in Athens the Monday morning after, but this is only for people in extremis. Crete is a big island and deserves at least several days, not merely for ruin-hunting, but also to appreciate its own fair landscapes and enjoy those encounters in remote villages which make all the difference to one’s ‘feel’ of a place. The ideal thing is to rent a small car, for though the new road system only dates from about 1946, parts of it are excellent and almost everywhere is now accessible to the visitor. Of course, the southern coast remains a little remote and out of reach because the mountains run from left to right; but the whole inner coastal run from Chanea right down to Sitia is both possible and thrilling in its variety and ruggedness. Thus you will slip down through four counties, each with its capital town, and glimpse the variety of landscape which exists within this one island – quite apart from catching a sudden sight of a sacred place like Mount Ida, with its white crown. Chanea, Rethymnon, Heracleion, Lasithion are the towns you will pass. Then suddenly cloud-cradled Dicte will come into view, another place sacred to the gods of Crete.

  Whatever else has changed, the cast-iron rule of hospitality has not and, if you are lucky enough to rent a remote villa for a few days, you will certainly find that, for during the night invisible hands have placed a basket of fruit or eggs on your door-step. Nor is it possible even today to pay for your drinks if you are with a Cretan. The far countryside is still remote and savage and intact; the vendetta still flourishes in a manner unknown to the Ionian Islands. In Crete, with its rough accent and manly, chivalrous uprightness of temper, a hero is a sort of Young Lochinvar – a pallikar or ‘buck’. In a remote village it might even be difficult to get away without eating a whole sheep – including the eye, a great delicacy, which might be offered to you on a fork, with an Odysseian flourish. There are few hazards in such warm-hearted company, but I can think of one. The drink called tsikudi, a kind of local marc or grappa, which has been piously distilled from dragon’s bones, fills one with a strange Byzantine effulgence if drunk by the pailful. The resulting hangover makes you feel like one of those sad, haloed saints in the icons. However, these are trifling worries of an everyday sort and are soon mastered under the guidance of a native. In all this blue air and racing sea, everyday life seems easy to live; it is the intellectual problems, caused by the muddle of history, that tend to dismay one most.

  What about Minos? He was, in terms of mythology, the old king who ruled Crete during its rise as a seapower and its development into the most important civilization ever to flower in the Mediterranean. It was a stepping-stone between Egypt and Athens, on the one hand, and between Egypt, Athens, and Asia Minor on the other. During the period of its greatest glory, it succeeded in combining and refining dissimilar influences from the neighbouring countries and stamping them with a specific Cretan personality. Yet, as always, accurate dating remains a bugbear; were there many Minoses – was Minos a generic name for all the rulers of Crete? Or did they all descend from one? At any rate, the ancient myth of the Cretan civilization has clung on so successfully that, when Sir Arthur Evans was casting about for a frame into which to fit all his exciting new finds at Knossos, he took the old name and christened the civilization he was examining a Minoan one.

  The son of Zeus and Europa, according to the legends, was Minos who, after getting rid of his brother Sarpedon, obtained the throne of Crete with the help of Poseidon. From his capital i
n Knossos, he developed the island’s seapower and overran the neighbouring islands, in which he smoked out the nests of pirates and generally established order. He was venerated for his wise laws and the security his fleet bestowed on the surrounding countries. His wife Pasiphae was the daughter of the Sun, and the children she bore him were called Androgeos, Ariadne and Phaedra. But trouble loomed ahead, possibly due to hubris, or overweening; maybe power had made him too cock-sure about his importance. At any rate, he incurred the wrath of Poseidon for not sacrificing a marvellous white bull which had been sent to him for that purpose. The punishment was dire. Poseidon made Pasiphae fall in love with the bull; with the help of Daedalus she then disguised herself as a cow and the fruit of this union was a grotesque monster with a man’s body and a bull’s head. It ran amuck and ravaged Crete, so that finally it was locked up in the labyrinth which had been constructed by Daedalus on the pattern of the Egyptian one, as described by Herodotus.