The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  It would be an exciting thing to explore this Gortyna labyrinth with professional care; perhaps by the time these lines are printed the Speleologists’ Club of Athens will have done so and printed their findings.

  One last brief thought before leaving the ancient history of the island with all its conundrums – a thought devoted to the scripts. Here again one wishes that the whole subject had been fully explored, and the findings clearly tabulated. Alas! Despite all the great enthusiasm for the Michael Ventris ‘breakthrough’ into an interpretation of the script called Linear B, opinions seem still to be divided as to its veracity.

  Nothing could better illustrate the sharp division of thinking about the history of Minoan Crete than the fact that the Encyclopaedia Britannica carries two articles concerned with it, one of which clearly accepts the authenticity of Ventris’s discovery, while the second seems to cast doubts upon it. The ordinary reader or visitor will not pay much attention to these learned differences. But if Ventris is right, it is most exciting to find, among the deciphered words, ones which are in daily use in any Greek village today (toson meaning ‘so much’; kreesos meaning ‘gold’; eruthros meaning ‘red’; selinon meaning ‘celery’). There are also some proper names which strike a chord – Theseus, Hector, Alexandra and Theodora. Myself, I hope that Ventris is correct though I have not the scholarship to assert that he is.

  The earliest seals, tags or tallies, with their pictographic signs, hinted at an Egyptian influence. Linear A and Linear B came later, and are thus probably more sophisticated. While A remains undeciphered, the brilliant suggestions of Ventris gave great hopes for a decoding of Linear B, and some progress was made along the lines of his suggestions. The real disappointment has nothing to do with the accuracy or the errors of his interpretation – it is that what has so far been decoded is relatively uninteresting. We have so to speak tumbled into a Minoan stockroom, among registers which tabulate the stock held in these depots. No poems, alas, or proclamations, or religious documents, which might give us a clue as to how these far-off people thought or felt about the universe.

  If history is eloquent though mute, the poets themselves are far from mute, and the Cretan poet deserves to be heard on his native soil. Here is one whose name is now world-famous. ‘This Cretan landscape seemed to him like good prose; well-fashioned, economical, shorn of excessive riches, powerful and controlled … It said what it had to say with manly austerity. But between its austere lines you could discern an unexpected sensitivity and tenderness – the lemons and oranges smelt sweet in sheltered hollows, and beyond, from the boundless sea, came an endless stream of poetry.’ The writer is Kazanzakis, perhaps the most representative Cretan mind of today, expressing strange yearnings for mystical revelation, and a stranger belief in the heroic future of man. There are few Cretan writers or artists who have done work of European stature. This is not the fault of the Cretan soul and mind, which is both poetical and productive; it is the fault of the history that has torn up the land, annihilated the populations, driven the clans into hiding. There has been no peace, in which the arts of leisure and introspection could flourish; it is hard to be an artist with a loaded pistol in one hand. Nevertheless, whenever chance offered the Cretans a breather, they took it, and men like Kazanzakis and Prevelakis, though they spent much of their maturity abroad in Athens and elsewhere, remained obstinately Cretan-souled to the end. It is doubtful whether someone who is not an ardent Philhellene will find much literature to read about Crete, except the really great book Zorba, which is a marvellous evocation of a landscape, and a sketch of a temperament as validly Greek as that of Odysseus himself. It is a captivating book, which should be read in the island if possible or immediately after returning home.

  There are other good books about the island, but they are mostly by foreigners. The home-grown article is good in quality but, apart from one very big novel by Prevelakis, there is not much of it. The average reader or traveller will probably not surmount the longueurs of the national poem, The Erotokritos, though he will, if he dips, find much to admire in it. Nor does it seem strange that this is a poem of courtly love, which might have been made in Toulouse by French troubadours. The heroic style is Cretan par excellence, and the village poets, often blind, wandering bards, have carried it all over the island with them – and far afield, selling the texts of their songs and recitations in little chap-books printed in other corners of Greece. They sing of courtly virtue – levendia, which is simply the modern word for Homer’s arete. And the feminine version of the word describes the virtue of a girl not only supremely beautiful but valiant and heroic – a real mate fit for a levendis. It is a beautiful word – levendissa – and when a Greek wants to compliment you on your wife or your sister, or express a genuine and profound admiration for the noble stamp of her mind, he will use the word. Without girls of this heroic mould it is doubtful whether Crete, or for that matter Greece itself, would have kept on constantly renewing its poetic image, and in the long wars and insurrections there are as many women heroes as there are men – whose exploits were no less dazzling than those of their men.

  This can best be appreciated in the folk-poems, which sometimes lilt and swing, and at others are cobbled by the patient drone of the bagpipes. The verse, with its long hopping lines – the words are so long in Greek – sounds as if it were skimmed across the tongue, like pebbles skimmed upon a calm sea. The imagery is all taken from the much beloved scenes around the singer – the Cretan landscape. He writes of what he best knows and feels.

  The rhyme-schemes and imagery have that sweet, pastoral quality which we tend to associate with Theocritus; but if Cretan verse seems somehow wilder and less sophisticated, that is because of the musical intrusion of Asiatic quarter-tones. What is particularly interesting to the student is that so many of the words are ancient ones, still doing duty in the spoken demotic of today; words which might have strayed out of a Greek anthology. Apart from the marriage and christening poems, and the straight love poems, there are others that are darker, sadder. There is quite a tradition of poems devoted to exile, which is not surprising, for Cretans were often carried off and sold into slavery just like the African negroes. I am reminded of the haunting, negro songs of exile when I hear these long, sometimes sobbing, tunes about xenitia, and I am also reminded that exile is one of the most painful things to inflict on a Greek. Pace the Turks who extorted their yearly levy of young boys just as the Minotaur did long ago – the impoverished economy of Greece in general forces people to go abroad to earn a living. But they always come back. Songs like these are also mixed with a group of songs called the Amanedes – or ‘Alas’ songs, adapted from Turkish models and expressing a sort of hopeless Weltschmertz of a romantic kind, that is associated with every kind of deception and disappointment. (In common speech, too, one hears ‘Aman-Aman’ said often, with a wagging of the head; it is sorrow with a wide-angle lens.)

  Of the most ordinary and popular rhyme-forms, the mantinades corresponds roughly to our popular limerick, and copes with all moods and behaviours. The Greek rhyme is competitive, too, and every village has its prize versifier, capable in an open contest (liberally dosed with wine or cognac) of ‘capping’ a rival’s lines and carrying off a trophy for his village. In the villages of Cyprus, the Cyprus Radio organized fully fledged Eisteddfods up on the mountain of Troodos, where once a year there was a cup-tie, so to speak, involving all the bards of the island. It was an impressive sight, for the old singers dressed up in full rig, just as the Scots pipers would in similar circumstances. Microphones were provided. There were times, too, when tempers frayed under a particularly nasty satirical thrust, and one was afraid that one of the contestants might receive a crack over the head with the microphone-boom. The contest was widely followed, and each champion took a dozen bus-loads of fans with him for the finals. The red thick wine Commanderia is excellent for oiling the gullet and the creative soul, and we made some memorable films of these contests for our archives.

 
Cherries for lips, then, almonds for skin turned white under the stress of passion, olives for dark eyes, the night sky scattered with stars like flour, young men in embroidered waistcoats with waists slender as violins dancing the handkerchief-dance before a chosen girl … All this is still there today – a delight not only to the visitor but also to the philologist. The dialect is strange, the accent rocky and abrupt; you can know Greek quite well and still not understand what a Cretan villager says to you.

  You may be safe in thinking that it is always something hospitable; usually it is a summons to have a shot of tsikudi in the local tavern and recount all. In the old days, when a stranger entered an island village, he was confronted by a Homeric scene; the clients in the café crowded into the street, holding their chairs, and sat down in a semicircle, involuntarily turning his entry into a kind of theatrical performance. Embarrassed and flushed, ashamed of his inadequate Greek, and full of good intentions, he strayed about like a lost camel in front of fifty pairs of beady dark eyes – feeling like some enticing dwarf for whom they had waited a century. Then he would notice that in front of the theatre two chairs had been placed, one for himself, and one for his wife. Beckoned, he would weakly sit down. It was then, in the tones of a herald in an ancient Greek play, that the mayor (or the oldest among the oldsters) would address him with the historic, ‘You are a stranger?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘What news from Europe?’ This has happened to me almost everywhere in Greece; the smaller the village, the more I expected it. What is most striking is the reference to ‘Europe’; as if Europe were as far away as the moon. And, when conversation became general, one was always astonished to find that one had to do with thirty old gentlemen who were up to date with the happenings of that strange world, Europe. They knew when a Government had fallen, and in their own pronunciation they knew the names of Attlee, De Gaulle and so on … It seemed somehow strange to find oneself involved in an argument about the fate of the pound sterling or the franc in a place like this – a mountain village, say, in Crete or Rhodes, with eagles combing the high heaven and a blissful northern wind painting Chiricos everywhere on the main deep. How strange and thin it sounded – the fate of the British Labour Party amid all this glamour of nature!

  Life in the small villages is as horrible as the same sort of life in far Wales or far Scotland; full of bigotry and ignorance, and the perennial low IQ, which spells death to art. It is a horrible life, not only full of physical privations but of intellectual strangulation, the life of a remote village in Greece. If I never regretted it, and really managed to enjoy it, this was because I was fascinated by the language and the people, and buoyed up by the marvellous classical landscape which is so full of magic that it wallpapers even your dreams. People who don’t have precise things to do or study, or who are in need of outside stimulus and crowds, will find that life in a Greek village will turn them claustrophobic within a year. It is quite understandable; for a Greek villager, life in Surbiton would do the same. Here I must add that the Greek race is the only one I have so far come across in which people can actually pine away and die from homesickness; I have witnessed it more than once. Nostalgia, by the way, is an ancient Greek word still in full use. Pronounced nos tal ghea, it still means what it says. The penultimate symbol is long.

  Home is where the heart is, says Euripedes, and even Greece, that rocky heap of wave-worn grey stones, welcomes its children back with open arms. The Cretans will remind you that a fine style does not depend on riches: indeed if you knew the mean yearly income of the old Zeus-like gentleman in the pub who insists on paying for your drinks, you would feel humbled by his vehement assertion that, for the Greek, strangers are closer than brothers, and life must be taken aristocratically, by the horns.

  Atmosphere for atmosphere, I feel much more mystery and splendour about Phaestos than Knossos. I think most people would agree. The site is a honeyed one for summer breezes, and hard by on a westward tack lies the little close of Hagia Triada in its green curves of sward; there is a wisp of a Byzantine chapel and a few sketchily dug-up houses. The view is as good as from Phaestos itself, and through the verdant plain below a small river called Giophoros – ‘earthbringer’ – prettily potters. This is apparently the St Ives of the Minoans; here they built a villa and sent the children to spend their summers. This impression seems right when you are there, and it is supported by factual evidence, since many of the richest and most elaborate finds have come from hereabouts. These include the mysterious Phaestos Disc, which is so strange and beautiful; inevitably, it too remains undeciphered, and the scholars think it came originally from Asia Minor. About seven inches in diameter, it is imprinted with pictographs on both sides, which move inwards, spirally, upon the centre. Date about 1600 BC. Does it have to do with Babylonian astrology? Is it a mandala? That it has magical powers I am sure; a Greek painter friend blew up a photograph of it and incorporated it into an icon for his island house. He assures me that one can wish upon it with success, and there are several people who claim that their lives (maybe a misprint for ‘wives’) have been completely changed by praying to it. I cannot vouch for this claim; but the little disc is so beautiful that I am surprised artists have not made more play with it, as an illustration to brochures – in the way they have with the gold mask of Agamemnon. More interesting still, it is an almost unique example of printing signs with movable type.

  The rain has stopped, the clouds have broken; the vault of blue spreads out like a fan, the blue decomposing into that ultimate violet light which makes everything Greek seem holy, natural and familiar. In Greece one has the desire to bathe in the sky. You want to rid yourself of your clothes, take a running leap and vault into the blue. You want to float in the air like an angel or lie in the grass rigid and enjoy the cataleptic trance. Stone and sky, they marry here …

  HENRY MILLER

  It is always the light that gets them.

  It is fair to say, though, that if we find so many puzzles and enigmas in Crete, the modern peasant, pressed by the economies of life into becoming a waiter, has to snatch up a sort of phonetic ghost of a foreign tongue which is often the cause of diverting mistakes – though not for him. In Aghios Nikolaos, a barman tried to find me a pair of blue jeans, which he insisted on pronouncing ‘gins’; I paid no attention at first, and then in a later conversation I suddenly saw that this man, who spent his life pouring out pink gins, had conceived a perfectly rational echo-association with blue jeans. For him the Anglo-Saxon soul hovered between the two poles of pink and blue gins; it was his form of Linear B. And of course we make the same sort of mistakes, or worse, in Greek. You will not have spent long in Greece before your children ask plaintively why it is that the Greeks seem to talk of nothing but teapots; it seems to be a national obsession, cropping up in almost every conversation. The truth is that the absurd Greek word for ‘nothing’ is ‘tipoty’.

  I first saw Chanea in April 1940 during a perilous voyage in a shaky, leaky caique which was down a bit by the stern; I was one of about fifty refugees from Kalamata, and my destination was supposed to be Egypt via Crete. It was a miracle we were not Stuka’d during the night, for our engine belched clouds of sparks into the sky and must have pinpointed us clearly. Many similar craft on the same journey that night did not have our luck and were sunk with all hands. However, my daughter snoozed in her basket like a loaf of bread between two badly wounded men we had picked up; and I was later too preoccupied with washing her nappies at the public washery in Cythera to give much thought to Venus Anadyomene. Chanea was in a state of disarray, or at least our forces were; except for the New Zealanders who arrived in top trim, with oil rags round their bolts, hats on, and a good book under their arms. There was little to be done, and I was glad when we were whisked out into Egypt some time later; but I won’t forget the cruiser York lying almost on her side in Suda Bay, firing at the Stukas with the last usable big gun. As a small-boat owner, and a sketchy but adequate sailor, I found this an ignominious way to arrive in the kingdom of Minos; a
nd I longed for a chance to visit Crete in a boat – a wish which so far has not been granted. However, during the last war, I learned so much small-boat lore from the people who were putting agents ashore or collecting them at all times, night or day, in winter or summer, that I realize no account of the island would be really complete without a warning about its navigational problems. Crete is a devil for small boats, and an anxiety even for largish ones.

  I must insert here a warning from somebody far more competent to give one than myself – Ernle Bradford, that enviable mixture of sea-dog, poet and scholar who has really made the Mediterranean his own back garden, and whose books are captivating. He writes:

  Compared with many a smaller island, Crete is still a difficult place for those who come here in their own boats. There is Kissamo, Chanea and Suda Bay (of evil memory) to the west, then there is little between Retimo and Heracleion. To the east, in the gulf of Mirabella, there is the anchorage of Spinalonga, where a friend spent a whole winter repairing his boat. I have not been to Spinalonga myself but if solitude and primitive conditions, coupled with a good anchorage appeal, then it is a fine place to stay. On the south coast I know only Port Matala, ideal for visiting Phaestos … As always along the southern coast one must keep an eye out for clouds gathering on the mountain peaks. Squalls white or black, bursting down from the islands are a regular feature in the Aegean. But the Cretan squalls are something that no-one who has experienced them is ever likely to forget.

  So much for the sea; as far as the land is concerned one should offer an honourable mention to the two hideouts of Zeus, without taking sides. Between the White Mountains and the Lassithi ranges, there is only a sort of symbolic difference which is the result of the poetic echo which Ta Lefka Ori give off to the Cretan. This great harp of rocks is a-dazzle with snow all winter – the chief peaks crowd up to over two thousand metres – and it spells the secrecy and silence which lie at the heart of the Cretan soul. Solitude, silence and whiteness; this is the inviolate stronghold of the Cretan spirit, and thus the most likely nursery for Zeus. The whole western end of the island is dominated by them, all skylines bend to their whiteness, all ballad singers tune in to their image.