The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  The great massif is the largest single mountain block in Crete; and high up there, hidden from the plains, is a plateau which seems like the roof of the world. It is some five kilometres in diameter but seems much more. It is surrounded by a semicircle of angular, stony, limestone hills like wardens. This is called Omalos and, while no springs burst into the charmed circle, the winter rains are drained off through blowholes set like gills at the northern end, where the road enters through a forbidding pass. Through another short pass one comes to the mysterious gorge of Samaria, which has always had a mixed reception from visitors; some think it is just a natural feature and without interest, others find it one of the most sinister corners of Christendom – as I do. I can’t recall anything as long or as spectacular in Europe, though perhaps Switzerland may have something like it. There is a twisting path down to the sea which is eighteen kilometres in length and which varies in diameter, its narrowest being three metres; the walls close in and, if your donkey is heavily laden, they will scrape and strip him. Why is there no great legend (Eurydice-like) about this singular Hades-like descent into the gorge of Samaria? Or is there one I don’t know about? At all events the walk is both long and a bit dangerous because of the surfaces. One day, one supposes, all this area will become a national game reserve where tourists, with trained ghillies, will spy on the shy chamois. Halfway down the gorge is deserted little Samaria, with its silent, backwards fourteenth-century church of St Mary. Light a candle. Cross yourself.

  As far as the towns are concerned, both Chanea and Heracleion have a few choice corners, but in the main I have always found them charmless; they are dusty and windy, and fairly throb during the summer heats. In Heracleion, the old town is still clearly demarcated by the Venetian walls, though they are now almost overgrown in parts and have been pierced for wider roads. Indeed high up on the battlements, a crazy colony has grown up, where people live in shacks with their livestock and even manage a spot of market gardening. It presents an improbable sort of picture (sometimes a donkey appears in the sky), which has much of the charm one associates with those refugee towns which sprang up around Athens after the Asia Minor disaster – all fashioned in old kerosene-oil tins, but beautifully planned and contrived for simple gypsy-style life.

  You will, however, have more to do with Heracleion than Chanea because of the museum and the proximity of Knossos; not to mention the fine little Cretan Museum which has a marvellous display of costumes with intricate Byzantine-influenced decoration. Sumptuous and bold in style, yet exquisite in taste, these marvellous creations of the peasant mind fill one with respect.

  Once you have made yourself familiar with the Mycenean treasures and enjoyed the ruins of Knossos, you may find yourself faintly doubting the authenticity of the later restorations. In fact, there has been a good case made out against Sir Arthur Evans, not for falsifying but for exaggerating when it came to restoring frescoes. He had fallen in love with his dream-child – and of course there is no doubt of the greatness of his discovery from an historical point of view. His critics have claimed that he jazzed-up the site with unwarrantable and specious reconstructions, and that he attached far too great an aesthetic importance to things Minoan. The Minoans did not produce (or so far have not) one single sculpture which seriously rivalled the best that Egypt or indeed the Greek mainland had already done. The little snake-goddess is charming and pleasant as a piece of folklore but not really impressive as sculpture. The jewelry does not compare with Egyptian, nor with the hoards found at Mycenae, in aesthetic value. What remains? The artistic reputation of the Minoans rests upon the frescoes, and it is here precisely that the criticism falls most sharply. Evans used two ghosts (one might say spectres) who faithfully copied down what he told them to; one was Dutch and one Swiss. Their work smells of the twentyish art nouveau which was the rage in Paris when they were young – a rage which cubism finally blitzed, though it still hung on furtively as the cobwebs do in the back of an interior decorator’s mind. At Knossos the Evans restorations so much took on this style that Paul Morand was excited to find Russian ballet choreography had been influenced by Crete (the opposite was true!). And now, just as art nouveau seems to us passé, so do the ladies of Knossos.

  Knossos is worth a second visit to settle your mind. Did Evans exaggerate unpardonably or not? It is something worth troubling about, though this is a purely aesthetic consideration in no way reflecting on the greatness of Evans or on the value of his work.

  Whatever doubts one may have about the order in which successive waves of men came washing into Crete, the Minoan finds constitute a great historical anchor for the historians. The codification of the laws is one department in which the Cretans made history, for the earliest written legal document in Europe (though of course of another period) is the great inscription on stone of the Law of Gortys. Its discovery was one of those splendid accidents which I always feel are predestined. In the wall of a water-mill near the ruined church of St Titus at Gortys, a visiting German antiquary discovered a large stone with a long inscription which he copied out. Succeeding visitors found more stones embedded in the water channels and, after a long fight with the recalcitrant peasant who owned the land, managed to assemble a reasonable text of this great code. The inscription was written in twelve columns, each originally five blocks high, of which we only have four. Each column was about five feet high. The text consists of a series of laws relating to citizenship, marriage, tenure of property and inheritance. Though incomplete, it gives us an incomparable insight into the way people lived at a remote time (they are dated the first half of the fifth century BC). Many of the laws found their way into the elaborate Roman code and thence into our modern codifications. For example, the property rights of women, both married and divorced, are clearly enunciated: a wife’s dowry and inheritance remained subject to her control and could not be sold or used as a security by her husband. Divorce was the right of married couples, at the instigation of either party, and seems to have been relatively common – as with us. A divorced wife could, if the husband had been the cause of the divorce, claim back any property which she had brought to her husband, together with half the produce from her own property. The rights of both serfs and slaves were carefully defined.

  Important too is the safeguarding of property interests. In cases of adoption, for example, the rights of inheritance were precisely defined; an adopted son could become sole heir if there were no legitimate sons; otherwise he took a daughter’s share in the estate. The division of the population into age groups, before and after puberty, and the age of full citizenship, was laid down clearly. Regulations were promulgated for the membership of the Dorian tribes and of the brotherhoods. Sharp distinctions between the various classes were the order of the day – as can be seen by the variations in the scale of fines payable for the same offence. Legal credence given to witnesses varied with social status – that of free men being the only evidence acceptable in certain cases. The culture was one in which the dice were loaded in favour of privilege. For example, for an offence such as rape, the fine levied was far heavier for the violation of a free woman than of a serf, which in turn was heavier than for that of a slave. On the other hand most offences were punishable by fines or by restitution, and no barbaric penalties seem to have been envisaged by the code. There is no mention of the death penalty.

  Traditionally, Chanea is the home of the quince, and its quince compote has always been a famous local comestible. I also remember Chanea as greener and less dusty than other towns. There are small and pleasant prospects, where one can sit over an ouzo and think about nothing – just feeling the sunlight on your fingers, and tasting it in your glass. Traditionally, too, its inhabitants are thought more cosmopolitan and outward-looking than most Cretans. Certainly, they are sufficiently evolved (to use a word in its French sense) to make jokes about the duller aspects of the island character.

  One of these, which illustrates Cretan hard-headedness, can be told with decency since it comes fro
m a Cretan himself. During a parachute course in the Middle East the instructor, jump-training a group of commandos from various islands, saw one of them fumble with his harness and hesitate to advance into the bay for the jump. Incautiously, he made a pleasantry – asking if the novice was scared. The response was unexpected. ‘Scared?’ cried the young man. ‘You dare to tell a Cretan that he is scared? I’ll show you who is scared.’ He unhooked his safety harness altogether and jumped to his certain death. So be careful what jokes you make when you are in Crete.

  The Cretan is famous for his stubbornness and his national pride, which almost matches that of the Spaniard; he feels about Athens very much what a Sicilian feels about Rome. If in some remote village, you happen to strike a fiesta evening with some village dancing, look out for the Butcher’s Dance (Hasapiko) which is performed with every sort of knife, even those big ones shaped like cutlasses. Advancing and retreating, the dancers clash knives until the sparks strike, and they utter roars and snarls which suggest that their enmity is not imitated but real. Hasapiko gives you a disturbing insight into the savage buried passions which stir the breasts of the villagers in these remote corners of the big island. Hundreds of years of sieges and battles and famines have gone to make up this unyielding and obdurate character, with all its limitations as well. I once asked a friend who had spent two whole winters as a commando in Crete what had made the job he had done hardest. I expected some stock answer – the cold and chilblains, or fear of the enemy. But no; the hardest thing to cope with, he said, was the lack of conversation. There were only two permissible topics for men – the performance of pistols or small arms, and the cut of boots. This was worse than the Cavalry Club, he added; and went on to say that if one dared to open a book, there would be alarmed looks all round – you must be sickening for something; a friend would ask, ‘Feeling off colour, old man?’ But I doubt if remote village communities would be any different from those of the Cretan shepherds living on Mount Ida.

  A modern Greek poet has called the Cretans a people of stone – but he didn’t mean stony-hearted; one must remember that the crop-area of the island amounts to only three-eighths of the total space, and that the remainder of the country is unsuitable for any sort of cultivation. This bony land, with its uncompromising mountain slopes, pastures three-quarters of a million sheep and goats, which forever scramble and munch among the rocks of the thin garrigues. Hence overgrazing with all its dangers, and whole sectors of good land invaded by unpalatable spiny plants and shrubs. The high mountain pastures cannot be used in winter because of the snow, so that lowland grazing is obligatory. In addition to the half-million flock animals there is a further quarter-million of domestic sheep and goats, approximately three per farm family. These chosen members of the caprine world are, by contrast, cosseted; they shelter under the family roof at night, and by day they are towed about by the children and fed upon whatever greenery comes to hand. Hence the enormous damage they inflict upon the land. However, they provide enough milk to meet the family requirements in dairy products like cheese and yoghurt. It is a tragic situation, for the goat is the scourge of Greece, and there seems no way that it can be abolished. At any rate, just after World War II, I saw a re-afforestation plan for Greece which was, I think, sponsored by UNRRA or some such international body. It was an extremely comprehensive study; it clearly promised that the Greek forests could become as they were in ancient times within the space of some eighty years, and the plan argued great financial prosperity for the country if carried out. The only proviso was that the goat must go but the Athens Government could see no way of bringing this about without risking trouble with the public.

  I remember, too, trying to discuss this plan with some villagers, when I visited, many years ago, the island of Spinalonga (Longthorn), where I was surprised to find some good wine in a tavern and some fresh mullet. The idea was greeted with consternation – and the promise of long-term benefits with utter scepticism. It was an autumn day of high wind and racing clouds, with a thunderhead sea; I did not at that time notice the harbour amenities of Spinalonga. It used in the past to be a leper colony; when I first went to Greece there was a significant number of leprosy sufferers, and there were several little settlements for them. Spina was one. After the last war the disease seemed to decrease dramatically, perhaps with new treatments, and the island returned to itself again. There is a pleasant Venetian fortress on an islet which protects the bay opening. Here we waited for a squall to die away with the evening calms, while our skipper found a chapel to pray in and to make advances to the local saint whose name I forget. By dint of much crossing himself backwards, as is the Greek Orthodox fashion, he managed to prevail upon him at last and we had a smooth passage.

  Recalling that forgotten saint, I am reminded that I have said nothing about icon painting – a vexing subject, though one which should not be completely ignored, since Crete has of late come to the fore with her recently discovered (they were always there, but nobody cared before) church paintings and icons. It is difficult to know exactly how one should evaluate and appreciate an icon; certainly not in the same way as one does an Italian primitive or a Renaissance church painting, because there one is dealing with individual artists. With icons, one is dealing always with a school; its range of impact seems much less, and much more remote, than that of Italian painters. Icons convey a delightful smokiness to the dignified interiors of Byzantine churches, with their massive displays of convoluted silver and copper decorations and candlesticks; and I can well understand one wanting to have a fine icon or two on one’s own walls. But just what criteria one uses in judging them I do not know, and I have a feeling that the subject has not yet been opened up by critics, whose judgments might help us to form our own taste and appreciation for these delightful eidola. Myself, I always see them with Olympian rather than Christian protagonists, and I think they must have hung as charms in the ancient Acropolis – to be coaxed, invoked and implored. Or threatened, as they are still. Ask St Spiridion if he hasn’t been threatened more than once, or St Nicholas or Poseidon (there is little real difference to the peasant mind).

  Saints, like men, can become lazy and fail in their duties; it may be necessary sometimes to call them to order. As late as the last century in the Italian Abruzzi there lingered a custom which sounds very ancient. When the weather was not what it should be, or when a harvest turned out particularly badly, the statue of the village saint in the local church was carried out into the fields and ceremonially whipped. Nor were these Italian peasants the only ones to retain the sense of magic in their dealings with heavenly matters. Much the same sort of thing must have gone on in the mind of an eminent English archaeologist of whom I was told. He lived in Greece before the last war. He always carried an ash-plant in his car; for the slightest defection he would raise the bonnet and administer a smart thrashing to the engine. He seriously claimed that this treatment worked nine times out of ten in cases of dumb insolence, to which cars of that remote epoch were prone. The defect was remedied by the chastisement. Someone a little more modern might perhaps have thought of thrashing the chauffeur instead.

  I am hunting for the right tone of voice in which to attempt to convey the strangely ambivalent attitude of the Greek peasant towards his patron saint; it is a compound of the personal and sceptical which contains no hint of irreverence or whimsicality. He scolds his saint when things go wrong, as one might scold a business partner who has not been pulling his weight. And he feels so close to his saint that he can allow himself the luxury of a joke at his expense which, to the casual eye, might suggest disbelief in the powers of the eidolon. Not so. We spend our time in beseeching our saints and praying to them; the Greek wishes on his saint, and by a man-to-man attitude seeks to coax him into, the appropriate state of mind to grant the wish. He is particularly irritated when he has actually invested something like an exvoto in gold or a jewel, and the saint does not come across. I have even heard saints referred to in a most opprobrious fashion –
sometimes as ‘that stinking old cuckold in the niche’. This is not irreverence, but a kind of superstition that one should not utter praise aloud for fear of igniting the devil. It is on a par with the Evil Eye drill; when you see a beautiful child you must spit thrice and mutter the formula Na meen avaskathi (‘May she not be bewitched’). In ancient times certain deities had to be approached counter-clockwise, so to speak; there used to be a shrine to Heracles in Rhodian Lindos which could only be approached by walking backwards, throwing stones, and uttering the worst curses and blasphemies. The god would not respond to any other kind of blandishment.

  It is not likely that you will take your leave of Crete with the happy feeling that you have come to grips with, and solved, any of the tantalizing problems it presents – whether those concerned with Minoan dating, the invasions of Mycenae, or the date of the Dorian epoch. It is pitiable how scanty and enigmatic, not to mention self-contradictory, the available materials are. But this provides a rich and muddled compost in which archaeologists and prehistorians can flourish; and they must be kept employed, for the best of them bring us enriching theories and discoveries. Nor from the world of fables and semi-fictions will you feel that you have nailed the Minotaur, or really elucidated the scientific discoveries of Daedalus. It will not be your fault for, even as far back as Homer, the muddle and overlapping seem pretty constant; he speaks for example of ‘a land called Crete in the midst of the wine-dark sea … and in it many men beyond number and ninety cities. And there is a mixture of tongues there. There are Achaeans there and stout-hearted Eteo-Cretans, Cydonians and the wavy-haired Dorians, and illustrious Pelasgians.’