The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  Janaki was a dynamite fisherman – since the coming of dynamite the fish have moved very much further out to sea and have become more scarce. Today the Aegean is full of fishermen who are thumbless, because of a faulty priming; the standard lazy man’s weapon being a cigarette tin packed with explosives and primed with a short fuse which makes an explosion in about two fathoms. Before the time of dynamite the fish were not only more plentiful but stayed close in to the land. Now they have to be pursued much further out, which explains why in poor ports where the men cannot afford good boats and tackle there is a dearth of fish. This is certainly the case with Lindos today.

  I am much on my guard against chronologies which seem too water-tight, and against statistics. Theories of gradual evolution may not be infallible. An entirely new species could, I have always felt, emerge by an accidental jolt or jog caused by the elbow of a sleepy god. The infinite millennia so often posited are the dream-boats of numerologists. As for the science of statistics, I must report respect tempered by scepticism. There was a fine example in Rhodes, where I was saddled with a clerk who went to exaggerated lengths to secure statistics of sales for our little newspaper. Of course you must know who buys your paper and where, for distribution purposes, so I did not discourage his ardour. One day he came to me in some puzzlement and showed me the sales for one small island off Leros, which startled us. Apparently we sold five times more copies than the total population of the island, on which there was only one tiny hamlet. Moreover, I knew from a friend that there was almost nobody except the priest who could read in the place. How then came these prodigious sales?

  On my next trip north I called in and the mystery was revealed to me. The price of ordinary brown paper, such as tradesmen use for wrapping, had become very high, because of shortage; they were using my precious newspaper to wrap up their fish because it was cheaper than any other. It was not the prose or the layout or the information which it carried that made them buy; it was a godsend to them for wrapping fish. This was a salutary lesson and I often think of it when I study the circulation of a big London paper. Who is wrapping fish in it? Every editor should ask himself the question at least once a day.

  Another factor in evolution that interests me is human adaptability. It need not take centuries for an entirely new thought to come into the human mind and create a fashion which runs counter to all that was accepted before. I experienced an example of this too in Rhodes. The Turkish community had no newspaper and we were asked if we could oblige with a small weekly. We had no Turkish founts at the Government Press. Dear old Gabriele, the Venetian head printer, mulled over the problem for a while and then came up with a suggestion. Since Ataturk had romanized the Turkish script, we could set up almost everything they asked us to; but there were two or three gaps – letters with a cedilla, or an apostrophe. The old man said he thought we might find a substitute for the missing letters by turning some of our existing vowels upside down or on their side. It sounded to me most impractical, and a nightmare to hand-set. Gabriele, who loved his plant and everything about print and paper, implored me to let him try, and so I did. The first number was a surprise, and my critics in the administration accused me of trying to give the Turks strabismus and sick headaches. I also got a mild Turkish protest or two. By the third number everyone was reading our new improvised Turkish quite easily and the paper enjoyed the desired success with the community. Come to think of it, the Greek post office has become quite used to receiving and transmitting texts in transliterated Greek. Indeed, I seem to remember that somewhere in Asia Minor there is a community for whom a special edition of the Bible was prepared in transliterated Greek, because though Greek by birth they had never been allowed to learn the alphabet; they had preserved the spoken language phonetically.

  When one thinks how systematically and with what tenacity the Italians tried to suppress and undermine Hellenism in these islands for thirty-six years, one is amazed at the resilience and endurance of the Hellenic tradition. It is claimed the Italians were much tougher even than the Turks; they were certainly set on stamping out the embers of Hellenism in order to secure their propaganda pre-eminence in the world at large. I was therefore astonished to find that, though everything had gone under cover, hardly a year passed before the whole trappings of feasts, holy days and religious observance had once more taken possession of the island, for all the world as if they had never been suppressed. The brilliant Byzantine colouring of the Orthodox rituals, the country fairs, the weddings and baptisms emerged with renewed impetus and vigour. It was touching to see the ancient Greek island awake from its long sleep, with an indication that after so long it might be united to metropolitan Greece.

  But has Greece ever ‘fallen asleep’? It is worth mentioning (in order to stress once more the primordial continuity of things) that just under Lindos, as under the Acropolis in Athens, there is a sacred grotto which is still invoked in prayers – though the present incumbent is called ‘The Virgin’ (Panaghia) instead of Athena. She is equal to every emergency – from plagues, or national disasters of any kind, to sterility and even human illness. The Christian overlay is less than an inch thick. Moreover, with the liberation of the island, all the Orthodox saints popped into the daylight, one after the other. St Nicholas, once Poseidon; Demetrius, once Demeter; Artemidoros who was once Artemis the huntress; Dionysios about whom the less said the better. Sitting in the tavern, under the blaze of whiteness – the heart of light – which is Lindos’s citadel, I often heard the saints invoked by Janaki and his friends, and it always reassured me that they should spring so naturally to the lips of these inventive, generous and dispossessed modern Greeks, who had all the same virtues and defects of their long-ago ancestors.

  It was here too that I came across the Rhodian version of Pan – the modern orthodox devil which has become his contemporary replacement. For some reason I could not establish, he is called by a different name – Kallikanzaros – and he is the chief mischief-maker in the peasant’s world. He is a curious mixture of differing attributes. His chief trait is the mischief-making that is already so well expressed in the folklore of Ireland – or of Germany for that matter. He turns milk sour and generally makes life a misery for the incautious housewife who forgets to put out the traditional battery of charms needed to neutralize his wickedness. In physique he resembles a diminutive Pan or Christian devil. In another sense he is stupid, his behaviour as inconsequent as it is often loutish. He can cause miscarriages or kidnappings – every kind of peasant misadventure. It would be fair also to describe him as some sort of changeling, for in the terms of the Orthodox Church (which tacitly accepts his existence) those couples who have intercourse on 25 March will certainly have a kallikanzaros child born to them on Christmas Eve! He exists side by side with his more sinister cousin, the vampire, who is less evident here than in Crete, Santorin and northern Greece. Sometimes – an inevitable result of the historic distortions produced by these long-lived personages – their lines of conduct get confused. In some parts a kallikanzaros pops out of a tomb and leaps on to the back of an unwary peasant whom he forces to run across country at breakneck speed until he drops down exhausted by setting a cross of bramble over a suspect tomb.

  The Orthodox vrykolax has his own sphere of action, and many are the stories told about him and the grim ceremony of staking a suspect body while an anathema is pronounced. One old priest, who told me about two ceremonies of exorcism he had personally witnessed, said that the physical results of the prayer were remarkable – the body literally flew asunder and the joints made a fearful crackling noise, which he imitated vividly by shuffling spittle about in his mouth. He also taught me to look for the sign of a vampire – in case I ever needed to offer a diagnosis. One never knows what might happen in Greece, so I accepted his lesson with grateful attention. The corpse when revealed is particularly bladder-round and fully fleshed, though deathly white. The lips, however, are ruby red, and the lower lip pends, round and thirsty-looking. I have never had
a chance to apply all this strange lore; only on one occasion did I ever get near a vampire and then I arrived weeks after the ceremony and the reburial of the corpse. But I was introduced to a small boy who had once been the brightest boy in the village but was then a hopeless idiot. What had happened was this. When they opened the grave of the vampire – a particularly unpleasant villager, a moneylender – they found not only that the body was quite fresh after over two years of burial, but that the orange he held in his hand was still ripe. Incautiously, the child peeled and ate it. It turned his wits and there he is now, a pitiful reminder to us of the demonic powers of the vampire.

  I for one firmly believe all this rubbish – there is something about the atmosphere in a Greek island which renders one both superstitious and indulgent towards attacks of ancient Greek aberration disguised in the modern folklore. Nor is it wrong to invoke the psychological power of faith in matters of this kind; I am thinking of the numberless faith-healers in the villages of Greece, and also the diviners who can take a dip into your future – often with remarkable perceptiveness and accuracy. Twice I have had correct fortunes told from my hand – the palm full of ink on one occasion; and I have come across numberless cases of faith-healing for minor ailments. Moreover, there is a pleasant mystery about that strange race of women healers called ‘the good women’ (Ai kales gynaikes); most villages have one, usually a widow or an elderly nun. They have an extensive knowledge of simples and herbs, and often perform remarkable cures. Their work very much intrigued our army doctor, a sceptical Yorkshireman, who wrote a monograph on them for The Lancet. There is no knowing where this information was gathered; there is no school for good women, and besides, many of the best healers are illiterate. I remember the Edinburgh-trained doctor being particularly struck by the fact that though they were good at massage they knew how to spot a tuberculous bone and leave it alone. The islands are full of such little mysteries.

  As you swing up out of Lindos the temperature drops with the change of air and you are cooled by the mountain air. Along to the north, the country gets harsher and bonier, until you reach the little end villages around Siana, whence the ascent of Atabyros must be undertaken. It is the old god-mountain of Rhodes and echoes Mount Ida on Crete across the way. The country is abrupt and farmless, and the only reward you will get from climbing the chief mountain is a stupendous view. Atabyros has its history also, but it hardly differs from that of the many mountain sanctuaries of the islands. Once a great shrine, a few tentative references suggest that human victims were among its sacrificial offerings – burned alive in a huge bronze bull. From Siana you curl round upon Monolithos, with its shocks of mountain grass and spring flowers and great boulders stuck up against the sky. The sea flashes below among the trees – blue as a kingfisher’s wing. It is a splendid corner of the island for a picnic, or even for a weekend of camping. There is nothing to see now until you get to Cameirus, which should be with a westering sun, in a late hot afternoon with bunches of cicadas strumming their music to the golden airs. Cameirus is situated like Lindos at the midriff of the island, but on the opposite side. There is a tiny little harbour, but it is for rowing boats, and it is clear that even ancient Cameirus did not enjoy the same maritime advantages as Lindos.

  The atmosphere of Cameirus is wonderful. I make no special plea, but write with the opinion of one who has camped there winter and summer. The ancient town was never fortified, which suggests that Cameirus was never invaded and reduced; it lived on forever in this bronze summer calm with its orchestra of insects and the whiffs of resin from its pine groves, quite out of time. It lay in the sheltered lee of the island, while Lindos took the brunt of battle and commerce and pirate invasions. Its quiet limestone slopes were ideal for building, and excavations have uncovered the groundplan of a prosperous but somewhat secluded town, which lay here above the sea, its face turned towards Cos and Kalymnos. There is an impressive arrangement of water cisterns which fed the old town; but they suggest not so much sophisticated plumbing as a need to combat water shortages, which are all too common in the islands. The land hereabouts is brown and white limestone. In the summer, the sea becomes a sheet of enamel with an enamel sky above it. One smells earthquakes and takes refuge for a siesta among the pines whose resin perfumes the still air.

  The winter rains are of such density, albeit short-lived, that they form tiny torrents that roar down into the ditches dug by the archaeologists. They wash away whole slices of wall so that when they stop you find whole walls that have ‘teethed’ pottery like a baby’s gums. It is tantalizing to see the handles of tear bottles or amphorae protruding from the brown soil, which you must not touch while everything is wet for they would snap off. You wait for the sun and let them cook slowly; then one day when the trenches are nice and friable you start with a small brush to dust away and clear them. It is exciting, and demands great patience. During my stay, I uncovered several small bits of pottery for the museum, though nothing upon which I could erect a new theory of Rhodian culture, unfortunately. Meanwhile, what has been uncovered at Cameirus, so I have been told, is only a tithe of what remains to be uncovered in the surrounding foothills of the site. My only regret is that the Germans plonked down a military cemetery on the hillside below, hogging the view of the old town, which was not necessary in an island with so many wonderful corners for military cemeteries.

  The little winding road up to the town and, by the same token, to the shrine must have been decorated once by trees and punctuated by statues, and perhaps a fountain. In fine weather the little beach below might take a boat the size of a caique, and was undoubtedly a good deal more animated than it is today. The place has its peculiar magic, which never lets you down; and when you sit there on the edge of the hill to watch the sun setting over the deep, you feel the whole weight of evening descending on you, pushed by the penumbra of the turning world. It is time to light that small campfire and unpack the sleeping bags and the other kit. To brew a billy among the stiff, listening pines. From here, the run on into Rhodes town is no great matter in terms of time or distance; and all the more pleasant if undertaken in the evening glow, early enough to allow you to call in at ancient Ialysos and take a look at the Valley of the Butterflies – a curiosity which is well worth a moment’s attention. As for Ialysos, now prettily transformed into Mount Phileremo, its history suggests that long before the Greeks it was settled by Phoenicians. However, apart from its role as one of the three capital cities, there is little to tell about it; except that in the Middle Ages a frightful dragon dwelt hard by in a cave, and was finally despatched by a gallant knight, the Chevalier de Gozon, who later joined the knights. The only thing of interest is that in almost every invasion of the island the invader has first landed here. Suleiman was no exception; for the great siege, he pitched his tent and raised his standard here, using Ialysos throughout as a headquarters.

  The Valley of the Butterflies (the Petaloudes) is further west, under the little feature called Mount Psinthus, and may be too far to include in the usual one-day itinerary. But it is very strange and worth a visit. A series of narrow, shady ravines have been chosen as a dwelling by this small butterfly; there would be nothing remarkable about this, except that they exist in such numbers that they flow in and out of the ground and among the trees like a soft cloud of dark-winged moths. I say ‘dark-winged’ because they haunt the shadows of the ravines, but with the slightest touch of sunlight they turn out to be in fact red-winged. The best time to visit them is June or July. For what it is worth, I will add their scientific pedigree, which took me some trouble to unearth. They are day-flying moths (Callimorpha hera L) – a variety of the red and black Jersey tiger-moth. Since no eggs or caterpillars belonging to the moth have ever been found in the valley, or for that matter anywhere else in Rhodes, it has been assumed that they are visitors from the Turkish mainland; though why they should choose to congregate in this particular corner of the island rather than any other corner, is a mystery. Once, while I was there, a youn
g Greek entomologist collected a number and took them back to Rhodes town in the hope of breeding them, or at least of finding out whether there was any special herb or perfume which had lured them from so far away. He had no luck with them, as all his specimens died in captivity. So the mystery still remains, though the firework display of the little things continues unabated and is a perpetual delight for visitors to the island.

  One of the pleasant features of the Rhodes of the knights was that they encouraged or perhaps even introduced herds of deer, leaving them free to roam at will upon the wooded slopes of the Profeti Elias. In modern times the Italians followed suit, and I once saw some photographs of these pretty animals moving slowly like tiny stars on the side of the mountain. By the time we occupied the place they had disappeared, no doubt into the cooking pots of the Axis troops.