The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  I shall say little – there is little to say – about the grotto of the Seven Virgins, which lies a little way outside the town. As with so many inconvenient ancient Greek Nereids, the Orthodox church tried to make a moral story out of them. Such was their purity that, when some wicked pirates came, they retired to a cave and were never heard of again. However, they work the same miracles as their ancestors the nymphs – as you will see from the wall inscriptions and the slips of petticoat attached here and there, even to bushes outside. If you wish to conceive, a slip of your petticoat and a prayer to them will usually do the trick. I know a lady who tried this with great success, and her son, like any Calymniot sponge-fisherman, actually went to sea when he grew up.

  The Dodecanese (Twelve) Islands lie or trail down the whole length of frowning Turkey – a slender vertebral column, each one a mountain tip – linking the two big islands, Samos and Rhodes, head and tail, so to speak. Perhaps ‘frowning’ is a trifle unkind, though the Turkish mountain ranges overtop the island hills and seem free from all life that is not nomadic. Yet the fate of this group of islands has always been actively linked to the present Turkish mainland, and it is only in recent times that they have found themselves cut off. I suspect that the Asia Minor disaster, that foolish Greek campaign, was one of the causes, and that it has left a traumatic wound in the sly and secretive Turkish temperament, rather as the repeated invasions by Germany have affected the French. It is not possible to convince an ordinary Frenchman that Germany is now no longer belligerent; he won’t swallow it. So I think a good deal of heady, Greek propaganda about The Great Idea of a Greater Greece overseas has made the Turks suspicious and unco-operative. Where does this Great Idea come from? Perhaps it is some absurd vestigial reaction, echoing the ancient Greek expansion into Italy and Sicily … No, this can’t be true, because each little colony – Rhodes, Corinth, Athens, and so on – acted separately, and they were often at war with each other. It is more likely to be some relic of a Byzantine pipe-dream. But whatever its origin, its consequence was fatal to two neighbours who have need of each other. Much of ancient Greek history took place over the water – Troy, Halicarnassus, are still there to be visited; while in more recent times, one has only to read a novel like Aeolia by Venezis to realize how much the Greeks felt at home in Turkey and what a wrench it was for them to find themselves ‘exiled’ to places like Athens or Salonika. Think of Smyrna in flames, of Ataturk … The Greeks have always been hasty, intemperate and great chatterboxes, while the Turks by temperament are shy, secretive and literal-minded. When they lived side by side, they got on famously. Even in Byron’s day not all pachas were tyrants; as a breed, they were mostly lazy and profligate, were dumb and could be bribed. The Greeks I knew from Asia Minor have a real, amused affection for the Turks. In Rhodes, one told me that when they wanted impartial and fair legal judgment on some matter under arbitration, they asked a Turkish mufti to pronounce on it and accepted what he said.

  The Dodecanese lingered long under Turkish rule; but they were referred to as the ‘Privileged Islands’ since they enjoyed tax exemptions and special privileges granted in the age of Suleiman the Magnificent. These they kept right up until 1908, when the islands united against Turkish rule – egged on by you-know-who. They were liberated in 1912, and Greece was promised that they would be restored to her at the end of the war. However, at the Treaty of Sèvres, the promise simply evaporated and they were given to Italy as a reward for her war services. It was not until 1948 that they returned to Greece; yet they have always been as distinctively Greek as any other Aegean island. One wonders how the Greeks have managed to keep their affection for the British in spite of all this jobbery.

  Though the word ‘Dodecanese’ was not officially applied to them until 1908, they must always have been thought of as a group of twelve, as they are so referred to by a Byzantine chronicler as early as 758 or thereabouts.

  The most northerly, and in a queer sort of way the most anomalous, of the group is Patmos, which lies like a tortoise in a spatter of atolls, sculpturally rather fine, but not scenically outstanding. What makes it seem strange is that it is wholly a Christian island, with no whiff of ancient Greece about it. There seems to be no trace there of the usual succession of invasions, or Neolithic habitations, or whatnot. It suddenly emerges in full glory with the Apocalypse, that strange, transcendental poem which is worthy of an early Dylan Thomas. The mere fact that the Apocalypse was born in the lugubrious hole that the monks still show you with pride and awe instantly puts Patmos into the top class of poetic evocation.

  The monastery on top of the island is grimly beautiful in a rather reproachful way, and it crowns perfectly the small oatcake of the island, which has practically no green, is nearly all uncompromising stone. Seven hills, seven letters, seven candlesticks, seven stars … The punch-drunk numerologist who gave us this magnificent doom-laden poem is said to have conceived and executed it in a cave, over which there stands now a chapel dedicated to St Anne and the Apocalypse. Here the resident monk will show you not only a picture of St Anne, but also the hole in the rock which was riven by the voice of God as it came upon St John. The whole extravanganza was taken down at the speed of revelation itself, presumably in shorthand, by his disciple, Prochorus, who used a protruding piece of wall as a desk. It reads magnificently in our English version – as richly as a Welsh nervous breakdown at an Eisteddfod. On the wall, a silver halo marks the spot where the Apostle laid his head to rest. The place is inconceivably gloomy in winter – my last visit was during a storm. The wind howls outside and, inside the dark rock-chamber, you hear the mountain teeming with invisible springs, the noise of water everywhere macerating pebbles, the drip, drip of rain at the entrance. The monk of that epoch was a sad rascal, who looked like a half-drowned spaniel but was clearly very superstitious, for he crossed himself ardently every time the wind moaned. I was glad to get out and back to the port where my companion had brewed up in a tavern with no window panes. Pencils of white light moved about the sky like searchlights in the pitch-dark afternoon. It was only three in the afternoon, and yet lights had to be lighted. Successive flashes of lightning flared on the windows of the monastery high up on the crown of the hill. I pitied poor Prochorus at his stone desk, taking down this elaborate poem with its Asiatic images. The site of the revelation was neglected for centuries, and it was only in 1088 that the Emperor Alexis Comnenos granted the place to St Christodoulos for the founding of a monastery.

  When one thinks how rife piracy was in these waters at that time, one wonders whether the emperor’s gift was a polite way of exiling an awful bore. Whether or no, it was an act of great temerity to start off and found a monastery in so unprotected a place. Nevertheless, the old saint set about building and the result of his labours and that of several generations after him is still here for us to admire. It is all painted stark white, and the towers and steeples are patterned in cubist motifs of great beauty, without a trace of prettiness. From the top, walking the ramparts of this lowering castle, you can see that Patmos is formed from three masses of metamorphic rock, all but severed from each other. Port Scala, an excellent lie-in when there is high wind or a brutal sea, is a deep-cut fjord which all but sections the island into two parts. The site of the ancient town was down here when, for a brief while, it was an Ionian settlement; later on, the Romans exiled troublesome politicians here. The rest is anonymity and piracy until the good St Christodoulos came along; and the strength and strategic positioning of his great castle-monastery shows to what extent the place had to be made defensible. The body of its founder lies in a casket in a chapel full of squirming Byzantine decoration whose murky splendour is impressive but not very uplifting. As for St John … it does not seem absolutely certain that the great document he produced was written in Patmos at all; we know only that Domitian had him exiled here about AD 95. What is curious is that the ‘Acts of St John’, a work of pious hagiography written by his disciple, Prochorus, deals with all the miracles he perf
ormed in the island but does not actually mention that the Apocalypse was written here. Anyway, the book itself was never accepted by the Orthodox and figures in the Apocrypha. It was just too good.

  Pacing the battlements of the monastery, you can enjoy a splendid view of the whole island, and also catch a glimpse of sinister Mount Cerceteus lying to the north like a watchful hammer-head shark. It seems to attract electrical storms, and the frequent displays of fireworks have given rise to a number of legends in the island itself, where the peasants call it St John’s Light. I have tried to find a concrete side to this rather odd ascription – perhaps a folk-tale or a legend which would explain what the devil (sic) St John might have had to do with electrical storms on the faraway mountain – but have had no success. The peasant woman I asked could not answer my question, but it certainly did not trouble her; she simply shrugged her shoulders and went on beating an octopus against the rocks of Scala, in order to soften it up for lunch. The real treasure of Patmos is the great library, and this is what makes it worthwhile to mount a mule and go wobbling up the precipitous road to the monastery; this and of course the views.

  The great library is now no more than a shadow of its former self. Diligent ‘collectors’ across a couple of centuries have stolen or borrowed priceless things, which have later turned up in the national libraries of Germany, France and England. The same argument which is trotted out to excuse the affair of the Elgin Marbles is in order here – namely, that local ignorance and neglect constituted a greater danger to the manuscripts than their pilfering for a market which at least preserved the spoils of these forays. There would, say we, have been no Elgin Marbles to squabble over had Elgin not bought them – for the local Greak apathy was exceeded only by Turkish neglect. And now that the Acropolis itself is melting away, a victim of the petrol engine, what is one to think? Myself, I think I should have given them back and kept copies of them in plaster for the British Museum. For us, they are a mere possession of great historic interest. For the Greeks they are a symbol, inextricably bound up with their national struggle not only against the Turks, but also against an image of themselves as bastard descendants of foreign tribes (not Greeks at all); an image which they very successfully shattered during the Albanian campaign, thus putting modern Greece squarely on the world maps as the right true heir to the Periclean heritage. Their simple ‘No’ to Mussolini was as perfect as any Periclean declaration.

  In the catalogue of the Patmos library, some six hundred manuscripts are recorded; but now only two hundred and forty are left to admire. The most valuable, and at the same time the most charming to the eye, is the celebrated Codex Porphyrius of the fifth century, of which the major portion is still in Russia. The Orthodox Church has always had strong links with the Balkans, though there are now only a few monasteries left which were originally populated by Russian monks for whom Mount Athos was always a place of holy pilgrimage. The absoluteness of this strange peninsula, where no female creature (neither woman nor hen) is welcome, mark it out as an uncompromising forcing-house for monks disposed to mysticism. Mind you, laymen with a religious turn of mind often arrange to take a retreat in an Athos monastery, in order to purge their souls of the material dross of everyday life. The two poets, Kazanzakis and Sikelianos, came here together and spent over a year in prayer and meditation – a period of religious striving about which Kazanzakis has left us a moving testimony. His mind was divided between, on the one hand, the spontaneous old rogue Zorba, exulting in life, and on the other, the problems of St Paul and St Francis, which he found so tormenting. His work spans the full spectrum of the Greek soul, which is highly sceptical and irreverent, and at the same time profoundly religious, though only in the anthropological sense. I recall a diplomat telling me once that whenever he travelled with Vichinsky to the United Nations, the old Russian Communist delegate never failed to cross himself in the Byzantine style before taking a plane. It is wise to take such precautions. One never knows.

  And so northward in the direction of Samos, but with a stopover at the unrewarding and rugged Icaria which has an unkempt air, as if it has never been loved by any of its inhabitants. This is understandable; it won’t bear comparison with its magnetic neighbours, and moreover, it lies awkwardly abaft the channel, as if the first intention was to be a stopper of it. All that its position achieves is interference with the free-running tides from north to south, creating the sort of lee which is not sufficiently interesting for people under sail. The impression it gives of disorder and vacillating purpose is increased by a visit ashore – the road system has the air of being thought up by a drunken postman. There are some thermal springs, but they do not enjoy great renown. To write more about Icaria would be like trying to write the Lord’s Prayer on a penny. Onward then to the spacious bays of Marathocampus in Samos, and the grizzled head of Mount Cerceteus.

  The Northern Sporades

  *

  Samos and Chios

  There is some justification for linking these two islands together; they are equally important historically, and both share the proximity of the Turkish mainland which in ancient times must have given them a distinct metropolitan flavour. Samos is separated from the mainland by a small gap hardly two kilometres in length. To me, the approach to this famous island is more beautiful than the island itself. You travel, by magnificent sea-roads, as if across the heart of some fine old Victorian steel-engraving by Lear or Landseer, among headlands and promontories of unstudied grandeur, which the Victorian traveller always described as ‘sublime’. It is sublime. After this approach, the island itself, despite its harsh backbone of mountain, despite the grizzled head of Mount Cerceteus which lifts itself up to nearly 5000 feet (1520 m), is a little disappointing.

  Chios, twenty miles away, boasts of Homer, while Samos can only put up one tyrant of genius and a mathematician called Aristarchus – who has no right to be as little known as he is, for, after all, his heliocentric notions of the heavens anticipated Copernicus by some two thousand years. Fertility was the essence of classical Samos, and provided it with even more nicknames than Rhodes. Homer alludes to the island as watery, but he was outdone by other Samiot enthusiasts, who called it Anthemis for its flowers, Phylis for its greenery, Pityoussa for its pines, Dryoussa for its oaks, and so on. Indeed people were so carried away by the greenness and abundance of Samos that Menander, the poet, announced that the fowls in this Eden produced not only eggs but milk as well. Perhaps he was parodying the extravagance of Samiot claims? I saw very few fowls (and found the food calamitous) when I spent a weekend in Vathi, the main harbour, which is a colourful enough little place but awkwardly sited for the frequent winds, that scatter spray and dust with equal abandon. The second harbour, Tigani (Frypan), is more attractive; spacious and eloquent itself, it has fine views of the Turkish mountains which hover down to Cape Kanapitza. There are several little taverns with good seafood, and here, if you wish to pander to local patriotism, you may ask for a performance of the loveliest Greek folk song of all, Samiotissa (‘Samiot girl’), and use its stately, lilting measure to learn the finest and gravest of the Greek dances, the Kalamatiano.

  It is singular that, in an island so famous for its sculpture, artificers in precious metals, and carvers, the names of few eminent individuals have descended to today. Polycrates the tyrant, who made Samos queen of the seas in 535 BC, has hogged the stage of history.

  The reputation of Polycrates is not undeserved for, apart from his conquests on land and sea, he was also a discriminating patron of the arts, who invited many distinguished poets to visit his island court. His rise to fame was staggering in its swiftness, and at the height of his power he had a fleet of galleys of one hundred and fifty oars and an army of a thousand bowmen on call. At heart he remained a corsair, and his maraudings seem to have been unplanned and without any central object. He went to war for the fun of it; yet, magically, was always the winner. He inspired a small vignette by Herodotus, on which his fame still largely rests. In order to escape
the jealousy of the gods, he threw a rich emerald ring into the sea; but after a day or two a fisherman turned up at the court with a huge fish for dinner. When it was carved, the ring was found inside. ‘A sure sign’, says the historian, ‘(for a man so lucky that even what he had thrown away came back to him) that he would die a miserable death.’ Which he indeed did, for he finally allowed himself to be lured into Ionia and arrested by his enemies, who revenged themselves on his past misdeeds by flaying and crucifying him.

  It was under Polycrates’s rough rule that three of the greatest engineering feats of the ancient Greek world were carried out. The first was the great mole which protects the harbour; Lesbian slaves were forced to fashion this as a punishment for taking arms against the Samiots. The second was the extraordinary tunnel which exists even to this day as a water-conduit for the capital. The third was the temple of Hera which was one of the wonders of the ancient world, and of which little now remains except the site, starkly beautiful on its headland where goats browse and untiring eagles weave overhead. Cape Colonna, as the place is called, has priceless views of the mainland from every spur; but of Hera’s temple only a single column marked the spot when last I was there.