The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  In the calm vernal glades of Thasos you feel that the ancients had a simpler, better way of living than we have. But perhaps this is romancing.

  Skiathos · Skopelos · Skyros

  The next three islands are not only similar geographically but give the impression of being a mini-group of scallywags (they all begin with the letters SK), lolling along the coast of Euboea, loitering with intent, so to speak. Three maiden aunts turned pirates. A lack of notable antiquities has shielded them from the worst indignities to be suffered from people; they lack, for the most part, the amenities which tourists are persuaded they need. However, they are perfect places to build that secluded island house, in order that you may live the good life which is always somehow connected in your mind with beauty and solitude.

  The recent history of these three places has been somewhat mixed up and thrown about by the extensive Greco-Turkish exchange of populations in the twenties; but if there is little that is ancient for you to see, you can admire the beauty and style of the Greek island face and form – specially among the old people, calm as sea-shells, sitting in church porches gossiping, or upon pavements made of black-and-white sea-pebbles. But a sense of remoteness and estrangement is theirs. They are off the main track of tourism, which is the only summer life for these Aegean Islands. Remember, too, that the Greek ferries close down in October and, if you live on an island, you only get mail once or twice a week in winter, not more. If you want to motor back to Europe you must make the long haul via Yugoslavia with its snowy mountains. But in these moments, with their long sunny siesta silences, broken only by the drunken braying of mules in the olive glades, you can muse upon the island face of the modern Greek, with all its classical qualities still intact. Faces honed by privation to a beauty which only the austerity of death will qualify, by adding immobility, and by freezing them.

  The islands themselves seem somewhat like orphans – say the orphans of Byronic corsairs; but well-nourished and well-to-do orphans, for they are surprisingly green, all three of them. Clearly their geological history is different from that of the marble islands we have just left. A geologist’s diagnosis would be: metamorphic, laminated rock, with quite extensive pockets of limestone, and lots of fresh springs.

  Even if the tourists don’t flock here, the islanders know them. They receive many visitors from the mainland, who take ship at Volos to come here for the summer, to spend a modest villegiature. It is easy to forget that the average Greek today, even a highly placed functionary, is poorer than the average tourist who visits Greece. The doctor, dentist, professor tend to steer clear of fashionable islands because of the inflated prices. They do quite as well in places like Skopelos, lunching on a piece of fish with a glimpse of salad, followed by a smidgeon of cheese and a bowl of peaches. They also pay one-third of what we are charged for the same meal.

  Tourists, despite the vigilance of the Tourist Police, are regarded by the island villagers as fair game, because it is understood that they are all millionaires with extensive steel factories in Pittsburgh. The remoter the island, of course, the firmer this conviction is, and the harder it is to correct, unless one speaks Greek and reacts forcibly.

  The coast along which the three corsairs skulk is a thankless and profitless one, the coast of Euboea; there are few harbours and fewer lighthouses, and the channel is as full of wind as a big drum. You will not meet too many sailors pleasure-cruising among the three; the currents and winds are somewhat tricky. But occasionally you will see some great foreigner – an oceangoing yacht from far away, spreading its white canvas wings like palms as it tests the pulse of the wind’s eye, and probes softly north, whispering; taking its passengers to where they can glimpse the steep, star-crowned cliffs of the Holy Mountain, womanless Athos.

  Skopelos means ‘reef’ or ‘rock’ – I looked it up once in a dictionary. But I think the ‘skop’ part of the word (like that in our own ‘telescope’) tends to mean vantage-point, perhaps something like the Italian ‘belvedere’. This is the middle island of the group and thus best calculated to keep its eye on what happens in the spacious channels between. I make no mention of Alonnessus, which spoils the euphony of my theme, without adding anything at all in the way of grace or history. As for Skiathos and Skyros, I would like to derive them from echoes of the word for shade – ‘skia’; both are green, something almost beyond belief for a mariner who has just left the central Cyclades, where the wind crackles in the dry grasses of Delos as if it travelled across some ancient parchment. Here water and cypresses and shade give one back a sense of plentitude and peace – particularly on Skiathos, the beauty of the group, whose perched capital neatly divides a harbour like a mons veneris; its dazzling white houses built as if from lump sugar, its labyrinth of quizzical churches.

  The Greek motto must be: ‘If time hangs heavy, why not build a church?’ The size doesn’t matter; it can be tiny, and adapted from a hole in a rock, or as big and barn-like as a ship’s chandler’s religious aspirations. All these Greek islands are riddled with tiny churches – some of them quite bizarre in their wriggly contorted Byzantinism. Moreover, the locals have also done their own thing, making their interiors celebrated in terms of old furniture and wall panels and decorative sideboards. A Sicilian exuberance reigns, and it is customary to leave the courtyard door ajar so that strangers can peek in and admire what they see. This is also a way of getting into a free chat and gossip, which is so very dear to the Greek heart, particularly on the remoter islands.

  The capitals of Skyros and Skiathos are the most populous of the group – some four thousand souls – which gives an indication of their intellectual magnitude; if one lived here, one would live a little like a beachcomber, waiting for the next boat, depending on the radio. Most people are no longer equipped for a life of real solitude; the city with its stresses has conditioned them. Once I went for two years without reading a newspaper or listening to a radio, and I was surprised on emerging from this long abstinence to find that nothing seemed to have happened in the interval. There was, it seemed, no really new news. The headlines in the newspapers had the same deadly banality, and described identical situations to those which had existed on the day I gave up reading them. It was rather a jolt. Is there, then, no such thing as real news – is the whole idea of news an illusion? On small remote islands one is apt to think so.

  You experience something similar, but more deeply, if you go on a long fishing expedition where you do not have occasion to speak for as much as ten days. You can feel your thoughts rusting quietly away, until they drop into that blessed limbo of nescience which is the very beginning of another kind of wisdom – a wisdom which people must secretly seek without always being conscious of the fact. Here, sitting under a tree, staring at the thick oily meniscus of a hazy midday sea with Euboea etched upon it, you hover between sleep and waking and feel rather like Crusoe. On this deceptively beautiful coast, the winds and waters did for Xerxes and his gigantic fleet of four hundred vessels. They were grounded by gales and munched to pieces by the jagged cliffs of Euboea – a fitting end to the hubristic Persian expedition. When Athens received the news, great was the rejoicing, and a temple to the north-east wind was erected on the banks of the Illysos. What cads!

  For my money, Skiathos, with its sweet geometry and homogeneous layout, is the best looker of the three capitals. But I may have been influenced by the fact that the beach of Koukounaries is by common consent the finest in Greece, and that really does mean something in a country with so many wonderful beaches. ‘Pinecones’, it is called, and I had the luck to see it before someone gave the show away. Nowadays it has a small hotel pitched on it. In old times, during the sunny season, little temporary shelters, roughly arranged as taverns or eating-houses, came into being and provided music and mastika of a delightful village kind – innocent and unsophisticated. Whoever wished could tread a measure in the evenings, to the jerk of a drum and violin, while the moon rose over the still waters. Obviously, there have been changes – thou
gh I was delighted to hear this wonderful place praised by some young visitors who had recently spent a summer in the island. So perhaps all is not yet lost.

  It was in Skiathos, too, that I had one of many long and instructive conversations with a lunatic; this one swept out the church. It made me realize how humane the Greek islanders are in the face of such afflictions – much more so than we are, for Greece has retained a bit of the reverence and superstition which used to be attached to the idea of madness, treating it as a privileged state. This reverence probably dates back to ancient times, when the soothsayer or sage was not quite the best-balanced member of the community – he saw visions, heard voices. Harmless lunatics in Greece are regarded today as lucky people to have around, and there is always plenty of work for such mascots. Instead of being locked away from the community they play an active and valuable role in its affairs. Every business tries to co-opt a nut if possible, for he brings good luck. When I first reached Greece ten thousand light-years ago, every garage had one, and he was so terribly helpful – I am thinking specially of one named Kostas in Corfu – that there were sometimes dire results – even an accident.

  Kostas, after a long career of usefulness, made one bad slip while investigating a car whose petrol-gauge had broken. He hit upon the ingenious idea of ascertaining the petrol level in the tank with the help of a lighted candle. Mercifully the tank was almost empty, but the ensuing explosion was enough to send Kostas flying into the surrounding décor. He was badly burned and spent a long time in hospital – so long that he quite disappeared from circulation. When he emerged, he had changed his job. The newly born Greek dictatorship of Metaxas had decreed that all the youth of Greece must join the National Youth – a paramilitary organization – for training. It was modelled upon Italian and German equivalents. Judge the amazed delight of everyone when Kostas, clad in uniform, led the first parade, bearing a banner aloft, and goose-stepping fit to kill. All felt that the incident illustrated the mental level of the dictatorship.

  In Skiathos, the patient, pale young man was a failed priest, who had remained as a sort of honorary sacristan to the church of St Michael. My Greek was bad, and his hardly better, since he stammered. After a bit of relentless intellectual sparring, a sort of despair seized him and, mounting his broomstick like a hobby horse, he galloped off into the sky – or so at first it seemed. Actually he had fallen over the terrace into a flower bed. It seemed useless to prolong such an inconsequential relationship, so I merely observed that in my country only witches rode broomsticks, and left it at that. I remember walks with him in the blazing heat, among the vines. Someone claimed that the plums of the island were world-renowned, but I could find none either on trees or on tavern menus, so I concluded that they had all been exported to Athens. On the other hand, there were fine olives and marvellous almonds in quantity. There is no ancient history worth recording, and the odd monastery or two lie empty and mouldering among the cypresses. They had once been rich dependencies of Athos, I was told, and I repeat this piece of possible misinformation for what it may be worth. I know that the monasteries do own a lot of secular land in the nearest islands.

  In Skyros, two unlikely shadows frequent the plane-shaded glades and whispering springs – Theseus and Rupert Brooke. Just what the former is doing here would be difficult to divine; he retired here in old age, sad and disabused by life, and worn down by all the adventures he had lived through. King Lycomedes agreed to put him up, but was manifestly jealous of his guest’s celebrity. After all, apart from the exploit with the Minotaur, and the disgraceful abandonment of the loving Ariadne in Naxos, the hero had been pretty steadily in action throughout a long life, abducting one pretty female after another. There were no bounds to his cupidity – Helen herself was one of his victims; he also organized the abduction of Persephone and actually managed to get into the Underworld with this praiseworthy object in view; he was always accompanied by his faithful friend Pirithous on these expeditions. Although they got into the Underworld, they could not get out again, and had to invoke the help of a fellow-hero – Heracles, no less. Theseus’s great succession of love-adventures would be enough to make anyone jealous, and Lycomedes grew so tired of listening to the hero’s reminiscences that he finally set upon him and had him thrown into the sea. His remains were buried in Skyros, whence the pious general Cimon had them brought back to Athens and placed in the sacred enclosure of the Theseum.

  My favourite among the abductions of Theseus has always been the rape of Antiope – for he did not hesitate to attack even the feared Amazons and carry one off. She later bore him a son, Hippolytus. Being utterly fickle, he repudiated her and took up with Phaedra. This so enraged the Amazons that they invaded Greece and, after a series of smashing victories, found themselves actually contesting the Acropolis with the armed forces of Attica. Theseus had carried off the sister of the Amazon Queen, Hippolyta, and this base desertion of Antiope caused such anger among the Amazons that they planned this avenging expedition against the Greeks. Amazon forces landed even in Attica. Nothing could stop this army of tall ash-blonde warriors, whose origins are supposed to have been Caucasian. They had settled centuries before in Cappadocia and their capital, which was ruled over by a queen, was called Themiscyra. On all their frontiers there was a ‘No Men Allowed’ sign; but these blonde terrors were no lesbians, they simply did not want to be subject to the masculine whim. They were keen on hunting, shooting and fishing, like the British Royal Family today, and took a slightly dazed view of art. But they were a good deal more honest than a lot of our own liberated ladies, for they acknowledged the basic need for union with men, and every year at mating time – or ‘lilac time’ as Ivor Novello used to call it – they gathered on the frontiers which they shared with the nervous Gargarensians and sought a temporary union with a man. When this bore fruit, they handed back the boys but kept the girls to swell their numbers, and these were trained in war and in the chase. Artemis was their patron saint.

  Those who have ever met an Amazon in the flesh will be able to testify that the missing right breast (in order to free the right arm for the long bow) is a complete myth. It is a relief to be reassured on this point by competent scholars, who say that the word a-mazos or ‘breastless’ could equally mean ‘heavy-breasted’. In fact, in none of the reliefs or sculptures that we have of Amazons locked in mortal combat is there any suggestion of a removed right breast. Amazon troops were taken with deadly seriousness, and the graves of those who fell in the attack on Athens were long pointed out and even offerings made to the shades of these fallen warriors. Many towns were proud to claim that they had been founded by Amazons – Smyrna, Ephesus, and Paphos among them.

  Scholars of comparative mythology have provided us with a portrait of Artemis, which suggests that she was the toughest and most merciless of the goddesses – a bit of a bitch in fact; any defection, even accidental, was punished immediately. When consulted about a plague she had caused to descend upon Attica, she announced that it would only end if and when all the girl children of the capital were dedicated to her; thus a huge procession of children every year wound its way up the Acropolis to her shrine in order to preserve Athens from the pestilence. This is only one example of her harshness; she was a goddess who never hesitated to order floggings or fill a bridal chamber full of snakes – as the luckless Admetus, who had accidentally annoyed her, could testify.

  There was perhaps a bit of the Artemis touch about the Amazons in battle, for they gave no quarter; their forces engaged Bellerophon in Lycia, and indeed attacked Heracles as well who, as chance would have it, slew Hippolyta, their queen, in battle. During the Trojan War, they came to the aid of Troy when their young Queen Penthesilea was killed by Achilles. I myself believe – though there is not an atom of truth in it – that the shadowy descendants today of the vanished Amazons are those blonde beauties known in Turkey as Circassians, and made famous by their high reputation as the supreme ladies of the seraglio. You see them sometimes in Greece; they are
ash-blonde with very fine silken hair, moon faces, and sweet round chins. They are the essence of feminity and often appear in Turkish travel-posters and on boxes of Rahat Loucoum (Turkish Delight). They have very slightly bowed legs like sugar-tongs and marvellous thighs.

  I will not go any further into the press book of Artemis, but leave the rest to the readers of the big Larousse. She was a strangely vindictive creature, and quite unpredictable. After all, she is supposed to have been very keen on Orion, but one day the luckless man happened by accident to touch her, while they were both hunting in Chios. It jangled her nerves and set her on edge so that she summoned a great scorpion up from the earth which stung him viciously in the heel. I ask you! And he a fellow-hunter with whom she had been on close terms of mutual admiration and, some said, even of love.