The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  St Dionysios on his way to Naxos saw a small plant which excited his wonder. He dug it up, and because the sun was hot sought shelter for it. Looking about he saw the bone of a bird’s leg and he placed the plant in it to keep it safe, but the plant grew and grew, and looking about for a larger covering he came upon the leg-bone of a lion. Unable to detach the bird’s bone he placed the whole inside the lion’s bone. But again it grew and grew and, as he looked about, he came upon the leg-bone of an ass and placed the whole thing in that. So he came to Naxos and, when he planted the first vine, for this little plant was the first vine, he could not detach it from its coverings, so he buried the whole lot together. Then the vine grew grapes and men made wine, and drank of it for the first time! At first when they drank they sang like birds; then, continuing, they grew strong like lions; but continuing thus, they last of all became as foolish as asses.

  The story was recounted to Lawson about sixty years ago by a peasant from Euboea, who was illiterate and presumably had it from a long oral tradition.

  The deep valleys and groves of the Naxian hinterland are largely unexplored; there are many ruined citadels and crumbling monasteries with battered frescoes, but few treasures of importance. The real treasure is the landscape itself. Some of the fig-trees are so old that they have burst open, and in one which borders the main road out of the town, the great fissure has been turned into a tiny wayside shrine with a small pictured Virgin in it. A bottle of olive oil and a dried fig have been laid before the little icon, obviously the first fruits of some religious landholder. The lushness, the scent of lemons and the deep dust are reminiscent of Chios, though Naxos is even more heavily endowed with greenery and has a better water distribution.

  The town, for all its faded elegance, is somewhat dusty and desiccated in summer; because for ages it did not figure on any tourist itinerary, it has an aura of neglect and abandon, which meant that when I was there the taverns were slatternly and the ouzo of poor quality. In such cases you have to be a bit high-handed and risk opprobrium as an awful snob from Athens; but of what avail all the ducal escutcheons if the ouzo is newt’s blood? Once too there seemed nothing to eat in the two taverns except bread; we walked about the town, in the quaint phrase of Shakespeare, ‘crammed with distressful bread’.

  When a Naxiot wants to tell you to go to hell, he will tell you to go to Apollona. This turns out to be rather good advice, for the village of that name lies at the further end of the island and is extremely handsome; it has the best walks, and the most impressive scenery. In fact Apollona is the only excursion worth making, unless you are a fanatic for ruined fortresses and abandoned nunneries of which there are many, several in picturesque situations. Apollona is for real – and the girdle of cliff-shapes gives it real atmosphere. There used also to be a drinkable tavern there owned by a profuse and somewhat risky widow, who was obviously kept very much on the run by the village gad – a fragrant brute with huge canines.

  The site is ancient, and historically speaking the old town is supposed to have had a temple of Apollo in it, whence the name it still has today. All over the Cyclades you come across this Dionysus–Apollo duet; it isn’t clear whether they were rivals or partners when Olympus was a going concern. From modern Apollona the views are superb and, if you have a turn for walking, it would make a pleasant base. About a quarter of an hour from the town there is a quarry containing a giant sculpture sketch – unliberated as yet from the rock – which is almost ten metres long and suggests that it might have become something like a Sicilian telamon. But where now is the temple which such an animal might bear on his shoulders or head? It has vanished. Or was the sculpture simply a freak – a rough sketch for a giant figure? There is supposed to be a grotto named after Zeus somewhere on Mount Ozia but, apart from the scenery and fine gold air, the long walk to it is not really worth the candle. Besides who would want to displace Mount Ida as the site of the birth? It would not take more than a long weekend to get to know Naxos thoroughly; perhaps greater familiarity would enable you to override the small deficiencies I have recorded. The flavour of the place is pleasant and alert and, as you gaze over the rail to watch its lights fade into the night, you may have a Byronic twinge of nostalgia and decide that one day you might return to settle among those mazy streets and silent dusty squares.

  The jump from Naxos to Paros is also a jump from one poet to another, one age to another; for Paros is the lieu d’élection of the poet Seferis, who used to claim with smiling diffidence that it was the loveliest of all the Cyclades and that the organization of its streets and squares aspired to the condition of music. Here he liked to spend his summers, walking among the brilliantly variegated colour schemes of the little town, worrying at his verses like a hound. In truth it is much prettier than Naxos and has some of that indefinable beatitude which comes from a truly perfect siting of its capital in relation to the prevailing winds. Both Aphrodite and the Delian Apollo had shrines here and, while there is no magic, healing icon, the feast of the Assumption on 15 August is celebrated here with as much fervour as it is in Tinos.

  What is the secret of its charm – the feeling of zestful ease it gives you while you navigate those dazzling white streets punctuated with whole balconies and bowers of flowers in bloom? The two long, main streets are more or less parallel, and they have been criss-crossed and stitched with interconnecting lanes of pure whiteness, which give the impression of being simply felicitous afterthoughts. The town, once symmetrically laid out, has been scribbled over by an absent-minded god. I think that is what Seferis liked about it, its unexpectedness. Every day, when you awake, it seems quite fresh, as though finished in the night and opened to the public just this morning. The standard Venetian castle rides the traditional acropolis crown of the ancient city. The ancient stone has been run into the old walls in a most flagrant way, and here and there you will find rows of drums and columns seized from a now vanished temple to Hera. So one age wolfs the glories of its predecessor. But any architect will tell you how wonderful it is to find one’s building material already on site. Given the Naxian’s disrespectful attitude towards antiquity, it is lucky that the famous Parian marble remains (though half of it is in Oxford) – which, among other things, gives us a possible date for the birth of Homer (regarded as apocryphal by the scholars).

  The famous Parian marble, with its sweet, almost translucent blond colour, is not being mined any more – or it was not when last I was there. They told me that the seam had been a slender one and was exhausted. However, a visit to the old quarry, where all those choice cuts came from, suggests otherwise: indeed I think it would be possible even today to have a large block for a statue cut from this fine stone. The light sinks deep into its surface and reflects back from way inside – giving an impression of lightness and transparency. Later sculptors such as Michelangelo and Canova became enamoured of white Carrara, but in my opinion this famous Greek stone is superior. The quarries, which lie some way off the main road to Naoussa, were deserted when I was there. A few tumbledown buildings marked a fleeting attempt by a French company to re-open the seams and market the marble. But the project failed.

  Walking about the cuttings in the blazing heat – there is a delightful little wall-relief to the nymphs, obviously carved by a sculptor who was waiting for his block to be cut and trimmed – my thoughts turned to my first lesson in ancient Greek in faraway London around 1925. I went to a small Elizabethan grammar school in Southwark for a couple of terms, where Mr Gammon, who always seemed a trifle drunk, and articulated somewhat thickly, showed me what a devil the Attic grammar is: ‘Inflected languages are hell.’ More than this he introduced his pupils to the Greek aesthetic by holding up a battered picture of the Venus de Milo and saying: ‘What do you think they were up to? Were they just trying to make us tingle with lust? Certainly not!’ And he banged his desk violently. Then he lowered his voice and said in a grave tone: ‘They were asking themselves what beauty was, and whether it lay in proportion.’ He swept us w
ith his gin-swept glance and sighed. It was a memorable remark in spite of its depravity and, for me, it went deep; long afterwards, reading Longus, and thinking about the proportions of the Acropolis with the help of Vitruvius, I remembered Gammon gratefully. The point he made is worth making again today.

  I also owe to him the story of the acanthus pattern which crowns the Corinthian column. A young and beautiful Corinthian girl became ill and died. After she was buried, her nurse placed all her treasures in a basket and, lest she should feel lonely without them, placed the basket upon the tomb, over the roots of an acanthus plant. She covered the basket against the weather with a tile. When spring came the acanthus grew its leaves around the basket. The tile bent them back. The keen eye of Callimachus, who was passing, fell upon this striking combination of forms and he adopted the motif for the Corinthian column which he was just designing. So the head of this column – the most perfect of the Greek style – became a monument to a young girl who died some 2500 years ago. It is an attractive story.

  Gammon also had much to tell us about the Greek temple, which he insisted was not merely a house, or even a church, but a sort of mathematical declaration of the male and female principle raised to its highest power. In their search for the Golden Mean, they were haunted by the Ideal of Perfection. Where did it reside? The admirable Vitruvius has left us some rich and thoughtful observations on the architectural problems the Greeks faced. The passage is so useful to remember when you confront ancient Greek sculpture, that I make no excuse for copying it out in full, since Vitruvius is not easy to get hold of today.

  When Ion had founded thirteen colonies in Caria – among them Ephesus and Miletus – the immigrants began to build temples to the immortals, such as they had seen in Achaia, and first of all to Apollo Panionic. When they were about to set up the columns in this temple they could no longer recall the measurements. While they were considering how to make them at once trustworthy and graceful it occurred to them to measure a man’s foot and compare it with his height. Finding that the foot measured a sixth part of the height they applied this to the column by laying off its lowest diameter six times along the length of the column, inclusive of the capital. Thus did the Doric column begin to represent the compressed beauty of the male body in building.

  The Roman goes on to explain that for Diana’s Temple a female slenderness was the architect’s model.

  At the bottom they laid a foot like a sole; into the capital they introduced snails, which hung down right and left like artificially curled locks; on the forehead they put rolls and bunches of fruit for hair, and down the whole shaft they made grooves to resemble the folds in female attire. Thus in the two styles of column they invented, the one was copied from the naked and unadorned body of the man, the other from the dainty figure of an adorned woman. But those who came later, with a more critical and finer taste, preferred less massiveness and accordingly fixed the height of the Doric column at seven and of the Ionian at nine times the diameter.

  He goes on to add that the Corinthian column emulates the slenderness of a virgin. If some scholars doubt the authenticity of all this, it is at least highly suggestive, and useful to bear in mind when looking at Greek work.

  If you straggle back to the road from the blazing quarries, and go on to Naoussa, you will find a delightful little fishing village with the usual Venetian fort cresting it. Among these ruins, when trying to pick flowers, I alerted a couple of large reddish scorpions and was happy to escape their stings. A scorpion sting is very painful and there seems to be no treatment for it. The swimming, in a cove nearby, was fine, and I was sorry to get on the road again.

  I recall other dicta by Mr Gammon – dicta full of fungus, you might say, for that low voice was furry with drink. ‘What is the message of the caryatids, my boy, tell me that? What, you don’t know? I will tell you.’ Leaning forward on his desk he said: ‘Every girl has a duty to look ever so slightly pregnant.’ This was when we were alone – I had been kept in to write a hundred lines while he invigilated; he would never have dared to say anything so improper to the whole class. I have often wondered if Gammon managed a trip to the Greece he so much adored – where his queer Erasmic pronunciation would have seemed laughable, as I realized when I heard live Greeks talk. And it takes time to adjust from school Greek of the ‘What Ho on The Rialto’ kind to the five diphthongs of the modern tongue.

  It may seem a bit odd to be thinking of Mr Gammon in faraway smoky London while wandering about the quarries of Paros; but it is thanks to enthusiasts like him that one culture secures a foothold in another. Gammon planted in me so many observations, like barbs, that I early had a feeling of familiarity with the Greek thing. And I was not surprised to discover when I got there that Greece was almost exactly as he had taught me that it might be. Watching Paros slowly fading into the trembling amethyst dusk of the summer night, I could hear Gammon’s voice in my ear again. He was talking about 480 BC, in the heart of Cockney London, not far from Tooley Street with its roaring and howling drays racing beer barrels down to the wharf at Tower Bridge. (The oxen of the sun, Gammon might have called them for his mind was full of Homer.)

  You will say the Persians were utter rotters and I agree. But here and there there was a spark. Even Xerxes, my boy. Would you believe it, he had never seen a plane tree in all its majesty? It was the symbol of genius to the Athenians, for their philosophers sat in the shade of the tree when they were in spouting mood. But Xerxes! When he crossed the Hellespont he saw one for the first time. It stopped him dead in his tracks. It must have been like seeing your first Gothic cathedral, or Mount Everest. He fell hopelessly in love with it. The whole damn army of a million odd men came to a dead stop while he paid tribute to this tremendous object. He adorned the tree with all the jewels of his court, taken from the lords and ladies and concubines, loading the branches until they sagged. He declared the tree his wife and mistress, and even said that it was a goddess. It was highly embarrassing for the General Staff. It looked for a while as if the whole campaign would be called off while he sat drooling over this tree. Disaster was, however, very narrowly averted, and he was persuaded to resume the march.

  Mykonos · Delos · Rhenia · Tinos · Andros

  At first sight it may seem somewhat arbitrary to treat the rest of the Cyclades as a central double constellation, and divide them into a northern and a southern group. Anyone who knows them, however, will think the decision justified on the grounds that Tinos, the Lourdes of modern Greece, lies almost cheek to cheek with Delos, the Lourdes of the ancient. The rings of association (pebbles dropped into the well of Greek history) widen according to contrasting yet strictly complementary magnetic fields; one speaks for Apollo and ancient Greece, the other for Byzance and the post-1828 era which brought modern Greece to birth. The result is a truthful and balanced presentation of a Greece with several profiles, of an etching in successive stages. If I put the point of my compasses upon the famous monastery of Tinos and describe a circle, I would separate off a group composed of Andros, Mykonos, Delos; and then Syros, Kythnos and Kea – a group sufficiently rich in beauty and historical associations to strike the visitor as being the very heart of Greece – the island Greece: the heart of the Greek experience. He will not be wrong. It is here in the brown, wave-washed Cyclades, here or never, that you can absorb and digest this fervent landscape and appreciate the continual intellectual ferment of the people who inhabit it.

  The mercuric prototypes made familiar by the old Greek dramatists are still here, in the modern agora; they have not stirred in their frames – merchant-bankers, adventurers, seamen, shipowners, négociants in wine and oil and fruit, peasants, priests, poets, paupers – the whole dramatis personae of the Aristophanic scene. Moreover, each of the islands with its characteristic accent and garb is pictured in the modern Greek shadow-play, which is showing signs of a new revival. This great cycle, devoted to the adventures of Karaghiosis, the modern epic hero, is something more than a Punch and Judy show, being ful
l of topicality and political allusion. The new Odysseus, the much diminished hero of the modern world, is a figure rather like the Chaplin tramp, who triumphs over the Turkish overlords by superior cunning. His satyrical turn of speech, however, and his repertoire of jokes are pure Aristophanes in their riskiness and tang. You will surely find this little shadow-play in one of the islands, for it tours there every summer, with a large cast of hand-operated marionettes – Corfiots, Zantiots, Cretans, Viziers, Agas, each presenting a highly accentuated local style – a medallion of place.

  Among so many imperatives – for here in the Cyclades the traveller cannot afford to be lazy, for fear of missing a vital experience – it is perhaps best to begin with Mykonos, the most likely tourist landfall, the island which has perhaps suffered the most from its recent over-popularity and the wrong kind of tourist. (‘Pray, what is the “right” kind of tourist?’ I don’t know.)

  They will tell you on all sides, and with some justification, that Mykonos is finished, crowded out, crushed flat by the feet of the faithful. These people are disgorged in passive droves by the great cruise liners en route for Delos, which lies just across the strait, half-an-hour distant. Painfully plodding in Germanic crocodiles, often led by a stout member of a tourist club holding aloft a banner, they march off round Delos, like a human sacrifice to a culture which has ceased to identify with its own roots in the past. These pale, muffin faces are hunting eagerly in the past for the lost clues to their present. So much flesh roasted in this torrid sun, their devoutness is as touching as it is exasperating. Mykonos and Delos reel under their presence, but usually only for a month or two, and not every day.