The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  Some of them are in fact small museums, but nearly all are strictly private and permission to visit must be wangled – though the patriotic Hydriots are always delighted to welcome an interested visitor. A word with the mayor or the schoolmaster is usually enough to obtain access to this little history of the Greek Navy. To a Greek the great names of the captains are like a roll of drums, and it is an emotional business looking upon the relics of this exciting period, stored so reverently in the little chain of houses – of the Bulgaris, Tombazis, Votzis, Boudouris and Coundouriotis. One of these is now a small school taken over by the Beaux Arts of Athens, where visiting painters and other artists are always welcome. The prettiest and most evocative corner is perhaps the secret chapel and garden of the Boudouris house.

  From 1770, when the war with the Turkish overlords was declared, Hydra was swamped with refugees from the northern sections of the Morea. With a surplus population of some 20,000 souls as against a native one of only 4000, they were almost forced into trade, with a touch of piracy on the side; and it is said that the British blockade of Europe during the Napoleonic period was a piece of luck of which they rapidly took advantage. Their ships went everywhere carrying anything, and within the space of a generation or two this huge burst of energy led to a number of Hydriots becoming fabulously wealthy. When at last the real War of Independence was declared in 1821, these patriotic corsairs ploughed all their gains back into the Greek Marine.

  There are one or two excursions to be made in the island, but frankly the heat of the burning rock makes one think twice before doing anything active in high summer. The beauty and singularity of the capital are something that never wears off, even after many visits; and there are pleasant bars to loiter in, dawdling away a long hot morning which is punctuated by the old cathedral bell clearing its throat and going off with such a bang that one thinks there is a fault in the machinery. However, since the town has been tucked into a natural amphitheatre, with its shoulder and back to the Meltemi, it becomes extremely hot in August, much hotter than the other islands of the group. Not everybody likes it, in the fierce, airless heat of midsummer, and there is also a water problem; once it was supposed – even as late as the time of Turkish rule – to be well watered, for its Greek name meant just that. But it is a volcanic island, and frequent underground thrusts play havoc with water levels and bury freshwater springs. Water is now caught here in catchments as in so many other volcanic islands. Sometimes a huge floating water-tank looking like a whale is towed incongruously into port by a corvette to bring much-needed water, without which the ouzo would taste only half as good.

  For the young and sprightly, there is a really worthwhile excursion to Mount Elias, called after the battered white convent which clings to the crest of the hill. Here savage old Kolokotrones, one of the most celebrated Klephtic leaders of the revolution, was imprisoned, and there is still a pine under which he is supposed to have passed the long siesta hours. But beware of the mid-morning heat and get early on the road, so that you reach the place before the Aegean is as yet quite awake. You can walk, or travel precipitously by donkey, as on Santorin (there are no cars or buses on Hydra as yet); enquire from Miltiades on the quayside. From the top, your horizon will have a great transparent bowl of holy light, and the old guide, if he is still extant, will show you the fragile cloudlike stains marking the outlines of Seriphos and then of Siphnos. Northward is an island masking delectable Poros; westward is the great, curdled bay of Hydra and its watchful partner, breaker of winds and currents, Dhokos, just out of sight. The two little mountains, burned white by the sun, jut up with a Sicilian extravagance. Then, if you turn towards the south, the sea is empty all the way to sombre Crete, and beyond it to Africa.

  Having listed the disadvantages of Hydra I must emphasize that it is a real gem of colour and variety; and there is nothing quite like going to sleep on deck in its little funnel of a harbour, to be woken at dawn with the first arrival of fish and vegetables – when the whole waterfront turns suddenly into a coloured flower-bed. With the sun, the island opens like a dark rose, and you forget any of these small annoyances which can dog a traveller in these waters. Just lying on deck and watching the rigging sway softly against the pure white light will make you glad that you have lived long enough to realize the experience of Hydra.

  The rocky confines of the inland glens and hills remind one that the Greeks of old did not see the base and brutal landscape which we do today. Most of the fruit and vegetables now in the country came to it comparatively late. Citrus fruit, tomatoes, eucalyptus, loquat, palm, cactus, flourish here nowadays because they were imported from other lands by such industrious and curious races as the Arabs. It is even said that the olive is not native to Greece – which would be strange, for the olive is now a prime symbol of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the rich anthology of aromatic plants, held in check today by the depredations of goat and charcoal-burner, is something which the Greek of classical times would recognize at once, as he would the indestructible upsurge of spring wild flowers which take advantage of every scrap of terrain to exploit the first rains of the year – iris, asphodel, anemone, cyclamen. The culinary herbs, too, are still those that existed in early times – garlic, lavender, rosemary, sage, and others which echo their way into all later literatures, and are part of the memories of every Aegean traveller. The traveller’s feet bruise them as he walks the stony hillsides, and he will always remember their flavours in the simple food of those islands so rich in fish, so poor in beef, so full of succulent lamb and pig for the tavern spits – which still send their pleasant clouds of incense up to Olympus to tickle the imaginations of the Greek gods, if there are any left today.

  To go from rocky Hydra to Spetsae is to jolt the kaleidoscope again; Spetsae is very different in form and atmosphere. Moreover, while there is no doubt about the beauty and force of Hydra, opinions are divided about Spetsae. Some find it appealing and some appalling. The truth of course is not extreme, and this cool, well-wooded, little holiday-place is perhaps the favourite of those Athenians who like life easy. Its critics assert that it is un-Greek, and more like an Italian or French island, but not so good as either Ischia or Corsica. Let pedants bicker. It was known to the ancients as Pitouissa, ‘the pine-clad one’, and has from earliest times been a noted health-resort, which may have been the reason for its relatively rapid modernization. Its sinuous corniche-like meandering coast road does suggest the country round Forio d’Ischia, and its sophistication is on about the same level. A few old-fashioned hotels and some delightful shady cafés are here to welcome you. But it is a most unstrenuous place, and its great extollers (among them the Colossus of Maroussi) find the ideal way to drink it in is to sway round it in a fiacre. You can tour the whole island like this, nearly always in shade, calling a halt for a meal or a drink or a bathe whenever you need. It is a good idea, for during your leisurely jog you come upon a great variety of scenery in little space; everything – coves and bays and headlands – seeming like diminished samples of some great original. There are also patches of desolation, an intruding chunk of plain karst that has strayed down from the rock-strewn watersheds – which you must cross to reach Dalmatia.

  Among modern folklore attractions of Spetsae you can catch a glimpse of Spetsoupoula, the tiny islet belonging to the ship-owner Niarchos, and perhaps visit the famous college of Anargyros which is a mock-up for a British public school on the lines of Victoria College in Alexandria. The best families send their sons there, to train them up as statesmen; the result always seems to be much the same – instead of statesmen, they become politicians, a very different sort of animal. It is a pleasant act of piety to spend a few moments in the local museum, locally called the mexis, and ponder upon the bones of the illustrious Bouboulina which lie in a modest yellow casket enshrining all the poetry and energy of the Revolution. For this indomitable lady is a whole folklore unto herself. She did everything but grow a moustache. She captained a ship which played a central part in
the battles against the Turks, and has become so much a legendary figure that one can no longer separate true from false in her story. She was supposed to indulge in a bit of piracy on the side, and even to carry off unprotesting husbands in the style of Catherine the Great. Her name and her portrait smell of gunpowder, but no one has ever been more in need of a critical biography which sifted fact from legend. A latter-day Amazon, she is remembered with appropriate affection, and some amusement.

  I am surprised that the Orthodox Church has not, in its easy-going way, seen fit to sponsor her as a local saint, but maybe it has something to do with the numerous husbands she is reputed to have acquired at pistol point. The portrait of her, the only one I ever saw, depicted a swarthy, rather shy-looking lady drawn up manfully against a flag, scimitar in hand. She looked too nice to be the terrible personage the legends suggest; perhaps she saved that other side of herself for the Turks. Spetsae has little to show beyond the bones of Bouboulina despite the active and glorious role she played in the Greek Revolution. Wandering round her pretty beaches and pleasant pine glades, one somehow feels that she just escapes being a modern suburb of Athens. But I think the impression of near-suburbia must always have been there because of the real proximity of the capital. Even in ancient times the place was famed for its cool and salubrious summer climate, and even in days of sail it was so close that one could run down in with a following boreas in very little time. Today it is joined to Athens by swift hydrofoil as well as less speedy island craft, so that it seems that much less remote, more urban, more sophisticated. Poor Bouboulina herself strikes a raffish note more in keeping with people who might be going north to dine in the Athens Plaka …

  Modern communications being what they are Spetsae is also a travel nexus for people bound in different directions – west for Epidaurus, north for Athens, east for the lonelier and lovelier cloud-cuckoo groups which I think of as the Central Cyclades, and which form a perfect contrast to her civilized and contented grace.

  You journey back from the Greek islands to the mainland less with regret than with a feeling that you have touched the fringe of a mystery. We shall never know, presumably, who the Greeks really were or really are; and any brief history of the ancient world only deepens the mystery. Neither the country nor the scope of the Greek imagination seems ever to have had boundaries. Politically, they tried every kind of system, from aristo-Spartan fascism to the democracy invented by Athens and so beautifully enunciated in the speech which Thucydides attributes to Pericles. Kings, chieftains, parliaments. But they were not content to try out systems of social government in which political man might exist in equity and harmony with his fellows; they were also mad keen to discover man’s place in nature, and equally anxious to learn what, ultimately, nature itself was all about. Rationalists, mystagogues, poets, philosophers – there were so many of them in Greece, with such various convictions. This variety and their appetite for abstractions were mixed with a strict irony and tenderness about what things a man can do to be happy, to be just, to be good, to drain the cup of life to the full. Among other things, they were the first to express doubts about the justice of slavery, and the role of woman in the social world. Their variety of belief was accompanied by an equivalent variety of gods, tyrants, Amazons, lawgivers, poets, princes … Their story is an astonishing demonstration of human curiosity and human daring. The question is not so much ‘What did they have that we haven’t got?’; it is rather ‘What did they start that we have still been unable to finish?’ They did not get to the moon, of course; but the basis of atomic physics which gave us this more-than-doubtful blessing was the work of Greek speculative thinkers.

  This small country, so repeatedly raped and shattered and ground to powder, and then reduced to the bare calc of its desolate capes and headlands, never had any fixed geographical borders. It was a state of mind. And the traveller will not be wrong if he detects even today, after so many centuries of so-called decline, a pulse-beat at the heart of Greek light, which still thuds with the old anxious curiosities and concerns. Greece may be all ashes, but the phoenix is still there, waiting for its hour.

  Flowers and Festivals of the Greek Islands

  The Greek islands are rocky and mountainous; the mountain regions are mostly of a limestone nature, but sandstones and clays prevail in the valleys. All the geological periods are represented from the Neotriassic to the Pleistocene, including modern alluviums. In Corfu, where this subject has been more thoroughly studied, Dr Sordina’s recent excavations show that the island has been inhabited from upper Palaeolithic times, some 35,000 years ago. No human skeletons have so far been found, but numerous stone tools of the Levallois-Moustier type evince that those early settlers belonged to the Neanderthal race.

  The climate of the islands is warm-temperate. In Corfu, the yearly mean is about 17.5°C. Rainfall differs considerably from one island to another. Corfu has the highest rainfall in Greece (with the exception, some years, of the Jannina mainland area), with a total of about 1300 mm per year. Zante, too, has an abundant rainfall, but the other islands, and especially those in the Aegean Sea, have a much drier climate. For this reason, the Ionian Islands are mostly well wooded, while some of the smaller Aegean Islands are little more than bare rocks. The rainy season is from winter to spring, and this is followed by a three-to-five-month summer drought. Snow falls are rare, except on the higher mountains, especially those of Crete.

  Flora

  It should not be forgotten that the terrain of the Greek islands varies considerably in height, from sea-level to the White Mountains (2450 m) of Crete. The flora, in consequence, varies from the semi-tropical to alpine. The account below largely confines itself to providing a much-condensed list of flowers growing around sea-level – which are the ones most likely to be met with by the casual visitor.

  The flora and fauna of mainland Greece and the islands are mostly that of the north-east Mediterranean basin and, owing to the mild climate, many semi-tropical plants have become acclimatized; among these are Dracaena, Yucca and Aloe. The date-palm grows freely; but, in most of the islands the fruit drops off the tree before it is ripe enough to be eaten. In the south of Crete, however, dates can reach maturity, as can bananas.

  As far as the native flora is concerned, Corfu and Zante strike the casual beholder as being one vast olive grove. The reason for this is that during the long Venetian occupation (1386–1797), the peasants were encouraged by the authorities to plant olive trees and could pay their taxes in olive oil. A census taken in the 1960s gave their number as 3,100,000 for Corfu alone. The variety mostly cultivated is the Lianolia (Olea europaea craniomorpha) which produces a small black olive that is very rich in oil. The Corfu trees have never been pruned and many have reached a great size and age; some of them are reputed to be six hundred years old and more. The crop is most abundant every other year, and is sometimes heavily damaged by a small fly (Dacus oleae) whose grubs attack the immature olives and cause them to fall to the ground. The culture of the olive on the Greek islands (and mainland) goes very far back in antiquity; and deciphering of the Cretan (Minoan) scripts on many clay tablets originating in Crete have shown from the detailed accounts kept in the Cretan palaces that taxes were paid in olive oil, and this oil was stored in the huge and often beautifully decorated storage jars kept in the magazines still to be seen at Knossos and other Minoan sites on Crete. It is clear that the culture of the olive was a very large and important part of agriculture on Crete, and almost certainly in the many other Aegean Islands where the Minoan civilization was supreme between 2500–1200 BC.

  In Cephalonia, Mt Ainos (1628 m) is famous for its forest of Cephalonian Fir (Abies cephalonica Loudon). Chios has large numbers of Mastic Trees (Pistacia terebinthus L.) from which a kind of chewing-gum is made.

  One of the commonest trees on the islands is the Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens), of which two varieties are seen: the slender var. stricta and the spreading var. horizontalis. The peasants call the first
the male and the second the female tree; but the Cypress is in reality monoecious with the male and female flowers on the same tree. The Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis) is also abundant. It is often attacked by the Processionary caterpillar, the larva of the moth Thaumetopoea pityocampa, whose untidy web-like nests can be seen hanging among the branches. The hairs of this caterpillar are highly irritating to the skin and can even cause blindness should they reach the eyes. In Crete and the south-east islands of the Dodecanese, Pinus halepensis is replaced by Pinus brutia, a species generally resembling P. halepensis but differing in the straight trunk and branches, its thicker leaves, and the very short and not recurved stems of the cones. Other trees are White Poplar (Populus alba), Elm (Ulmus campestris) and Eastern Plane (Platanus orientalis). The White Poplar seems, unfortunately, to be succumbing to various fungoid diseases and is being replaced by the more resistant Canadian Poplar (Populus canadensis).

  Curious to say, a very common tree is the ‘Tree of Heaven’ (Ailanthus altissima) which is not indigenous to Europe at all. It was imported to France from North China as a garden tree about 1751 and has become perfectly naturalized all round the Mediterranean area; it grows rapidly and seeds itself everywhere by means of its winged seeds. It is a fine tree which can reach a height of 20 metres and more, and is a beautiful sight in June and July when it appears to be covered with huge crimson flowers. The actual flowers are, however, small and inconspicuous, greenish white in colour; it is the leaves immediately surrounding them which turn bright red and orange during florescence. The peasants dislike this tree, whose seedlings often invade their fields and vineyards, and call it Vromodendro (Stinking Tree) because of the disagreeable smell of its flowers and of its leaves when rubbed. But, owing to its quick growth and spreading root system, the Ailanthus is an excellent erosion-arresting tree that should be actively encouraged.