Mani (15 page)

The discovery of gunpowder and of the burning of lime for tower building were deemed priceless godsends by the Maniots. A third inestimable boon was the importation of cannon. Heavy pieces
[4]
cast in Constantinople or Venice or Woolwich were joyfully lugged from the shore by men and mules and
hoisted into the top chambers of the towers while teams of mules wound up the stony valleys under loads of powder-kegs and shot. They were now able to bombard enemy towers a quarter of a mile away or if, as it often happened, they were only across the street, to batter each other to bits at point-blank range. When two powerful Nyklians of the same village were at war, it must be remembered that each side owned a number of towers and the opposing sides were sometimes several hundreds strong. At the height of a feud these forests of towers were plumed with the flashes of cannon, the air was a criss-cross of the trajectories of flying balls; shot came sailing or bouncing along the lanes, every slit concealed a man with a gun, every wall a group from which the slightest enemy movement would draw a hail of musketry, singing and ricocheting and echoing through the labyrinthine streets. There were, as we have seen, frequent mêlées at close quarters and all the approaches to the village were posted with the
khosia
-men of both sides lying in ambush and cancelling each other out. The neutral population, though allowed to move about the streets at their risk, wisely resumed the troglodytic existence of their forbears or moved to other villages till the two factions had fought it out.

The theatres of war were no larger than the area bounded by Piccadilly, St. James's Street, the east side of St. James's Square and Pall Mall; the equivalent, in distance, of the cannonading of Brooks's by White's, Chatham House by the London Library, Lyons Corner House by Swan and Edgar's, almost of the Athenaeum and the Reform by the Travellers'. Sometimes it lasted for years: a deadlock in which the only sounds were the boom of cannon, exploding powder, the collapse of masonry, the bang of gunfire and the wail of dirges.

On certain specific occasions, the vendetta code afforded a temporary relief to this lunatic state of affairs: a general truce known as the
tréva
(also a Venetian word) during the seasons of ploughing, sowing, harvesting and threshing and the winter
gathering and pressing of the olives. The opposing sides, often in next-door fields, would ply their sickles or beat the olives from the branches with long goads in dead silence. The truce was also a chance to restock the towers with victuals and ammunition by night. At last on an appointed dawn, when the sacks of grain and the great oil jars were full, all would start up again hammer and tongs.

There was another curious means by which a single member of one of the feuding families could obtain a temporary private truce called
Xévgalma
, or Extraction. If a man had to cross no-man's land on an important errand like a baptism, a wedding, a funeral, the search for a surgeon or, in later times, to go and vote, he would take a
Xevgáltes
, an extractor, with him; a heavily armed neutral, that is,—if possible a Nyklian with whose family the other side would be loth to start trouble, a man whose presence momentarily extracted his companion from the feud. “I've got a
Xevgáltes
!” one would shout from behind cover. “Who is he?” the enemy Nyklian would ask from the tower. “So and so.” “Pass,” the Nyklian would shout back, and the two would advance into the open and go on their way unscathed. Any hostile gesture towards his protégé would automatically put the extractor's clan in feud with the offenders. Sometimes the answer, if the extracting clan was not sufficiently to be feared, would be, “I don't accept your extractor.” In such a case, they would stay where they were. If when they had left the village a
khosia
-man refused to accept the extractor he would shoot the protégé down and his clan would have an additional war on their hands and a host of new guns would be added to the havoc.

There were several ways in which these affairs could end. The logical one was the destruction of one side by the other. What was left of the losing side would scatter to other villages leaving the winners in possession of their shattered towers, their olives, their stony corn-plots, their prickly pears and salt-
pools: uncontested masters of the place until some rising Nyklian family should have assembled or procreated enough guns to challenge them. Over fifty Maniot villages owe their foundation to these sudden diasporas. But Maniot custom offered several other solutions. If the losing side wanted to avoid annihilation they could sue for a
psychiko
, a “thing of the soul.” The whole family, their leaders in the van, unarmed, in humble garb, heads bowed and hats in hand and bearing themselves with the submission of Calais burghers, would approach the other side, who were seated, fully armed, in the
rouga
. They would kiss the hands of the parents whose children had been shot and petition for pardon. This would be graciously granted and the winners would dictate the terms of co-existence in the village of which they would now assume command.

In the case of the isolated killing of a member of one family by another, unrelated to any general policy on either side, if it was proved that it was a mistake or done in drunkenness or if the two families were linked by military alliance or by blood or god-relationship the ritual consequences could be avoided by an offer, on the part of the offending family, of
psychadel-phosyne
, or soul-brotherhood. Then the offending side expressed sorrow and true penitence and the actual killer made himself the especial protector and benefactor of the wronged family. Unlike
psychiko
, this was equally honourable to both sides and often the beginning of an indissoluble bond. All these matters were settled by a local council of elders known as the
Gerontikí
, the only institution lower than the Bey or the
archikapetan
which maintained any semblance of order in the Mani. Their function was not unlike that of the Courts of Honour which, in pre-1914 Germany and Austria-Hungary, weighed the pros and cons of quarrels in the
Hochjunkertum
, enforced or discouraged a duel, appointed the weapons and the terms and decided when honour had been satisfied. Needless to say, when two powerful Nyklians were determined to fight it
out, neither side paid any attention to it. But sometimes, when a village war had continued for years with a parity of casualties and destruction on both sides and no possible verdict in sight, they were content,
faute de mieux
, to accept the conciliation of the
Gerontikí
. Final peace—which was appropriately known as
agape
—was concluded at last by a meeting in the
rouga
of both sides. There in the middle of the ruins they would quite literally kiss and make it up; embracing, drinking to friendship from the same cup, and paying reciprocal visits of ceremony. The
agapes
were quite often lasting. The Turkish threat, again, would reconcile all parties, and sometimes supernatural intervention would call a cease-fire. The most famous case is the appearance of the Blessed Virgin to the Mavromichalis and Mourtzinos families in the middle of a battle with the warning that a Turkish host was approaching. They crossed themselves, embraced and advanced to meet the enemy side by side. The longest truce of all was the general
tréva
called by Mavromichalis on the eve of the War of Independence. Everyone, in these times, went heavily armed. They would sit talking in the
rouga
in the evening with their guns across their knees, and before celebrating Mass, priests would carefully lay their guns across the altar at a handy distance. In spite of the local piety there were several murders and fights in church during Mass.

At the victorious end of the War of Independence, the Mani, except for enlightened innovations like cannons and guns, was still living in the Dark Ages. No region in Greece was more awkward to fit into the modern European state which Greece's rulers were bent on constructing. The Maniots were pro-English, Capodistria's party pro-Russian. They started badly with insurrections and the assassination of Capodistria and they were alienated by sorties from Kalamata to put down the inter-Nyklian wars. Who were these newly liberated Vlachs who had the effrontery to interfere with the habits of five hundred years? The Maniots had been free far longer, they maintained,
and, what was more, had no doubts about how freedom should be used. Capodistria had stamped out piracy but the ordnance still flashed merrily in scores of villages. The old private music of gunfire and dirge continued just as it had in the good old days. The blood-feud flourished, Nyklian challenged Nyklian, the villeins knew their place, the towers multiplied, their summits climbing higher than ever before. The towers themselves, for Nyklians and Government alike, had become the symbols of Maniot nonconformity. King Otto's regency, diagnosing in them the root of all Maniot strife, determined, in order to bring the Mani into line with the rest of Greece, to smash them. The Maniots—the Nyklians, that is, for they were the only ones whose opinion mattered—became still more firmly resolved to cling to them. But there was worse to come. The old guerrilla days were over, the Regency was building up a modern conscript army and the Nyklians were outraged to learn that all had to begin at the bottom in a revolutionary competition of merit in which Nyklians might conceivably find themselves under the orders of promoted villeins. It was like trying to persuade the Malatesta and the Baglioni to go through the ranks commanded by the stable hands of Rimini and Perugia. They put their foot down, refusing not only to discuss the demolition of towers or limitations of height or number, but the very idea of a Maniot formation which was not automatically officered by Nyklians.

Out of patience, the Regent determined to act. The whole region, like the Highlands after the Battle of Culloden, must be reduced and pacified and a party of the 11th Bavarian regiment, imported by Otto's regency to back the new regime, marched into the Mani with orders to occupy and destroy the towers. They moved accordingly into a number of towers in Tsimova which had not yet become Areopolis. The Deep Maniots rose and besieged them. Understanding their peril the Bavarians beat a hasty retreat but thirty-six of them were captured in a
tower and sold back to the State by the Maniots at the ransom of a
zwanziger
a head. Four companies of Bavarians, who the locals termed “the vinegar-baptized,” were promptly despatched to Petrovouni, where the Maniots had fortified themselves, and in the ensuing battle against eight hundred Maniot villagers, they were badly beaten. In the retreat half of them were killed with bullets and slingstones. The Government in Nauplia was in despair. A force of six thousand, complete with artillery, was next despatched to besiege Petrovouni under a General Schmaltz,—and forced to retreat to Gytheion yet again. In the negotiations that followed, the Maniots, urged by a Mavromichalis and a Grigorakis (both descendants of Beys), surrendered Petrovouni; a few towers on the edge of the Outer Mani were bought by the State, a limitation of height was published but not observed and a general amnesty declared. It was really a victory for the Mani.

The Nyklians had their own way in the end, and their end was their undoing, An intelligent Bavarian officer called Max Feder, who spoke Greek and knew the Mani and who was indeed a personal friend of all the great Nyklians, travelled the peninsula and, at amicable gatherings in the village
rougas
, enrolled all the kapetans and his Nyklian friends as officers into a militia unit called the Maniot Phalanx, which he commanded successfully in the suppression of other disorders in the Morea. They slowly accustomed themselves to western military notions. The distance between Nyklian and villein decreased, and bit by bit they became partisans of the
status quo
. Kindness and tact succeeded where coercion had been powerless. The electoral system and local government took root, schools were built and—a great landmark in Mani history—a villein was elected mayor of the great Nyklian stronghold of Nomia. The Mani was shared between the nomes of Kalamata and Laconia (the dividing line running along the watershed of the Taygetus) and subdivided into eparchies and demes. A military revolution in
Athens forced King Otto to grant a constitution in 1843 and in 1844 Greece had the first general election in all her long history. Burlesque and turbulent though it was—nowhere more so than in the Mani—this was the simultaneous death-rattle of the old order and the muling and puking of modern parliamentary Greece.

The feuds continued, but, as the nineteenth century grew older, they became more rare. It is fitting that the last full-dress war took place in Kitta, the first place where the Nyklians, in flight from Andronicus II, settled in the Deep Mani. The struggle between the great families of the Kaouriani and the Kourikiani had emptied the village of all but their contending clans and all the surrounding hamlets rang with the customary noises of guns and flung rocks and the shattering of marble roofs. Nobody (except the new schoolmaster, for whom both had a superstitious awe) could cross the street without shouting “a neutral, a neutral!” The Prime Minister, Koumoundouros (himself a Maniot and a descendant of the eponymous Bey), sent a force of gendarmerie to besiege the Kaouriani, who were deemed the aggressors. The gendarmerie were beaten off with heavy loss, and they spoke with awe of “these men of iron and blood.” They were finally reduced by a besieging force of four hundred regular soldiers and artillery and forced to surrender. They were treated with gentle methods, however, and it was the last of the great Nyklian contests. Centuries of anarchy had come to an end.

The last few decades have disarmed the prejudices and blurred all distinctions between the Nyklians and the hinds. Sitting in the evening along the stone bench of the
rouga
with their sickles and their fishing-nets on the slabs beside them, they have the appearance of dark wiry people of the mountains and the sea; their brows, unless unlocked in laughter or the affability of conversation, are knit in an habitual frown. But, like nearly all the mountaineers of Greece, the patched clothes and
bare feet are accompanied by the physiognomy and the bearing of nineteenth-century portraits of generals, ambassadors and dukes. There is little in the hollow cheeks and bony noses, sweeping white moustaches, piercing clear eyes and ease of manner that can be connected with the word “peasant,” though I am forced for want of a better to use it often enough. They all grew up in the atmosphere of village wars. Many of the indestructible elders remember them clearly; and much of their discourse revolves longingly round those old battles between rough-hewn grandees in their grandparents' and great-grandparents' days: the wars of the Mavromichali and the Mourtzini of Tsimova and Kandamyli, the Michalakiani and the Grigoriani of Kharaka, the Katsiriani and the Tsingriani, the Kaouriani and the Kourikiani of Kitta, the Messisklis of Nomia and the Yenitzariani of the Katopangi. And all round them in scores, as the sagas multiply far into the night—battered with cannon-balls and pocked with bullets, assaulted by time and decay, disapproved of, legislated against and condemned by regime after regime and as bold as brass—stand the wicked and indelible towers.