Mani (16 page)

The cannon rusted. The great Nyklian wars were over. But, against the continuance of private feuds—the vendetta as it is usually understood—legislation was impotent. The habit of violence continued and though the scope was limited to isolated action, the old rules were observed. It was strife between individuals and it seems to have gained in implacability what it has lost in extent. Once the declaration of enmity had been made, no distance would interfere with the pursuer and his quarry. For, with the changes of Greece and improved communications, many of the inhabitants left the peninsula. Often years would pass before the threatened man was tracked down and destroyed. There was no relenting; a revolver bullet or a dagger thrust in Athens, the Lavrion tin mines, Constantinople, Alexandria or under Brooklyn Bridge, would suddenly resolve a
forty-year-old feud. It is said to have decreased a great deal lately. I asked three policemen—from another district, as always—how often such acts occur to-day. One said “Never. That is, very rarely.” The second, “Four or five times a month.” A third said, “A few per year. It all depends.” A Maniot who was sitting in the café said, ambiguously, “They don't know what they're talking about. Anyway, as if that old stuff matters compared with all the killing of Greeks by Greeks we had here in the War....”

* * *

Now comes a ramification of Mani history, a marginal comment—an extended bracket or footnote, almost—which I find it impossible to leave out of these pages for several reasons. Here it is.

When, a few days before, our caique had sailed across the gulf of Vitylo (it is written like this in demotic, more often than Oitylos which is still, as it was when its Troy-bound villagers climbed on board one of the sixty ships of Menelaus, its official name), the first thing to catch our eye was the enormous Turkish keep of Kelepha. From the heights where a temple to Serapis once stood, it dominates the little town of Vitylo and the whole gulf. It was built at the low ebb of Greek fortunes immediately after the fall of Crete in 1669, under pretence of a guarantee to the freedom of Maniot trade, as opposed to a prelude to occupation. Vitylo was the seat of two great Maniot families, the Iatriani and the Stephanopoli. The presence of this fort and garrison at their front doors was a bitter torment: they were attacked on the way to their fields, their property was stolen, their women had to be locked in day and night. Despair had overcome the Greeks at Candia's fall. It really looked at last as if the Turks would stay in Greece till doomsday. The two families determined to leave together for
the free Christian realms of the Franks, settle there, and fight the Turks again in more hopeful days. But, before this could happen, the two families were at war with each other over the theft and marriage of Maria, a Iatrian girl, by one of the Stephanopoli. Several were killed on either side. It was then that the Iatriani received a formidable ally in the shape of Liberakis Yerakaris, who belonged to the third great Vitylo clan of Kosma, the terrible ex-pirate released from jail in Constantinople by the Grand Vizier on the condition that he subdued the Mani.
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He was appointed commander of the region, and was soon, as an ally of the Turks, its Prince.... But he had been engaged to the stolen Maria and his main reason for accepting his post on such questionable terms was an angry determination to destroy the whole Stephanopoli tribe. He started by capturing and publicly executing thirty-five of them. After that his ambition carried him off on strange courses. He became an erratic war lord and condottiere, now on the Turkish, now on the Venetian, now on the Greek side, in an endless succession of bloody campaigns all over continental Greece. Local conditions were worse than ever and after this fiery interlude the two families were still resolved to emigrate, though, rather naturally, to different places.

The Iatriani were the first to move and their destination was chosen for an odd reason.
Iatros
is the Greek for “doctor,” and the Iatriani had long been convinced that their name was a Hellenized form of Medici; that they were, in fact, descended from some shadowy emigrant member of the great Florentine family. They would sign their names “Medikos or Iatrianos,” or, even more often—it is as near as the Greek alphabet can get to the Italian—“nte Mentitzi” or “Mettitzi”;
[6]
the orthography
and penmanship of the few relevant documents of this time clearly show that swordsmanship in the Mani was still the dominant skill. So it was to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany that their thoughts at once sped, and, after their thoughts, an emissary. The Grand Duke, Federigo II dei Medici, either accepted the bona fides of these far-away kinsmen or decided to humour their conviction. He welcomed their proposal and offered them wide acres on generous terms. His son Cosimo III had succeeded when, at the end of 1670 or early in 1671, the Maniot Medici actually dropped anchor in Leghorn. He made them welcome and they were given land to colonize not far from the coast round the villages of Casalapin and Vivvona, near Volterra, in the jurisdiction of Siena. Several hundreds of them settled in joyfully and their troubles began.

Five Orthodox priests had come with them but, according to Greek sources, the Bishop of Volterra sent a charlatan to their settlement, a real or masquerading Archbishop of Samos—this dark accusation is hard to unravel—who, singing Vespers according to the Eastern rite, summoned the priests to accept the Western creed with the
filioque
and bade them submit to the authority of Rome. Catholic forms of service were introduced and a Greek Benedictine from Chios, who, in a sermon, forbade them honouring any saints canonized in the East since the separation of the Churches, declared the indissolubility of marriage under all circumstances and urged the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar. In twenty-two years not a shadow of Orthodoxy remained. With this vital stay removed they rapidly lost all consciousness of being Greek and were soon merged by inter-marriage with the surrounding population. But (hints a Greek chronicler) even more baleful influences were wreaking their dissolution. “It is to be feared,” writes Spiro Lambros, “that they were not only Romanized in a few years but entirely wiped out also. For these mountaineers of the Taygetus were unable to resist the miasmas of the swamps in which they had settled
such a short time ago.”
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To-day, one can hunt the Tyrrhenean coast in vain for their descendants. The Italian population and the Maremma swallowed up all trace of them centuries ago. They have faded away over the marsh like will o' the wisps.

The Stephanopoli had still more pressing reasons for clearing out. Their past history in wars against the Turks, the proximity of the fortress of Kelepha, the enmity of the many remaining Iatriani, the implacable hatred of Liberakis, whose fortune, after decimating their family, was soaring, and the hostility of a number of other families of the Mani in general—everything counselled departure. The Stephanopoli laid claim, with or without foundation, to origins that were even more august than those of the Iatriani. Their family legend or tradition (capable of neither proof nor the reverse) made them descend from the dynasty of the Comnènes which had given Byzantium six emperors and Trebizond twenty-one. After the Fall of Trebizond, the story goes, Nicephorus, the youngest son of David II Grand Comnène, after wandering for years in Persia and other eastern lands, finally disembarked at Vitylo in 1473 where he was honourably welcomed in accordance with his rank. This wandering prince soon imposed himself on the Maniots, married the daughter of one of the great families (Lasvouri), and launched himself into the heroic doings of the peninsula. His grandson Stephen, who gave the family its present name, won a heroic victory against the Turks in 1537, built a fine tower in Vitylo, which is still standing, and a monastery of which the abbot, his son Alexis, is deemed a local saint. The Iatrianos and Kosmas families, moved to envy by Stephen's riches and power, conspired together and assassinated him.
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Two centuries later his descendants, four hundred and thirty of them, were wondering where to go.

They sent one of their number, a man already much travelled and widely lettered, to seek a new home. The Maniot Medici ruled out the hospitable Grand Duchy so he explored the length of Italy—in vain—until he reached Genoa. The Serene Republic, only too pleased to settle loyal foreigners among the rebellious inhabitants of their island possession, offered him and his kinsmen wide lands in Corsica. He returned to Vitylo, a French brigantine was chartered, and, on the 3rd of October, 1675, the Stephanopoli, with three hundred kinsmen and allies, seven hundred and thirty souls all told, went on board with their bundles of household goods, their family ikons, and, it is said, the bell of the Cathedral. The port was a wild scene of weeping and lamentation; but the departure had to be brisk to elude a Turkish flotilla. At the last moment the Archbishop of Vitylo tried to board, but he was turned back because of his great age. Distraught with grief and anger at the sight of all his family leaving for ever the holy soil of Greece, he climbed a high rock and cursed them as they sailed away down the Messenian Gulf. To this day, it seems, descendants of the emigrants attribute all their reverses to the Archbishop's curse.

They called at Zante and dropped anchor in the Sicilian straits where they were kept in quarantine under the castle of Messina. So struck were the Maniots by the beauty and wealth of the place, they almost decided to settle there. But as the island was being fiercely debated by Spain and Louis XIV, they sailed on; calling for a while at Malta, which was then in possession of the Knights; then they followed the Barbary Coast some distance before turning north. Their leader, George Stephanopoli, died on the voyage, and Parthenios, Bishop of Maina, assumed command. After wandering for three months they reached Genoa on New Year's Day, 1676. They were hospitably received by the Republic and accommodated in several palazzi till the winter was out. The terms of their grant—a generous
one—were drawn up: the most important of these was the proviso that the Maniots, while keeping their own Greek rite, should submit to Rome and practise their religion in the manner observed by the ex-Orthodox of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples; become Uniats, in fact. The most interesting item was the right to bear any arms they wished and the permission to fly the Genoese flag in warlike expeditions against the Turks. The former condition, which had not been made during their emissary's visit, they secretly planned to shelve. There is something very stirring and gallant about the intentions which underlay the second condition.

When spring came they set off. The wide stretch of land they had been granted at Paomia, Revinda and Sagone, in the coast region of western Corsica, was steep and uneven; but the soil, when they could get at it, was good. They pitched tents and bivouacs and plied their bill-hooks to the stifling
macchia
, the dense growth that blurs all the outlines of Corsica and turns its mountains the dull khaki green of a well camouflaged army lorry. They soon had it clear, walled it off with stones, divided it into arable and vegetable gardens and terraced it for olives and vines. They built a little Cathedral for their bishop, a Parish Church of the Dormition of the All Holy Virgin sprang up; and, in the trim new houses, chapels to SS. Nicolas, Athanasios, George and Dimitri and even a monastery named the Nativity of Our Lady for the small group of monks and novices. It was soon a flourishing community, so much more so than the filthy Corsican villages surrounding them that the natives were gnawed with envy. It appears that the Corsicans were far wilder and more uncouth than the Maniots and their agricultural methods primeval. They learnt the best ways of ploughing and cultivation and the care of vines from their new neighbours, new devices in spinning and weaving from their wives, and, which seems strange, as the poor Mani is no gastronome's paradise, how to cook food that was eatable at
last.
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One may wonder where among the stones of the Mani the vigorous colonists had learnt these georgic skills. But all disinterested records coincide in praise. They lived peacefully and, in the words of one of their priests, pleasing in the sight of God.

But religion, their costumes, their language and their ways cut them off from their neighbours. Their prosperity kindled their anger. After three armed brushes, this anger was tempered by fear and respect. This was apparently not reciprocated, for though individual friendships and god-relationships sprang up, the Maniots refused to inter-marry. They disliked the Corsicans and dubbed them, from their shaggy capes, “the goat pelts” or just “the blacks.” (Unless the Mani was very different then, it sounds like the pot and the kettle.) When, half a century after the establishment of the Greeks, the Corsicans rose against the Republic, their envoys sought the aid of the Maniots. But they stayed loyal to their benefactors and sent the insurgents packing with prophecies of seeing their hewn-off heads aligned on the walls of Bastia.

Despatching the women and children and the old men to Ajaccio, ninety Maniots barricaded themselves on a headland by the ruined anti-pirate tower of Omignia. Then, in April 1731 (according to the lively chronicle of Father Nicolas Stephanopoli) the rebels came back, outnumbering the Maniots a hundred to one. Attempts at pourparlers by the besiegers were again greeted with insults from the battlements, the heralds withdrew and the enraged Corsicans, beating kettle drums and blowing down trumpets and cows' horns, charged. “Their shouts rose to the sky, a hail of shot poured from the walls, the whole cape was covered with smoke, the sun was hidden and the earth shook with clamour and gunfire!” A cease fire came with darkness. None of the enemy had even got across the low
surrounding wall, three hundred were wounded and many killed. The Corsicans threw the dead into the sea and the waves washed them up on the rocks under the tower. None of the Greeks had been hit, “not even their clothes.” Placing sentries, they gave themselves up to laughing and feasting and clashing their cups together and thanking the All Holy Virgin for keeping them safe. They might have been back in the Mani!