Mani (18 page)

“I
N WINTER
,” said a man carrying a small sack of rock salt on his shoulder, “the wind blows clean through you. In one side and out the other. A terrible
voras
[1]
comes down from the middle of the Peloponnese and follows the line of the Taygetus, pulling up trees by the roots and tearing slabs of marble off the roofs this size,” he spread his arms like a fisherman, “and carries them away as easily as leaves off a branch. And the rains! All the downhill paths turn into rivers.” Looking at the hot landscape of pebbles sinking towards the sea, this was almost impossible to conjure up. The air was stifling. We had fallen in with the salt-carrier in a lane going down to the bay. He waved back towards Kitta and Nomia. “The year before the war we had so much rain that it carried all the plants away, all the trees, every speck of earth, licked the rocks clean to the bone. It even emptied the cemeteries and scattered skulls and bones and ribs for miles over the hillside! When God had finished making the world, he had a sack of stones left over and he emptied it here....” He kicked one of them. “If only we could find a merchant who bought stones, we'd all be millionaires... You wouldn't find me sweating along the roads with
this
,” he said, giving a resentful slap to the sack of salt.

We stopped on a headland near the ruins of a fort and looked down at the little port of Yeroliména. How mild and
ordinary it looked after the strange villages we had left behind: a few houses, a quay lined with caiques, a mole running out into the bay. But beyond it the coast climbed away eastwards and each rocky shoulder supported a congregation of towers. “There you are,” he said pointing, “the Kakovounia”
[2]
—they ended in a low saddle and then rose again turning south, and finally sank into the sea once and for all—“and Cape Matapan. Nothing but stones all the way. Are you sure you don't need any in England? I'd let you have them cheap...or some thorns? We've got some very nice thorns....”

* * *

Small as it is, the little town of Yeroliména is a loophole into the outer world from the stern seclusion of the Mani. The caiques along the quay, the anchors and capstans and coils of cable, the gilt lettering on the bottles of a chemist's shop, the sacks and barrels and tins of the grocers', three policemen drinking coffee under a tree, three caique captains with shiny peaked caps drinking Fix beer—all indicated in the single dusty street, even under the furnace breath of the sirocco which lulled it into semi-catalepsy, that another world existed somewhere. Undreamable leagues away, round cape after cape, past a dozen gulfs and islands, at the end of caique journeys that seemed as remote and hazardous as argosies, hovered, in the mind's eye, the disordered mirage of the Piraeus.... Taking our cue from the sailors, we sat down. The salt-carrier rapped an iron table top and spirited three bottles out of the depths of a café, drops of moisture running in shiny tracks over the misted glass like advertisements in the
New Yorker
. The salt encrusted along the whiskers and eyelashes of our companion, the taste of sweat in our mouths and the African wind that seemed to be burying us
at the bottom of invisible dunes, trebled the rapture of those long icy draughts.... One forgets about wine at moments like this and blesses the memory of Herr Fuchs, the brewer to the Wittelsbachs in Munich who was summoned here over a century ago by his fellow Bavarian, King Otto. FIJ, his transliterated name on all the beer bottles of Greece, has a peculiar talismanic magic. It revived us enough to arrange with one of the captains at the next table for a lift in his caique next day round Cape Matapan. In a little while we were supine and sheltered from the sun in rooms above the chemist's.
Nada the Lily
and
Two Worlds and Their Ways
slowly fell from our hands as we sank Lethewards while outside the languid activity of Yeroliména lost momentum and halted at last in its noon trance.

Yeroliména may, according to a theory of Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis, have been the site of the town of Hippola to which Pausanias attributes the emplacement of a temple to Pallas Athene. Other compilers of classical atlases have placed it further up the coast. As there is little more than a mention in Pausanias and not a stone to go on in either place, honours are even. Less than a century ago there was nothing here at all except a little ruined chapel by the sea. A young man called Michali Kasimantis left his village of Kipoula (the other candidate for the temple) some time before the middle of the last century and got a job in a European paint-merchant's shop in the island of Syra. Floating at the maritime cross-roads of Asia, Thrace, Crete, the Greek mainland and the archipelago, Syra, before the rise of Piraeus, Patras and Salonika, was the most important port and trading centre of Greece. (Its importance has declined now but the little capital is full of substantial merchants' houses and fine streets and gasoliers and Second Empire cafés. There is an elegant colonnaded square with a pillar-fronted theatre, tall palm trees and statues and a band-stand which should always be showering forth the music of Offenbach and Meyerbeer. A disarming, faded cosmopolitan air
hangs over everything. It is best known to-day for its Turkish Delight and delicious nougat in large circular slabs.) Kasimantis eventually set up on his own, flourished, and soon became the most prosperous colourman of the Levant. Remembering his home, he returned to Yeroliména in the 70's, and built a quay and a mole and a couple of warehouses and put two nephews in charge. Soon caiques were calling with all kinds of goods which were piled into the warehouses and carried on the backs of mules up steep paths to the scattered thorpes of the Deep Mani; and the caiques sailed away again with olives and oil and carobs and the surplus of their corn. The little town sprang up, and the weekly steamer from the Piraeus drops anchor there. It has already acquired the agreeable mellowness of decay.

Limeni, the cradle of the Mavromichalis family below Areo-polis in the long gulf of Vitylo, is one of the only two safe harbours of the Deep Mani. But communications to Limeni are cut off by mountains and lack of roads from the extreme south, leaving only Mezapo and Yeroliména. Both of them are hazardous in foul weather. Ships must then load and unload as best they can in the little desolate bay of Porto Cayo, just over the saddle of the Taygetus. The single office of these inlets in the past was to afford a fair-weather refuge for the Maniot pirate ships. The slave trade was one of the mainsprings of eastern Mediterranean piracy. This demand for slaves began in the time of the Mameluke Sultans of Egypt, where hundreds of thousands of them were needed yearly for harems and household work and even, such poor fighting men were the Egyptians, as soldiers. The Sultans were soon imitated by all the Moslem potentates from Spain to the Caucasus and the western coasts of India. Venice and Genoa were the great slave merchants of the Levant, and, based on their fiefs in the Aegean islands, they would buy or capture slaves wherever they could lay hands on them regardless of race or religion, though they had a slight bias against selling their fellow Catholics. They had
assembly-points in the Black and Red Seas and unloaded their wares at the great slave-markets of Alexandria, Damietta, Beirut and Algiers. The towns of Venice and Genoa were slave transit-camps; the Florentines made use of Ancona for the same purpose and many rich Italian families kept slaves in their houses. When Gallipoli and Adrianople fell to the Turks, the Greeks also adopted the trade, shipping off vast quantities of Christian prisoners for sale in Egypt. The Maniots would raid the islands and the Turkish villages, collect prisoners—they specialized in Turks and in the Catholic Franco-Levantines of the Cyclades—and sell them to Venetian traders from Methoni and Coroni on the Messenian peninsula. When the Venetian slave galleys put in, Maniots at feud would even attempt to waylay and capture each other or their enemies' wives for sale as slaves; a convenient way of ridding the neighbourhood, of putting the avenger out of harm's way and of turning an honest sequin. Their vessels would lie in wait for Turkish and Venetian convoys between Crete and Cape Matapan, and, being too small to attack them in bulk, pounce on laggards and strays, board them, or force them into the rocks. They were frequently in league with captains from the islands, particularly from Cephalonia. Travellers have described the great caves of the Mani stacked with various loot: guns, yataghans, swords, turbans, stocks of baggy trousers, embroidered waistcoats, soft fezzes, and wide skirts and fur-trimmed gold laced jackets for women. Cunningly carved woodwork and wooden furniture, all cut from one piece, were much in demand; troughs, plates, forks, spoons, cups, caskets, bronze kitchenware pots, pitchers and amphorae from Messenia, also the inevitable lime for tower-building. Small ships would sail away to the minute islets of Sapienza and Skiza off the tip of Messenia, build rough kilns, and sail back in a few months with cargoes of this precious stuff. This was the era when Greek pirates would “churn up the sea in boats no bigger than walnut shells,” in the words
of Capodistria, who finally suppressed the already waning piracy of the Mani.

No pirate enterprise of any consequence was complete without a priest. He blessed the expedition at its outset, prayed for fair weather for his parent ship and foul weather for the enemy and interceded for the souls of his fallen messmates. He absolved the sins of his floating flock and saw to it that a share of the loot, often wet with blood, was hung beside the ikons on the mainmast as a votive offering. If more than eight days passed and no prize came their way, he would intone a litany on the deck, and when a prospective prize was sighted he would level a matchlock over the bulwarks with the rest and join the boarding party with khanjar and scimitar. After the decline of piracy the Deep Mani was supplied by pedlars from all over Greece with caravans of donkeys—like those of Anavryti—which drove from one mountain hamlet to the next with great bundles of assorted wares. The pedlars, in their turn, grew scarcer when the quay at Yeroliména was built.

* * *

The sirocco died during the afternoon. Towards evening we followed a gentle slope that carried us into the foothills of this last buttress but one of the Taygetus: a shallow staircase, winding and rising, of smooth marble slabs. This luxurious going seemed almost decadent after those dolorous inland lanes, turning the pedestrian's gait into the dignified and ceremonious ascent of a doge. The sea sank and skyscraper villages loomed on the steepening slants of the mountain-side. Alika, the first of these, seemed locked in a death-grapple with the omnipresent prickly pear. Millions of thorn-studded bats swirled round the tower bases and groped through barred windows and gaps in the masonry and rolled in green cataracts from the steep rock's face overhead. It seemed to have driven the villagers
out; all but two old men who were drinking outside a vault-like tavern on the flat stage of the
rouga
, half of which had been excavated out of a precipice. The tempest of thorns overhead was succeeded on the rock face below by a jungle of slogans and rather talented primitive caricatures on the hewn rock in white paint. But it wasn't the vegetation that had cleared the village, one of them said, seizing my wrist like the Ancient Mariner and pouring out a glass of wine with his free hand, while his companion jerked a stool behind my knees compelling me to sit (they didn't often get company, they observed), but hatred and politics.
Ta politika!
The occupation, the Germans, the Italians, old feuds, the Communist bands, the Greek security battalions which the Germans armed against them, the right-wing Chi organization after the Liberation, the battles with ELAS up in the mountains, the massacre of their opponents in remote valleys, the savage reprisals. “It was a fight of each side to wipe out the other, burning their houses, smashing their oil jars, shooting prisoners...” Then the Civil War, poverty, disappointment—no wonder the village was empty! “Only a few old sticks like us are left behind.” He shouted for some more wine, and softly changed gear. “We used to get thousands of
okas
of unfermented must from Kalamata by caique. We put in the resin ourselves, letting it work and mature; and then,” he demonstrated what he meant, “we swallowed it. But we don't need so much now. There are not enough throats left.” Next he told us how seventeen Maniots after the fall of Greece, finding the Germans and ELAS equally intolerable, sneaked off in the middle of the night in a rowing boat that could barely hold them. Favoured however by a mast and a sail and a steady north wind, after three days they espied a line of sand, some palm trees and houses and a minaret. It was Derna, and luckily it had just fallen to the advancing British Army. They were greeted as heroes by the English, who gave them “white bread and tinned meat,” and sent them off to join the
Greek brigade, with whom they fought until the final assault on Rimini.

A little later, as we talked of the Maniot dirges by which I was obsessed, I was surprised to hear this bloodshot-eyed and barefoot old man say: “Yes, it's the old iambic tetrameter acalectic.” It was the equivalent of a Cornish fisherman pointing out the difference, in practically incomprehensible dialect, between the Petrarchian and the Spenserian sonnet. It was quite correct. Where on earth had he learnt it? His last bit of information was that, in the old days (that wonderful cupboard!) the Arabs used to come to this coast to dive for the murex.

The path from Alika sank into a deep ravine which ended in a quiet and secret-seeming combe; then it climbed the other side to the steep and jutting headland of Kyparissos. We lay down near an altar with a slab commemorating the republic of the Free Laconians among the broken fragments of a Greco-Roman temple and watched the sun westering towards Yeroliména. Again there was this miracle of innumerable gold splinters sown over the sea. Directly below the sun they gathered into a wide gold sheet, flaking away in fragments and ripples as the water approached the shore and turning purple and grass-green among the teeth of rocks a long way beneath our cliff. It was exactly here that Mavromichalis found the mermaid-princess. Inland, the gold towers of half a dozen villages began to slant their stretching shadows across the mountains. The coast rose and fell westwards to the gulf of Yeroliména where the sea was on fire. It rose and fell for a few miles to the east, then turned south to the darkening last blue peninsula of Taenarus.