Mani (2 page)

His record of that region will, to many readers, appear loaded with unfamiliar names. I had never before heard of Petrobey Mavromichalis, who led the Mani in its revolt against the Turks and helped give “rebirth to the shining phoenix of modern Greece”; of Petrobey, or Zanetbey, or the local notables called Nyklians, or of Saint Nikon the Penitent, who in the tenth century finally wooed the Maniots away from their old gods, or the Cretan poet Vincentios Cornaros, or of any of the “astonishing titles of the various dignitaries at the courts of the hospadars,” or indeed of the hospadars themselves. Leigh Fermor explains many of these things, but his references do tend toward the allusive, as though reminding us of what we already know. He pays us the compliment of writing as if we can keep up, following him as he free-associates down the centuries.
Filioque.
It's a kind of table-talk often interrupted, in my own case, by a flight to the encyclopedia. But he allows for that, suggesting in one of his essays that a reference library is an essential part of any dining room. His books do more than record where he went and what he saw, for in the very play of their references they also extend an invitation for explorations of our own.

To Leigh Fermor himself those unaccustomed names matter
intensely, and what his books convey above all is the thrill of chasing after them, the zest of discoveries to be shared. Though sometimes he doesn't share, not quite. The preface to
Mani
contains a great tease, in which Leigh Fermor regrets that for lack of space he has had to omit any account of the regional “belief in vampires, their various nature and their origins.” His learning isn't worn lightly so much as cocked at a sly and rakish angle. At the start of this book he hears a barbershop rumor of a village of Greek-speaking converted Jews in the hills. “It was an outstanding bit of information. I had never heard of Jews in the Peloponnese,” and so he sets out to investigate. For why shouldn't it be true, given that “the Greek world, with all its absorptions and dispersals..., is an inexhaustible Pandora's box of eccentricities and exceptions to all conceivable rule”? And there follows a two-page list of those exceptions, a catalogue of all the different ways of being Greek that includes “the phallus-wielding Bounariots of Tyrnavos,...the Ayassians of Lesbos, the Francolevantine Catholics of the Cyclades,...the few Gagauzi of eastern Thrace,...[and] the greengrocers of Brooklyn...if all these, to name a few, why not the crypto-Jews of the Taygetus?”

To name a few
. Or a few hundred. Leigh Fermor is serious, and he winks. No other travel writer takes so infectious a pleasure in the world around him. Early in
Mani
he describes a midsummer dinner in the city of Kalamata when the “stone flags of the water's edge...flung back the heat like a casserole with the lid off,” until on a “sudden, silent decision we stepped down fully dressed” into the water, taking the restaurant's table and chairs with them. The waiter arrives with a platter of grilled fish, looks “at the empty space on the quay,” and then, “with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure,...stepped unhesitatingly into the sea.” Boats gather around the table, the retsina flows, the night begins to swoon with music, and yet what interests Leigh Fermor isn't his own behavior but the waiter's aplomb in
following him. No one forgets this scene, and in reading
Mani
I feel on every page ready to walk into that water myself.

—M
ICHAEL
G
ORRA

With love to Joan
 

I
HAD MEANT
Mani
, before I began writing it, to be a single chapter among many, each of them describing the stages and halts, the encounters, the background and the conclusions of a leisurely journey—a kind of recapitulation of many former journeys—through continental Greece and the islands. I accordingly made this journey, setting out from Constantinople, which seemed to be the logical point of departure historically, if not politically, for a study of the modern Greek world and then moved westwards through Thrace and Macedonia, south through the Pindus mountains, branching west into Epirus and east into Thessaly; south to all the rocky provinces that lie along the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, then eastwards through Bœotia and Attica to Athens. Next came the Peloponnese, the multiplicity of solitary islands and the archipelagos which are scattered over the Greek seas, the eastern outpost of Cyprus and the southernmost giant of Crete. I undertook this journey in order to pull together the unco-ordinated strands of many previous travels and sojourns in all parts of Greece, for I had begun wandering about this country and living in various parts of it a few years before the war. The war did not interrupt these travels though for the time being it altered their scope and their purpose; and since then they have continued intermittently until this very minute of an early morning on a white terrace on the island of Hydra.

This long and fascinating journey, like those which preceded
and followed it, was a matter of countless bus-rides and long stretches on horseback and by mule and on foot and on inter-island steamers and caiques and very rarely, for a sybaritic couple of weeks or so, on a yacht. When I became static at the end of it the number of dog-eared and closely written notebooks I had filled up on the way was a forbidding sight. To reduce all this material to a single volume was plainly out of the question. The chief problem, if the results were to be kept within manageable bounds, became one of exclusion.

All of Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or a stream without a battle or a myth, a miracle or a peasant anecdote or a superstition; and talk and incident, nearly all of it odd or memorable, thicken round the traveller's path at every step. It seemed better, therefore, in writing, to abandon the logical sequence of the journey; to avoid a thin spreading of the gathered material over the whole rugged surface of Greece; to attack the country, rather, at certain chosen points and penetrate, as far as my abilities went, in depth. Thus I could allow myself the luxury of long digressions, and, by attempting to involve the reader in them, aspire to sharing with him a far wider area of Greek lands, both in space and time, than the brisker chronicle of a precise itinerary would have allowed. It absolved me from perfunctorily treading many well-beaten tracks which only a guilty and dutiful anxiety to be complete would have made me retrace in print; there was now no need to furnish this free elbow-room with anything which had not filled me with interest, curiosity, pleasure or excitement. To transmit these things to the reader is one of the two aims of this book.

The second aim, both of this and other books to follow, is to situate and describe present-day Greeks of the mountains and the islands in relationship to their habitat and their history; to seek them out in those regions where bad communications and remoteness have left this ancient relationship, comparatively speaking, undisturbed. In the towns and the more accessible
plains many sides of life which had remained intact for centuries are being destroyed apace—indeed, a great deal has vanished since my own first visits to Greece. Ancient and celebrated sites are carefully preserved, but, between the butt of a Coca-cola bottle and the Iron Curtain, much that is precious and venerable, many living mementoes of Greece's past are being ham-mered to powder. It seems worth while to observe and record some of these less famous aspects before the process is complete.

These private invasions of Greece, then, are directed at the least frequented regions, often the hardest of access and the least inviting to most travellers, for it is here that what I am in search of is to be found. This is in a way the opposite of a guide book, for many of the best-known parts of ancient Greece, many of the world's marvels, will be, perforce and most unwillingly—unless their link with some aspect of modern Greek life is especially compelling—left out. There are two thoughts which make this exclusion seem less unjust. Firstly, the famous shrines and temples of antiquity usually occupy so much space in books on Greece that all subsequent history is ignored; and, secondly, hundreds of deft pens are forever at work on them, while in this century, scarcely a word has been written on the remote and barren but astonishing region of the Mani.
[1]
Even with this thinning of the material it was impossible to prevent the theme from ballooning from a chapter into a fair-sized book; and there are many omissions. The most noticeable of these is the belief in vampires, their various nature and their origins, to which many pages should have been devoted. I left them out because so much space is already used up on Maniot superstitions. But fortunately, or unfortunately, vampires exist in other regions, though they are less prevalent than in the Mani; so I will be able to drag them in elsewhere as a red herring.

It only remains to thank the enormous number of Greek friends and acquaintances whose hospitality and kindness over many years has been of such help to me. I would like especially to thank Amy and Walter Smart for their kind hospitality in Normandy, and Niko and Tiggie Hadjikyriakou-Ghika for lending me the beautiful house in Hydra where most of this book was written.

—P.M.L.F.

Hydra, 1958
 

 

[1]
A notable exception to this is the admirable chapter (
Maīna
) in Mr. Robert Liddell's excellent book
The Morea
(Cape) which has recently appeared.

“YOU HAD better look out if you are going up to Anavryti,” said the young barber ominously as he snapped his scissors. He plunged them into another handful of dust-clogged hair. There was a crunch of amputation and another tuft joined the ring of colourless débris on the floor. The reflected head, emerging from a shroud in the looking-glass opposite, seemed to be shrinking visibly. It already felt pounds lighter. “They are a queer lot.”

“Why must I look out?” The nature of the threat sounded ambiguous. The reflected Spartan faces along the back of the shop were bisected with happy grins of anticipation.

“Why?” The policeman leant forward. “They'll have the coat off your back!”

An old Arcadian in a kilt went even further. “They'll skin you alive, my child,” he said. A child, beaming at the barber's elbow said, “They'll eat you!”

Their tone made it impossible to treat their warnings with too much concern. I asked why they were so much to be feared.

“Because they are Jews,” the policeman said.

“So they say,” one of the Spartans added.

“Of course they're Jews,” the Arcadian cried, turning on him. “All the villagers in Anavryti and Trypi are Jews. Always have been.” By now the reflected men were rolling about with unrestrained laughter at the idea of these two semitic villages on top of the Taygetus mountains.

It was an outstanding bit of information. I had never heard of Jews in the Peloponnese. The only Jews in Greece, as far as I knew, were the Sephardim in the north—Salonika and a few mainland towns such as Yanina, Naoussa, Preveza and Arta and in a few of the islands—talking fifteenth-century Spanish and Ladino. Their story is well known. Expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Sultan had offered them hospitality in the areas of Constantinople and Salonika, just as the Medici had allowed them to take root and multiply in Grosseto and Leghorn. There is no anti-semitic feeling among the Greeks: Greek business men like to think they can outwit any Jew, or any Armenian for that matter; and, in the Karaghiozi shadow-play the Jewish puppets are amiably absurd figures in caftans and spiked beards called Yacob and Moïse, humorously whining broken Greek to each other in nasal squeaks. Their numbers have been cruelly reduced by the German occupation.

I asked if the villagers of Anavryti spoke Spanish. A priest's reflection leant forward clicking his tongue in the negative: he was the hairiest man I've ever seen. (What's he doing in here, I wondered. Orthodox clergy are forbidden to shave or cut their hair.) Two dark eyes seemed to be peering into the looking-glass through a hole in a black hayrick.

“No,” he said, “they speak Greek like the rest of us. When Holy St. Nikon the Penitent, the apostle of the Laconians, converted our ancestors to Christianity, these people were living in the plain. They took refuge up in the goat-rocks, and have lived there ever since. They go to church, they take the sacraments. They are good people but they are Jews all right.”

“Of course they are,” the old Arcadian repeated. Shaven and shorn now, and brushed clear of the wreckage, I prepared to go. The old man leant from the window into roasting Sparta and, waving his crook, shouted through grinning gums equipped with a solitary grey fang, a repetition of his warning that they would skin us alive.

* * *

The man who led the way to the mosaics—the only antiquity surviving inside the modern town of Sparta and a Graeco-Roman one at that—had the same tale to tell. They were a strange lot; and Jews.... We followed him down some steps under an improvised roof. With a tilt of his wrist, he emptied a pitcher on a grey blur of dusty floor. The water fell in a great black star, and, as it expanded to the edges, shapes defined themselves, colours came to life and delightful scenes emerged. Orpheus in a Phrygian-cap fingered his lyre in the heart of a spellbound menagerie of rabbits, lions, leopards, stags, serpents and tortoises. Then, as effeminate and as soft as Antinous, Achilles swam to the surface among the women of Scyros. Next door another splash spread further enchantments: Europa—lovely, Canova-like, with champagne-bottle shoulders and a wasp waist, heavy-thighed, callipygous and long-legged—sat side-saddle on the back of a fine bull breasting the foam to Crete.