Mani (23 page)

As far as I can discover, apart from Leake and Pouqueville, few people from the West came here. The society they portray is a primitive one. (A very black picture was to be painted of it, as we shall see later, by the only poet the Mani ever produced; but, again, he was not a Deep Maniot.) They were, of course, much richer then, thanks to piracy, but most of their cash went in forcing the growth of their towers and in personal adornment. In old prints of the Mani, women who are out of mourning are magnificently dressed. A thin white wimple of silk or muslin was arranged round their heads over a small cap and their plaits ran across their brows in a band. A long-sleeved dalmatic, heavily embroidered and fringed, fell to the knee and covered the top part of a long flowing dress which reached the feet. Under this were flowing
shalvaria
—oriental trousers—slippers adorned with gold wire, or, among the poor, rawhide moccasins. The men's costume was not unlike that of the islanders and the Cretans: baggy trousers with many pleats ending just below the knees with legs either bare or greaved in embroidered gaiters, their oriental slippers sometimes turning
up at the tip. Over their shirts they wore a short bolero as stiffly galooned with bullion as a bullfighter's jacket. (Petro Mavromichalis, when Leake visited the Mani, wore a coat of green velvet charged with gold lace.) Their great moustaches would sometimes measure eight inches across and their hair fell in thick black waves over their shoulders. At a raffish angle on the side of their heads was perched the soft, “broken” fez with its long black tassel of heavy silk. Over the sash their middles were caught in with belts equipped in front with a slotted marsupial flap of leather to hold their arsenal of weapons: the almost straight pistols whose butts tapered and then swelled into knobs at the end like wrought silver crab-apples;
khanjars
, those long knives with branching hafts of bone or ivory that spread like two out-curving horns; and, their chief weapon for close-quarter fighting, the yataghan, its ivory hilt dividing like the
khanjar
, the long subtle blade curving and straightening again as fluidly as a flame. Often, too, they would carry cross-hilted scimitars whose blades described a semicircle. The steel of many of them was beautifully damascened and arabesqued and they were scabbarded in silver and silver-gilt and plum-coloured velvet. In full array, they were equipped with splendidly mounted powder horns and with intricately worked pouches for shot made of hammered silver from Yanina. Their long-barrelled guns, which resembled Afghan
jezails
, were so heavy that they could only be aimed when resting on a rock or a branch. This made them useless for hand-to-hand battles but valuable at a distance or for an ambush. These had a euphonious name, which sounds more like a flower than a gun; indeed, very like the Greek for both carnation and clove:
karyophylia
. This strange and musical word is an uncouth Hellenization of the name of an Italian gunsmith's shop whose wares were highly prized all over the Levant:
Carlo e figli
.

All this warlike bravery, thrown into advantage by their martial bearing and driven home by frowning brows and a fulminating
gaze, was splendid. There are several portraits of these magnificently dressed Maniot paladins in the great Athenian house of the present M. Petro Mavromichalis—who is still, half-playfully, half-seriously, styled “the Bey”—in Athens. I was surprised to see how fair were these Mavromichali warriors; their great manes and moustaches gave them the air of Vikings. As far as I can remember, only John the Dog wears the baggy Maniot trousers; the rest are all in snowy fustanellas, presumably because they were painted in Athens after the War of Independence when that fine Epirote-Illyrian garb had become the almost universal badge of Greek patriots. Indeed, under King Otto and Queen Amelia, the fustanella and all its attendant finery, with superbly Byronic island costumes for ladies-in-waiting, was the official court dress. When he was Greek Minister in Paris the great Kollettis (who came of a Kutsovlach family from Syrako
[5]
in Epirus) would often wear it, and the Goncourt journals speak with admiration of his presiding fully-kilted over delicious banquets of
agneau à la pallikare
. Now, apart from the evzones and those mountain regions where the old men still go kilted, it has died out. Wittelsbach eccentricity, and a touching loyalty to the country he adopted, impelled King Otto still to affect the fustanella in Bavaria after his abdication. It is thus clad that we may think of him among the fir trees and neo-gothic pinnacles of Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau and reflected in the bright mirrors of the Nymphenberg.

Apart from their appearance, their warlike pursuits and the superstitions and customs on which I have touched, there are no recorded details to quicken one's reconstruction of this former life. Yes, there are two: a traveller mentions that it was customary for the priests to wear a brace of pistols and that the
Mani was so poor in food that many of the mountaineers lived on salted star-fish. This custom, if it ever existed (and it is the reliable Leake who records it), has died out without a trace. Star-fish? They were horrified at the idea. It was as bad as the bulls of Katsimbalis....

Pondering on this strange vanished life, I had a momentary vision, chiefly promoted by the conversation on the roof the night before, of the great-grandparents of my hosts involved in a village war in midwinter with the wind screaming through the towers; with the women pounding and grinding away at their cumbrous handmills or crowding round a brazier, melting lead and moulding shot;
karyophylia
poking from every slit, a swivel gun placed in the embrasure by my table, my host presiding over it, befezzed and voluminously breeched. Outside, the snow whirled along dark lanes which lightning and cannon flashes suddenly lit up and the report of the ordnance was drowned in thunderclaps. Children clambered upstairs stooping under the weight of single cannon-balls while beautiful dark girls, their plaits flying, sped up the ladders with flaming linstocks. There was a smell of gunpowder and the sound of somebody groaning in the darkness....

Vatheia is one of several villages hereabouts which is supposed to have been populated mainly by Cretan refugees, presumably those in flight from the Turks after the Fall of Candia and the final defeat of the Venetians three centuries ago. Other Cretans had fled centuries before, in the thirteenth when Crete fell to the Venetians, taking refuge among the Byzantines of Asia Minor and settling along the Meander's banks. They have left a strong impression on the Mani, especially on the dialect. Again and again I heard, with sudden excitement, turns of phrase and pronunciations and words that I had only heard before in the most inaccessible villages of Crete. There are many superficial resemblances in their way of life; even, now and then, in their appearance. Yet there is a compact fleshiness (I do
not mean fat), almost a muscle-bound look, about many Maniot features: a dark floridness, a low planting of hair on the brow, and above all a shuttered wariness in those dark eyes which, handsome as many of these faces are, is quite different from the alert, luminous extroversion of the Cretan physiognomy; and in spite of all the apparent resemblance, the whole atmosphere is different. On the whole, they dislike each other, and it is not entirely because, out of all Greece, the Cretans are the most advanced partisans of Venizelist republicanism and the Maniots of the Royalist cause. Perhaps the heavy Cretan influx caused bad blood in the past; but it is probably because, in many ways, there are too many points of similarity. In fact, having during the war and afterwards become so fond of the Cretans—considering myself, in fact, almost an honorary Cretan—it was painful for me to hear them criticized so much. My spirited defence of them became something of a joke. The Greeks whom the Maniots think most similar to themselves are the Epirotes, especially (according to Dimitrakos-Messisklis) the Chimarriots of the Acroceraunian mountains. He finds much in common in the customs and characters of both regions, and, like a secret river deep down under successive immigrations from other Greek lands, the same tough Doric strain.

With what ease populations moved about in ancient Greek lands, in the world conquered and Hellenized by Alexander, the wide elbow room of Rome and the Byzantine Empire! Undocumented, free and unregimented, people wandered where they liked between the Thames, the Danube, the Euphrates and the upper Nile—anywhere, in fact, that was free of the Barbarian menace, and often beyond. Now everyone is numbered and ringed like a pigeon and held captive in a cage of frontiers. Across the firm loom of settled populations a constant irregular warp and woof of minor movement was always in progress, propelled by restlessness, by pursuit of trade, thirst
for booty, search for colonies, flight or exile; or transplanted, perhaps, out of policy or for asylum. The little church of Tourloti,
[6]
outside Kitta, hints that one of the least known of these shifts may have made a small contribution to the population of the Mani. I do not know the date of the church. It is extremely old. But an inscription declares that it was founded by a husband and wife called Marassiotes, and dedicated to SS. Sergius and Bacchus. Now, by the middle of the seventh century A.D., the Lebanon had been inhabited for some time by a people called the Mardaites, which may be translated “rebels,” “apostates” or “bandits.” (They sound a rough lot, not unlike the Shi'ite Kizilbashi in the Pomak villages of the Rhodope mountains.) The Byzantine emperors sometimes used them as levies, and Constantine V Pogonatus had twelve thousand under his orders there, serving as a rampart against the Arabs. When the Arabs conquered Syria, the Mardaites retreated north and acted as a “brass wall” along the Byzantine border, whence they were constantly raiding the Arabs until Justinian II (685– 695) agreed by treaty with the Caliph to withdraw them into the interior of the Empire, and they were accordingly distributed between the Pamphylian coast (where they became seafaring men), the island of Cephalonia, and the Peloponnese. But the Mardaites were not originally from the Lebanon at all. They had wandered there (for some lost reason and at some lost date) from the district of Maras, in eastern Cilicia, almost fifty miles inland, that is, in a north-easterly direction between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Euphrates. This was also the home of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus whose names are so unfamiliar
in the Mani that their church is merely “The Cupola-ed One.” The Orthodox laity are strongly regional and selective in these matters. The only other church dedicated to the two saints that I know is the beautiful and famous ex-mosque in Constantinople; and the name of the founder of Tourloti—Marassiotes—(which, too, is unknown in the Mani to-day) means, exactly “someone from Maras.” Greeks, founding shrines far from their homes, are nearly always loyal to their home-saints. A church built by a Corfiot outside his island is almost certain to be called St. Spiridion; a Cephalonian, St. Gherasimos; a Zantiot, St. Dionysios; a Cretan, St. Minas; a Salonikan, St. Demetrius; and so on. Thus, the implications of this tiny church, just over ten yards square, offer themselves irresistibly: as well as the predominating Spartan blood there is probably some Frankish in the veins of the villagers of many-towered Kitta; possibly some Byzantine, almost certainly some Cretan; it now seems probable that we must add a wild splash from beyond the Taurus and the Lebanon, Greek still, and—sprung from “brigands” and “apostates” though it may have been—from brigands and apostates who, on the brink of absorption in their fourth and last sojourning place, remembered with piety the two saints that once watched over their lost Anatolian homes....

The three strange yoke-fellows were still toiling round the threshing floor; the sun, climbing to its meridian, contracted their shadows on the stone circle. Watched from my cool eyrie the geysers of thrown grain, shooting into the air every few seconds and then dissolving in a floating haze of chaff, seemed to encourage speculation on trifles. Those three-legged cooking pots that were worn as helmets.... Mr. Dimitrakos bears out Professor Kouyeas' interpretation of
Kakovouliotes
by producing another obsolete nickname for the Deep Maniots:
chalko-skouphides
. This, at least, is plain:
chalkos
means brass,
skouphi
means a cap, a small hat: thus, the Brasshats. I don't know why,
but somehow I felt unconvinced by this derivation, in spite of the authority of both sources—Dimitrakos and Kouyeas—and the impeccable Maniot endings to their names; but, a little while ago, in the
Travels
of Thomas Watkins, M.A.—a series of letters published in 1792—I suddenly came on the following phrase: “The Magnotti”—Maniots—“free and independent as the ancient Spartans (are) still wearing on their heads iron helmets in which they occasionally boil their black broth...” This cross reference, from a source unknown to either of my authorities, convinced me in a flash—and will do so until it is competently refuted—that they are right, that the district has taken its name from its inhabitants, not vice versa, and that the Bad Mountains and the Land of Evil Council are really the Country of the Cauldroneers. So it is helmeted like three-horned Vikings that one must conjecture their sallies through the imaginary snow, their descents with fierce slogans and bared yataghans on the invading columns of the Seraskier and the Kapoudan Pasha!

The famous “black broth of the Lacedaemonians” crops up in nearly all the old travel books. It is identified with all sorts of things, of which the oddest is coffee (essentially a Greek thing, in the eyes of early travellers), which was first drunk in England in the seventeenth century, to the wonder of all, by a learned Cretan called Nathaniel Canopus who was at Oxford—at Balliol—for ten years until he was ejected under the Commonwealth in 1648. A still more far-fetched explanation of coffee is produced by Pietro della Valle in 1615. It was, he says, the magic potion
nepenthe
, the secret of which was learnt by Helen when she was in Egypt with Menelaus after Troy fell. It took away all pain and brought on drowsiness. It was this, in the fourth book of the
Odyssey
, which Helen slipped into the wine of Telemachus and his companion to send them off into a happy and dreamless sleep.