Mani (24 page)

I have never seen one of these three-legged cauldrons. Cauldrons
and saucepans in Greece are usually legless with flat bottoms, quite unsuitable for their dual Deep Maniot rôle. They must have died out, like so many small adjuncts of the past. (How many pogo-sticks still collect the dust in English attics? There are probably not more than a score of penny-farthing bicycles still in existence.) There is no evidence when these cauldrons became obsolete.... Another custom which has vanished without trace is the smoking of chibooks, those long slender Turkish pipes of cherry-wood with little earthenware bowls and elaborate amber mouthpieces. In all the old prints and engravings of Greek life they play a great part. A chibook is as essential an attribute of the klepht as his
karyophylia
, and sometimes as long. They must have been awkward bits of property, especially for a guerrilla warrior. On visits of ceremony, they were indispensable. It is not too far-fetched or romantic to find something purely Homeric in the character of Greek hospitality. But the formalities of visiting are oriental; at least they are that hybrid achievement which we think of as “Turkish”: and, like many Turkish formalities, full of dignity and grace. It is not for nothing that when these tribesmen from Central Asia became static, their neighbours were the three most civilized races: the Persians, the Arabs and the Greeks. The other details of welcome survive intact: the spoonful of jam made from quince or whole grapes or morello cherries or rose leaves, the thimbleful of ouzo or raki, the little cup, iridescently cupola-ed with bubbles, of oriental coffee (or Spartan broth or a scruple of
nepenthe
?), the great gleaming glass of water, which is appraised and extolled by guest and host alike with the niceness of cork-sniffing claret experts. These were offered on trays by the eldest daughter, who would stand in silence until they were finished with her hands crossed on her breast. But formerly a sheaf of chibooks was brought in as well. They were carefully filled and lighted with chips of charcoal by two myrmidons (they were impossible to light alone), then, after the mouthpiece
had been plunged into hot water, offered already smoking to the guest, who would take a few ceremonial draws before broaching the topic of his visit. In a prosperous Nyklian's tower, all the smouldering pipe bowls, to save the carpet, were gathered on a brass tray in the centre, with the stems, two or three yards in length, radiating to the richly accoutred Lacedaemonians cross-legged round the walls on divans, with a pistolled priest among them, perhaps, and a couple of kilted pallikars seeking asylum in the free Mani from the Pasha-ridden Morea, and the Bey in his fur-trimmed robe; all fingering their beads in silence, lids peacefully lowered over the amber mouths of their calumets, preparing to broach the eternal themes of feud and piracy and rebellion. It is hard to fit
Belisarius
and Rollin's
Ancient History
into this conversation piece; but, if we can, we must add a young philhellene traveller in a frieze jacket, with a sketch book and vasculum beside him, his forefinger marking the place in a pocket volume of Pausanias or Strabo as he puffs and chokes....

Variations on this scene continued—till when? Well into the nineteenth century. One may search for these pipes in vain in Adrianople or old Stamboul, let alone the cement villas of Ankara. A few still moulder in the Plaka and some of the islands. Yet I have seen them in use as everyday objects (a strange and solitary survival of time when the Ottoman Empire, running from the pillars of Hercules to the Gates of Vienna, embraced three-quarters of the Mediterranean) among Hungarian magnates. Zichys and Telekis and Esterhazys—commemorating after dinner in shooting boxes on the puszta and in Transylvanian castles the time, long before Belgrade was reconquered by Prince Eugene, when the Pest skyline still bristled with minarets,—would enshroud themselves in smoke from these long pipes. (They too, by now, must be minor casualties of the
status quo
.) It is fortunate, but peculiar, that the comforting narghileh, which is even more unwieldy, should have survived in all the
old cafeneia of Greece; steaming and portentously gurgling at the end of its coil—a tube as flexibly jointed as the seated caterpillar which these things always conjure up—the little red coals burning aromatically through the
toumbeki
leaves from Ispahan.

There are two more lost fragments of corroborative detail which have mysteriously vanished without trace; at the other end of the Greek world, this time, in the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia which are now called Roumania. They are two kinds of headdress, both of them extraordinary and worn alike by the hospadars (voivodes or reigning princes) and the ministers and dignitaries of their little courts: the Great Boyars of the Princely Divans of Yassy and Bucharest.

Greeks, Roumanians, Turks and all foreign historians have been unanimous till recently in execration of these men, and, on the whole, wrongly; but that is not the point here. The important thing is that from the first decades of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the nineteenth, these two vassal thrones of the Ottoman Empire were occupied by Phanariot
[7]
Greeks or Hellenized Roumanian noblemen. Thrones were obtained through corruption and the princes' reigns were brief, nearly always extortionate and oppressive and frequently cut short by the bowstring, the gallows or the block. Some were princes of outstanding qualities, some were worthless, a few of them unmitigated villains. But they were all of them civilized and cultivated men and their misdeeds are in a measure balanced by their service to the Orthodox religion, by the encouragement they gave to both Greek and Roumanian learning, and, towards the end of their heyday, by their share in the
Greek War of Independence. All the opprobrium which, thanks to Voltaire and Gibbon, loaded the adjective “Byzantine”—ruthlessness, duplicity, greed, vanity, ambition, vice, superstition and cruelty—has overloaded the implications of “Phanariot.” With the strange processes of revision, “Byzantine” has now lost its pejorative meaning; and, by the same processes, the Phanariots are emerging less satanically with every passing decade.

The juxtaposition of “Byzantine” and “Phanariot” is not fortuitous. The old elective thrones they occupied, however perfunctory and, as it were, simoniacal their elections, were those of the old Roumanian Orthodox monarchs; of the Mushats, the Bogdans, the Bassarabs, of Stephen the Great, Michael the Brave, Peter the Cruel, Vlad the Impaler; and the atmosphere that surrounded these mist-enfolded Dacian-Latin potentates was half Byzantine, half Slav, a last faint echo in the snows beyond the Danube of the last faint whispers of imperial Byzantium.
[8]
This conjunction of influences was reflected, until well into the nineteenth century, in the astonishing titles of the various dignitaries at the courts of the hospadars—the Great Ban of Craiova, the Grand Logothete, the Grand Spathar, the Grand Vornic, the Vestiar, the Hetman, the Paharnic; and so on. Until the war, the stucco and chandelier-hung palaces of Bucharest and Yassy and the labyrinthine country houses of the
boyars—stranded like great ships in the flat landscape—were full of portraits of these most peculiar figures. A few of them were painted by Liotard, who came to the east as the travelling artist of the wicked Earl of Sandwich. Their beards—blue-black or ashy white, very occasionally a flaming carroty red—descended in billowing cascades to where their tapering white fingers rested indolently on the jewelled hilts of ceremonial daggers stuck in their sashes. Necklaces of pearls and gems sometimes hung round their necks. The long thick folds of their braided and fur-edged caftans widened over their shoulders to a great expanse of fur. Dim under the varnish in the background, the blazons of Wallachia and Moldavia impaled each other under the ermine and the pearl-studded hoops of closed crowns. The lips that nested in those cataracts of beard were voluptuously curved and red as cherries or clenched in a hermetic and ruthless line and their thick linked eyebrows, arched over eyes that peered forth from under hawk's eyelids, wore expressions of wickedness and arrogance and Olympian calm. Above, springing and expanding from hollow temples, the stupendous headgear climbed.

There were two different kinds. One of them, a smooth white which had faded on the canvas to the colour of a mushroom, ascended for several inches in a cylinder of equal diameter with the head of the boyar it was adorning and then began gradually to swell like a balloon, spreading at last to a huge pale globe two feet or more in diameter, the summit of the dome the best part of a yard from its wearer's brow. The other was an enormous edifice of thick fur, roughly cylindrical, but with a perpendicular ridge down the front springing from just above those arched eyebrows (which the hat's edge repeated in a widow's peak of fur), and ascending almost as high as a guardsman's bearskin, thickening slightly on its upward journey to end in a flat top at the summit of the ridge. A projecting bulge of coloured stuff—it was hard to discern whether this, the actual
cap inside the fur cylinder, was velvet or silk—over-topped the rim of this amazing structure, which was sometimes still further heightened by a spreading aigrette nodding from a heavy diamond clasp. These elaborate achievements must have enlarged the stature of a medium-sized man to eight feet and turned a tall man into a titan.

What is the origin of these sartorial freaks? Not Turkish, certainly, as nothing similar appears among the wonderfully swathed pumpkin-turbans of the Turks—like the headgear of the Gentile Bellini portrait of Mohamed II and the still stranger garb of the janissaries (many were almost certainly inherited, after the fall of Constantinople, from the Byzantines)—in the museum in the Grand Seraglio. The huge Phanariot fur hat, the
gudjaman
, probably derives from Persia, Byzantium and Muscovy in equal parts: Slavonic fur covering those expanding cylinders worn by the Byzantine dignitaries on the bronze Filarete panels, depicting the retinues of John VIII Palaeologue, on the doors of St. Peter's in Rome, and by the Byzantine warriors in Piero della Francesca's battle between Heraclius and Chosroes on the walls of Arezzo. The Byzantine passion for strange hats, which also appears on Filarete's doors, is well illustrated in the famous Pisanello medallion of John VIII: something resembling a cap of maintenance from which the crown, ribbed in segments, shoots upward like half a cantalupe melon. But the other Phanariot hat, that wonderful white sphere called the
ishlik
, is of the purest Byzantine provenance. There is a magnificent example, in the mosaics of the Kahrie Djami in Constantinople, on the head of Theodore Metochites, Grand Logothete to Andronicus II Palaeologus, who died in 1332. Engravings of Roumanian soirées in early Victorian times show, among the piped overalls, the frock coats and epaulettes of young men and the crinolines and Louis Phi-lippe coiffures of the ladies, the reigning prince and the great boyars still attired in these ancient Byzantine canonicals. Pillars
of fur and brocade and jewellery, their headgear soars towards the elaborate plaster ceilings and the hanging lustres in monuments of plumed fur and in pale floating globes. Outside, in the snow-muffled streets, Arnaut bodyguards stamped to keep warm and strings of six Orloff horses from Bessarabia fidgeted with their postilions in the traces of splendid emblazoned sleighs driven by bulky Russian eunuchs from the self-castrating sect of the Skoptzi. In the eighteenth century Greek was the polite tongue, but in the nineteenth, as with Slav high life in St. Petersburg and Warsaw, French was the language of this strange nobility. (It remained so till World War II.) Educated at the Sorbonne, at the universities of Padua, Vienna or Moscow, or all four, they spoke several languages to perfection, and would spend their evenings discussing the writings of Chateaubriand and the poems of Vigny and Lamartine.

These obsolete sartorial baubles, of which under a century ago there must have been hundreds, have all vanished. The implements of ancient British beaker-men survive, but these have followed the three-legged helmet-cauldron, the chibook and the pogo-stick into non-existence. I have sought them in vain through the dust of many a Roumanian attic.

They, or rather their attendant associations, are not as irrelevant as they seem, for a number of these Greco-Roumanian boyars took part in the struggle for Greek Independence. One of them, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, the head of the Philiki Hetairia, even hoped to assume the throne of a Greece reconquered with Russian help. Another, Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, Byron's and Shelley's friend and the dedicatee of “Hellas,” was one of Greece's first premiers. They were disliked by the fustanella'd klephts of Roumeli and the Morea and, in the Athens of King Otto when Greece was free at last, the rough native heroes resented the sophistication and the polished French of these strangers, their use of titles in a state which had banned them, their superciliousness and their
European culture. They made them feel bumpkins. These two elements—the great guerrilla leaders, largely of simple origin in the mountains and islands, and the civilized Phanariots—were the dual components of Athenian society for many decades. They were incompatible to each other at first. But the breach diminished with time and was healed at last by the marriage of the son of Kolokotrones with a Phanariot princess Caradja, soon followed by the marriage of another Caradja to the beautiful daughter of the great Souliot hero, Marko Botsaris. The Phanariots, though socially exalted, have never attained, in the eyes of Greece at large, the supreme laurels which fell to the great generals and sea captains who played the leading rôle in Greek resurrection. But the two strains became interwoven and indistinguishable and formed the nucleus round which diplomacy, politics, the services, the professions, banking and foreign enterprise were to form Athenian society, which is fortunately one of the least exclusive, the most painlessly assimilative and, on the whole, the most scorchingly intolerant of pretensions in the world.