Mani (25 page)

The sounds of feet coming up the ladder put to flight these musings on obsolete headgear and their sociological implications (“and about time too,” I can hear the reader murmuring). A section of the floor creaked open as my host's head appeared through the trap door. He sat down with a sigh, laying aside his sickle to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He had a kind and friendly face with all the recesses of its bone structure scooped hollow by past illnesses.

“How is the work going?” he asked me.

“It's going well,” I answered; untruthfully, for I had mooned the morning away pleasantly without writing a word.

The conversation drifted inevitably to politics. Like most of the Maniots, he was a firm Royalist. I pointed to the poster of M. Petro Mavromichalis and asked if he had voted for him.

“Yes,” he said, “but I think we ought to change our deputy.
The government is always promising to build a road here and it never gets done.”

The vision of a metalled highway snaking through the hills appeared; blocked by a column of motor-lorries, each of them loaded with a howling menagerie of wireless sets for the silent Mani. I silently heaped blessings on M. Mavromichalis' head. I asked him who he would prefer to represent the constituency: it was sad to contemplate this uprooting of traditional allegiances. He looked surprised. “Who? Why, Kyriakos Mavromichalis of course, his brother. Who else?”

 

[1]
Put forward by Prof. Kouyeas of Athens University and quoted by Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis,
op. cit
.

[2]
George Wheler in 1675,
A Journey into Greece
.

[3]
The discoverer of both the sandwich and the islands.

[4]
Cornelius de Paneo.

[5]
This village, largely inhabited by shepherds who are semi-nomadic between there and the Preveza area, also produced the poet Krystallis.

[6]
Tourloti is a dialect corruption of the word “Troulloti” which means “cupola-ed.”
Troullos
is a cupola, the same word as
trullo
, which southern Italians apply to those strange beehive dwellings cohering in scores in the Apulian villages of Alberobello and Casarotonda near Bari, the old Byzantine capital of Magna Grecia. They are one of the minor phenomena of architecture and the only things that I have seen at all similar are the beehive shepherd huts high on Ida and the White Mountains in Crete.

[7]
From the Phanar quarter of Constantinople, round the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the spiritual headquarters of all Orthodox Christianity, and the centre of all the financial and intellectual life of the Sultan's Greek subjects.

[8]
The Cantacuzene family—the most nearly verifiable of all surviving Byzantine dynasties—took root and reigned in Roumania long before the arrival of the Phanariots, thus escaping the tainted adjective. The most representative of the Phanariots are the families of Ghika (of southern Albanian origin), Mavrocordato and Soutso (from Chios), Ypsilanti and Moruzi (both of whom originated in the fallen Comnenian empire of Trebizond) and Mavroyeni from the Aegean and Rosetti (reputedly of Italian origin). Cantemir the historian and the Callimachi family were Hellenized Moldavians and the Caradja are presumed to have come from Ragusa in Dalmatia. The Rakovitza, Sturdza, Stirbey, and Bibesco families were of Roumanian stock. But all through the eighteenth century Greek was the court language, and it was Greek Constantinople that shed its glow on their little provincial capitals. All of them possessed immense estates in Roumania, many of which existed till a few years ago.

O
NE COMPENSATION
of this kind of travel is the unchartable and unregimented leisure between the rigours of displacement. Letters build their vain pyramids on some table in Athens; weeks pass; their mute clamour dies down unanswered; dust and oblivion enshroud them and the flight of months makes them obsolete and strips them of all but antiquarian interest. This vacuous and Olympian sloth is made more precious still by the evidence all round of arduous and boring toil. Here, too, in the absence of lofty theories about the intrinsic virtue of work regardless of results, no northern guilt comes to impair its full enjoyment. Such mephitic ideas cannot long survive the clear and decarbonizing sun.

Now and then one finds oneself, in the dilettante fashion of one of Marie Antoinette's ladies-in-waiting, helping in some pleasant and unexacting task: gathering olives onto spread blankets in late autumn, after beating fruit from the branches with long rods of bamboo; picking grapes into baskets, shelling peas or occasionally, in late summer, helping to tread the grapes. I remember one such occasion in Crete, in a cobbled and leafy yard in the village of Vaphé at the foothills of the White Mountains. First we spread deep layers of thyme branches at the bottom of a stone vat which stood breast-high like a giant Roman sarcophagus, then a troop of girls hoisted their heavy baskets and tipped in tangled cataracts of white and black grapes. The treading itself is considered a young man's job. The first three,
of which I was one, had their long mountain boots pulled off; buckets of water were sloshed over grimy shanks and breeches rolled above the knee. “A pity to wash off the dirt,” croaked the old men that always gather on such occasions. “You'll spoil the taste.” This chestnut—which I imagine to have existed for several millennia—evoked its ritual laughter while we climbed on the edge and jumped down on the resilient mattress of grapes. Scores of skins exploded and the juice squirted between our toes.... In a minute or two a mauve-pink trickle crossed the stone lip of the spout, and dripped into the waiting tub; the trickle broadened, the drops became a stream and curved into a splashing arc.... We were handed glasses of the sweet juice which already—or was this imagination?—had a corrupt and ghostly tang of fermentation. When the stream slackened, the manhood of the treaders, shuffling calf-deep in a tangled slush by now and purple to the groin, was jovially impugned.... For days the sweet heady smell of the must hangs over the village. All is sticky to the touch, purple splashes and handprints on the whitewash and spilt red rivulets between the cobbles and the clouds of flies suggest a massacre. Meanwhile, in the dark crypts of the houses, in huge grooved Minoan amphorae, the must grumbles and hits out and fills the house with unnerving fumes and a bubbling noise like the rumour of plots, a dark conspiracy of whispers. For as long as this vaulted collusion lasts, a mood of swooning and Dionysiac laxity roves the air.

How different from the vineless and unleafy Mani! But still, leisure has its rewards here as well: idle mornings of meditation in upper rooms and saunters through a maze of towers and now, lying and smoking after a happy sleep in the cave-like shadow of a carob tree, above a landscape scattered with harvesters, I could watch the glint of their sickles as they felled the sparse corn. Under their yellow loads animals minced up the lanes on delicate hoofs. Threshing teams rotated on the gleaming dials of stone like the bustling minute-hands of eccentric
timepieces and the winnowers plumed the middle distance with golden geysers of chaff. Strange that the word
cereal
should conjure up no vision but that of an overfed northern brat with a scarlet cheek crammed with breakfast food; never Ceres, whose rites were being celebrated below. But the Greek name—
Demetriaka
—immediately suggests the kind goddess of the sheaves with her chaplet of wheatears, her torch and her poppy.

Common words derived from the names of ancient gods in modern Greek are more evocative of their origins, perhaps by their freshness on a foreign ear, than their Latin equivalents in English. “Venereal,” for instance, never suggests Venus, but “the Aphrodisiac diseases” in modern Greek are immediately and painfully suggestive of baleful aspects of Aphrodite Pandemos. “Erotikos” merely connotes “pertaining to love,” and summons up the innocent and youthful Eros; unlike the word “erotic” in English. But there is no English equivalent of divine Latin origin—it would be “cupidinous”; Amor's derivatives strike a more suspect note; and, strangely, though “Mercury” is the fluid metal compound in English, the Greek word
hydrargyros
(watersilver) fails to commemorate Hermes. He only survives, as he does with us, in the word “hermetic,” recalling not so much the messenger of the gods' swiftness and volatility, as Hermes Trismegistus or the Egyptian Thoth and all that is sealed up initiate and arcane.

The cavernous shelter of this carob tree, these branches dangling with horny locust beans, was the right asylum from the afternoon sun for this Maniot pastoral. As the oven-like heat began to languish, the beckoning figure of our old host appeared below. Joining him, we made our way along a lane that circled like a contour-line the flank of two tower-crowned hills and led away to a cleft in the limestone mountain-side unexpectedly filled with green plane trees and figs and sycamores and a sudden insurrection of pink and white oleander: a green
and leafy dell on the flank of the Mani. It was all due to a tinkling thread of water so cold that a mouthful made one shiver, which fell from the rock face into a rough stone tank whose inner walls fluttered with dark green water-weed. Neolithic channels and bamboo conduits led the precious liquid into hollowed tree trunks; and a similar system of flimsy and primordial irrigation had conjured up, over strips of earth banked in miniature tiers on both sides of the descending cleft, the green of tomato leaves and chickpeas and beanstalks. It soon petered out and the rock descended in great steel sweeps to the sea, interrupted now and then by a crescent of yellow stubble. The place had the unexpectedness of an oasis. The old man slipped two bottles into the tank and joined us at the low wall that overhung the bright layers. “There!” he said, “my garden.”

He used the word
bagtche
, a Turkish word of Persian origin, instead of the more usual Greek
kipos
or
perivoli
. It is a term still in common use in many country districts. I had been on the lookout in the Mani for any diminution in the sprinkling of Turkish words in spoken Greek but although there are considerable local peculiarities in the Maniot dialect there appeared to be no appreciable change in this respect. Contact with other races inevitably leaves a linguistic deposit and the two main contributors in Greek have been the Turks and the Venetians, the latter especially in matters concerning navigation. Perhaps the word
bagtche
has stuck because of the Turkish devotion to kitchen gardens; though the best gardeners in the Balkans are actually the Bulgars. It is, with curd-making and the distillation of attar, almost their only skill.

One of the great stumbling-blocks for writers like Dr. Fallmerayer, who are eager to underline or exaggerate the importance of the Slav element in the ethnological make-up of the modern Greeks, is that although Slav settlements in Greece left a vast and tiresome legacy of place-names behind them, there is scarcely a word of Slav origin in ordinary spoken Greek. If the
language of a race is a living memorial to its history, the Sla-vonic share in the history of Greece would seem to be very slight indeed. The Turkish and Venetian words are nearly all nouns describing some object that first reached the Greeks
via
the Turks or the Venetians. In nearly every case there is a pure Greek equivalent and the interlopers could all, if necessary, be discarded. Indeed, there are purists who are eager to scrape away these alien barnacles as blemishes to the purity of the Greek tongue; perhaps, also, as they seem the stigmata of foreign occupation. Wrongly, I think. The corollary of this cleaning-up process is a distortion of history. It would certainly rob the rich spoken tongue of much of its stimulus and bite. (The Hellene and the Romios are at it again!) There are, through this random incrustation of Turkish words on the smooth surface of the Greek language—jagged and barbarous sounds perhaps, but with a rank zest like a wipe of garlic round a salad bowl—a number of noble Persian words. One turn of phrase, now that I know its full import, always fills me with delight: “
Milá ta Ellinika pharsí
,” “He speaks Greek perfectly.” It is a common remark in the everyday demotic. All is plain sailing except the last word.
Pharsí?
This mysterious and un-Hellenic adverb of perfection is never applied to anything but skill in language and it was only after I had been hearing it for years that an Athenian expert in such matters explained its meaning. Among the old Turks of the Ottoman Empire, Arabic was the language of religion and Persian the language of poetry and romantic literature. A cultivated man was expected to be acquainted with the latter, and, even if his knowledge of it was slight, to adorn his rough vernacular, as a jackdaw decorates its nest, with borrowed Iranian elegances; to talk, in fact, in the mode of Fars, the south-eastern province from which the name of Persia (and, no doubt, of the Zoroastrian Parsees) derives.
In the mode of Fars
...the phrase slipped into the Romaic, and I can never hear it now without a brief dream-vision of the closed gardens
of Shiraz—
bhags
, in fact—filled with the sound of lutes and quatrains and falling fountains and the songs of moon-faced girls....
[1]

The old man picked a few tomatoes and chickpeas and unwrapped from its rag a lump of cheese which he took out of his basket. Spreading them all neatly on a napkin he then unstoppered one of the bottles that he had left in the stone tank. It was
kokkinelli
, excellent retsina the colour of pink champagne which is common enough in Attica but rarer than nectar in this landscape of pumice. Its short sojourn under water had almost frozen it. Sipping and eating, alerted by a sudden noise and the clank of bells, we watched two herds of goats converge along the path from either direction. A third came leaping down through the trees, three shaggy hordes of Satans reeking of Hell and filling the air with dust. The hillside was alive with their many-pitched and sardonic derision; there was a ripple of hoofs and a clatter of long ribbed and spiralling horns as they assaulted the troughs and the hubbub was augmented by the heckling of skinny dogs.