Mani (3 page)

“How pleased Zeus is to have her on his back,” the man observed. “See, he's smiling to himself.”

When we left, the water was drying on the first mosaics, and the flowers and figures and beasts had almost faded back into invisibility. In the time of Pausanias the town's most treasured exhibit was a fragment of the shell of one of Leda's two eggs, the portentous double-yolker from which Helen was hatched. (The other one enclosed Clytemnestra, each of them sharing a shell with one of the heavenly twins.)

The fierceness of the blaze that had beaten on Sparta's main street all day had diminished. The Laconian plain grew cooler. A few miles beyond the roofs and a ruffling vista of trees, the Taygetus mountains shot into the sky in a palisade which looked as sheer and unscalable as the Himalayas. Up the flank of this great barrier a road climbed, searing it in mile-long sweeps and
acute angles like a collapsible ruler; up, up, until it vanished among peaks whose paler rocks gave a half-convincing illusion of eternal snow. This was the road to Anavryti, the approach march to our private invasion of the Mani. A chance acquaintance from Mistra, who turned out to be the bank manager of sleepy Sparta, was waiting with his jeep as he had promised and, as we went spinning through the cool woods to the point where the great upward zigzag began, I repeated my questions about the inhabitants of Anavryti. “Yes,” he said, hooting his way through a clinking herd of goats; their twisted horns surrounded us for a moment in a tangled spinney: “they all say they are Jews but nobody knows why, or where they are from. It's probably rubbish.”

It was very puzzling. Perhaps he was right. And yet the Greek world, with all its absorptions and dispersals and its Odyssean ramifications, is an inexhaustible Pandora's box of eccentricities and exceptions to all conceivable rule. I thought of the abundance of strange communities: the scattered Bektashi and the Rufayan, the Mevlevi dervishes of the Tower of the Winds, the Liaps of Souli, the Pomaks of the Rhodope, the Kizilbashi near Kechro, the Fire-Walkers of Mavrolevki, the Lazi from the Pontic shores, the Linovamvaki—crypto-Christian Moslems of Cyprus—the Dönmehs—crypto-Jewish Moslems of Salonika and Smyrna—the Slavophones of Northern Macedonia, the Koutzo-Vlachs of Samarina and Metzovo, the Chams of Thesprotia, the scattered Souliots of Roumeli and the Heptanese, the Albanians of Argolis and Attica, the Kravarite mendicants of Aetolia, the wandering quacks of Eurytania, the phallus-wielding Bounariots of Tyrnavos, the Karamanlides of Cappadocia, the Tzakones of the Argolic gulf, the Ayassians of Lesbos, the Francolevantine Catholics of the Cyclades, the Turkophone Christians of Karamania, the dyers of Mt. Ossa, the Mangas of Piraeus, the Venetian nobles of the Ionian, the Old Calendrists of Keratea, the Jehovah's Witnesses of Thasos,
the Nomad Sarakatzáns of the north, the Turks of Thrace, the Thessalonican Sephardim, the sponge-fishers of Calymnos and the Caribbean reefs, the Maniots of Corsica, Tuscany, Algeria and Florida, the dying Grecophones of Calabria and Otranto, the Greek-speaking Turks near Trebizond on the banks of the Of, the omnipresent Gypsies, the Chimarriots of Acroceraunia, the few Gagauzi of eastern Thrace, the Mardaïtes of the Lebanon, the half-Frankish Gazmouli of the Morea, the small diasporas of Armenians, the Bavarians of Attic Herakleion, the Cypriots of Islington and Soho, the Sahibs and Boxwallahs of Nicosia, the English remittance men of Kyrenia, the Basilian Monks, both Idiorrhythmic and Cenobitic, the anchorites of Mt. Athos, the Chiots of Bayswater and the Guards' Club, the merchants of Marseilles, the cotton-brokers of Alexandria, the shipowners of Panama, the greengrocers of Brooklyn, the Amariots of Lourenço Marques, the Shqip-speaking Atticans of Sfax, the Cretan fellaheen of Luxor, the Elasites beyond the Iron Curtain, the brokers of Trieste, the Krim-Tartar-speaking Lazi of Marioupol, the Pontics of the Sea of Azov, the Caucasus and the Don, the Turkophone and Armenophone Lazi of southern Russia, the Greeks of the Danube Delta, Odessa and Taganrog, the
rentiers
in eternal
villaggiatura
by the lakes of Switzerland, the potters of Syphnos and Messenia, the exaggerators and the ghosts of Mykonos, the Karagounides of the Thessalian plain, the Nyklians and the Achamnómeri of the Mani, the little bootblacks of Megalopolis, the Franks of the Morea, the Byzantines of Mistra, the Venetians and Genoese and Pisans of the archipelago, the boys kidnapped for janissaries and the girls for harems, the Catalan bands, the Kondaritika-speaking lathmakers of the Zagarochoria, the Loubinistika-speakers of the brothels, the Anglo-Saxons of the Varangian Guard, ye olde Englisshe of the Levant company, the Klephts and the Armatoles, the Kroumides of Colchis, the Koniarides of Loxada, the smugglers of Aï-Vali, the lunatics of Cephalonia, the admirals of Hydra,
the Phanariots of the Sublime Porte, the princes and boyars of Moldowallachia, the Ralli Brothers of India, the Whittals of Constantinople, the lepers of Spinalonga, the political prisoners of the Macronisos, the Hello-boys back from the States, the two pig-roasting Japanese ex-convicts of Crete, the solitary negro of Canea and a wandering Arab I saw years ago in Domoko, the Chinese tea-pedlar of Kolonaki, killed in Piraeus during the war by a bomb—if all these, to name a few, why not the crypto-Jews of the Taygetus?

We were gaining height at a vertiginous pace. As we turned the angle of each long slant, a new expanse of Laconia unfurled below. These foothills were already in shadow but the answering slopes of Mt. Parnon were immaterialized by soft light. Evening sunbeams streamed obliquely through the mountain rifts, filling with green and gold and gentle shades the swellings and the subsidences of hollow Lacedaemon. The sauntering loops of the Eurotas had shrunk now to a thread whose track was marked by oleanders opening cool green sheaves of spiked leaves and pretty flowers of white and pink paper over little more than the memory of water: a memory whose gleam, through the arid months to come, would keep their bright petals from languishing. Poplars, willows, aspens and plane trees fluttered along the banks and olive groves speckled the mild slopes with silver-green, the stem of each tree casting a longer shadow now. In a score of places the slanting sunlight caught the discs of threshing floors, each as smooth and as faultlessly circular as the base for a cylindrical temple and shining now like coins. We climbed into a zone where couples of eagles, patrician and aloof, circled and drifted with a few furlongs of air between them through their last flight of the day. Angular shadows were advancing over the plain underneath putting out the flash of the threshing floors one by one.

Nothing in the grace and the enchantment of all this could remind one of museless and unbookish Sparta. Time has erased
all suggestion of the hateful ways of that Potsdam of the Peloponnese and it is a message from long before, clear with the indestructible truth of legend, that reaches the observer as he looks down; an intimation as miraculous and consoling as the hand of Argive Helen laid across his brow. He remembers that here stood the palace of Menelaus, the gates where Telemachus and Peisistratus reined in their chariot for news of Odysseus and stayed as the guests of the red-haired king and his ageless queen and, lulled by nepenthe, fell asleep. A few miles north-west lies the gorge that led them back to Pylos. Reaching Kalamata
[1]
at sunset, their wheels slowed down on the sands next day.

The bank manager set his jeep at the steepening slopes. It had become a race with the sun. The shadow line was mounting the sides of the Taygetus as inexorably as the tide, submerging us at moments until a steep twist in the road, up which the jeep jolted headlong, lifted us buoyantly once more into a last precious radiance. But all at once, at a final sharp twist, we went under for good. The road turned inwards along a high green valley of trees and flocks fast filling up with twilight. As it grew darker, this high valley became stiller and more mysterious; the road dwindled to a winding track; at last the lights of Anavryti began to glimmer through the dark. Such is the force of suggestion that the first shepherd seemed to resemble, in the jeep's headlamps, a light-skinned Yemenite. We expected, at any moment, to be surrounded by Shylocks and Fagins and Svengalis, like the wonderful caftaned populations, the forests of red and black beards, waxen faces, corkscrew side-whiskers and black beaver-hats (occasionally a rabbi's with a fox's brush coiled round the crown) that surround a newcomer in many of the villages of High Moldavia or Bukovina.

It was something of a disappointment to find ourselves,
when we reached the centre of Anavryti, at the heart of an ordinary assembly of Laconian peasants. Here and there the will to believe would give an illusion of Hebraic characteristics, but when the stranger came nearer to the lights of the coffee-shop, the illusion would fade. The bank manager drove off into the night and, over wine after a meal of eggs and potatoes, we discussed ways of crossing the Taygetus into the Mani. “The Mani!” everyone exclaimed. Why did we want to go there? They were a terrible lot: wild, treacherous people, knife-drawers—
machairovgáltes!
—and they shot at people from behind rocks. The dismay was general. Only one man spoke up for them—they were very good people indeed, he said; gentle as lambs to strangers.

Maps were unfolded and we twisted up the wick of the lamp. Most of the company recommended going westwards through the villages of Bergandéïka and Yannitza to the plains of Kalamata, and then turning south along the west coast of the Mani. In the end, however, persuaded by a grave-looking middle-aged man called Yorgo, we decided on a route running south-west into the heart of the Peninsula. Although only the frailest of dotted lines crossed the multiplied contours of the map and the deepening patches of purple and green along the Taygetus watershed, it looked shorter. As this was impassable to mules, formal bargainings for a beast were dropped and Yorgo agreed to shoulder most of our untidy impedimenta and guide us as far as the town of Kampos. Maps turn everyone into field-marshals, and forefingers were soon jostling each other across the painted paper landscape while a dozen mouths attempted to spell out the place names from the printed Latin characters, turning (naturally enough) the X's into CH, the P's into R's, the B's into V's, the H's into E's and spiritedly improvising sounds for the letters that had no similar symbols in the Greek alphabet; with strange results. Everyone had to put his finger on the little cluster of dots that pinpointed Anavryti.
“
Na to!
” they would say, clicking their tongues. “There it is! Just fancy their knowing the whereabouts of our village, far away in London!” Their lamplit eye-sockets expanded with pleasure.

The village subsisted, they said, and prosperously too, on the tanning of hides—which arrived from the plains by mule and cart-load—with bark from the woods of the valley. They cut them up and sewed the pieces into boots and shoes. They also wove blankets and those thick rope mats that are used in the oil presses during the olive harvest. Little caravans of mules laden with their wares were always setting forth and their merchandise was peddled from house to house in the mountain villages and markets of Laconia and Messenia and Arcadia. These industrial and mercantile pursuits are unusual in a small highland community and, as several jugs of wine had been emptied, I at last risked the question which had been at the tip of my tongue all the evening: what was all this about the Jewish origins of their village and of Trypi? There was a cheerful outbreak of laughter.

“It's all nonsense,” one of them said. “Those sleepy clodhoppers in the plains are jealous because we are cleverer and harder-working and above all,” he leant forward with a meaning smile, “better bargainers than they are.”

“That's right,” another agreed. “The Anavrytans are as bright as they make them. We can nail horseshoes on a louse.” He shut one of his eyes and a neat gesture with horny hands demonstrated this delicate smithery, the fingers of his left hand seeming to grasp a louse's hind leg, while those of his right plied an elfin hammer.

“We can fly,” another said.

“We could sell you the air,” a fourth added.

“We sleep with one eye open,” explained yet a fifth.

“The plains-people are jealous because our wits are quicker,” the first went on. “They come up here to get wool and we send
them off shorn!” Good humour was universal and more wine appeared.

“We're Christians just the same as they are and always have been.”

“Yes, but how long has this joke about Jewish descent been going on?”

“Always,” was the proud answer. “For a century of centuries....”

An elderly villager called Dimitri, who had adopted us for the night, led us home. Balconies almost as wide as the houses themselves, reached from outside by diagonal boxed-in staircases on wooden stilts, jutted above the lanes. On one of these Dimitri's wife spread scarlet blankets and quilts against the mountain air. Dimitri, smoking a last cigarette as he leant on the balcony's edge, said he thought there might be some truth in the story of the Jews and the flight from St. Nikon. “But who can tell? It's such a long time ago...ages and ages...over a hundred years, perhaps...”

There was a new moon. Who
were
the Anavrytans, then? Probably ordinary Greeks, like the rest of Laconia. After all, the Kravarites had said that the mulberry-trees of Perista were planted there centuries ago by Jews, and the Tzakonians of Ay. Andrea had referred to the inhabitants of nearby Karakovouni as “Jews”—meaning, perhaps, nothing more than “strangers” or people ignorant of the Tzakonian dialect—and the Chiots are nicknamed “Jews” because of their commercial acumen.... And yet the pursuits of the Anavrytans...it was a conundrum. After the Slav invasion of the Peloponnese, these particular mountains were the haunt of a wild Bulgarian tribe, the Meligs. Could some of these, remaining unassimilated longer than the rest and, still heathen, have been dubbed “Jews,” the name sticking even after their conversion and assimilation? There are no records, and it is impossible to discover. Wine-heavy sleep soon smoothed out these wrinkles of perplexity.