Mani (30 page)

Pelion itself, the home of the centaurs for the last few thousand years, a precipitous, wide-skirted peninsula leaning into the Aegean towards the Sporades from south-eastern Thessaly, covered with grass and forest as the rest of Greece must have been before erosion, tree-felling and goats laid it bare, is such a region. Almost every acre of Greece is in some way venerable and, like most points in Greek geography thickly wreathed with fable, Mount Pelion—once its beautiful villages are left behind—is locked in a prehistoric hush that only birds and leaves disturb; as though the solitary stranger's were the first mortal lungs to fill with that early air and the ancient legends were only beginning. Every rock and stream is a myth. But, in spite of the last few pages, it is neither the putative archaic tribesman nor the lop-eared primordial quadruped of old coins nor the cinder-eyed modern kallikantzaros that I detect in those steep Magnesian glades. Such is the power of early training that I hear the thud of a cavalcade and see sleek piebald and skewbald flanks, the fall of abundant tails and the slither of
spatulate leaf shadows over hairy quarters and sunburnt biceps and the merge of muscular peasant backs into strawberry-roan withers. Classical centaurs are at large. Stooping to avoid the moss-covered branches and nesting in whiskers and speckled sailors' beards, a couple of pleasant uncomplex faces gravely confer three yards above their eight loitering hoofs. Breaking into their colloquy, a dappled greybeard with garland of vine leaves all awry links arms and begs them in the obsolete dual mode to let it rip. There are unwieldy subsidences in the blue-green shade, a doubling-up of forelegs and tangled fetlocks and a sprawl of recumbent groups with chins cupped in horny hands. The leisurely swish of tails dispels the mayflies and there is a murmur of confabulation. Somewhere among the glaucous trunks a new-peeled spit is turning and a whiff of roast reaches the nostril. The tuning note of a plucked string vibrates in a hollow tortoiseshell. Sudden uninhibited laughter is heard and the glug of wine pouring from a calabash. From the islanded sea the rumour of far-away conches comes echoing up the ravines; while, scattered round them on the grass, among the half-whittled arrows, thorny green carapaces split open to show the dark gleam of chestnuts in the dew.

It would be pleasant to dawdle with them here; but the towers of the Mani are calling us.

 

[1]
Nearly four times as much, in fact, as the treasury of English literature—“To be or not to be” plus “My kingdom for a horse,” a beggarly twelve words, though free of nationalism—that adorn the memories of their exact English equivalents. I very much fear that the Greek might win even more signally by also being able to quote the first of these Shakespearian fragments.

[2]
There are understandable reasons, mistaken though they may be in this case, for this attitude. The last few centuries have been full of miseries, and it is natural to wish to forget them and the poverty and hardship that went with them, of which superstition can seem a part. During those sombre times, the only inspiration was the memory and example of klephtic heroes. As Greece re-emerged, these were joined by a remoter pantheon of ancient, more dimly remembered ancestors—warriors, rulers, philosophers and artists—who though they had yet to re-attain in rustic minds the same lustre as the klephts and the traditions of lost Byzantium, were considered by the rest of Europe, which the Greeks, by force of arms, had at last rejoined, as the glory of the world. A few decades later, Professor Fallmerayer sought to prove that the Greek population of the peninsula had been entirely replaced by Slavs in the Dark Ages. The theory has been discredited, but it was both bewildering and angering to the Greeks, not only as impugning their Greekness, but because, since early Byzantium to the present day, Slavs have been natural enemies and “barbarians,” and, the Bulgars especially, utterly abhorrent. This theory has left a legacy of touchiness. Fallmerayer's main argument is based on the number of Slav place-names in Greece. It proves nothing one way or the other. A low ebb of national spirits, a brief foreign ascendency and a temporary change of land tenure may, though it is not the rule, do the trick in a generation or two. A minute English ascendency has changed thousands of place-names in the British Empire, a handful of English altered

[3]
Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion
by John Cuthbert Lawson, Fellow and Lecturer of Pembroke College, Cambridge, 1910.

[4]
I shall write of these at length in another book.

[5]
Somebody—I forget who—told me ages ago that the fire-leaping which marks the summer and winter solstice—for it also occurs at Christmas—celebrates the victory over Antichrist. But I have asked and searched in vain for corroboration. Perhaps a reader may know.

[6]
Surely it is Pan that the Greek Doctors, and St. Jerome in the Vulgate, had in mind when translating the Hebrew of the 91st Psalm. “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the arrow that flyeth by day.” The English translated it quite literally, “... Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”
Symptoma kai daimonion mesembrinon
, the Greeks rendered the last phrase, and
incursus et daemonium meridianum
, St. Jerome—the onrush and the noonday demon; both quite gratuitously.

[7]
Like much else in these pages, Lawson is my source for this sad tale.

[8]
Except twice in a late source which is perhaps to be suspected of sophisticated
post-facto
influences. In one old Maniot dirge he is called a “corsair.”

[9]
Dodwell.

[10]
By this sort of phrase I mean a matter of decades, never centuries.

[11]
The Cyclades
, Theo Bent.

[12]
The word and the bird exist in ancient Greek, but with no sinister implications. Sad legends attach to its small congerer, the little owl—
gioni
in modern Greek—whose intermittent melancholy note haunts the whole Mediterranean night; but they have no relevance here.

[13]
Tattooing is often practised by prisoners as well, “to pass the time”; and those patterns in blue gunpowder (which are never the erotic symbols of the West; stern village morality seems to veto them) often indicate unorthodox sojourns in the old fort at Nauplia, or at Levkas or in Itzeddin or the agricultural jails of Crete. There are less inhibitions about this in Greece than in England. Indeed, the uncensorious and charitable character of the Greeks and certain factors in the free life of the mountains—the many revolutions, blood feuds, smuggling, bloodshed in a rage, the armed abduction and marriage of girls, to a certain extent sheep-rustling in Crete—robs prison life of its stigma. I have often listened to uninhibited and often hilariously funny reminiscences between magnificent old greybeards who were at Itzeddin or some other—I was about to say university—together. The Gorgons, caiques, phoenixes, patriotic banners, saints and Virgins that cover their arms from shoulder to wrist have the same emblematic function as college blazers. Away from the northern mists, guilt is never quite at home. Among the poor in Greece it is only really crimes against the sense of personal or national honour—
philotimo
, in fact—that are burdened with guilt and scorn; and in this, they are implacable.

[14]
Santorin
.

[15]
Probably in the person, as usual, of a shepherd or a sailor.

[16]
Yet, given the vitality of gods, one has difficulty in accepting outright the efficacy of reconsecration. Swarms of Byzantine saints and angels and crusading Madonnas with their northern retinues must have troubled the air for centuries above the turbaned heads in Aya Sofia and Famagusta. What old popish numina really preside in secret over the Anglican asepsis of usurped pre-Reformation churches? A keen eye and ear should detect the flight of afrits and djinns and the ghost of a muezzin's call round the great Giralda minaret which is now the belfry of Seville Cathedral.

[17]
My friend Col. Thanos Veloudios is a great authority on these, as on many other odd matters.

[18]
The Latin word has left deep traces in the language, in association with Christmas; it seems to have stuck in various parts of the Empire. Thanks, again, to Trajan's victory over Decebalus and the colonization of Dacia,
calînda
is still the Roumanian word for a Christmas carol.

[19]
Kolovelónides.

[20]
During the war, when the occupying forces on one of their seasonal beat-ups in search of hidden arms had done exactly this (with the exception of the gag), an old woman, pointing to the wreckage of spilt oil and wine, compared the enemy, with rueful humour, to the creatures we are discussing.

[21]
This may be a trace of native prejudice, for the southern Euboeans, though now completely assimilated, are largely of Albanian stock.

[22]
It is interesting to see how the Alexandrian translators of the Septuagint dragoon the pagan fauna into the bestiary as symbols of wilderness and desolation. In
Isaiah
34, the Hebrew words for various desert animals like wolves, jackals, “howling creatures,” etc., were unscrupulously Greeked as ono-centaurs, satyrs and sirens, which were quite unknown to the Jews; as though prematurely to ram home their outcast, exotic plight. However, it has not stopped some of them haring about the cities and having a wonderful time till to-day.

[23]
One feels inclined to found a R.S.P.C.C.A., the extra C standing for “classical.”

[24]
Not the small formal Pan piping to a listening goat on the rocks by Apollo's temple on top of the hill but the life-size figure outside the town in an olive grove, on the solitary gatepost of the old town wall.

W
E SET
off from the towers of Vatheia next morning. It is impossible to penetrate very far into the narrow Mani so near its tip without climbing a blank mountain-side. The sea, lodged like a set-square at the bottom of every valley, is seldom out of sight. In cleft after cleft irregular blue triangles appear, expanding as one climbs the backbone of this stony southernmost shire until the intervening headlands sink and the straight lines from which all the triangles hang cohere in a single and continuous horizontal that keeps pace with the ascending track and goes on climbing until the horizon is half-way up the heavens. The meridian dazzle erases the skyline and the hot rock underfoot seems the igneous flank of a planet embedded in still cocoons of blue space.

Sometimes, however, as we trudged northward up the eastern side of the Mani, enclosed valleys and the dry zigzag of a torrent bed gave an illusion of hinterland. Vasilio had offered to accompany us to a village further up the coast and had lashed our battered luggage—filled now with clean and beautifully ironed linen and with parting gifts from her family—onto her father's mule, a great grey raking thing that shouldered all this and two great sacks of corn as though they were stuffed with thistledown.

We had come down from the tower at cockcrow. There was not a trace of sirocco in the early morning air and the wide empty valleys, though just as dry and stony and steep as any we had crossed so far, seemed surprisingly easy going. Letting the
animal and our little caravan circle through a winding valley along the ghost of a mule track, I found a short cut between two spurs and was soon looking across another ravine to the towers and walls of Layia: towers and walls that so exactly tallied in texture and colour with the stone-crop of the surrounding hills that it was as if the landscape had shrugged them together into a system of lanes and shot those tall parallelograms into the air on a sudden subterranean impulse.

Once again as I ascended the sunny cobbles it seemed as if all the villagers had fled, until, coming at last to a little square
rouga
beside the church, I found three old men—like the elders of Alika, the only survivors, one might think—sitting round a wooden table with glasses and wine before them and two cucumbers sliced up like fallen pillars, the pale green drums sparkling with sprinkled rock salt. The leaves of a mulberry tree spread an umbrella of shade and the unwalled eastern side of the little square overhung the sea. The rusting barrels of eighteenth-century swivel guns were prone on the slabs among tall grass. There was something delightful in this little group and the conversation wandered at random on a variety of themes. Such assemblies of old men, sheltering under leaves in all the hill towns of Greece and letting the hours go by to the rhythm of the slow fall of their amber beads, call to mind the scene, on the Scaean Gate of Troy, of Priam conferring with his elders whose fighting days old age had ended, all chirping harmoniously like cicadas on a tree.

It was half-past eight and they had been peacefully enjoying the wine and the morning air since daybreak. My arrival, the courteous chorus of welcome, the stranger's answer of “Well-found,” and the offer of a chair and a glass, only made a short interruption in their discourse. I sat and listened. The Laconian peninsula lay weightlessly along the eastern horizon and, slightly more substantial, the outline of Elaphonisi—Stag-Island—loomed between us. Wraithlike on the Lybian Sea
which expanded southwards far beyond the divider-point capes of Malea and Matapan, hovered Cythera once again, and beyond it, hardly discernible, Anticythera, the last stepping stone to the two stormy western capes of Crete. An old man aimed his finger at the blue waste of water south-west and beyond his grooved and broken fingernail I could just descry two thin fragmentary scratches on the surface of the far-away sky: the summits of the White Mountains and of Mt. Ida; and I thought with homesickness of Cretan friends there, turbaned, black-clad and high-booted figures with their rifles beside them, grazing their shaggy flocks in the sky.