Mani (38 page)

The walls of this dim chamber, except for the twinkle of a
solitary ikon-lamp, were almost bare of pictures. But the edge of the floor, which was trodden as hard as marble, was a forest of paraphernalia. A cooking-oven and a bread-oven tunnelled subsidiary caves into the walls, three great grooved amphorae and a congeries of smaller jars crowded together. Oars, a small mast dislodged from its socket, fishing rods and bamboo poles stood in sheaves. There were great extinct acetylene flares fitted for a boat's prow, and glass-bottomed metal cylinders, both of them for
gri-gri
fishing; loops of net, cork- and gourd-floats, rolls of twine, patched sail cloth and unshipped rudders; various baskets and maze-like osier fish traps and a couple of rusty anchors. This maritime apparatus mingled with mule saddles and harness, sieves and sacks of corn just threshed and winnowed. There was chopped wood and thorn-faggots for kindling. A ploughshare, spades, sickles and adzes were assembled like an arsenal of burglars' tools for extorting a livelihood from the iron-hard Mani. Long tridents and fish spears for sea quarry, two double-barrelled guns for quadrupeds and avifauna and a rifle for bipeds lent against or hung from the walls. Ropes of onions and garlic and of dried tomatoes, threaded and strung for making that dark russet sauce called
belté
, dangled from the beams. Various sons, two dogs and a number of cats and hens in ones and twos pecking jerkily indoors after dropped wheat grains and now and then an enormous lop-eared nanny-goat, wandered in and out. Husks of chaff floated in the shadowy air and the warm and dusty smell of the wheat and the tang of brine told of a hard, amphibious life. The water's edge was only a few yards away and the faintest splash was captured and magnified by this concavity as though every so often the slow summer sea were rippling through the house. Through sleepy lids I watched my hostess spinning; her left hand pulling and twisting a thin thread from the hank of wool on the end of the distaff she wore tucked into the top of her apron, the gyrating spindle sinking floorwards from her nimbly
flickering right forefinger and thumb and then slowly rising again like a slow-motion yo-yo. She looked a beautiful, sardonic but benign underwater potentate. It was plain that the door was never shut except in winter, for two swallows' nests hung among the beams and vaulting in the dark nether end of the room. A swish and a flutter marked their exits and their entrances and a momentary breeze from their wings would brush one's cheek or forearm.

* * *

It has been said that the Mani is, poetically, the least fertile area of Greece. One exception to the Maniot sterility in folk poetry—the dirges—has been discussed. But there is also a single exception—a modest one, it is true—to the general lack of formal poetry. It is only formal, really, in the sense that the author's name is known:
The History of the Whole Mani, its Customs, Villages and Produce
, by Nikitas Niphakos. It is written in the “Political” metre, the usual peasant metre, that of nearly all klephtic ballads. It is so called, not from its contents but because the origin of all Greek fifteen-syllable-line poetry—a decapente-syllabic heptameter with a feminine ending—is attributed to Constantinople, the
Polis
or City. This verse-scheme has been the vehicle of some of the greatest of “modern” Greek verse—
The Epic of Digenis Arkitas
, for example, in the Middle Ages, the
Erotokritos
in seventeenth-century Crete, and in modern times
The King's Flute
by Palamas; but it is prone in careless hands to degenerate into banality and tedium. The tradition is so instinctive that any Greek, literate or illiterate, seems able to turn it out as faultlessly and easily as breathing. It is as natural and indigenous to modern Greece as the hexameter must have been to the Greece of Homer. No doubt the shift of tonic stress, a process as imperceptible as soil erosion,
which occurred in the early centuries of the Christian era, accounts for this important vernacular change.

Little is known about the author of the 385 lines of this poem. Nikitas Niphakos came from the village of Mília not far from Leuktra and the point where our Maniot journey began. He is presumed to have lived approximately from 1750 to 1810. Professor Kouyeas thinks, on good grounds, that he was captured, while still a boy, by a Moslem-Albanian expedition into the Mani; that he escaped and fled to Bucharest, the capital and throne of the Phanariot Greek hospodars of Wallachia, where he probably learnt to read and write. He probably returned to the Mani during the reign of Zanetbey Grigorakis, who reigned from 1782 to 1788. (The praise of this celebrated Bey is laid on so thick that it is fair to assume that Niphakos was one of his clients.) His poem is little known either inside the Mani or out—deservedly perhaps, for it has no great poetical value. But it is of considerable linguistic interest; it is studded with Maniot dialect words, some of them already obsolete. Yet it gives a fascinating picture of Maniot life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a picture, alas, which would corroborate the darkest reports of Western strangers. It is full of regional Maniot prejudice. He cracks up the Lower Mani but, rather oddly, has not much good to say of the Outer where his own village lay. But it is the Deep Mani that catches it hottest. He seems to have put the poem about, in the first instance, himself. Col. Leake came across a manuscript in Mistra in 1810. There have been others since, all slightly different. When we were in Areopolis, I got permission from the kind gymnasiarch there to consult the great Greek Encyclopedia
[2]
in the library of
the Lycée, and came across a copy of the poem there, and laboriously copied it out.
[3]

After supper that night we sat about talking on the steps under the archway, half in lamplight, half in moonlight: the submarine
koumbara
, her two guests and her assembled brood of amphibians. They were a delightful, handsome, easy-going lot, full of charm, intelligence and fun. We had been talking about dirges, and the
koumbara
sang us a few fragments she remembered from her childhood. I asked them about Niphakos. They had all heard of him but none had actually read the poem. When I said I had got a copy, they suggested that I should read it out loud. I had copied it in a hurry without paying much attention to the content, so I fished out my notebook and confidently let fly.

“A great mountain stands on the Morea,” it begins, “in the region of Laconia. The ancient Spartans called it Taygetus, and the Maniots, the Far Away Elijah.
[4]
... Other smaller mountains lie between it and Cape Matapan. To these mountains fled the ancient Spartans, the same men who to-day are known as the Maniots.”

“That's right,” said Petro, the youngest but one of the sons. “We're ancient Spartans.”

“... To save their lives and their freedom they built villages and strong places in the mountains. It was not in their nature to be slaves, but to live as free men. No mules they. The poor lads were true Spartans, free-born and well-skilled in battle. That is why they built hamlets and refuges in the mountains, and there they live in freedom to this very day.” So far so good.

“
Kalá ta graphei
,” said another son. “He writes it well.”

Niphakos goes on to enumerate the villages of the Mani:
“Seven and ten and a hundred are the villages held in freedom by their arms.” Considering the geography of the region, it is an enormous number. All travellers, and notably Lord Carnarvon in the 1830's, have commented on the proliferation of villages and the teeming population in this desolate region. (Many of the villages are almost empty now.) The inhabitants had, quite literally, fled there at one time or another and taken root, for freedom's sake. The poverty of a region so heavily populated was the source of all the Mani's troubles.

There is no further mention of history—two thousand years are skipped with enviable nonchalance—until the tangle of contemporary politics. The bulk of the poem is a harmonious concatenation of the names of the hundred and seventeen villages of the Mani, region by region. Here and there a region or a village is singled out for qualification. “The Lower Mani, rich in cotton and vallonia acorns”; “Korogoyianika stands like an unhappy bride”; “Layia,” I was glad to see, is “beautiful and holy”—largely perhaps because the Greek word for holy (
áyia
) is such a splendid rhyme. Likewise, Skoutari “shines among the other hamlets like the moon” (
fengari
). Again, Korea is as cold as the north wind (
vorea
). “The Outer Mani produces plenty of silkworms and oil and acorns.” “It has terrible gorges and wild ravines, wonderful hamlets and powerful villages.” “An-drouvitza, with all its birds, lies in the foothills of Far Away Elijah.” “On the cape is Kelepha with its castle; but it is a desert and has nothing else.” “And so I come to Arachova the far-renowned, hidden away in a witch-haunted valley; and then to the paths of the wolves, the land of sheep- and goat-rustlers and of night walkers. I will name the villages of the eaters of stolen goat's meat, the hole-dwellers and mule-thieves and the murderers of flocks.” He does so. But further on lies “Kastanitza, well known in many a battle and feared by the Turks, drunk though the villagers be.” The captaincies and the captains thereof are catalogued like a genealogical passage out of the Pentateuch.

At last we come to the great Zanetbey, “hero and wonder, father to orphans and firm pillar of his fatherland. He should be the first leader and bear the princely rank through all the confines of the Mani, even in all Laconia. He is great and hospitable and a mighty warrior. He does things that no one else in the Mani can do. I tell of things I have seen, not lies. A bell rings in his palace for the banquet in the evening and whoso hears it may go and eat at his table and come away filled. He loves strangers and the poor...but the evil he chases away and pounds to powder, like salt. So young and old obey him, and all the captains too. All except one, the lord Koumoundouros, who ravages his regions like a hawk and treads down the poor and steals their goods and eats their food and makes all the region sigh. He longs to hold sway over all the Mani, to take its silk away and seize its oil.” When he took troops and ships to attack Androuvitza, the effect was Biblical: “The brave youths answered him, dreadful captains went out before him. They met at Skardamoula, there they answered him, there they pounced on him like lions. One man repelled a hundred, and a hundred drove back a thousand. They stripped their enemies bare and sowed them to the winds. He (Koumoundouros) fled across the country in sore fright with his troops. On the shore he left the black Seraskier
[5]
and his army trembled until they were safe in the ships. And from his great fear he filled his breeches full.” This passage was a great success. “That's what the Lower and Outer Mani are like in arms. They devour their foes and would lose themselves for their friends.”

A long plea for civil peace comes next. Let murders, piracies and robberies cease, let no more houses and churches be destroyed. All the disorder springs from carelessness and illiteracy. Disorder provokes battles, robberies, murder, destruction and
upheaval. If only there were a few schools! If only the priests would lead and teach their flocks! If only the lowly would order themselves humbly before the great! “I indeed,” this passage concludes, “am deep in bitterness. I depart in sorrow, and I leave your [my?] homeland overshadowed with evening.” I paused.

“Yes, but what about the Deep Mani?” everyone cried.

“We're just coming to it. Here we are.” I cleared my throat. “
The Deep Mani
.”

“With bitter sorrow in my soul and misgiving in my heart I enter...the land of Evil Council.” This sounded unpromising, but it continued harmlessly enough with a list of the twenty and six villages and hamlets of the Deep Mani. (Oddly, and perhaps just as well, there was no mention of Kypriano, the village where we were sitting.) Tsimova (Areopolis) is the first on the list, “and there rules the captain, one Mavromichalis.” The poet speaks of “Mina and Kitta the many-towered, and Nomia too... Vatheia and Alika... The Deep Mani it is called. It is all the same and quails and Arabian figs
[6]
are their only fare. Of woods, trees or bushes there is not even one. There is nowhere to stand in the shade on the burnt hills. There is not a water-spring in the whole Deep Mani. Crops? Nothing but chickpeas and dried oats. The women sow them and the women reap and women scatter the sheaves on the threshing floor. On their unshod feet they grind them on the threshing floor and winnow them with their bare hands. Half-naked they load the grain on their backs, picking out the thick chaff lest it should harm the rest. And from the boiling heat and the burning of the sun their tongues hang out like the tongues of heatstruck dogs.”

“
Po, po, po
,”
[7]
interjected the
koumbara
deprecatingly here.

“Their hands and feet are horny and cracked, as tough as
leather and hard as a tortoise's shell. They grind away lamenting all night at the quern, pounding the grain at the handmill and singing dirges. Out they go betimes with their baskets, running to gather the droppings in the hollows and the places where the beasts go to drink at noon and to scatter their dung. Thither run the women and gather it up for fuel to cook their breadflaps on. There you see them, whiter than
kourounes
and more slovenly than pigs, for they knead the cattle droppings with their hands and spread dung-cakes in the sun to dry (‘
Po, po, po!
') and then take them home to cook the food of the widows and orphans.”

I was beginning to regret embarking on this poetical reading. I looked up in some trepidation, and was relieved to find them all smiling with amusement and interest.

“The hornwearer!” said one of the sons, and “What do you expect? He was only an Outer Maniot,” another; and a third, “Read on, Michali.”