Mani (43 page)

This night was no exception. There was no inn, but our adoption as guests by a villager for dinner and accommodation occurred as though the hamlet had been long forewarned. There was much affectionate talk under the trees after dinner of British soldiers who had taken refuge here and been fed and hidden by the villagers when the Germans overran Greece. Did we know Sandy, Len, Jack, Sid, Peter, Stanley and Ron,
Herbertos
and a tall Australian from Adelaide—“
o Lophtis
”? The tall one? And Spike—
Spaïk, o Neozelandos
—and Yanni from inside London, the one who was so badly wounded in the arm? “Po,
po, po! He was a good boy,” an old woman croaked. “We hid him in our olive grove for two months, and I used to take him eggs and cheese and potatoes. How his arm must have hurt—it had swallowed three bullets, but he was always laughing. We got a doctor for him. He used to call me ‘
Ma
.'” There was a pleased reminiscent cackle. “They took him off to England by submarine in the end.”

“Not to England,” said the priest gently, “to Egypt.”

“It's the same thing. To London. He went with the good, poor lad. I wonder how he is in London and if he found his mother and father all right. He had one married sister—she was married to a rich man, an important baker—and one was still free.”

Oddly enough, we did know one of these names. A couple of men from further north in the Mani asked us if we knew an officer who had come in secret to organize rescue parties—
O Markos
, Captain Marko the Skotzezos, who was captured by the enemy?
[2]
Indeed we did, and were able to give recent news. Our shares shot up and we basked in pride of friendship as a fresh supply of wine appeared. There had been one more such encounter, but a sadder one, while we were in the Deep Mani. On the way back from the temple of Kiparisso an old man asked us if we had any news of an Englishman called David—a tall chap, who walked across the hills like this—he took a few giant strides—making notes about all the Frankish castles of Greece? Always writing? He had come that way a year or two before the war. It was easy to recognize David Wallace. Here our news was not good. He and all his brothers except one had been killed in the war, David fighting the Germans with a party of guerrillas in Epirus, where he had been parachuted. We told him he had been buried in the churchyard of the little
cathedral of Paramythia, where a street had been named after him. The old man crossed himself sadly. “
Krima sto pallikari!
May the earth rest light on him....”

This was the last night in the rustic Mani. To-morrow we were leaving for Gytheion, at the head of the Laconian gulf. A hint of valedictory sadness hung in the moonlight overhead as I lay, agreeably drugged with wine and padded by half a dozen blankets from the thick layer of newly threshed grain which was spread from parapet to parapet of the flat rooftop. Ruined towers stood all round. A nightingale, a little way downhill among the trees by the stream, made everything seem yet more liquid and fleeting and sad. A nibble on one side of the moon showed that its course was more than half run, but it was still too bright for all but a few undistinguished stars to twinkle dimly in the corners of the sky; they hide themselves, just as Sappho says, when the moon at its full shines over the whole earth. In a few days all the famous constellations and a myriad other stars would be back: steady patterns across which the showers of summer comets fall in long and erratic arcs. How familiar some of them become, in their slow marches across the heavens, from constant sleeping out! One lies there gazing like an astrologer. The fixed North Star, both Bears, the large W of Cassiopeia and the tilted lozenge of Orion with his three-star belt; Greekest and subtlest of all—again, perhaps, because of Sappho—the Pleiades, that fugitive and misty little group that resolves itself into a far-away badminton racket warped by the dew through being forgotten overnight on a vicarage lawn.

The brief night over, it was only a question of standing up. Except for shoes, dressing was done. A small boy playing a flute in a doorway, as much as the sun, had performed the act of rousing. The sun was well over the Laconian peninsula the other side of the gulf, the gulf itself shone pale and new, and the Mani stretched to north and south below us in an imponderable imbrication of stage-wings lightening slightly with each
successive cape. The cypresses and poplars and olive trees sent long backward-seeming shadows sloping up the hillside towards us. After coffee and farewells we climbed down through the oleanders along the bed of the brook, swam in the cool waters of the cove, to the island and back, and walked along the coast to Kotronas. We had left our bags here in a kapheneion, the day before. In an hour or two, a steamer would call and carry us up the gulf to Gytheion.

 

[1]
The Argonauts
: George Seferis, translated by Rex Warner.

[2]
It was Mark Ogilvie-Grant.

I
T WAS
lucky that Kotronas was such an agreeable haven, for the weekly boat was hours late. They often are. There was another giant fig tree for shade, from one of whose lower branches someone had hung a big
synagrida
, the fish that kindled the envy of Poor Prodromos, the Villonesque beggar poet of Byzantium, friend, it is said, of the Emperor Alexis Comnène, when, peeping through the window, he saw one stuffed with spices and covered with sauce on the table of a rich abbot....

The waterfront was given over to net-making. One had to walk with care. Strips of filmy russet netting three feet broad were draped a hundred yards along the ground, the fishermen sitting on the ground at one end, stretching the net wide with their big toes and skilfully crocheting mesh after mesh with darting shuttles. A row of fishermen sitting along a low wall were busy baiting their lines for trolling. One had lost a hand through dynamiting, as usual. A basket on his knee was filled with a coil of twine, the rim set with corks stuck full as a pincushion with fish hooks. He looped the slack round his stump, tied a short length of nylon thread to the brown twine with his other hand, pulled it tight with his teeth, baited the hook with a chunk of fish and paid it out onto another loose coil, all at high speed, smoking ceaselessly and only stopping for a second to throw me a cigarette when he saw me fumbling my pockets in vain.

It looked as though no ship could ever come. The horizon sundered
the identical light blues of sea and sky with a dark blue ruler-stroke and the smooth surface of the water was dulled here and there with a faint wind like breath on a looking glass. Across these misty patches occasionally ran a smooth narrow line caused by a current or perhaps a faint contrary breeze, as though traced by the erratic rub of a fingertip. A large, full-bottomed schooner weighed anchor heading south for Matapan and Kalamata. There was not enough wind to hoist sail. Trailing a dinghy, she swung swiftly out of profile till the two bare masts converged, leaving a long scar across the polished and the arrowy water: then, turning the first stage-wing of the promontory, she profiled again and dwindled against the espalier valleys towards Matapan, as though being thrust up the perpendicular screen of sea on the point of her lengthening wake. The fierce and bandit-like kapheneion keeper gave us a large red rose apiece to console us for the delay.

But, within half an hour, we were off; sending out, as the steamer left the little gulf of Kolokythia, one of those siren blasts that sound so strange inland when they reach the ear along a maze of canyons.

This coasting steamer, sailing to and from the Piracus and calling at all the small ports of the south-eastern Peloponnese once a week, seemed very sophisticated to our bucolic eyes. The panelled Edwardian saloon, the brasswork and the curtains, the striped canvas chairs, the elaborate
ouzo
glasses and the saucers full of fat Kalamata olives and the slices of Cretan cheese and salami brought by a stylish steward (white-jacketed but, like me, unshaven) were symptoms of almost Capuan luxury.

When we emerged from our early luncheon the coast of the Mani had changed completely. The mountains had receded inland and the Lower Mani, with the forty-four villages of which Niphakos speaks, stretched in a flat green plain rimmed with low trees and pronged with cypresses and poplars; plentifully stocked, according to the poet, with cotton, and with those
vallonia oaks whose acorns are sold for dyeing and tanning. How mild and beautiful it looked! But after a few flat green coast miles, up inland soared the Taygetus again to great heights, dipping at the head of the gulf where more distant ranges showed beyond the Helot-haunted lowlands of eastern Laconia. To the east the rocky spine of the Laconian peninsula, as immaterial at its distant points as a soundwave, oscillated south to Cape Malea.

A pass winds through the north Maniot reaches of the Taygetus from Gytheion to Areopolis. It is the Deep Mani's only road-link with the rest of Greece and some distance along it, at a strategic point, stands the wreck of the Frankish fortress of Passava, hidden now in the curling blue waves of the range. It was built, like most of the other feudal castles in Greece, in the thirteenth century, when the Peloponnese, now styled the Principality of Achaea, was split up into subsidiary baronies. Some antiquaries derive its present vernacular name from
Passe-Avant
, others from
Pas Avant
, which has a hint of the battle of Verdun.

I have always instinctively hated Frankish ruins in the Greek world. This needs a little explanation; for a long time it needed it—as I am by no means immune to the romantic spell of Gothic ruins anywhere else—even to myself. In the damp forests and fields of western Europe, rearing their machicolations or their broken clerestories in Normandy, by the Rhine or in an English shire—in the heart of their native lettuce, in fact—they fill me with an almost Huysmansesque addiction. I derive nothing but pleasure, too, from crusading relics in Saracen countries; the eyries of Knights Templar in Syria, scowling holds like Krak des Chevaliers and the battered coats of arms on the city wall at Acre evoke reactions of which Sir Walter Scott and Heredia would both have approved.

Similarly, old Turkish houses in Greece, the domes of an abandoned mosque, a broken minaret and the cupolas of a
madrasseh seem quite all right.
[1]
They tell a calamitous tale of mistakes and of the clashing of irreconcilables and fierce conquest and large-scale tragedy; but there is an authentic splendour about the crusades in the Holy Land; and though one may bitterly deplore, as I do most fervently, that the Turks ever set foot in Europe, it would be as absurd to blame them for the destruction of the Byzantine Empire as it would be to arraign the laws of hydrostatics for damage by flood. But one can and may blame the wicked Fourth Crusade for making that destruction inevitable and bringing about the wreck of eastern Europe for centuries. We need not go into it all again. Western feudalism was utterly foreign to the Greek world and when it vanished, it left, beyond these ruined castles, not a trace. It is sad that those vanished tournaments and courts of love, the distant echo of horns and Burgundian hounds along the ra-vines of Achaea, the sound of lutes and plainsong and all the transplanted flowering of Western chivalry—much indeed that in the West I love—should touch me, in this instance, so little. I must admit that in Cyprus, something of the spell of Cœur de Lion and the Lusignan dynasty breaks through in those Gothic cathedrals turned to mosques, in the Abbey of Bellapais and in the castle of St. Hilarion, which hangs in the air like an illuminated detail from the
Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berri
.

Monemvasia, too, has a derelict lunar grandness and it cannot be denied that the castle of Karytaena, high on its Arcadian
rock above the winding Alphaeus, is hard to beat for chivalric splendour. The largest, the most formidable and the most intact of the Frankish holds are usually Venetian and built much later, at points on the mainland or on the islands that the Republic retained by treaty with the Turks and by force for centuries after the Frankish hegemony had vanished. (Some princely families, however, still retained a forlorn claim to their lost fiefs
in partibus
; the Duc de Nevers in the early seventeenth century, who—yet another!—claimed the Byzantine throne, actually planned to regain his putative empire in collusion with the free Maniots.)
[2]
The fringes of the Greek world are dotted with enormous Venetian bastilles, each one a vast brooding complex of slanting curtain walls, miles of moat, donjons, flèches, demilunes, glacis, bastions, barbicans, redoubts, counterscarps, sally-ports and drawbridges, all of well-nigh impregnable thickness. Slabs bearing the Lion and Latin inscriptions adorn them, commemorating some governor or general or gonfalonier called Zorzi, Mocenigo, Morosini or Bragadino. Many—at Corfu, Levkas, Coroni, Methoni, Nauplia, and Hera-kleion (which withstood the great Candia siege), at Nicosia and the titanic affair at Famagusta—are astounding, awe-inspiring and immensely depressing. A Greek writer has described the great stormbeaten and cormorant-haunted castle at Coroni as “the architecture of hatred.” And so it is. But these latterday strong points, gloomy though they are, are many of them untainted by the guilt that hangs over the others. They acted as barriers against barbarism, not, like their Frankish forerunners,
stepping stones to it. Occasionally a castle turns out to be Greco-Turkish, like those of Seven Towers at Constantinople and Salonika and the one that looms above Navarino. This, like Nauplia, was used till quite recently as a prison. I was astonished to see, some time after the present journey, that the inner courtyard was divided up in a warren of narrow yards bounded by high walls. I learnt that as it was the nearest prison to the Mani it used to be full of Maniot convicts inside for killing people in vendettas. As many of these feuding rivals found themselves in the same courtyard at all hours—Greek prisons are very easy-going—the crop of internal murders reached such a pitch that this honeycomb of little open-air pens had to be built, to keep them apart.