Mani (44 page)

But it is a cruel fact that the early Frankish castles seem more alien and baleful than the later Venetian or Turkish fortresses. They encircle the Grecian mountain-tops like so many crowns of thorns.

It is hard to allot fairly the guilt for the ecclesiastical rivalry that split the East from the West. Certainly both sides were to blame for not contriving to avoid schism over trivialities and for letting the
odium theologicum
bite so deep. I have found that Catholics are the more generous of the two in acknowledging a share in the responsibility to-day; quite rightly, Sir Steven Runciman would say;
[3]
but for the military blackguardism that made the break irreconcilable and finally ruined half Europe, the West are utterly and inexcusably to blame. “We may hate the infidel,” Petrarch said, “but we must doubly hate the schismatics of the East”; sectarian imbecility can go no further. There is only one figure in the West who came out of it well and then it was too late: Aeneas Sylvius, the great Pius II Piccolomini. He alone seemed to grasp the magnitude of the disaster and ten years after Constantinople had fallen he attempted to call the
sovereigns of Europe to a last crusade, one that would have redeemed the monstrous Fourth for ever—and which he planned to accompany himself to deliver the City and the Empire from the Turks. But it was too late. The sovereigns failed to send their promised armies and he died at Ancona (as we see in the last of Pinturicchio's frescoes of his life in the library at Siena), in sight of his half-assembled fleet.

So I did not mind missing the shards of Passava.

* * *

Rich in digressions and vallonia acorns, the plain and the pale blue ranges glided by, their relationship flowing and changing fast as we advanced up the wide gulf. Skoutari and Kalyvia and its peninsula had drifted south, and Ayeranos and the hump of Mavrovouni. The green world continued.

Gytheion, to which a small island was tethered by a long narrow mole, trembled towards us through the afternoon haze. It was sunk in afternoon catalepsy. Nothing moved among the shipping and the cranes along the waterfront or among the inert tiers of houses that climbed the hill-side. Beyond the ship's awning the sun beat down like a curse and I could feel the heat of the quay through the soles of my shoes as though I were treading across a flat-iron. Every shutter was down. “Not a cat
stirring,” a fellow passenger said as we crossed the Sahara-like waterfront. “The only people about at such a time would be adulterers heading for an afternoon assignation. But perhaps not in Gytheion. It's not Athens, after all!...”

* * *

I woke up a couple of hours later. Sounds coming through the closed shutters indicated that the spell-bound town outside was stirring into life. Two rogue-wirelesses were in full blast and very strange they seemed after the unpolluted Mani. There was the exhaust of a motor or two, voices, a ship's siren, the clip-clop of horses and donkeys and the occasional clash of those portable brass scales that fruit-sellers and grocers hold up like statues representing Justice. All the sounds, in fact, of an important provincial town that is also a port, the chief of the south-eastern Peloponnese, the seat of a bishopric, of law courts, several schools, a naval centre in a small way and a thriving market. The rumour of awakening activity, however, penetrated the darkened cube of my room in the Actaeon Hotel at one remove. At the end of my bed, just to be discerned through the carefully contrived gloom, hung an oleograph, completely faded and kippered with age, of Othello recounting his travels to Desdemona and the Doge. This picture, usually on the walls of kapheneia and tavernas, is inexplicably widespread in Greece. Another wall was adorned with a picture in cheerfully contrasted colours which is also one of an unexpectedly popular type: a Swiss meadow with cows grazing in front of a chalet and a dizzy range of snow-capped Alps. It is, I suppose, the equivalent of the bay of Naples in a Belfast boarding house.

Lying in a bed again, vaguely shrouded like a corpse on the brink of resurrection, seemed an incomparable, almost a guilty luxury. The penumbra was pierced by a thin blade of afternoon light falling from the junction of the two shutters. It was all the brighter by contrast with the tomb-like shadows. I lay smoking in a sybaritic trance watching the clouds of cigarette smoke slowly cauliflowering across the room to turn, when they struck this dazzling stratum of air, into a paper-thin cross section of madly whirling grey and pale blue marble. The soft murmur of the town was suddenly drowned by the furious jay-like voices of two women below my window, arguing across a narrow lane about something that I couldn't catch. It didn't matter. The point was the inventive richness of the language, the splendour
of the vocabulary, the unstaunchable flow of imagination and invective. I often have the impression, listening to a Greek argument, that I can actually see the words spin from their mouths like the long balloons in comic strips; however debased and colloquial the theme, the noble shapes of the Greek letters, complete with their hard and soft breathings, the flicker of accents with the change of enclitic and proclitic and the hovering boomerangs of perispomena sail through the air and, if a piece of high flown language or a fragment of the liturgy should be embedded in the demotic flux, which it often is, iota subscripts dangle. Some letters catch the eye more than others: the perverse triple loop of Xi, the twin concavity of Omega, the bisected almond of Theta, Phi like a circle transfixed by a spear, Psi's curly trident and Gamma's two-pronged fork. As the argument kindles and voices wax louder, the lettering matriculates from italics to capitals and out like dangerous missiles whizz triangles and T-squares and gibbets and acute angles, pairs of Stonehenge megaliths with lintel stones, and half-open springs. At its climax it is as though these complex shapes were flying from the speaker's mouth like flung furniture and household goods, from the upper window of a house on fire. Then suddenly the conflagration subsides as abruptly as it started, the dialectic geometry fades from the air and silence ensues; as it did now. The soft murmur of the town took over again, wooing me down into its midst. It was time for a clean shirt and a shave.

 

[1]
Palm trees, however (of which there are fortunately only a few), look desperately wrong. West of the Bosphorus, they should stick to Torquay and the Côte d'Azur. It is odd that an antipodean tree, the Eucalyptus, unknown before the voyages of Captain Cook, should look so beautiful and appropriate along many a Peloponnesian road. I think they unconsciously suggest the dream vegetation in the imaginary classical landscapes of Poussin and Claude—both of them, it is true, quite unlike Greece. Norman Douglas launches a splendid attack on these trees which falls, in my case, on deaf ears. One is illogical and eclectic in these matters. A British Army barracks or a London pillar-box in Cyprus looks detestable while our architectural legacy in the Ionian islands is full of charm. Of course, it is more beautiful and it tells a story with a happy ending.

 

[2]
His claim to the Byzantine throne was through his descent from Andronicus II Palaeologue, who married Yolanda, sister and sole heir of John the Just, Marquis of Monferrat. The marquisate passed to her second son, the Despot Theodore Porphyrogennetos, and continued in the male line of Monferrat-Palaeologue for six generations and then devolved upon an only daughter of Boniface de Monferrat who married Federigo Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, a scion of the great Mantuan house, who begat Duke Charles II, the claimant in question. He planned, with the help of the other powers, to raise the entire Balkan peninsula in revolt. The help never came and the ambitious scheme faded away.

 

[3]
The Eastern Schism
, by Steven Runciman (Oxford).

T
HE TIMING
, manner and mood of a private assault on a new town are a serious matter. If the town should be one of the world's wonders, it is crucial. To arrive at Constantinople by air, for instance, and reach the city by the airport bus is to be swallowed up by the saddest and most squalid of Balkan slums. It must be attacked from the sea and the haggish but indestructible splendour, crackling with all the atmospherics of its long history, allowed to loom slowly across the shining Propontis. Care should be taken with such cities, for the vital rendezvous of anticipation and truth can never be repeated. The maidenhead in question is flawed for a lifetime. Lesser towns should be broken into and entered by night; burgled, as it were; for like this there is the impact of two different towns: one in which the shapes of lamps and signs and lighted windows burn golden holes and parallelograms in the huge nocturnal mystery, drawing the eye indoors and filling it with unrelated fragments of detail; and another in the morning when all is dark indoors but the whole town's anatomy, sprawling or soaring or grovelling, is laid open by the sun.

None of these predicaments applied to our private
rapport
with Gytheion, for the town had been deflowered by earlier contact.

But the manner of our approach was important, nevertheless. The necessity to visit Gytheion would drag a hollow groan from most Athenians. But the broad streets, the din of shops
and the urban bustle filled us with the elation of bumpkins. The town might have been adorned with towering cathedrals, picture galleries and acres of museum; fabulous cellars might have been waiting at our beck. Even as it was, to lie in hotel bedrooms contemplating the fissures like forked lightning across the whitewash, to turn on a tap again—even if it gave egress to nothing more than a few Titian red drops and an outraged centipede—inspired us with the awe of a Red Army corporal in the state rooms of Tzarskoe Selo. The same marvelling pleasure persisted along the crowded waterfront. Contrast is all.

Athenians may groan but the antecedents of Gytheion are respectably hoary. There is no mention of it in Homer, but Pausanias sets down a myth attributing its foundation to He-rakles and Apollo in celebration of the end of their long quarrel over the theft of the Sybil's tripod at Delphi.

Others say that it was built after the destruction of Las by Castor and Pollux on their return from the Argosy. Phoenicians from Tyre used to put in here to fetch the murex up and the Laconians themselves soon learned and developed the industry; for all these waters, from Gytheion to Cythera, were rich in the purple-producing mollusc; presumably it still proliferates there undisturbed. Later it became the main seaport for Sparta, the scene of many a siege; most notably, on one occasion, when Tolmides with an Athenian fleet of fifty triremes sailed up the gulf and disgorged four thousand hoplites round the walls. Alcibiades once landed here, and Epaminondas captured it from the Spartans in his campaign along the Eurotas valley. The Macedonian Philip V and the Spartan tyrant Nabis contributed warlike pages to its annals. The town was wrested from Nabis by the liberal Roman general, Titus Quintus Flaminius, who was bent on destroying the pirate fleet of Sparta. He did so and annexed the town to the Empire. Rather strangely, he was honoured in Gytheion thereafter almost as a god. The town's history under the Romans was a peaceful and prosperous one:
the Free Laconian Federation founded by Augustus was in every way preferable to Spartan tyranny. In Imperial days the Roman addiction to purple expanded from the sober senatorial stripe on the republican toga into a craze. The industry boomed and along with it also the export of porphyry and
rose antique
marble: one can still see incised slabs here and there in the Mani and faded gashes on the hillsides whence it was quarried. This stone was the chief adornment of the palaces of Alexander Severus and Heliogabalus. New temples, dedicated to a widely assorted range of gods, sprang up alongside the old. They were followed by a theatre, forums and villas and aqueducts and baths.

Little is known of the end of this thriving city. It must have suffered the fate of other Free Laconian towns—centralization, standardization, bureaucracy and loss of privilege—in Diocletian's general shake-up of the provincial government of the Empire in the fourth century. Was Gytheion demolished in the great south Peloponnesian earthquakes of A.D. 375? Was it laid waste by Alaric and the Goths in 395 at the same time as Sparta: or wrecked by the Ezerite Slavs that settled later in the Eurotas valley? Nobody seems to know. Invasion and neglect destroyed many ancient and noble cities. They left little behind them but the beautiful names which cover their skeletons or their ashes like so many embroidered and threadbare shrouds; and Time frequently plucked away even these last rags. So it was with Gytheion.

When the heart of the Greek world moved to the Bosphorus, these regions withered into remote and seldom-visited provinces and their ancient radiance grew dim. They flicker in the pages of Imperial chronicles and ecclesiastical records and cast an alien and uncertain glow on the faded feudal vellum of the Franks. They become little more than a crackle of parchment. Gytheion was the centre of that corner of the Morea which was regained by the Byzantines after Pelagonia, becoming
part of the Palaeologue and Cantacuzene princedom. The region revives for a while in the transactions of shadowy despots and sabastocrators and dies again with the Turkish capture of Mistra. But, contradictorily, it was the tragedy of Turkish conquest which eventually breathed Gytheion back to life.

The town itself seems to have vanished in the interim for neither under its ancient nor under its later demotic name does it appear as a specific township during the first centuries of the Turkish occupation. There must have been nothing there at all, although the name “Gytheion” was sometimes used as a term for the surrounding villages, which built up a fierce and splendid fame for themselves defending the Maniot marches. Nothing, that is, except a scattering of overgrown Greek and Roman ruins among the mulberries and the vallonia oaks and the cornfields and perhaps a few fishermen's huts by the shore. The town sprang into being again during the last half of the eighteenth century with the rising fortunes of the Grigorakis clan, which, especially in the person of the great Zanetbey, have often found their way into these pages. When Hassan Pasha treacherously hanged Zanet's uncle in Tripoli, whither he had gone to treat with them under a safe conduct, Zanet led the reprisal attack on the Turkish garrison and population in the castle of Passava. It ended in massacre. Later he drove the Turks from the lowlands round Gytheion, turning many miles of the coast to north and south of the ancient town into a family apanage
[1]
which he fortified at strategic points with many a strong tower. He became rich and powerful and the acknowledged leader of the north-east Mani, achieving a position similar to that of the Mavromichalis of Tsimova. For a long time he refused the Beydom of the Mani; the last two rulers had been
hanged by the Turks. He was forced to accept the title in the end when two of his sons were taken and held as hostages at Constantinople. He had long since established himself on the Marathonisi, that little island lying a couple of furlongs out to sea opposite the centre of Gytheion, from which the locality had long taken its demotic name.
[2]
It has now reverted, as is so often the case, to its ancient name, but for many humble generations the place was known as Marathonisi. He established his little court in the heavily fortified and cannon-bristling castle he had built there and devoted his long reign and his fortune to the cause of Greek freedom. The Mani became a meeting place, a refuge and an arsenal for the great klephts of the Morea—notably for Zacharia and the elder Androutzos—and Maniot waters were the haunt of irredentist sea captains, the greatest of whom was the fabulous Lambros Katsonis. He was in communication with the Russians and when they abandoned the Greek cause, he broached negotiations with Napoleon. The visit of Napoleon's emissaries, the ex-Maniot Stephanopoli brothers from Corsica, has already been mentioned. He was eventually deposed in favour of a more accommodating bey—Koumoundouros—for equipping the Mani guerrillas with French arms and gunpowder. His castle withstood several fierce sieges, and his battles have passed into legend. His generosity, as we have seen from the poem of Niphakos, was on a grand scale and he was revered for his justice and magnanimity. He died in abject poverty.