Mani (6 page)

A large bell, green with verdigris, embossed with an effigy of a Catholic bishop with mitre and crosier and the legend that it was the “gift of the heirs of the de Bolis family,” hung in the belfry,—a present, perhaps, from the Venetians when the Maniots were their allies against the Turks; or loot from a pirate-raid. The schoolmaster said that Kolokotronis, when he was here with his klephts before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence (for it was here that he foregathered with Mavromichalis and the Maniot leaders before attacking the Turkish garrison in Kalamata: the first act of the war after the standard of revolt was raised at the Monastery of Kalavryta on the 25th March, 1821), would play games of human chess in this very courtyard. The flagstones were chalked out like a board and his pallikars took up their positions in squares—I hope in the cool of the evening—while Kolokotronis, in his kilt and his fabulous fireman's helmet, would stand on the wall and shout the moves, his opponent doing the same at the other end. The loser was condemned to take the victor for a ride on pick-a-back.

It was a varied morning's exploration.

* * *

I was alerted and fascinated by the schoolmaster's mention of the Palaeologi, the reigning dynasty during the twilight of the Byzantine Empire. The last emperor—Constantine XI Palaeologus Vatatses—died fighting in the breach on the day the imperial city was captured by Mohammed II. In another book
[2]
I
have told the story of the tomb of Ferdinando Palaeologus in Barbados, whose granddaughter, Godscall Palaeologue, vanishes from historic record as a little orphan girl in Stepney or Wapping, her father having died at Corunna in 1692. Her imperial descent is based on the supposition that the emperor was survived by a third brother, a shadowy figure called John, as well as by the historically verified Thomas and Demetrius, joint despots of Mistra. There is no point in retracing here the slender putative thread of his line through Italy, Holland, Cornwall, Barbados, Spain and the East End of London. If John existed, which is open to question, this little girl may have been the last imperial princess of the house of Palaeologue. Alas, at the end of the seventeenth century she disappeared forever into the mists and fogs of the London Docks.

It is the belief of the Maniots, the schoolmaster told me, that the Maniots descend in part from the ancient Spartans and in part from the Byzantines of the Peloponnese, both of them having sought refuge from their respective conquerors in these inexpugnable mountains; in the same way that many of the Byzantine families of Athens sought asylum in the isle of Ae-gina. (As we shall see later, there is a certain amount of colour to both these claims.) The founder of the church and the fortified building, I was told, was a member of the Mourtzinos family, who were reputed to be descendants of the Palaeologues. The Mourtzini were a prominent family, and one of them—Michael Troupakis Mourtzinos—was the Bey of the Mani (a virtually independent prince, that is) from 1779 until 1782, when he was beheaded by the Sultan.

* * *

Here I must anticipate a few weeks. Some days after this, in the Deep Mani, a young man gave me the name of his uncle, Mr. Dimitri Dimitrakos-Messisklis, the Athenian publisher, who,
he said, had written a book about the Mani. Back in Athens, I sought him out above his bookshop, discovering him at last up a steep flight of stairs: a learned and delightful elderly gentleman in a long cavern of books overlooking Constitution Square. Over coffee we talked about the customs and the history of the Mani, and his discoveries corroborated, amended and increased the information I had by then accumulated about the towers and the blood-feuds and the dirges. How remote, as the traffic roared below us, that stony wilderness already seemed!

When I left, he presented me with a copy of his book.
[3]
It is a wonderfully complete account of the Mani, its history and legends and topography and folklore; a model for county-historians anywhere. Here, in the part devoted to the Beys of the Mani, he sets down the traditional genealogy of the Troupakis-Mourtzinos family. The beginnings are far shakier than those of the Cornwall-Barbados-Wapping Palaeologi. The first one mentioned is a Michael Palaeologus in 1482, only twenty-nine years after the capture of the City, descendant of a branch, it seems, of the Palaeologi of Mistra, who had three sons: Panayioti, Dimitri and Tzanetto. The descendants of Panayioti were known by the surname of Troupaki, either, the book states, because they defended themselves from an ambush by taking up positions in a hole—
trypa
, or, in dialect,
troupa
—or because these shadowy Palaeologi, escaping from Mistra through the gorges of the Taygetus to the Mani, hid from the pursuing Turks in remote grottoes, where, like troglodytes, they lived for years.... Finally, when the coast was clear, they all settled in Kardamyli. The nickname stuck and the imperial surname fell into disuse.... The next of the family to be mentioned (perhaps the intervening names have been omitted as
they are of little interest to the general reader) is the ruling Bey already mentioned: Michael, whose name of Troupakis is now augmented by Mourtzinos,
[4]
another nickname, the dialect diminutive of
mourgos
, a bulldog; the complete name now meaning, roughly, Bullpup-in-the-Hole. The Bey's son, Panayioti Mourtzinos, was Kapetan, or guerrilla leader, of Androuvitza;
his
son, Dionysios Mourtzinos, became war-minister of Greece in 1830. George Mourtzinos, the last of the descendants of Michael the Bey, died in 1848.

By normal standards, this is, to say the least, a shaky pedigree; especially at the beginning: those three phantom Palaeologi.... But, just supposing they were verifiable, the rest, even allowing for the gap which seems to precede Michael the Bey, might be authentic. Not only were there no genealogists under the Turkish occupation, but no archives or records, not even a parish register of births and deaths, till a very late date. It is only in the Ionian islands, which were under the Venetians, and
among the Phanariot families that reigned in the Danubian Principalities, that Greek family records were kept; and, in those unchronicled centuries of oppression and turmoil and massacre and guerrilla warfare, oral tradition was the only link with time past. Fallible as it is, exposed to every rumour and misapprehension and
post-facto
accommodation, this is not always as unreliable as it might be supposed. There are many cases where, in the teeth of all likelihood and logical supposition, it has been proved right.

But I knew nothing about the Mourtzini at the time; nothing beyond the tradition that the former inhabitants of the castellated dwelling, the founders of the church, were popularly supposed to have been direct descendants of the Palaeologi....

* * *

The quiet charm of Kardamyli grew with each passing hour. Most unexpectedly, we discovered a little hotel consisting of a few rooms over a grocer's shop owned by Socrates Phaliréas, the cousin, it turned out, of a distinguished sculptor-friend in Athens. Equally unexpectedly, it was, in its unflamboyant way, very comfortable. No planks were spread here with hair-shirt blankets for a stylite's penance, but springs and soft mattresses and a wicker chair or two waited for tired limbs in old and mellow rooms; and the kind, deep voice of the gigantic owner, a civilized and easy-going host, sitting down now and then for a chat, induced in all such a lack of hurry that the teeth of time and urgency and haste seemed all to have been drawn.

The same leisurely spell pervades the whole of this far-away little town. Cooled in summer by the breeze from the gulf, the great screen of the Taygetus shuts out intruding winds from the north and the east; no tramontana can reach it. It is like those Elysian confines of the world where Homer says that life is easiest for men; where no snow falls, no strong winds blow nor
rain comes down, but the melodious west wind blows for ever from the sea to bring coolness to those who live there. I was very much tempted to become one of them, to settle in this small hotel for months with books and writing-paper; the thought has often recurred. The
Guide Bleu
only spares it half a line, mentioning little beyond the existence of its four hundred and ninety inhabitants. It is better so. It is too inaccessible and there is too little to do there, fortunately, for it ever to be seriously endangered by tourism. No wonder the nereids made it their home.

Returning from a long bathe beyond the forest of reeds, we saw a boy carrying a large silver fish by the tail: a
salpa
. (I haven't discovered its usual name.) I bought it, and, while it was being cooked, we sat under a mulberry tree, whose trunk was whitewashed right up to the start of the branches, on a terrace outside one of the few taverns. Like us, a few fishermen under their great hats were watching the sun sinking over the Messenian mountains, on the other side of which, sixteen leagues away, lay Pylos. A miniature mole ran out, and, alongside it, gently rocking with each sigh of the green transparent water, caiques were tethered a few yards above their shadows on the pebbly bottom. Oleanders leaned over a flat layer of rock across which the sea flowed with just enough impetus to net the surface with a frail white reticulation of foam which slid softly away and dissolved while a new one formed. A small distance from the shore rocks jutted, one bearing a whitewashed church, the other a miniature ruined fort. The sea's surface was striped with gold which turned as the sun dipped into pale sulphur shot with lilac. Beyond it the unruffled gulf sailed unhindered to the darkening peninsula opposite.

Thinking of our grilling fish, our minds strayed back to Kalamata (now hidden at the gleaming gulf's end), several years before.

It was midsummer in that glaring white town, and the heat
was explosive. Some public holiday was in progress—could it have been the feast of St. John the Baptist which marks the summer solstice?—and the waterfront was crowded with celebrating citizens in liquefaction. The excitement of a holiday and the madness of a heat wave hung in the air. The stone flags of the water's edge, where Joan and Xan Fielding and I sat down to dinner, flung back the heat like a casserole with the lid off. On a sudden, silent, decision we stepped down fully dressed into the sea carrying the iron table a few yards out and then our three chairs, on which, up to our waists in cool water, we sat round the neatly laid table-top, which now seemed by magic to be levitated three inches above the water. The waiter, arriving a moment later, gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then, observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea, advanced waist deep with a butler's gravity, and, saying nothing more than “Dinner-time,” placed our meal before us—three beautifully grilled
kephali
, piping hot, and with their golden brown scales sparkling. To enjoy their marine flavour to the utmost, we dipped each by its tail for a second into the sea at our elbow... Diverted by this spectacle, the diners on the quay sent us can upon can of retsina till the table was crowded. A dozen boats soon gathered there, the craft radiating from the table's circumference like the petals of a marguerite. Leaning from their gently rocking boats, the fishermen helped us out with this sudden flux of wine, and by the time the moon and the Dog-Star rose over this odd symposium, a mandoline had appeared and
manga
songs in praise of hashish rose into the swooning night:

wailed the fishermen,

* * *

I woke up thinking of the Mourtzini and the Palaeologi. It occurred to me, drinking mountain-tea in the street, that I had clean forgotten to ask when the Mourtzinos family had died out. “But it hasn't,” Mr. Phaliréas said. “Strati, the last of them, lives just down the road.”

Evstratios Mourtzinos was sitting in his doorway weaving, out of split cane and string, a huge globular fish-trap more complex than any compass design or abstract composition of geometrical wire. The reel of twine revolved on the floor, the thread unwinding between his big toe and its neighbour as the airy sphere turned and shifted in his skilful brown fingers with a dazzling interplay of symmetrical parabolas. The sunlight streamed through the rust-coloured loops and canopies of drying nets. A tang of salt, tar, seaweed and warm cork hung in the air. Cut reeds were stacked in sheaves, two canaries sung in a cage in the rafters, our host's wife was slicing onions into a copper saucepan. Mourtzinos shrugged his shoulders with a smile at my rather absurd questions and his shy and lean face, which brine and the sun's glare had cured to a deep russet, wore an expression of dubious amusement. “That's what they say,” he said, “but we don't know anything about it. They are just old stories....” He poured out hospitable glasses of ouzo, and the conversation switched to the difficulties of finding a market for fish: there was so much competition. There is a special delight in this early-morning drinking in Greece.

Old stories, indeed. But supposing every link were verified, each shaky detail proved? Supposing this modest and distinguished looking fisherman were really heir of the Palaeologi, descendant of Constantine XI and of Michael VIII the Liberator,
successor to Alexis Comnène and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer and Leo the Isaurian and Justinian and Theodosius and St. Constantine the Great? And, for that matter, to Diocletian and Heliogabalus and Marcus Aurelius, to the Antonines, the Flavians, the Claudians and the Julians, all the way back to the Throne of Augustus Caesar on the Palatine, where Romulus had laid the earliest foundations of Rome?... The generous strength of a second glass of ouzo accelerated these cogitations. It was just the face for a constitutional monarch, if only Byzantium were free. For the sheer luxury of credulity I lulled all scepticism to sleep and, parallel to an unexacting discourse of currents and baits and shoals, a kind of fairy-tale began assembling in my mind: “Once upon a time, in a far-away land, a poor fisherman and his wife lived by the sea-shore.... One day a stranger from the city of Byzantium knocked on the door and begged for alms. The old couple laid meat and drink before him...' Here the mood and period painlessly changed into a hypothetic future and the stranger had a queer story to tell: the process of Westernization in Turkey, the study of European letters, of the classics and the humanities had borne such fruit that the Turks, in token of friendship and historical appropriateness, had decided to give the Byzantine Empire back to the Greeks and withdraw to the Central Asian steppes beyond the Volga from which they originally came, in order to plant their newly-won civilization in the Mongol wilderness.... The Greeks were streaming back into Constantinople and Asia Minor. Immense flotillas were dropping anchor off Smyrna and Adana and Halicarnassus and Alexandretta. The seaboard villages were coming back to life; joyful concourses of Greeks were streaming into Adrianople, Rhodosto, Broussa, Nicaea, Caesaraea, Iconium, Antioch and Trebizond. The sound of rejoicing rang through eastern Thrace and banners with the Cross and the double-headed eagle and the Four Betas back-to-back were
fluttering over Cappadocia and Karamania and Pontus and Bithynia and Paphlagonia and the Taurus mountains....