Mani (7 page)

But in the City itself, the throne of the Emperors was vacant....

Stratis, our host, had put the fish-trap on the ground to pour out a third round of ouzo. Mrs. Mourtzinos chopped up an octopus-tentacle and arranged the cross-sections on a plate. Stratis, to illustrate his tale, was measuring off a distance by placing his right hand in the crook of his left elbow, “a grey mullet that long,” he was saying, “weighing five okas if it weighed a dram....”

Then, in the rebuilt palace of Blachernae, the search for the heir had begun. What a crackling of parchment and chrysobuls, what clashing of seals and unfolding of scrolls! What furious wagging of beards and flourishes of scholarly forefingers! The Cantacuzeni, though the most authenticated of the claimants, were turned down; they were descendants only from the last emperor but four.... Dozens of doubtful Palaeologi were sent packing...the Stephanopoli de Comnène of Corsica, the Melissino-Comnènes of Athens were regretfully declined. Tactful letters had to be written to the Argyropoli; a polite firmness was needed, too, with the Courtney family of Powderham Castle in Devonshire, kinsmen of Pierre de Courtenai, who, in 1218, was Frankish Emperor of Constantinople; and a Lascaris maniac from Saragossa was constantly hanging about the gates.... Envoys returned empty-handed from Barbados and the London docks.... Some Russian families allied to Ivan the Terrible and the Palaeologue Princess Anastasia Tzarogorodskaia had to be considered.... Then all at once a new casket of documents came to light and a foreign emissary was despatched hot foot to the Peloponnese; over the Taygetus to the forgotten hamlet of Kardamyli.... By now all doubt had vanished. The Emperor Eustratius leant forward to refill the glasses with
ouzo for the fifth time. The Basilissa shooed away a speckled hen which had wandered indoors after crumbs. On a sunny doorstep, stroking a marmalade cat, sat the small Diadoch and Despot of Mistra.

Our host heaved a sigh... “The trouble with dyes made from pine-cones,” he went on—“the ordinary brown kind—is that the fish can see the nets a mile off. They swim away! But you have to use them or the twine rots in a week. Now, the new
white
dyes in Europe would solve all that! But you would hunt in vain for them in the ships' chandlers of Kalamata and Gytheion....”

The recognition over, the rest seemed like a dream. The removal of the threadbare garments, the donning of the cloth-of-gold dalmatics, the diamond-studded girdles, the purple cloaks. All three were shod with purple buskins embroidered with bicephalous eagles, and when the sword and the sceptre had been proffered and the glittering diadem with its hanging pearls, the little party descended to a waiting ship. The fifth ouzo carried us, in a ruffle of white foam, across the Aegean archipelago and at every island a score of vessels joined the convoy. By the time we entered the Hellespont, it stretched from Troy to Sestos and Abydos...on we went, past the islands of the shining Propontis until, like a magical city hanging in mid-air, Constantinople appeared beyond our bows, its towers and bastions glittering, its countless domes and cupolas bubbling among pinnacles and dark sheaves of cypresses, all of them climbing to the single great dome topped with the flashing cross that Constantine had seen in a vision on the Milvian bridge. There, by the Golden Gate, in the heart of a mighty concourse, waited the lords of Byzantium: the lesser Caesars and Despots and Sebastocrators, the Grand Logothete in his globular headgear, the Counts of the Palace, the Sword Bearer, the Chartophylax, the Great Duke, the thalassocrats and polemarchs, the Strateges of the Cretan archers, of the hoplites and the peltasts and the
cataphracts; the Silentiaries, the Count of the Excubitors, the governors of the Asian Themes, the Clissourarchs, the Grand Eunuch, and (for by now all Byzantine history had melted into a single anachronistic maelstrom) the Prefects of Sicily and Nubia and Ethiopia and Egypt and Armenia, the Exarchs of Ravenna and Carthage, the Nomarch of Tarentum, the Catapan of Bari, the Abbot of Studium. As a reward for bringing good tidings, I had by this time assumed the Captaincy of the Varangian Guard; and there they were, beyond the galleons and the quinqueremes, in coruscating ranks of winged helmets, clashing their battle-axes in homage; you could tell they were Anglo-Saxons by their long thick plaits and their flaxen whiskers.... Bells clanged. Semantra hammered and cannon thundered as the Emperor stepped ashore; then, with a sudden reek of naphtha, Greek fire roared saluting in a hundred blood-red parabolas from the warships' brazen beaks. As he passed through the Golden Gate a continual paean of cheering rose from the hordes which darkened the battlement of the Theodosian Walls. Every window and roof-top was a-bristle with citizens and as the great company processed along the purple-carpeted street from the Arcadian to the Amastrian Square, I saw that all the minarets had vanished.... We crossed the Philadelphia and passed under the Statue of the Winds. Now, instead of the minarets, statuary crowded the skyline. A population of ivory and marble gleamed overhead and, among the fluttering of a thousand silken banners, above the awnings and the crossed festoons of olive-leaves and bay, the sky was bright with silver and gold and garlanded chryselephantine.... Each carpeted step seemed to carry us into a denser rose-coloured rain of petals softly falling.

The heat had become stifling. In the packed square of Constantine, a Serbian furrier fell from a roof-top and broke his neck; an astrologer from Ctesiphon, a Spanish coppersmith and a money-lender from the Persian Gulf were trampled to
death; a Bactrian lancer fainted, and, as we proceeded round the Triple Delphic Serpent of the Hippodrome, the voices of the Blues and the Greens, for once in concord, lifted a long howl of applause. The Imperial horses neighed in their stables, the hunting cheetahs strained yelping at their silver chains. Mechanical gold lions roared in the throne room, gold birds on the jewelled branches of artificial trees set up a tinkling and a twitter. The general hysteria penetrated the public jail: in dark cells, monophysites and bogomils and iconoclasts rattled their fetters across the dungeon bars. High in the glare on his Corinthian capital, a capering stylite, immobile for three decades, hammered his calabash with a wooden spoon....

Mrs. Mourtzinos spooned a couple of onions and potatoes out of the pot, laid them before us and sprinkled them with a pinch of rock salt. “When we were a couple of hours off Ce-rigo,” Stratis observed, splashing out the ouzo, “the wind grew stronger—a real
meltemi
—a roaring
boucadoura
!—so we hauled the sails down, and made everything fast....”

There, before the great bronze doors of St. Sophia, gigantic in his pontificalia, stood Athenagoras the Oecumenical Patriarch, whom I saw a few months before in the Phanar; surrounded now with all the Patriarchs and Archbishops of the East, the Holy Synod and all the pomp of Orthodoxy in brocade vestments of scarlet and purple and gold and lilac and sea blue and emerald green: a forest of gold pastoral staves topped with their twin coiling serpents, a hundred yard-long beards cascading beneath a hundred onion-mitres crusted with gems; and, as in the old Greek song about the City's fall, the great fane rang with sixty clanging bells and four hundred gongs, with a priest for every bell and a deacon for every priest. The procession advanced, and the coruscating penumbra, the flickering jungle of hanging lamps and the bright groves and the undergrowth of candles swallowed them. Marble and porphyry and lapis-lazuli soared on all sides, a myriad glimmering haloes
indicated the entire mosaic hagiography of the Orient and, high above, suspended as though on a chain from heaven and ribbed to its summit like the concavity of an immense celestial umbrella, floated the golden dome. Through the prostrate swarm of his subjects and the fog of incense the imperial theocrat advanced to the iconostasis. The great basilica rang with the anthem of the Cherubim and as the Emperor stood on the right of the Katholikon and the Patriarch on the left, a voice as though from an archangel's mouth sounded from the dome, followed by the fanfare of scores of long shafted trumpets, while across Byzantium the heralds proclaimed the Emperor Eustratius, Servant of God, King of Kings, Most August Caesar and Basileus and Autocrator of Constantinople and New Rome. The whole City was shaken by an unending, ear-splitting roar. Entwined in whorls of incense, the pillars turned in their sockets, and tears of felicity ran down the mosaic Virgin's and the cold ikons' cheeks....

Leaning forward urgently, Strati crossed himself. “
Holy Virgin and all the Saints!
” he said. “I was never in a worse situation! It was pitch dark and pouring with rain, the mast and the rudder were broken, the bung was lost, and the waves were the size of a house. There I was, on all fours in the bilge water, baling for life, in the Straits between the Elaphonisi and Cape Malea!...”

...the whole of Constantinople seemed to be rising on a dazzling golden cloud and the central dome began to revolve as the redoubled clamour of the Byzantines hoisted it aloft. Loud with bells and gongs, with cannon flashing from the walls and a cloud-borne fleet firing long crimson radii of Greek fire, the entire visionary city, turning in faster and faster spirals, sailed to a blinding and unconjecturable zenith.... The rain had turned to hail, the wind had risen to a scream; the boat had broken and sunk and, through the ink-black storm, Strati was swimming for life towards the thunderous rocks of Laconia....

...The bottle was empty....

The schoolmaster's shadow darkened the doorway. “You'd better hurry,” he said, “the caique for Areopolis is just leaving.” We all rose to our feet, upsetting, in our farewells, a basket of freshly cut bait and a couple of tridents which fell to the floor with a clatter. We stepped out into the sobering glare of noon.

 

[1]
I have been to Coroni since, and I now own one of these stupendous vessels. “We build them bit by bit from the bottom,” the potter said, “just as a swallow builds its nest.”

[2]
The Traveller's Tree
(John Murray), pp. 145–9.

[3]
Oi Nyklianoi
. D. Dimitrakos-Messisklis. This is invaluable to anyone who is interested in these regions and can read Greek.

[4]
There is nothing unusual in this. Many Greek names have changed over and over again, and the majority of them derive from
paratsoúklia
, or nicknames, as indeed have most names elsewhere in some degree. It may seem odd that these possible Palaeologi, all else being lost, should not have clung to the one imperial heirloom—their name—which still remained to them. But the same phenomenon occurs elsewhere in Greece. e.g. Byzantine names in Crete, like Skordyli and Kallergi (the followers of Nicephorus Phocas), or Venetian ones, like Morosini, Cornaro or Dandolo, survive in large numbers; but many of their bearers have allowed them to be replaced, even in recent generations, by nicknames which have stuck. There is the same random survival and erasure of great Frankish feudal names—i.e., of the Ghisi, the Giustiniani and the Sanudo, names which appear over shops—in the Cyclades. In Crete, nevertheless, in spite of these changes, their descendants have an unrationalized but very definite awareness of their august origins, and in one or two of the large mountain villages where traditions are strongest—Lakkoi in the White Mountains, for instance, and Anoyeia on the slopes of Mt. Ida—the mountaineers, though they may have only half a dozen goats to their name, possess a tribal pride and a knowledge of the part played by each family in Crete's innumerable rebellions against the Turks and a feeling of hierarchy and
Ebenbürtigkeit
among themselves which is almost Proustian in its intensity. Every shepherd, though he may be unable to read or write, carries a mountain Gotha in his head. I was fascinated, a few years ago, by the quantity of coats-of-arms above scrolls bearing Cretan names which may be encountered by any sheepfold, on the walls, among those of other distinguished alumni, of the University of Padua; placed there when Padua, like Crete till 1669, was a part of the Venetian republic. In Crete itself, these insignia have vanished without trace.

A
BLUE
cloud uneasy with electricity had swallowed the peaks of the Taygetus. The valleys rumbled with thunder and even a few phenomenal drops of rain pattered on the hot planks of the deck. But, as strangely as the cloud had spun itself out of nothing, it dwindled and shrank and finally, reduced to a static and solitary puff, vanished, exposing the western flanks of the Mani once more in all their devastating blankness. The Taygetus rolls in peak after peak to its southernmost tip, a huge pale grey bulk with nothing to interrupt its monotony. Nothing but a tangle of swirling incomprehensible creases of strata strangely upheaved. Every hour or so a dwarf township, queerly named, sprouted from the hot limestone at the water's edge: Stoupa, Selinitza, Trakhila, Khotasia, Arfingia. Little towers, with heavily barred windows and circular turrets at the corners, dominated a narrow shelf of whitewashed quay. Village elders (among which there is always the black cylinder of a priest's hat) sat over their coffee on the ramparts clicking their amber beads as they watched the pother of loading and unloading. Sacks of flour were piled among the capstans and lashed to the waiting mule teams which set off amid the shouts and whacks of their muleteers up labyrinthine torrent-beds for barren invisible hamlets in the hinterland.

Trakhila was backed by a blessed dark screen of cypresses. (It is strange how certain trees can civilize the wildest landscape in the same way that a single spruce or Christmas tree can barbarize
the most amenable in a trice.) Then the blinding emptiness continued for mile on mile over our port bow. Now and then, shadowless in the blaze, built of the surrounding rock and only with difficulty discernible from the mountain, a lonely house would appear. Once, on a high ledge, an ashy village was outlined by a thin kindly smear of green and later a castellated house stood by the water in a sudden jungle of unlikely green which turned out, as I strained my eyes, to be all cactus and prickly pear—Frankish figs as the Greeks call them—flourishing there with the same deceptive air of freshness with which a cascade of mesembrianthemum will run wild over a hill of pumice.