Roumeli (15 page)

How incongruous, among the languid Panamanians and Lascars and Chinamen, these three alert islanders seemed! When the time came to pay, it was impossible. This encounter was a sudden shaft of light and cheer in a rather dispiriting sojourn, and, as I made my way back to my quarters through the trams and the mosquitoes and the racy invitations murmured in the lanes, I meditated with homesickness about the faraway archipelago and the language and the country which we all knew
well; and also about the wording of their question: why, in their momentary delusion about where I came from, they had used the word “
Romiòs
” instead of the more usual “Hellene.”

The answer carries us back two-third of the way to Pericles.

When Constantine founded a second capital for the late Roman Empire, Constantinople was not meant to be the successor to the ancient metropolis on the Tiber, still less a substitute or a rival. The mushroom city was the twin capital of an undivided State. But within sixty years, different emperors ruled as administrative partners over the two regions. The eastern city expanded; the western, beset by barbarians, declined; and, in less than a century, almost by mistake, it was extinguished by the Goths, leaving the Empire shorn of its western half, but once more subject to a single city, the New Rome on the banks of the Bosphorus. And so it remained until 1453, when it was destroyed by the Turks. The eastern outlived its amputated western half by twelve dynasties, eighty-four emperors and just under a thousand years.

The world in which Byzantium–Constantinople–New Rome grew up was Greek. So were the surviving Roman citizens and soon the emperors too. Athens had fallen into a decline, and Constantinople was now the heart and centre of the Greek race. When theological discord about the Holy Ghost divided the East and the West the newer imperial city became the metropolis of the Eastern Christendom as well, and remained so for all its millennial span. So, for a thousand years, the Greeks were
Romaíoi
—Romans—as well as Hellenes; and the word
Romaíoi
soon meant a subject of the Empire and an Orthodox Eastern Christian in rather confusing contrast to the Western Christians with their spiritual capital in Old Rome. The word “Hellene” came to mean a pagan, and when, after Julian the
Apostate's brief revival, paganism disappeared, the word “Hellene” went into abeyance too. Much later, for a freak decade or two, a Byzantine élite, influenced by the neoplatonist cosmogony of Gemistus Plethon—alas, lost—seriously thought of themselves as “Hellenes.” It was a faint, entrancing Renaissance echo of Julian's throwback, and, the times being what they were, the word “Hellene,” one suspects, had more than a dash of its old pagan meaning. Radiating from Mistra in its last days, the revival was as fleeting and ill-starred as the school of painting that flourished by its side. (I wish I had been there.) Dire events blew those brief candles out. Afterwards only
Romaíos
remained. To the Moslem races—the Persians and Arabs and, later, the Turks—the Empire was known as Rūm. By the time Byzantium fell, and for the following four centuries, all Greeks, in Islam, were
RÅ«mis
. The grander word
Romaíos
dropped out of everyday use, and Greeks themselves used the more familiar word
romiòs
(a half-Graecized form of
rūmi
) in referring to themselves and their countrymen.
[1]

The spoken Greek of everyday—the language of popular poetry, songs and proverbs, the living tongue, in fact—came to be called Romaic. Opposed to this was the archaizing literary idiom of theology, chronicles, official documents and the liturgy,
which grew steadily more artificial as time passed: a language of scribes. The deviation began long before Byzantium fell; both are versions of the universal
koinē
of the Hellenistic world, and undisputed heirs of ancient Greek. But Romaic, or Demotic, Greek was spoken by everyone; the other, “Katharévousa,” the “Pure,” was written by a few, spoken by none. One was familiar homespun, the other, ceremonious brocade. When, for a combination of political and religious reasons, the Greeks stopped thinking of themselves specifically as “Hellenes,” they didn't cease to be Hellenes, even if they thought of themselves as
Romaíoi
. When Greece regained its freedom, the old name of Hellene was once more in the ascendant and
Romiòs
fell into disfavour among the revivalists. Today, the two words carry definite and different undertones.

“Hellene” is the glory of ancient Greece; “Romaic” the splendours and the sorrows of Byzantium, above all, the sorrows. “Hellenism” is symbolized by the columns of the Parthenon; Byzantium, the imperial golden age of Christian Greece, by the great dome of St. Sophia. Were one compelled to find an emblem for the more complex meaning of
Romiosyne
—the Romaic World, “Romaic-hood”—perhaps it would still be St. Sophia; but a St. Sophia turned into a mosque filled with turbans and flanked by minarets, with all her mosaic saints hidden under the white-wash and the giant Koranic texts of the occupying
Turks; the Greeks meanwhile, exiles in their own land, celebrate their rites in humbler fanes.

A few years ago I asked George Theotokas, the distinguished Greek writer, why the word
Romiòs
, used in certain contexts, has a derogatory sense. He thought for a long time, and then said “I suppose because it means our dirty linen.
Einai ta aplyta mas
...” In this subsidiary meaning, it not only conjures up the tragedy of the Fall, but the helplessness of subjection and the strands of Turkish custom which inevitably, during an occupation lasting centuries, wove themselves into the web of Greek life. It suggests the shifts and compromises with which the more intelligent Greeks outwitted their oppressors. Under the Ottomans, only the Greek Orthodox Church, and their wits, were left to the Greeks. These they used to some purpose. The Oecumenical Patriarch, the Sultan's single go-between with his Christian subjects, held the Greeks together as a family till better days should come. Turkish scorn of languages and their artlessness as negotiators led Phanariot Greeks, as Dragomans of the Sublime Porte, to play a considerable part in the foreign policy of the Empire. Greek Phanariot princes reigned vice-regally from the vassal thrones of Moldavia and Wallachia; Greek bankers handled finance; Greek mountaineers—the Armatoles—“guarded” the mountain passes; Greek seamen manned the warships of the Turkish fleet.
[2]

Most of them laboured in secret to lighten their countrymen's lot. The administration was fierce, but it was also idle and corrupt. Under these conditions ruse and compromise became virtues. Flexibility and quick wits were the keys to survival and the road to riches. (
Nés dans le serail
, as it were,
ils en connaîssaient les détours
.) This is where the word
Romiòs
begins to take
on its pejorative sense. It implies that, the enemy once removed, a deposit of the wicked arts by which the Greeks had outwitted him for ages, still remained: weapons now aimed at their fellow-countrymen. Abetted by the untamed customs of the mountains, they slowed up the smooth conduct of a regenerated and sovereign state. Indeed, the phrases “
romaïka pragmata!
” and “
romaïkes douliès!
”—“Romaic things!” and “Romaic doings!,” always accompanied by a series of disapproving clicks of the tongue—mean “slovenly goings-on” or, worse still, “dirty work.”

The Turkish occupation is a boundless limbo. But it is full of wonderful stories of Odyssean ruse, picaresque adventure and the skilful exploitation of chaos. Tales abound of soaring careers and distant wanderings in search of fortune which can vie with anything in
Gil Blas
,
Hadji Baba
and the
Arabian Nights. Romiosyne
at its humblest and most comic level, is epitomized in the shadow-play of Karayiozi. This fascinating dramatic tradition is thought to have begun in China; at all events, it held sway for centuries in many lands from Manchuria to the Adriatic Sea and in each country it moulded itself to the ideas and manners of the inhabitants. In some parts of the Orient it was rabelaisian and lewd. Among the Greeks, it took on a lively, witty, parabolic turn. It has become profoundly and inalienably Greek.

The actors are transparent silhouettes cut out of camel-hide and coloured, jointed and manipulated by the invisible puppet-master and his apprentices on long rods which flatten and animate the figures against a stretched white linen screen lit from behind. The scene, often adorned with palaces, mosques and seraglios, is laid in Constantinople or in occupied Greece at any time in the last two or three centuries. The one-act plays performed
there, of which there are over a hundred—a fixed canon varying slightly according to the skill and imagination of the puppet-master—aim only to amuse; but they do much more: they depict, by comedy, caricature, parody and farce, the entire Romaic predicament.

The protagonist and anti-hero is the Karayiozi himself. He is the epitome of the poverty-stricken and downtrodden rayah; his home is a wooden hut on the point of collapse. (“Karayiozi's hut” all over Greece, is synonymous with a hovel.) He is small, bald and hunchbacked; one of his arms, apt for the whole range of Greek gesticulations, is preternaturally long, a survival of the phallus which has such a bawdy role to play in the Arabian Karaguz. Ragged, barefoot, illiterate, nimble and versatile, he is a fast, pert and funny talker, and his speech is full of comic mistakes. Though he is a willing thief—
Romaïka pragmata!
—he is often caught; he is bold and timid by turns, skilled in subterfuge and disguise, volatile, restless, resilient, irascible and pugnacious, soon dashed, swift to recover. His schemes nearly always go awry and bring on a harvest of blows. Talking, jumping, gesticulating, arguing, he darts about among his towering and more static fellow-shadows with the restlessness of a firefly. However absurd and monstrous his behaviour we are always on his side. He is deeply likeable, a comic David surrounded by Goliaths. A small man pitched against intolerable odds, he corresponds to something in all of us; a pin thrust again and again into the balloons of vanity and self-importance; he is a perfect manifestation of the passion of the Greeks for mocking themselves and each other. The laughter of the audience is directed against themselves by proxy, and they know it.
[3]
He is the essence of
Romiosyne
.

Karayiozi, then, is a
Romiòs
. But “
Romiòs
” covers a wider field than the candle-lit quadrilateral that confines his antics. It suggests, as we have seen, the ghostly splendours of Byzantium, the sorrows of servitude, the “dirty washing,” and the absurdities of the shadow-play. It also bears a meaning which is free of any sad or derogatory undertone. It conjures up feelings of warmth, kinship and affection, of community of history, of solidarity in trouble, of sharing the same hazards and aspirations, of being in the same boat. It is the emblem of membership of the same family, a thing that abolishes pretence and explanation and apology. A Greek recognizing another Greek in adversity or exile or emigration, salutes him as a fellow-
Romiòs
and stands him a free meal or a bed and lends him a helping hand.

In spite of the intervening lustre of Byzantium and the woes of foreign domination, consciousness of descent from celebrated ancestors in the ancient world survived, however dimly, among even the humblest
Romaíoi
. All this, for modern Greeks, is caught up in the word “Hellene.” Though time, among the unlettered, may have driven this feeling into the subconscious or reduced it to the irrelevance of an obsolete legend, it was always there; even though circumstances removed the word from general currency for centuries. Scholars and men of letters, sadly reduced in numbers, kept this heritage alive and when the Turks were driven away at last, it was not a revived Roman Empire of the East, centred on Constantinople, which emerged, but Hellas with its capital (after a period of indecision) in Athens. The dome of St. Sophia retreated—(not very far; it still hovers beguilingly in the awareness of all Greeks)—and the Parthenon, neglected for many centuries, sailed aloft as a new lodestar for their national life; and it was not as Byzantines or Romaics that the Greeks, perhaps rubbing their eyes with wonder, began their new life, but as Hellenes. It may be compared to the revival of an old, forgotten, but authentic title long in abeyance.
Romiosyne
, as we have seen, had the pungency of the
familiar and the immediate; Hellenism has the glamour of an idea. They are two aspects of the same thing.

It would be hard to fire the blood of an English road-mender with the names of Boadicea, Caractacus or Cadwallader, or a French grocer's with that of Vercingetorix. At the rebirth of Greece, the inhabitants were suddenly, so to speak, taken in hand by rulers and hellenizing poets and scholars and by professors who had studied in the universities of the West, and introduced to a whole museum-load of forgotten marble relations. They were pleased; they were also overcome with shyness. These gods, philosophers, generals and heroes filled them with awe. They had always known about their grand kinsmen in a half-apprehended fashion; even though the only one they knew by name was Alexander the Great, the connection was a source of vague pride. The ancients were now presented as exemplars, almost as Confucian cult-objects. The modern Greeks, thought the classical innovators, had only to take them to their hearts for an emulous new Golden Age to begin and outshine the reign of Pericles.

It is hard to blame them. They lived in an age of wonders. The marvel of liberation had happened. There was much to be criticized in the recent Romaic past, many alien barnacles to be chipped away, modes of thought to be rooted out and impurities to be purged from the noble Greek tongue....It was too early for them to understand that their fellow-countrymen's descent from the ancient Greeks (and from a Greek past far remoter than the fifth century
B
.
C
. they had arbitrarily singled out as their starting point) was more convincingly asserted by hundreds of humble customs and superstitions that seemed backward and barbaric to their mentors, than it was by the rather charming neo-classical stucco buildings which began to spring up in Athens. It was impossible for them to grasp that the despised demotic was the rightful heir to the speech of the ancients, while the “pure” idiom in which they wrote—for
Katharévousa
has never been heard on human lips
[4]
—was, for all its noble descent, stone dead. Perhaps the words “Hellas” and “Hellene” sounded as awkward and unreal to them, at that moment, as “Britain” and “British” still do, after a century or so of empire and commonwealth, to the inhabitants of the British Isles: words only used by sovereigns, politicians, passport officers, journalists, Americans and Germans; and no one else; least of all the Welsh and Cornish, the only islanders entitled to them; only, quite correctly, by the inhabitants of Brittany.