Roumeli (17 page)

Should one add up the attributes of each column and mould them into people, two lop-sided freaks would emerge. Fortunately neither exist; each is a function of the other. Only enclosed in the arena of a single breast do they come to life. They are permanently, more or less, at loggerheads, and there is a wide range of contingencies for friction in which the actions of their host depend on which of them wins. After each of these bouts, he might paraphrase Gibbon: “I sighed as a
Romiòs
, I obeyed as a Hellene”—or the other way round.

It seems wrong to write of this conflict without mentioning some of the attributes which are common to both sides. It would leave the picture badly out of focus.

Emotional feeling for Greece is the country's deepest conviction. Affronts, threats and the danger of invasion are the things that not only fling the
Romiòs
and the Hellene into each other's arms—several things can do this—but reconcile all the internal differences of the country. Courage, self-sacrifice and endurance reach heroic heights. When the emergency passes, cohesion
too dissolves, and political rivalries rage as fiercely as ever (no wonder the verb
stasiazo
, “I am in a state of faction,” was one of the earliest verbs one had to learn at school); parties abound and factions flourish but such is the individuality of the Greeks that the country is really made up of eight million one-man splinter-groups reluctantly forced into a series of temporary coalitions.

Other traits leap to the mind: self-reliance; the belief that effort and cleverness, backed by luck, can accomplish anything; intelligence, rapid thought, alertness, curiosity; thirst for fame; restlessness and extreme subjectivity; a passion for news; eloquence, the knack for expressing thought in words; the impulse to express thought in action; energy and enterprise; enthusiasm and disillusion; a deep-seated feeling of confidence and of absolute equality not only with other Greeks, but with the whole human race, and of superiority to many; lack of class-consciousness or snobbery; strong family feeling; impatience with political opposition, corrected by tolerance of human shortcomings and fallibility; an easy-going moral code modified by rigid and puritanical notions of family honour; sensitiveness, especially to irony or affronts to personal dignity; quick temper, which can interfere with this; hatred of solitude and scorn for privacy, the need to sharpen the mind by conversation. Opinion is shaped by newspapers and by talk, seldom by private reading or un-utilitarian study; abstract philosophy and metaphysics are absent from Greek life. Talk is an addiction and it is conducted with invention, great narrative gifts, the knack of repartee, the spirit of contradiction, the questioning of authority, mockery, self-mockery, satire and humour. Love of pleasure emerges in the pan-hellenic passion for sitting up late eating and drinking and singing whenever the slightest excuse crops up.

The Greeks are famous for their financial acumen. Their knack of spinning the air into gold is mercifully unpolluted by
its accompanying blemish: meanness is scorned and almost non-existent; they prize and practise generosity whether or not they can afford it, and the laws of hospitality are as deeply rooted as the most sacred feelings of patriotism or Orthodox
pietas
. I think the Greeks have a much sharper awareness than Western Europeans of the flux of events and the instability of human affairs. In spite of interludes of Romaic sloth and procrastination, they feel compelled to take time by the forelock, exploit favourable currents and wrest fortune from unpromising circumstances; a tendency which can lead to bold and sudden undertakings and sometimes to opportunism. They have the keener sense, which poor and barren countries instil, of the existence of disaster and tragedy. But, though they may see many things in tragic and melodramatic terms, stoicism and humour are at hand to deflate them. Humour, indeed, runs through their whole story in a saving lifeline. Similarly the self-imposed code of
philotimo
, or private honour—a whole apparatus of ancestral scruples—mitigates anarchic impulses and sets a codifying bridle on Romaic short-cuts and personal solutions. To contravene these laws marks the offender with a more shameful and indelible brand than any sanction that the law can inflict.

Two items close this long list. The first is the conviction that a stranger feels here that he is surrounded by people of ancient and civilized descent. This feeling grows in force the lower one plunges in the economic scale; not because it is absent in bourgeois circles—far from it;
[7]
but primitive surroundings place it in higher relief. The last of these Greece-wide attributes is an orientation towards virtue. This may be rooted in the qualities
which the ancients prized or in the Christian ethic. Perhaps natural and physical influences are responsible. Chthonian demons drove the ancients to acts of darkness and horror; rage and violence sometimes harry their descendants. But the luminosity which surrounds them does much to exorcize the principle of wickedness and confute the dogma of original sin. In a world where the law's retribution is looked on as bad luck and life after death holds neither hope nor terror, the existence of this quality is especially remarkable. The bent towards virtue may waver, but it exerts as powerful an influence on the Greek subconscious mind as the north on a compass needle.

These sweeping remarks abound with contradictions, and so they should. It is also clear that the lists of Romaic and Hellenic characteristics represent different strata as well as opposed principles. The Romaic list enumerates humbler traits. The Hellenic idiosyncrasy affects every degree of the Greek ladder but spreads more amply as the rungs mount and the Romaic heritage thins out. The Dilemma is not only a struggle between the Old and the New, but between the East against the West as well.

The result of the tug-of-war is easy to predict. The old is breaking up, ancient customs are dying in scores, landmarks are vanishing, everything is changing with bewildering speed.

In Athens, particularly, the innovations of the West are welcomed with uncritical joy: incongruous skyscrapers spring in stooks, wirelesses deafen, sky signs fidget, neon scatters its death ray, trams clash, giant American taxis like winged and elongated boiled sweets screech and squeak along the sweltering asphalt with Gadarene urgency. The fever of demolition and rebuilding has the Athenians by the throat. Streets gape as though bombed, masonry crashes, the dust of a siege floats in
the air and the clatter of pneumatic drills has replaced the little owls' note as the city's
leitmotiv
. Rusting whiskers of reinforced concrete prong the skyline: new hotels soar from the rubble like ogres' mouth-organs. Athens is in a state of head-long flux.

On every return, I discover that a fresh crop of cafés, taverns, restaurants and bookshops, all of which had seemed as firm as the pyramids, has vanished, and the reshuffle of landmarks sends me careering from street to street like a fox with all his earths stopped. A few years ago, after only six months' absence, I arrived from the Piraeus and headed for a corner of the Syntagma—Constitution Square, the agora of modern Athens—intending to alight at my old refuge, the oddly named Hotel New Angleterre. (This was a dilapidated yellow building in the engaging neo-classical style of the reign of King Otho, at the pillared and pedimented door of which Victorian travellers would assemble on horseback for the journeys to Sunium, Marathon and Delphi. Flaking plaster caryatids supported the balcony, a stubborn lift groaned within, the hall ceiling was frescoed with centaurs, and along cobwebby vistas eccentric plumbing ran wild.) But it had gone, vanished as completely as if djinns had whisked it away, and there stood a gleaming cube of concrete and a brand-new café full of tubular chairs whose backs were strung like harps with plastic thongs:

I crossed the blazing Syntagma to the Hotel Grande Bretagne thirsting for a consolation drink. Nothing would have changed there, I thought. But I was wrong. The old hall had acquired the vast and aseptic impersonality of an airport lounge. (Greek architects have forgotten the saying of their ancestor Isocrates about man being the measure of all things.)
Beyond it, the bar, the noisy and delightful meeting place of many years, had become a silent waste dotted with lost and furtively murmuring customers dwarfed by their habitat into air-conditioned skaters on a rink of marble. Only the old bar-men were unchanged. They looked puzzled and wistful....(At the moment of writing, this bar is closed yet again for its fifth alteration in the last three decades. I wonder what Babylonian phoenix will emerge.)

It is the same everywhere. The Athenians look on this constant change with a mixture of abstract pride and private bewilderment. Much of this architectural restlessness may spring from the sudden boom in tourism. One's first reaction to this new windfall is delight: Greek economy needs these revenues; one's second is sorrow. Economists rejoice, but many an old Athenian, aware of the havoc that tourism has spread in Spain and France and Italy, lament that this gregarious passion, which destroys the object of its love, should have chosen Greece as its most recent, most beautiful, perhaps its most fragile victim. They know that in a few years it has turned dignified islands and serene coasts into pullulating hells. In Athens itself, many a delightful old tavern has become an alien nightmare of bastard folklore and bad wine. Docile flocks converge on them, herded by button-eyed guides, Mentors and Stentors too, with all Manchester, all Lyons, all Cologne and half the Middle-West at heel. The Athenians who ate there for generations have long since fled. (Fortunately, many inns survive unpolluted; but for how long? The works of writers mentioning these places by name should be publicly burnt by the common hangman.) Greece is suffering its most dangerous invasion since the time of Xerxes. Bad money may drive out good, but good money, in this case, drives out everything.

In dark moments I see bay after lonely bay and island after island as they are today and as they may become. The present vision is familiar enough: rough slabs with bollards and capstans,
crescents of sand or white pebbles where the fishermen toil barefoot at their nets, caulk and careen their boats, repair their tridents and weave complex fishtraps of wicker and twine. The ribs of caïques assemble above the froth of shavings like whales' skeletons. Humorous, sardonic, self-reliant men live there, lean from their war with the elements, ready to share their wine with any stranger. At nightfall they assemble under the branches outside the single ramshackle taverna. Now and then, after a good catch, if musicians are handy, one of them performs a slow and solitary dance for his own pleasure, and then rejoins the singing and the talk. Sponge fishing and storms and far travel and shipwrecks and half-a-dozen wars, and sometimes smuggling, play a great part in their conversation; laughter often interrupts it. After dark, beyond the caïque masts, the water a mile or two out is scattered with constellations where other sailors are laying their nets from little acetylene-lit fleets or craning overboard to lunge with their long fish-spears. Behind them the alleyways descend the hillside in rivulets of cobbles between archways and escalading whitewash. The smell of basil and rosemary fills these lanes, competing with the salt, tar, sweat, resin, fish scales and sawdust of the waterfront. Their life is rigorous to the point of austerity and sometimes of hardship; but there are a hundred things to make it worth while. There is no trace of depression or wage-slavery in the brine-cured and weather-beaten faces under those threadbare caps. The expression is wary, energetic, amused and friendly and their demeanour is a marine compound of masculinity, independence and easy-going dignity.

Then the second vision assembles. The shore is enlivened with fifty jukeboxes and a thousand transistor wirelesses. Each house is now an artistic bar, a boutique or a curio shop; new hotels tower and concrete villas multiply. Battalions of holidaymakers agleam with lotion relax under striped umbrellas. The roar of the speedboats sometimes drowns the transistors, sirens
announce fresh steamerloads, helicopters clatter. The caïque-building yard has long been cleared away to make room for a row of bathing huts and a concrete lavatory; the spotless Tourist Police stroll past in couples. Somewhere at the edge of this scene, round a table of tubular metal, the old fishermen sit; they approve of the boom but they are slightly at a loss to know why they are not enjoying themselves any more. The Tourist Police tell them that last week's directive from the ministry forbidding bare feet and narghilé-smoking has been reversed: the tourists find them more picturesque. The mayor observes that his new hygiene-order is being enforced: no donkey is unequipped with the regulation net under its tail to catch the droppings; when the new and unnecessary road is finished and the first blasts of exhaust-smoke and klaxon set the final stamp of civilization on the place those obsolete animals will have to go. The struggle for life is over. The old fishermen's sons have jobs as waiters, knick-knack-salesmen and guides. The more personable fulfil a pliant role similar to that of gondoliers or Capri boatmen, while alms keep the little ones supplied with bubble-gum.

No tubular tables in the old taverna. One of a score now, the
boîte
is redecorated with old ships' timbers. Here, by neonrise, candles in bottles gleam from barrels turned into tables, each with its painted skull-and-crossbones; nets are draped from anchors and tridents, the bulbs hang in lobster pots, while another old fisherman's son in fancy dress twirls on the dance floor in an arranged and stepped-up dance based on the
zeibekiko
. Beaming and sweating in carefree clothes, conducted tours accompany the simplified beat with massed clapping and their own electric guitars and accordions. Cameras flash; West-phalia and the Midlands send up their acclaim.

But all is not well. Bronzed by long sojourn and gazing sadly into their highballs and away from the freckled and steaming influx, the older settlers are at bay. Who could have foreseen all
this three summers ago; when their yachts first dropped anchor here; when the first village houses were bought and converted, the earliest cocktail cabinets borne ashore, the first property acquired and developed? The gloom of the fifth century
A
.
D
. weighs on them; the dismay of Gothic patricians, long-Romanized, at the sight of their kinsman fresh from Illyricum swarming through the Aurelian walls. It is time to weigh anchor again and seek remoter islands and farther shores and pray for another three years' reprieve.