Roumeli (27 page)

This could go on for pages; but my real concern is the Kravara. Its fame springs from the prevalence, real or supposed, of professional mendicancy.

The odd part is that there are scarcely any beggars in Greece. Sellers of jasmine, violets, combs and pistachio nuts are
constantly breaking into café conversations and sellers of lottery tickets wend from table to table with their many-pennoned lances; fiddlers scrape tunelessly for a few minutes then take the saucer round; but all these are legitimate. Still more so are the wandering boot-blacks with their brass-bound tabernacles slung on baldricks and the sea-food peddlers with baskets of oysters and clams. (For some reason, many of them are pock-marked as though in sympathy with the rugous shells of their stock.) Sponge sellers are the grandest of all. Ringed like Saturn by their merchandise and sometimes invisible under a cumulus of perforated globes, they float about the city crying “
Sphoungaria!
” When rival clouds appear in the sky, they hover near the arcades and a single raindrop sends them scuttling for shelter: they know that a brief shower turns their buoyant wares to lead. A nocturnal and terrible old Cappadocian drifts from tavern to tavern selling toys and practical jokes made of celluloid, cardboard, twisted rubber-bands and gunpowder and a device he invented himself, which, released by an unsuspecting victim, mimics the protracted report of flatulence.

Perhaps begging was not always so rare; but it jars with Greek ways and the pride that makes tipping difficult. Doors are opened and tables spread for any stranger arriving in a village; this surely spikes the guns of mendicancy as a skilled profession. The few beggars one does meet are pathetically amateur and innocuous; an old woman out of luck, a down-and-out whose modest demands are made with little conviction; sometimes a jovial old card with breath like a blow-lamp, a bloodshot wink as he points thirstily down his throat and a mock salute as he dives, clutching his winnings, into the nearest drinking-hell for his fifteenth
ouzo
of the morning; each dawn finds him, to the despair of his dear ones, snoring in a different doorway: the sort of figure, in fact, that we could all become. There is nothing to set against the rest of the Mediterranean, no competition with the infernos of Naples and Palermo. The
only real professionals are the gypsies. Their single-mindedness overrides flight and rebuff with a patient erosion of whispers and plucked sleeves that exalts their takings from alms to danegeld. Where and how did the Kravarites deploy their skill?

A pathway to the eastern skyline of the canyon led to a notch that the
kaphedzi
had pointed out: the gates of the Kravara. When I reached it, the treeless hills sank northwards, a cauldron enclosed by the limestone summits of Aetolia and blurred by landslides of shale and scree. A triangle of mountain barred its nether extremity and the Eurytanian ranges rippled away beyond in a dim and scarcely discernible overlap: a gaunt, stricken, rather beautiful region where the shade was already shrinking under the mid-morning sunlight. A few small clouds loose in the pale air towed their bending shadows over the salients and ravines.

The Kravara covers, I think, about fifty square miles, but the figure has no meaning in such a terrain. A score of villages lurk there; not one was visible and there was no hint of the presence of man or beast, not a leaf or a grass blade. Under a sharp sky where late winter was turning into early spring, the sphinx-like region was replete with enigmas.

The first village came so abruptly that I had dropped into the middle of it only a minute later than my first plunging glimpse of its roofs. It slanted up and down the ravine's edge from an untidy quadrangle of dust and stone. Under a couple of acacias outside the
magazi
—the bar, café and grocer's shop where the heart of a Greek community beats—a handful of villagers were languidly conversing over a tin mug of wine and its brood of thick, squat tumblers. Further elongated by the soaring of his black cylindrical hat sat an amazingly tall priest with his hands folded over the crook of a bulky umbrella. Silence fell except for the growl of a dog worrying some shameful trove nearby. Greetings were guardedly exchanged; the stranger must speak first; then, “you are welcome” evoked its response of “you
are well found.” Back came “be seated” as a rush-bottomed chair was brusquely freed from its dreaming tabby and the priest filled a new glass of wine. I had been so intrigued by the
kaphedzi's
recent injunction that the question leaped prematurely from my lips: “What does
boliarévo
mean?” The silence thickened; ambiguous glances were exchanged. An old man at last said: “Are you an Athenian?” When my distant habitat was explained, their brows began to clear. A stranger from Europe! They were congenitally on their guard against compatriots, as though wary of ritual teasing. Suspect on Greek lips, the word
boliarévo
became guileless curiosity on a stranger's. A long time ago, the old man said—
palaia! palaia!
, corroborated the priest with a wave—the villagers of the Kravara were great travellers....They used to wander all over Greece, and abroad too. They invented a secret language—all nonsense, the old man declared—in order to be able to talk without other Greeks understanding. These wanderers used to call themselves
boliárides
, and the language they spoke was
ta boliárika
, and
boliarévo
meant—the old man paused here. “Was it,” I asked, “anything to do with the old tradition of begging—ages and ages ago?”

Everybody looked happier. “Yes, that's right!” they all said. “You've heard of it?” Relief spread through the company. The old man went on. “That's exactly it! They used to earn their living by wandering about and begging. Can you blame them? Look at these mountains! Nothing grows here, you couldn't graze a mouse! So off they went. Some of the old ones were not very scrupulous; they didn't mind what they said or did. A few used to pretend to be lame or mad or holy men—anything to extort alms. This was what
boliarizing
meant: outwitting the mugs.” Everybody laughed. “But it all died out long ago.”

I began to conjugate the verb:
boliarévo, boliaréveis, boliarévei
. “We boliarize, ye boliarize,” the others chimed in to complete the present indicative, “they boliarize.” The priest went off for more wine. His robes were a jig-saw of patches. The silver
hair and beard, the wide blue eyes and the delicate moulding of nose and temples combined in a saintlike distinction. His quiet conviviality was more manifest as the glasses succeeded each other; it robbed his gait of its sureness but left his dignity unimpaired.

But where did the word
boliárides—boliáris
in the singular—come from? Nobody knew. It is inexistent in Greek. The only similar word I could think of was
bolyar
. The bolyars, linguistically akin to the boyars of Russia and Rumania—were the warlike noblemen of the mediaeval Bulgarian Empire. What had this obsolete Slav word to do with this community so close to the gulf of Corinth? The early Slav invasions of Greece left many place-names but only a handful of words and this is not one of them; and the Bulgarian-speaking “Slavophone” villages of Macedonia, as they are discreetly called, were hundreds of miles away. As we talked, a possibility dawned. Many Kravarites set off for Europe through Albania, Serbia or Bulgaria, mainly the last. They picked up a smattering of these tongues; perhaps this was how
boliáris
found its way to the Kravara. But in what circles in Bulgaria would a foreign beggar learn the word for a mediaeval noble? Doubt returned. (There are one or two ordinary Slav words in
boliárika—tzerkva
, for instance, is “church”—and perhaps people with more than my stale and swiftly diminishing supply of Slav words will recognize more. Another—
gaïna
—sounded familiar: it is Rumanian and Koutzovlach for a “chicken,” descending from the Latin
gallina
.)
[6]
But most of the words were fabricated. Everyone knew the small mysterious vocabulary by heart. It is like the thieves' cant
of Alsatia in old London or Villon's in Paris, the Shelta of Irish tinkers and the jargon of highwaymen, in which a pistol was a barker, a lantern a glim and a baby a lullaby-cheat.

The table burst into a hubbub; strange words came showering out. The laughter and the gobbledygook made me wonder for a second whether the odd sounds were being improvised as a joke. Apart from one or two Slav, Vlach (or Rumanian) words, a sound here and there had a Turkish ring; others might almost have been Romany, but I don't think they were. The reader may spot and trace more words than I have; most of them, I think, are pure invention. I pointed to objects in turn, or said the words in everyday Greek and out leaped an emulous chorus of boliaric equivalents.

Q. (pointing to my eyes) “What are these?
Ta matia?
”

A. “
Tziphlia!
” “
Otsia!
”—the last plainly Slav, from
otchi
.

Q. “And this?” (pointing to my head) “
To kephali?
”

A. “
Koka! Karoni!
”

Q. “And these?” (waving my hands) “
ta khéria?
”

A. “
Tchogránia!
” they managed the “tch” sound, inexistent in Greek, with ease.

Q. “And that?
I yénia?
”—pointing to Father Andrew's beard.

A. “
Máratho!
” Fennel...

Q. “A foot?
To pódi?
”

A. “
Vatso!
”

Q. “
Moustaki
, a moustache?”

A. “
Douki!
”

Q. “Door?
Porta?
”

A. “
Tchapráka!
”

Outlandish words! Back they boomed in unfaltering unison, only halted by an occasional brief bicker about the pronunciation. We were off.
[7]

At this point food—
liópi
—appeared on the table. It unleashed a fresh swarm of syllables:
bouzouróno
, “I eat”;
boudjour
, “bread”;
hasko
(Slav?), “fresh bread”;
sarlagaïn
, “oil”;
bourliotes
and
solínes
(literally “tubes,” Why?) for “olives”;
prasino
, “flour” (“green”—again why?);
lópia
, “vegetables”;
yanitza
, “an egg”;
gnoshi
, “salt”:
beligrídia
,
[8]
“grapes”;
ripo
, “fish”;
mazarak
, “meat”;
koukouroúzo
, “sweet-corn” (pan-Balkan, outside Greece, for “maize”);
patlísia
, “cherries”; and
benir
, “cheese.”
Mleko
and
voda
for “milk” and “water,” are plain Slav; but water is also
kaoúri
....The catalogue closed with
karaméto
and
daró
; coffee, that is, and a cigarette....

Gnóshi...sarlagaïn...tchapráka...dervó...tchogránia...havalóu...tcharmalídi...lióka...hálpou
...the alien and the un-Greek ring of these wild syllables filled me with wonder. It was as though each villager, as a word was uttered and corroborated by the rest, were throwing a strange object on the table in a mysterious and insoluble Kim's game. A few were remotely familiar, the linguistic equivalents of rusty pen-knives, bus tickets of vanished lines, flints from a blunderbuss, snuffers, glove stretchers,
a broken churchwarden, the cat's whiskers from a crystal set, a deflated million-mark note, the beer label of a brewery long bankrupt, a watchman's rattle. Others were familiar objects misapplied, latches used as bottle openers, ping-pong balls riddled with airgun slugs, cartridge-case ferrules, newsprint twisted into bottle stoppers; then foreign objects—a kukri, the stub of a Toscana, a medal from Lourdes, a Samoan blowpipe, a voodoo charm from Haiti....

Others resembled scraps from newspapers in unknown tongues, nuggets of freak mineral and coins with the legend all but effaced which a trained linguist, geologist or numismatist perhaps, but not I, would identify in a flash. But most were puzzles of twisted metal gleaming enigmatically in the Aetolian noon.

Unearthing this stuff, abetted by the wine which had lulled Father Andrew asleep, had sent all our spirits soaring. (A wine splash still blurs the pencilled page in front of me and may have misplaced an accent or two.) I read the list out loud and amended it. Then my companions began to glue the words together in sentences. “
Phóta pou spartáei to houmouráki mou!
,” one cried, pointing to his daughter trotting down the road. “
Kitta pou phevgei to koristaki mou
,” I would laboriously work out. “Look at my daughter running away.”

Another, spotting the gendarme strolling our way, whispered in mock concern: “
Stíliane! Mas photáei o bánikos pátellos!
”

“
Prosochi!
” I construed. “
Mas kittázei o megálos choroph′ylax!
” (Beware, the important policeman is watching us!) The gendarme was bewildered by the laughter as he sat down.

“Don't tell him!” everyone cried, pouring him some wine. “It's a secret!” The gendarme, a nice man from Amorgos, accepted this mild chaff with a tolerant Cycladic smile. I had the agreeable feeling of being in league with outlaws.

The session turned into an exam. Darting about my notes, I slowly put together the following: “
Tchekmekiazei o verdílis sto koutióu
”—but it will shorten matters to put the actual
Greek
into English: “The virdil tchmekizes in his box while the matzoukas, stílian-wise, manes the houmouraki's klítzino. The maláto pulls his fennel and anyrizes, but all the maletchkos, including the gotopoules, are gaskinning in the dair and mandaring the skarlaimdjis. The banic patello koupons the boliar to the gavin where he eats dervo and calls on his Markantonies. The phlambouri sinks and it starts to kranize as halpou comes...!” “The father sleeps in his house,” that is, “while the beggar furtively steals his daughter's ring. The priest pulls his beard and grows angry but all the children, including the young gents, are laughing in the street, and making fun of the peddlers. The great policeman takes the rascal to the prison where he gets the stick and calls on his saints. The sun sinks, it starts to rain and night comes on.”
[9]
Impossible, without seeming to boast, to describe the success of this gloomy little story! Best to set off for the inner Kravara on this note of triumph. I stood up, exchanged farewells and reached for my stick. My elderly instructor grabbed it first and held it out of reach: “What's it called in Boliaric?”