The Greek Islands (11 page)

This can best be appreciated in the folk-poems, which
sometimes
lilt and swing, and at others are cobbled by the patient drone of the bagpipes. The verse, with its long hopping lines – the words are so long in Greek – sounds as if it were skimmed across the tongue, like pebbles skimmed upon a calm sea. The imagery is all taken from the much beloved scenes around the singer – the Cretan landscape. He writes of what he best knows and feels.

The rhyme-schemes and imagery have that sweet, pastoral quality which we tend to associate with Theocritus; but if Cretan verse seems somehow wilder and less sophisticated, that is because of the musical intrusion of Asiatic quarter-tones. What is particularly interesting to the student is that so many of the words are ancient ones, still doing duty in the spoken
demotic
of today; words which might have strayed out of a Greek anthology. Apart from the marriage and christening poems, and the straight love poems, there are others that are darker, sadder. There is quite a tradition of poems devoted to exile, which is not surprising, for Cretans were often carried off and sold into slavery just like the African negroes. I am reminded of the haunting, negro songs of exile when I hear these long, sometimes sobbing, tunes about
xenitia
, and I am also
reminded that exile is one of the most painful things to inflict on a Greek.
Pace
the Turks who extorted their yearly levy of young boys just as the Minotaur did long ago – the
impoverished
economy of Greece in general forces people to go abroad to earn a living. But they always come back. Songs like these are also mixed with a group of songs called the
Amanedes
– or ‘Alas’ songs, adapted from Turkish models and expressing a sort of hopeless
Weltschmertz
of a romantic kind, that is
associated
with every kind of deception and disappointment. (In common speech, too, one hears ‘Aman-Aman’ said often, with a wagging of the head; it is sorrow with a wide-angle lens.)

Of the most ordinary and popular rhyme-forms, the
mantinades
corresponds roughly to our popular limerick, and copes with all moods and behaviours. The Greek rhyme is
competitive
, too, and every village has its prize versifier, capable in an open contest (liberally dosed with wine or cognac) of ‘capping’ a rival’s lines and carrying off a trophy for his village. In the villages of Cyprus, the Cyprus Radio organized fully fledged Eisteddfods up on the mountain of Troodos, where once a year there was a cup-tie, so to speak, involving all the bards of the island. It was an impressive sight, for the old singers dressed up in full rig, just as the Scots pipers would in similar
circumstances
. Microphones were provided. There were times, too, when tempers frayed under a particularly nasty satirical thrust, and one was afraid that one of the contestants might receive a crack over the head with the microphone-boom. The contest was widely followed, and each champion took a dozen bus-loads of fans with him for the finals. The red thick wine
Commanderia
is excellent for oiling the gullet and the creative soul, and we made some memorable films of these contests for our archives.

Cherries for lips, then, almonds for skin turned white under the stress of passion, olives for dark eyes, the night sky scattered with stars like flour, young men in embroidered waistcoats with
waists slender as violins dancing the handkerchief-dance before a chosen girl … All this is still there today – a delight not only to the visitor but also to the philologist. The dialect is strange, the accent rocky and abrupt; you can know Greek quite well and still not understand what a Cretan villager says to you.

You may be safe in thinking that it is always something
hospitable
; usually it is a summons to have a shot of
tsikudi
in the local tavern and recount all. In the old days, when a stranger entered an island village, he was confronted by a Homeric scene; the clients in the café crowded into the street, holding their chairs, and sat down in a semicircle, involuntarily turning his entry into a kind of theatrical performance. Embarrassed and flushed, ashamed of his inadequate Greek, and full of good intentions, he strayed about like a lost camel in front of fifty pairs of beady dark eyes – feeling like some enticing dwarf for whom they had waited a century. Then he would notice that in front of the theatre two chairs had been placed, one for himself, and one for his wife. Beckoned, he would weakly sit down. It was then, in the tones of a herald in an ancient Greek play, that the mayor (or the oldest among the oldsters) would address him with the historic, ‘You are a stranger?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘What news from
Europe
?’ This has happened to me almost everywhere in Greece; the smaller the village, the more I expected it. What is most striking is the reference to ‘Europe’; as if Europe were as far away as the moon. And, when conversation became general, one was always astonished to find that one had to do with thirty old gentlemen who were up to date with the happenings of that strange world, Europe. They knew when a Government had fallen, and in their own pronunciation they knew the names of Attlee, De Gaulle and so on … It seemed somehow strange to find oneself involved in an argument about the fate of the pound sterling or the franc in a place like this – a mountain village, say, in Crete or Rhodes, with eagles combing the high
heaven and a blissful northern wind painting Chiricos
everywhere
on the main deep. How strange and thin it sounded – the fate of the British Labour Party amid all this glamour of nature!

Life in the small villages is as horrible as the same sort of life in far Wales or far Scotland; full of bigotry and ignorance, and the perennial low IQ, which spells death to art. It is a horrible life, not only full of physical privations but of intellectual
strangulation
, the life of a remote village in Greece. If I never
regretted
it, and really managed to enjoy it, this was because I was fascinated by the language and the people, and buoyed up by the marvellous classical landscape which is so full of magic that it wallpapers even your dreams. People who don’t have precise things to do or study, or who are in need of outside stimulus and crowds, will find that life in a Greek village will turn them claustrophobic within a year. It is quite understandable; for a Greek villager, life in Surbiton would do the same. Here I must add that the Greek race is the only one I have so far come across in which people can actually pine away and die from
homesickness
; I have witnessed it more than once. Nostalgia, by the way, is an ancient Greek word still in full use. Pronounced
nos tal ghea,
it still means what it says. The penultimate symbol is long.

Home is where the heart is, says Euripedes, and even Greece, that rocky heap of wave-worn grey stones, welcomes its
children
back with open arms. The Cretans will remind you that a fine style does not depend on riches: indeed if you knew the mean yearly income of the old Zeus-like gentleman in the pub who insists on paying for your drinks, you would feel humbled by his vehement assertion that, for the Greek, strangers are closer than brothers, and life must be taken aristocratically, by the horns.

Atmosphere for atmosphere, I feel much more mystery and splendour about Phaestos than Knossos. I think most people
would agree. The site is a honeyed one for summer breezes, and hard by on a westward tack lies the little close of Hagia Triada in its green curves of sward; there is a wisp of a Byzantine chapel and a few sketchily dug-up houses. The view is as good as from Phaestos itself, and through the verdant plain below a small river called Giophoros – ‘earthbringer’ – prettily potters. This is apparently the St Ives of the Minoans; here they built a villa and sent the children to spend their summers. This impression seems right when you are there, and it is supported by factual evidence, since many of the richest and most elaborate finds have come from hereabouts. These include the mysterious Phaestos Disc, which is so strange and beautiful; inevitably, it too remains undeciphered, and the scholars think it came originally from Asia Minor. About seven inches in diameter, it is imprinted with pictographs on both sides, which move inwards, spirally, upon the centre. Date about 1600
BC
. Does it have to do with Babylonian astrology? Is it a mandala? That it has magical powers I am sure; a Greek painter friend blew up a photograph of it and incorporated it into an icon for his island house. He assures me that one can wish upon it with success, and there are several people who claim that their lives (maybe a misprint for ‘wives’) have been completely changed by praying to it. I cannot vouch for this claim; but the little disc is so beautiful that I am surprised artists have not made more play with it, as an illustration to brochures – in the way they have with the gold mask of Agamemnon. More interesting still, it is an almost unique example of printing signs with movable type.

It is always the light that gets them.

It is fair to say, though, that if we find so many puzzles and enigmas in Crete, the modern peasant, pressed by the
economies
of life into becoming a waiter, has to snatch up a sort of phonetic ghost of a foreign tongue which is often the cause of diverting mistakes – though not for him. In Aghios Nikolaos, a barman tried to find me a pair of blue jeans, which he insisted on pronouncing ‘gins’; I paid no attention at first, and then in a later conversation I suddenly saw that this man, who spent his life pouring out pink gins, had conceived a perfectly rational echo-association with blue jeans. For him the Anglo-Saxon soul hovered between the two poles of pink and blue gins; it was his form of Linear B. And of course we make the same sort of mistakes, or worse, in Greek. You will not have spent long in Greece before your children ask plaintively why it is that the Greeks seem to talk of nothing but teapots; it seems to be a national obsession, cropping up in almost every conversation. The truth is that the absurd Greek word for ‘nothing’ is ‘tipoty’.

I first saw Chanea in April 1940 during a perilous voyage in a shaky, leaky
caique
which was down a bit by the stern; I was one of about fifty refugees from Kalamata, and my destination was supposed to be Egypt via Crete. It was a miracle we were not Stuka’d during the night, for our engine belched clouds of sparks into the sky and must have pinpointed us clearly. Many similar craft on the same journey that night did not have our luck and were sunk with all hands. However, my daughter snoozed in her basket like a loaf of bread between two badly wounded men we had picked up; and I was later too
preoccupied
with washing her nappies at the public washery in Cythera to give much thought to Venus Anadyomene. Chanea
was in a state of disarray, or at least our forces were; except for the New Zealanders who arrived in top trim, with oil rags round their bolts, hats on, and a good book under their arms. There was little to be done, and I was glad when we were whisked out into Egypt some time later; but I won’t forget the cruiser
York
lying almost on her side in Suda Bay, firing at the Stukas with the last usable big gun. As a small-boat owner, and a sketchy but adequate sailor, I found this an ignominious way to arrive in the kingdom of Minos; and I longed for a chance to visit Crete in a boat – a wish which so far has not been granted. However, during the last war, I learned so much small-boat lore from the people who were putting agents ashore or collecting them at all times, night or day, in winter or summer, that I realize no account of the island would be really complete without a warning about its navigational
problems
. Crete is a devil for small boats, and an anxiety even for largish ones.

I must insert here a warning from somebody far more
competent
to give one than myself – Ernle Bradford, that enviable mixture of sea-dog, poet and scholar who has really made the Mediterranean his own back garden, and whose books are captivating. He writes:

So much for the sea; as far as the land is concerned one should offer an honourable mention to the two hideouts of Zeus, without taking sides. Between the White Mountains and the Lassithi ranges, there is only a sort of symbolic difference which is the result of the poetic echo which
Ta Lefka Ori
give off to the Cretan. This great harp of rocks is a-dazzle with snow all winter – the chief peaks crowd up to over two thousand metres – and it spells the secrecy and silence which lie at the heart of the Cretan soul. Solitude, silence and whiteness; this is the inviolate stronghold of the Cretan spirit, and thus the most likely nursery for Zeus. The whole western end of the island is dominated by them, all skylines bend to their whiteness, all ballad singers tune in to their image.