Roumeli (19 page)

Little in these crags and ravines had changed for centuries. One felt that each village must have existed since Minoan times. There was little there but a church filled with flaking Byzantine frescoes and a slanting maze of stepped and cobbled lanes; but there were subtle differences in the weave and the pattern of blankets and knapsacks and the way that men tied their fringed head-kerchiefs, and in the cut of their hooded capes, and in some of them, a distinguishing accent, a variant of the Cretan dialect, and even of physical appearance. However often these villages had been sacked and burned they were always built again and according to an unbreakable formula. I remember sitting on the flat roof of a friend's
[11]
house in Anoyeia, on the slopes of Mount Ida, and, as I gazed at the moonlit jig-saw of roofs and houses all round, calling to mind Aristotle's ideal for the capitals of the Greek states: cities small enough to hear the voice of one herald.

We seldom stayed in villages; not through fear of treachery, but lest innocent garrulity should endanger them. The houses contained little: a semi-circular arch across the living-room, a smoke-blackened hearth, a low ledge of divan round the walls spread with coloured blankets, a loom, a wooden table and stools, the ikons and their lamp and a pitcher with thorn twigs in the mouth against flying insects. Onions, garlic and tomatoes
hung from the cobwebbed beams; faded pictures of Venizelos looked down from the walls and enlarged sepia photographs of turbaned grandsires armed to the teeth. Hens, pecking their way indoors, were always being shooed out, and swallows dived to and from their nest in the rafters with a swish; when we were there, rifles leaned in the corner and lay across the tables; some were adorned with silver plaques and cartridge-belts heavy with flashing clips festooned them. The thick embrasures of the windows and the doors framed downhill cascades of olives and a canyon twisting between dovetailing scarps; often these vistas ended in a triangle of the Aegean or the Libyan Sea; they were nearly always commanded by the upheaval of Ida or the White Mountains. Sometimes, with sentries posted, after a banquet with the Olympianly bearded priest, the mayor and the village elders, we would stay the night. At these meals, the women, coiffed and clad in black—saviours of numberless British, New Zealand and Australians—served and stood near with arms akimbo; they joined in the conversation spiritedly but, in this masculine and patriarchal society, seldom sat with us. In villages like this I was treated for small maladies now and then—for rheumatism, due to constant sleeping out in wet clothes—and for persistent headaches. The universal remedy of cupping was followed, in every case, by darker therapies administered by clever old women: many candle-lit signs of the cross were performed over the afflicted part; incantations accompanied them, and oil dropped slowly into a glass of water in ritual quantities. Once a beautiful young witch knotted a pinch of salt in one corner of my turban and murmured spells for half an hour. Impossible to discover the words: “
mystiká prágmata! Kalá prágmata! Vaskaníes!
” was the only answer, through lips across which forefingers were conspiratorially laid; words followed by peals of laughter from the women and the girls who gather at such times: “Secret things! Good things! Charms...!” They worked at once.

But the high mountains, for nearly three years, were our real home. It was there, at the end of hours climbing and higher than the dizziest village, that devotion to the Greek mountains and their population took root. We lived in goat-folds and abandoned conical cheese-makers' huts and above all, in the myriad caverns that mercifully riddle the island's stiff spine. Some were too shallow to keep out the snow, others could house a Cyclops and all his flocks. Here, at ibex-and eagle-height, we settled with our small retinues. Enemy searches kept us on the move and it was in a hundred of these eyries that we got to know an older Crete and an older Greece than anyone dreams of in the plains. Under the dripping firelit stalactites we sprawled and sat cross-legged, our eyes red with smoke, on the branches that padded the cave's floor and spooned our suppers out of a communal tin plate: beans, lentils, cooked snails and herbs, accompanied by that twice-baked herdsman's bread that must be soaked in water or goats' milk before it is eaten. Toasting goats' cheese sizzled on the points of long daggers and oil dewed our whiskers.
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These sessions were often cheered by flasks of raki, occasionally distilled from mulberries, sent from the guardian village below. On lucky nights, calabashes of powerful amber-coloured wine loosened all our tongues. Over the shoulders of each figure was slung a bristly white cloak stiff as bark, with the sleeves hanging loose like penguins' wings; the hoods raised against the wind gave the bearded and moustachioed faces a look of Cistercians turned bandit. Someone would be smashing shells with his pistol-butt and offering peeled walnuts in a horny palm; another sliced tobacco on the stock of a rifle: for hours we forgot the war with talk and singing and stories; laughter echoed along minotaurish warrens.

Few of the old men could write or read, those in middle age found reading hard and writing a grind; the young were defter penmen, but, owing to their short time at school and the disorder of the war, they were not advanced in the craft, apart from an occasional student on the run from the underground in one of the towns. A by-product of this scholastic void was a universal gift for lively and original talk; the flow and style of their discourse were unhindered by the self-consciousness which hobbles and hamstrings the rest of us. They had astonishing memories. These often reached back to their great-grandfathers' day, and, by hearsay, far beyond. In an island of long lives, this made all the past seem recent: compelling proof of the continuity of history. It reduced the war to just another struggle, the worst and the most recent of many, with which we were perfectly able to deal, and, though the Germans had overrun Greece and driven the British back to El Alamein, win. “Never fear, my child,” some greybeard would say, prophetically prodding the smoke with a forefinger like a fossil, “with Christ and the Virgin's help, we'll eat them.” All agreed, and the conversation wandered to the First World War and Asia Minor and arguments about the respective merits of Lloyd George and Clemenceau, to Bismarck and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or the governments, constitutions and electoral systems of different countries. Then the level of this far-ranging chat, much of it far beyond the scope of their literate equivalents in England, might suddenly be reduced by another old man, simpler than his fellows, asking, and evoking general derision and amusement by his question, whether the English were Christians or, like the Moslems, polygamous....Intelligence, humour, curiosity, the rapid assimilation of ideas and their quick deployment, an incomparable narrative knack, arguments resolved by a sudden twist, the inability to leave facts and ideas undeveloped—they are objects to play with like nuggets—all these graces flowered in this stony terrain. The Cretan dialect, with its ancient survivals
and turns of phrase and a vocabulary that changed from valley to valley and an accent unpolluted by the metropolis, was an unstaunchable fountain of delight and fascination.

Their clothes, however ragged and patched, were emblematic of the dash and spirit they prize so highly: black boots to the knee, baggy, pleated, dark-blue trousers—breeches among the young
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—wasp-waisted at the middle by a twisted mulberry silk sash eight feet long in which was often stuck a long dagger with a branching ivory hilt and an embossed silver sheath; above this came a black shirt and sometimes a blue waistcoat as tight as a bullfighter's, stiff with embroidered whorls. A black silk turban with a heavy fringe was twisted at a rakish tilt round every brow. Bandoliers and a slung gun came next—fittings which often accompanied the frocks of abbots, monks and priests—and over them, in winter, the white hooded cape. A curly handled stick, never a crook as on the mainland, with as many wriggles along its shaft as could be found, finishes everything off. All, however tattered and frayed by mountain life, is taut and streamlined, a garb in which, as I well know, it is impossible not to swagger. This bravura was accentuated among the old men by the odd archaic cut of their beards; shorn under the jaw-line, they jutted from their chins like the beards of ancient warriors on vases. This look was underscored by their deceptively frowning eyebrows and the high hawklike bridges of their noses. The ferocity of those swooping brows was contradicted by the eyes beneath. These are seldom wary and reserved, as they are in the Mani: alert, confident, wide, humorous and unguarded, they blaze like lamps.
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Everything about these
men spells alacrity and vigour. They are lean, sweated to the bone, strong and resilient; the old are as hard as the limestone that surrounds them, the young as fast across the mountains as Hurons, as untamed as ibexes. Nowhere in Greece is the quality of
leventeiá
so clearly manifest. This attribute embraces a range of characteristics: youth, health, nerve, high spirits, humour, quickness of mind and action, skill with weapons, the knack of pleasing girls, love for singing and drinking, generosity, capacity to improvise
mantinades
—those intricate rhyming couplets sung with a sting in the second line—and “flying like a bird” in the quick and violent dances.
Leventeiá
often includes virtuosity on the
lyra
: it is universal zest for life, the love of living dangerously and a readiness for anything.

Rather unexpectedly, this supercharge of energy and extroversion is shot with a most delicately poised sensitiveness, sometimes by a touchiness, where a mishap or a slight, even an imaginary one, can turn the world black and drive its victim into melancholy and languor, almost to pining away. It is the task of friends to diagnose the anguish and exorcize it; not always an easy task. This lurking demon, resembling the
tribulatio et angustia
of the Psalms, the Greeks call
stenachoria
. But the problem acts both ways: should distress assault one, they recognize its symptoms with an almost feminine intuitiveness and try, with tact and solicitude, to resolve it; and even if they are mistaken about the cause, this kindness may allay the effect. Their need and their talent for friendship is the obverse of implacable hatred for enemies.

Stenachoria
finds them helpless; but, with the major calamities that shower down upon them, they are better fitted to deal; ancestral reactions come to the rescue. The loss of a kinsman in a mountain affray or a reprisal holocaust would unloose grief and rage which, ungovernable at first, the longing for vengeance would channel and the anodynes of fatalism slowly allay. The Cretans see life in tragic and heroic terms. This being
so, it is fortunate that their feeling of comedy is also pronounced. They are preternaturally quick at locating the ludicrous aspects of things; they seize the point and throw it back in a different shape. (The gift for laughter in Greece becomes still more remarkable when we think of her neighbours. Turkey, the Slav states, Albania and Southern Italy weave a dark garland of literalness and scarce jokes....) This blessing lightened many of our troubles. It gave a marvellous zest to those long troglodytic sessions which, especially in winter, often kept us pent.

These were the times when one heard how to foretell the future by dreams and by gazing at the markings on the scraped shoulder blades of sheep and learnt about the superstitions and beliefs which still survive there; about gorgons and nereids and vampires; of the “light-shadowed ones,” who can see more than ordinary mortals; of how an ancestor of the Manouras family fought with a dragon outside his village, and how, at each anniversary of the Battle of Frangokástello, phantom hosts of Greeks and Turks—“the people of the dew”—complete with guns and cannon and banners, are seen to fight the battle all over again. The hours were often whiled away with singing
mantinades
. Some of us even learnt to improvise them ourselves, which was considered a feat for strangers, and hailed with applause. There were many songs. But
ta rizitika
, “the foothill ones,” were far beyond our scope, so intricate are they, so unseizable in key and rhythm and changes of tempo. One called
Chelìdonáki mou gorgó
, “my swift little swallow,” especially sticks in my memory....The
lyra
often accompanied these songs; it is a three-stringed instrument a foot-and-a-half long, propped upright on the musician's knee and played with a bow. Beautifully hollowed and carved out of walnut, this smooth and polished instrument is light as a feather and capable of a great range of moods. Exciting and violin-like, the melodic line swoops, soars, twirls, laments and exults with a manic-depressive fluidity. It was good luck to have a
lyra
-player in one's party, not only for
the sake of the music; the players are great fun, as a rule, fast runners, and crack shots; nonpareils of
leventeiá
, in fact.
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The lucid memory of the old men made a century or two ago sound as recent as yesterday. Take the
Erotókritos!
This poem was written by a shadowy figure called Vincentios Cornaros from the east of the island. A Cretan, in spite of his august Venetian name (perhaps, but not certainly, of remote Venetian origin), he lived in the early seventeenth century during the last decades of the Venetian occupation. The poem, nearly twelve thousand lines of fifteen-syllable rhyming hexameters, is written in deep and wonderful Cretan. Romantic and epic in style, its Arcadian and mediaeval background suggests Orlando Furioso and the dream region of Shakespeare's wood near Athens. Mountains tower, seas rage, battlements frown from crags, horns resound, glades echo to the cry of hounds, hawks hover, throne-rooms glitter, bowers and chambers are lulled by lute strings, swords clang together, lance after lance is splintered in ceremonious and deadly tournaments. It is the background for the thwarted and ill-starred loves of the hero, Erotókritos and Aretousa, the king of Athens' daughter; illstarred, that is, until the happy ending, by which time fabulous beasts, witches, spells and terrible steel-clad rivals and a thousand hazards in castles, ravines and forests have all been overcome. This chivalrous and magical world of fable was just as remote from the author's period as Cervantes from the books that Don Quixote read. Unknown outside Greece because of the deep vernacular that enshrouds it and its daunting length for a translator—though many, including me, have longingly toyed with the idea—it is one of the great epic poems of Europe.