Roumeli (4 page)

After an hour or so the hum of talk sank to a single deep bourdon note which resolved itself into the opening phrases of a klephtic song. The first stanza was sung by a group of two or three and then repeated, in a slow and long-drawn roar starting with the vehemence of a lurch, by the rest of the shepherds. Rather surprisingly, so far from the Morea, it was about the great War of Independence leader, Kolokotrones. (I would have expected some more northern Klepht, and above all, Katsandónis
from the wild Agrapha mountains, a great paladin in the time of Ali of Yanina, and himself a Sarakatsán; or Karaïskakis, perhaps.) “Kolokotrones shouted,” sang the nomads, “and all the world trembled: Where are you, poor Nikitará, you whose feet have wings?—
pou choun to pódia sou phterá
? Go, go and seize the Turks, drive them like hares into a trap, slay some and capture some, and lock some in the castle....At Antikorpha and Trikorpha the blood is flowing like a brook....” This gave rise to another deep melopee from the south: “They have blockaded all the roads of the Morea, they have sealed up all the passes....” When the massed voices died down, the steady and unchanging note of the smaller group continued half in a wail and half in a roar, setting up its own curious vibration. This comparative lull was always followed by the long deep cry of conjuration—
Oré!
—“O, you!” or “Hark!”—which ushers in most klephtic stanzas; and another act from the warlike past began, heckled and abetted by sudden ejaculations from the others and goaded on by ear-splitting pastoral whistles.
[7]

These songs unfold with a slow metrical elaboration of semi-tones and recapitulated half-lines and with a force of delivery which seems to strain the singers to the brink of syncope. Their heads are flung backwards with eyes half closed or faraway and the veins of their foreheads and necks project like thongs. The stories, usually heroic narratives, frequently veiled in a parable, are as fierce and melancholy as the music. The slow cumulative incantatory power fills the smoky air overhead
with toppling minarets, blazing fortresses, volleys from long-barrelled guns, the smell of powder and the clash of yataghans as the Klephts and the janissaries close with each other on semicircular bridges over fabulous ravines....Across the Valley of Tempe, Klepht-sheltering Olympus thunders reproach at Turk-trampled Ossa. Flame-eyed pallikars gallop into churches to receive communion from the saddle; hoary in years and slaughter and scimitar in hand, they lie bleeding to death under plane trees by a stream....We are transported to the fastnesses of Roumeli, Tzoumerka, Pindus, Hasia, Kakosouli: names to make the hair stand on end. The power and fierceness and lyrical beauty of these words unite in creating all round the singers and listeners the free world of mountaintops far from the spawning Turks of the lowlands. It is the eagle-haunted realm of Klephtouriá!
Oré amán!

The Sarakatsáns were not great virtuosi but their singing had the merit of vigour and conviction. I was struck by one of their songs, in which the last word—
makaronádes
, a derogatory epithet for the Italians—had obviously, judging by the style of the words and the tune, replaced the name of some much older foe in order to fit the winter campaign of 1940: “Would that I had wings to soar on high, up to the topmost peaks of the mountains, to alight there and gaze down, down over Epirus and over poor Chimarra; to look down on the war, where the Greeks are fighting the
Makaronádes
.” The modern ending was a bit of an anticlimax, especially after the mention of Chimarra, a warlike Greek stronghold in the Acroceraunian mountains over the Albanian border which is almost as celebrated for its martial stubbornness, in Turkish times, as Souli and the Sphakian mountains of Crete. There was a distinct trace of anti-climax too, but also of oddity, about another of their songs: “Any one who wants to go to America, let him sit down and ponder. Forty days at sea, days of sorrow and sighing. They get into a boat and go ashore in New York. They know nobody
there so back they fly like birds.”
[8]
A sad little tale, but most peculiar here because, although in most Greek gatherings of this size, at least half a dozen would have spent a few years in Brooklyn or Chicago or Nebraska, Uncle Petro assured me that nobody in the room had been to America, nor, as far as he knew, any Sarakatsán, ever. Ideas of its whereabouts and character, for those who had heard its name, would be as hazy as a layman's notions of life on Mars.

During the banquet and the long procession of refilled glasses and the concatenation of songs the two falling shafts of sunlight from the windows had slanted up to the horizontal and veered askew down the room: the long sunlit parallelograms on the opposite wall were turning to an apricot evening hue. During these cheerful hours there had been no glimpse of the bride. “She's upstairs,” Uncle Petro said. “We must go and look at her,” and grasping the shaft of his upright crook like a punt pole, with joints momentarily acreak after long session, he levered himself to his feet. “
Ta Gerámata!
” he said with a smile, “old age....” He led the way up the ladder-staircase and the clamour dwindled.

Dead silence reigned in the upper chamber. The dowry was arranged down the two side walls: rolled bales of dark homespun for capes and for the bivouacs which are pitched on the march; a few of them white, some grey or a dark russet but most of them black; the colours, indeed, of the flocks from which they had been shorn and many of them of a matted and shaggy texture like rolled-up smoke. Scratchy blankets with angular patterns were piled in tall heaps and pillows that looked hard as granite and the bride's black and white trousseau. In the centre of the end wall, with bowed head and lowered eyelids
and her brown hands crossed over her midriff, the bride stood motionless. On either side of her on the floor sat her retinue of wild but subdued-looking girls. At our conventional wishes—“
Kaloriziki!
,” “may the marriage be well rooted”—she inclined her head a few inches, but uttered never a syllable. Nor, beyond a stiff bow, did she or her lips move a fraction when other late-comers arrived and hobnobbed with Uncle Petro and us as indifferently as if the figures at the other end of the room were effigies in an ethnological museum. Their extraordinary outfits were nearly identical, except for the flowers and the gold coins which adorned the bride.

In those Greek villages where the women still wear their regional costumes on feast days and ceremonies—and there are still a large though diminishing number—and in some out-of-the-way spots where a simpler working version of this gala rig is worn on week-days too—one is astonished by their richness and variety and grace; by voluminous skirts, expanding from tight waists, of Damascus brocade or Broussa velvet; by their soft and tilted mulberry-coloured fezzes with long satin tassels, or gold embroidered velvet pill-boxes or intricately arranged silk kerchiefs; even, in one part of Macedonia, by headdresses topped by a semi-circular plume like the helmet of Pallas Athene. There are satin-covered buttons, chased silver clasps and oriental filigree from Yanina: and, over their velvet boleros and their tight sleeves—or sleeves which may hang slashed and loose from the elbow like the petals of tulips—a riot of gold braid uncoils and ramifies in flowing oriental, baroque and rococo flourishes as richly and elaborately as over a post-Tridentine cope. In the wilder mountains they are stiffer and rougher but the basic canon is a dazzling variety of colour and material and a style that is fluid, feminine and deeply romantic. The visions summoned up by Byron's Haidee and the Maid of Athens are, in fact, pretty near the mark.

All was different here. Not only was there no silk or
satin or velvet or gold braid from the West and the Levant but hardly a stitch which came from anywhere but the backs of their flocks and their prehistoric-looking looms; and, complex though the costume was, not a single foliating curve or circle or ellipse, nothing swaying or branching or interweaving or flowering. The only rounded things were the chains and necklaces, the gold Napoleons, Turkish sequins and gold thalers that hung round the bride's neck. Another latter-day curvilinear after-thought to the angular whole, and one which was common to both the bride and her retinue, was a wide white goffered or crocheted circular collar like a flattened hidalgo's ruff ending at the shoulder in scallops. The complex headdress of flowers and stiff muslin and the veil which hung down the bride's back had the extraneous and charming air of votive adornments attached to a processional statue on a Calabrian or Andalusian feast day. From a rosette over each of her ears a long cluster of ribbons hung; they framed her face in the manner of the pendants on the diadem of the Empress Theodora at Ravenna.

But apart from these festival trimmings, all was made up of stern black and white lines and angles and so broad and solid-seeming were the black white-banded pleats that if any of the girls made a movement, their heavy and unwieldy clothes moved with the stiffness of armour. Aprons hung to kneelength as stiffly as stoles or heralds' tabards; their tunics were as rigid as dalmatics and nothing bore any relationship to conventional ideas of the human shape. They were related to the curvature and the jointing of anatomy as arbitrarily as are the plates of a metal fish or the sections of a toy wooden snake to their prototypes, or the layers of a Samurai's armour. Each garment looked as though, removed, it would be able to stand like cardboard. Their forearms and legs were encased in geometrically patterned armlets and greaves and the bride's wrists were a-clank with heavy bracelets. All, strangely and touchingly, were shod in stout, flat-heeled walking shoes. (Their mothers would have
worn pom-pommed
tsarouchia
.) It was hard to determine, therefore, why these clothes appeared so beautiful. They exerted, it finally dawned on us, the peculiar captivation of ancient Greek vases of the geometric period; every design was made up of straight lines and triangles with here and there an inchoate beginning of those patterns of white crosses on a black ground, and black on white, that cover the vestments of frescoed prelates on the wall of a narthex. All was angular: triangles mounting in pyramids or shooting diagonally in zigzags and saw's teeth and staircases with, very seldom a small triangle or chevron subtly placed among the dominating black and white, of pale ochre or terracotta or a deadened blue. “Geometric” and “neolithic” were the epithets which began to float to the surface of the mind, to hover there ever since, bringing with them the excitement of the thought that these clothes and these designs might not have changed for three thousand years or more. One knows that these thoughts must be banished, till confirmation should be forthcoming, to the limbo of improbability. But such dalliance is always stimulating. It was backed, in this case, by the certainty that nothing like these clothes exists in Greece or in the Balkan peninsula or in Europe or the Near East.

The bride's forehead, with the blue cross, was surmounted by black hair as coarse and lustrous as a mare's tail under a stiff linen coif and a load of baubles and flowers. Her face was burnt a deep bronze. It had the metallic, wide-browed, heavy-lidded beauty, the slightly sad mouth, the clear line of jaw from chin to ear, and, springing from the flattened ruff and a stomacher of coins, the strong columnar neck which I admired so much, a few years ago, among the Mayas of the Honduranean and Guatemaltecan jungles. Obsidian, chalcedony or basalt would have been the stone in which to carve those features and the posture of melancholy stillness of which the twilight was fast abolishing the details. She had an arresting distinction, a
Gauguin-limbed strength at variance with the Tanagra sinuosity which seems to have left an indelible stamp on Western ideas of grace and style.

There was no time for more of these cogitations. The reedy blast of a clarinet sounded under the fading window; then, after a few twiddles, a violin and the twanging of a lute and a tentative flutter of hammers over the wires of a zither. “Ah, the instruments,” Uncle Petro said. “
Ta órgana!
—at last!” I asked if they were Sarakatsáns. He looked at me in surprise. “Sarakatsáns? We only play the flute. They are gypsies.” And so they were, very dark ones, lined up under a tree in blue suits and pointed black shoes and all wearing ties, the only ones for miles. They looked sleek and urban among these other nomads, and rather bad hats. There was a crunch of hobnails up the stairs and the groom, flanked by his comrades, came to claim the bride and lead the first dance. She was reft from her shadows, conducted downstairs and under the trees. The sun was setting at the end of the valley. The groom then accompanied her through an extremely formal
syrtos
, and then a
kalamatiano
; each took alternate places at the head of a dozen guests with their hands loosely linked in a crescent. Neither looked at the other; there was a distinct hint of constraint in the air. No wonder; they came from neighbouring summer pastures but it was quite likely they had never met. Their marriage was as free of choice as a dynastic alliance between a Wittelsbach and a Hohenstaufen in the Middle Ages. It is hard not to wonder about the early phases of primitive marriages all over Greece; the shuddering apprehension which must prevail on the one hand and the unmanning strangeness on the other. Till recently in the Mani, the shyness of newly-wed strangers was so inhibiting that a sword was placed under their pillow in the hopes that it might symbolically sunder this knot of constraint in one Gordian slash....These handicaps must have been made all the more debilitating by gloomy preoccupation with the
inviolacy of the bride: by the vigil of the guests outside the nuptial dwelling till the groom's mother could blazon the all-clear in red on white with a flourished sheet or a shift. Salvos and rustic epithalamia saluted the tidings. In these strict societies, such proofs were surely redundant; but I have heard of Cretan bridegrooms, convinced, and probably baselessly, that others have been beforehand with them, repudiating their brides, and unloosing, as though in compensation, unstaunchable bloodshed between families. And what about the poor bridegroom? Would the floodtide of wine swirl him triumphantly through all obstacles or unmast him amidships? No wonder they looked shy. Young Sarakatsáns now do their military service like the rest of Greeks and no doubt head for the lanes on the outskirts of garrison towns on mating-forays with their fellow-recruits. But formerly, living in a ferociously chaste society, they approached wedlock unarmed by all but theory, hearsay and rule of thumb. Perhaps, as their detractors jovially hint, unconventional young shepherds, like pastoral folk everywhere, may have cast a thoughtful eye among their ewes for the quenching of early flames. This, again, would only be of relative help now.