The Greek Islands (30 page)

A vague unrest haunts one during the daylight hours in Delos – you will notice that I exempt the night. Its source is the endless search for a clue which will illuminate the intimate connection that obviously existed between treasure and
worship
in the ancient world – between the counting house and the sacred temple in whose shadow it operated. Perhaps somewhere there is a treatise on ancient Greek banking and its theory of values, which throws some light upon this superstitious linking of the material with the supernatural. Even modern cultures show traces of the same link, and I suppose that the hoarding instinct is as old as history, flowing through all the ancient epochs – Stone, Bronze, Iron – up to the Middle Ages, when it crystallized into the sacerdotal banking houses of the Templars and thence on to John Company and Chase Manhattan, so to speak. It is not invidious to see the temple enclosure of a sacred town like Delphi or Delos as a sort of spiritual dynamo,
generating
forces to ward off evil influence, bad luck, even the
ever-present
thieving hands which waited to pounce upon unguarded treasure.

Perhaps, for cyclopean man, the protecting gods were trees,
the sacred groves and enclosures which held a magic to ward off evil spirits. But what could his treasure have been; what was he afraid would be stolen – the secret of fire perhaps? To push imagination further, I think the trees were followed by the
herms
, those sculptured heads on tall columns which watched over crossroads of the cities and the private courtyards of families, sharing their duties with the
lares
and
penates
. After that, magic expressed itself in the statue primarily as a representation of the deity, and then its cocoon, the temple.

In any case, there must have been a very active belief that the temple gods were well disposed to material gain; they brought good luck and a following wind to one's enterprises, on
condition
that they had their cut in precious stones, statuary, or plate. In this sense, the modern Americans, with their frank avowal that material gain is holy, are very like the ancient Greeks – who must, like the modern peasant in Greece, have promised the local saint (then it was Apollo) a gold or bronze palm-tree if he would kindly help the fleet arrive safely back from Syria. The ancient, direct superstition is more disguised in modern times, but still there. It is not true, however, that the annual reports of the bigger banks in the USA begin: ‘In the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen. Gentlemen, as the poet Keats has written: “Beauty is loot, loot Beauty …”' There is not a word of truth in this.

In Delos at midday, the dry, island wind parches lips and heart, shivers the brown grass, and whispers among the ruins. Outside the sacred port, the Meltemi has started to stir up the channel until it boils white like milk. You will have to wait in patience for it to falter and fall, as it will with the early dusk, before taking your ship for Mykonos. And when evening comes, the strange Pharaonic bronze and green lights seem to play about the site of the ancient Serapeion, reminding one, not of Cycladean blue and white, but of the exhausted colours of the
Nile valley. There is hardly a god who did not plant himself here, introduced by the traders and mariners of the whole Middle Orient. They were encouraged to make themselves feel entirely at home – it was good for trade; and a puissant, magical city with its ‘free port' facilities encouraged the establishment of more permanent citizens – those who polished and set jewels or worked metals or carved stone. There was plenty of work for all. Only that little question of the inadequate harbour still troubles me.

When you walk here at dusk, waiting for the first blush of the rosy-bronze moon across the water, what a vast melancholy is distilled by this great ossuary, the broken whiteness of all this bundled and smashed stone! Everywhere the eye turns there is desolation; nothing whole, nothing erect, nothing complete. The curses of genius and of history have joined forces here to wreak their vengeance on everything to do with historical man – that is to say, man the predator, commercial man! For the disposition which the archaeologists have accredited to the various deities and their precincts suggests the same sort of haphazard muddle that Pausanias describes in the Acropolis – an ignoble jumble of superstitious objects, dirty wax, smashed bibelots, dusty feathers, rusty armour, broken arrows –
everything
overlooked, thrown about, forgotten, almost forfeiting any claim to historical significance. I am sure that had he ‘done' Delos in the same way, Pausanias would have produced
something
like his account of the Acropolis of Athens. Yet … I am sorry that in Delos there is not a plaster model, made by an architect, to guide one's steps; for, thanks to the patient work of the French over so many years, almost everything about the huge site and its history is known, and its location pin-pointed.

But the melancholy remains. A whole brief civilization was swallowed up here, battered to pieces. Only the lean archaic lions and the Dionysian nook with its frieze and phalluses
remain, to remind one that in spite of everything the island was once full of primal echoes and the astounding phosphorescence of Apollonian light.

There is a further mystery – at least for me – in the fact that twice the natural magic of the island was reinforced by a formal act of lustration, and a removal of anything which might
connect
it with death (the sepulchres, for example) and, by the same token, with life. Birth and death were officially banished from the place, and Rhenia across the water absorbed both the dead and those about to give birth. There must have been some profound reason for endowing Delos with this sort of immortality out of time. I have not been able to come upon a satisfactory explanation. Was it merely a commercial decision – to reinforce the magic of the site? The two lustrations are
historically
separated by more than a century. There must have been, surely, some more fundamental reason behind it. Perhaps the decision was made, for example, because of some great sin committed there. It could have been intended to be expiatory or generative of renewed power. The guide books announce this sort of thing without a tremor – yet the mere fact is obviously momentous. What does it really mean? We do not know.

It was the sage Peisistratus, when he was tyrant in Athens, who first decided to purify the holy birth-spot of Apollo. This was in 543
BC
. The second time the lustration was repeated and the magic intensified was in 426
BC
. At the same time a new law was promulgated forbidding all births and all deaths on the island – a weird kind of immortality indeed! It is impossible to believe that the reason was purely commercial, though there is no doubt of the tremendous economic power of this small harbourless hole of a place. The whole Levant traded here and presumably banked here, under the tutelary protection of the sacred shrines. One must, I suppose, imagine the situation was something like that of the power of the modern Swiss banking
system, which depends on money transferred under guarantee of secrecy from outside. All those immense fortunes of which we read must exist entirely on trust; they cannot be
acknowledged
on paper because they technically do not exist. If
tomorrow
a Swiss bank decided to pinch the entire forture of – name any millionaire – there would be no legal redress for him. Yet the banks have never done such a thing and never will … The whole fragile system rests upon a simple say-so. Delos must have had something of this commercial magic about it in antiquity.

However, there is no denying history; time erodes everything. Delos went downhill, its magic wilted and waned. We see it now very much as Pausanias would have done; in his day it was quite uninhabited, save for the guardians of the sacred temple. But the temple itself was no longer in business; the god was dead, along with all the others, and the world had moved off along a new vector. Nothing could reverse this drift. Most humiliating of all – it is Philostratus who records the fact – when Athens decided to sell off the place in a job lot, she could not find a buyer!

Salute the headless Isis on your way up the holy hillock; every faith and every creed was welcomed here. Apparently there are even traces of a small late synagogue among the other ruins. You will have the queerest feeling of sadness as your boat levels off and begins to cross the two or three sea miles which separate it from Mykonos – where all is shining calm and silence, and where the quiet windmills with their grey sails turn all the time; for never for a second does the wind let up. There on the
harbour
front, drinking or eating, your thoughts shift from time to time to that smudge against the sky – Delos. A mystery remains, a disquieting echo. In the tiny museum, I saw a Christian stele commemorating the death of a girl. The inscription read ‘Ego dormio sed cor meum vigilat'.

This is perhaps the place to mention the name of an old man, much revered in his time, who has now disappeared from the island scene. He was an old peasant, George Polykandriotis, whom I encountered on the sea-front and who informed me that he had started work with the French Institute, aiding them in their earliest digs on Delos. Later he became familiar with the pottery and vase forms, and then discovered in himself the gift of restoring pottery. ‘There is hardly a vase here or in Delos which I have not reassembled myself,' he told me. He had worked right into his old age, and now his sight had failed, which caused him great sadness. His old hands seemed still to have traces of the clay dust which had come from years of handling these precious shards and piecing them back together – as if they had gathered some of the soft, chalky bloom which is such a feature of the vases themselves. It is to this old helper that the Athens Archaeological Institute dedicated its twenty-first volume on the Delos finds – a fitting tribute.

In the central cluster of the Cyclades, the distance between the islands is so short that you navigate more by the eyes than by the stars. You are seldom without a visible landfall, except in winter; you move from smudge to smudge on a sea forever brushed by harmonious winds, which can make wires sing out and cordage groan, or treat a large passenger ship as a
wind-tunnel
, but which usually have the grace to die with the sun during the Etesian season. After hot days, travel by night is delicious under the canopy of stars of every size. The hush of the prow crunching its way through the lazy water makes you think of the night as a great Aeolian harp of the intuition, plucked by these sleep-echoing sounds. Then, suddenly, a signal goes forth; the ship booms and roars like a bull when it rounds some dark point, and a frail network of lights tells you that you are nearing a new harbour. This grave maroon shakes the heart as if it were the voice of Judgment itself.

It is time to discuss the Virgin of Tinos and her native island, for they form an imaginative link with Delos, today serving as the great Lourdes of modern Greece. The wonder-working Panaghia is modern, in the sense that she dates from the
revolution
of 1822, but – attesting once more the perenniality of things Greek – the spring over which her chapel was built had been famous for its cures centuries before. Her two great festivals are, if anything, rather more impressive than the one at Lourdes because of their exotic island setting, and because of the strange mixture of races and clans who bring their sick here to be healed. Even Central European gypsies manage somehow to come – so widely spread throughout the Balkans is the belief in the Virgin.

I had intended, after a stay in Mykonos, to return to Athens by the lazy little island steamer of the time, but it was nearly the Festival of the Tiniotissa and I decided to spend a night on the island during the celebrations. A Greek ceremony of this nature has an inevitable cheerfulness which breaks through the gloom and anxiety generated by so many sick people gathered together in one place – some
in extremis
, one would suppose. It has a solemnity that never becomes anxiety-sodden and depressing. The event, of course, brings great trade, prosperity and tourism to the island and hordes of hucksters, jugglers and camp
followers
during this brief period swarm into the capital, eager to make a little money. They sell everything, from sweets and straw hats to lucky charms and live pigeons. Probably the ancient Aesculapia also honoured this secular side of things, and outside the sacred precincts, where the priests performed their work of consecration, a whole short-lived city sprang up with flags, coloured bunting, and more practical things, for which exhausted travellers would give money readily – pure drinking water, lemon juice against flies and sea-sickness, and so on.

My festival happened to be that of 15 August 1940, that fatal day when an Italian submarine sank the cruiser
Elli
as it lay at anchor in the harbour, all dressed from top to toe with flags, in honour of the Virgin. Had my own steamer not been dawdling, we should have arrived in time to eyewitness the explosion. Mercifully, we arrived an hour afterwards, when the poor
Elli
had vanished leaving only a great puddle of dark oil on the calm sea. Flags and lifebelts floated everywhere and the
survivors
battled with the shock-waves of indignation which had swept over the whole city.

The actual declaration of war was a month or two off; but nobody watching the scene in Tinos had any further doubt about its imminence, nor indeed about its outcome. (Nothing that subsequently happened to the Italian army was in any way surprising.) It would be impossible to overstress the
ignobleness
and tactlessness of this base attack; if you wanted to drive the whole Greek nation fighting-mad, you could not do better than level such an insult at Tiniotissa on her great day, when the sick had come from so far to seek her help. Coming ashore, I saw a new expression on the Greek countenance – a silent, enraged, resolution which boded ill for the enemy. The whole town had been stirred like a beehive, and it buzzed with
indignant
life. In the harbour, the divers were busy about the patch of oil, and a corvette had appeared to help. Strangely, there was no weeping, no public lamentation, as there is so often. The uncanny silence showed me that the weight of this mortal insult went right to the depths of the Greek heart and could only be expunged now by war. As night fell, things settled down a bit; a seaplane came and more small craft. But the sense of shock expanded; roundabouts and swings were hushed, and radios were turned down reverently in the lounge of the ship, which had now decided to spend the night in harbour and return to Athens on the morrow.