The Greek Islands (6 page)

In the folklore of the island, Sir Charles Napier ranks among the demigods; indeed his local fame chimes with the national fame of Byron. The two men got on well during Byron's stay on the island, for they were both warm-hearted. The poet was waiting for his cue from the mainland, while Napier was a servant of the Ionian Islands Administration – a most
unenviable
job, as he found to his cost. The governors were as foolish as they were pig-headed and, despite the fierce agitation of Napier, managed to frustrate the best of his schemes for improving local conditions. It was not only on the mainland that battle was joined – Napier took on the Corfu
administration
in a vain attempt to secure approval for his development
plans. Meanwhile, he bent his energies to the task of building roads, and the present road system is largely what remains from his devoted work. He is, of course, the Indian hero, famous for his telegram,
peccavi
, which being interpreted meant: ‘I have Sind'; but fame meant nothing to him beside his passionate Philhellenism and his love for Cephalonia, and he reverted to the island again and again in memory, and in his extensive correspondence with other ‘exiles' from the Ionian.

‘The merry Greeks', he wrote, ‘are worth all the other nations put together. I like to see them, to hear them; I like their fun, their good humour, their paddy ways – for they are very like Irishmen. All their bad habits are Venetian; but their wit, their eloquence and their good nature are their own.'

Wandering about Cephalonia, one gets the deep impression of a large raw-boned island without much centre of gravity – but this uncertain feeling is largely due to the last earthquake's fierce devastation. (Zante is an even worse case.) The last really big tremor was as recent as 1953; and much of Napier's work, and the stylish buildings of the Venetians before him,
disappeared
in dust, to be replaced by ugly modern cubes of
prestressed
concrete whose only merit is that it is quake-resistant. The shock runs along the same earth-fault as that which passes through Sicily and ends with a bang at Paphos in Cyprus, after having ripped through the southern Ionian group. Corfu gets the secondary impact in the form of an occasional attack of the shivers, but so far has not had the same bad luck as Zante.

There is nothing imperative to see in Cephalonia except the magnificent scenery; although a few places will earmark
themselves
in the mind as excellent holiday spots – Assos is one. What is memorable, apart from a few churches of moderate interest and a Venetian fortress or two, is the actual ride by bus up the mountainside – climbing towards the peak of Mount Aetos, the dominating feature of the whole rocky spread.
Looking down, one does, in fact, see fertile valleys and rushing streams which belie the feeling of barrenness. And, of course, in ancient times the whole mountain was covered with a dense forest of silver fir which is special to the island – it is dark green in colour; the wood was much prized for its resilience and lightness, and furnished the hulls of ancient triremes and then galleons, right up to Venetian times and after. Presumably the craft of Odysseus was made from this famous wood, if we but knew. There are a few Homeric quibbles around sites like Sami, but one has the right to ignore them, because there the ancient remains are so scanty and uninteresting that it is obvious that such theorizing will not stand against the wealth of evidence in favour of Ithaca.

Something interesting and strange in the island is a sort of deep circular cauldron about a hundred and fifty feet or more in diameter, situated about two miles from Sami on the eastern coast. At the bottom lies a deep blue lakelet. For a long while there seemed to be no way for one to descend to lake level, and then in the sixties an underground cavern was discovered (rather, re-discovered, for the ancient Greeks knew it), and an access was plotted through the cave known as Melissani. This is now a tourist attraction. What is still more curious, however, is that this lakelet, which is brackish, communicates with the sea near Sami and also, by an underground channel, with the Gulf of Argostoli itself, eight miles away, right on the other side of the island. It was long known that a stream of seawater flowed inland in the Gulf of Argostoli with enough force to turn a couple of sawmills, but nobody could understand where this water went. Now we know that in reality it flows eastwards and, passing by the Melissani lakelet, comes out again in the Gulf of Sami, a singular topsy-turvy journey. Everything about the island and about the island character is obstinately
contrarywise
, even the streams. But this reversal of flow carries it right
under the so-called Black Mountain (Aetos) which is 5341 feet (1624 m) high.

Subject to wind and weather, the traveller comes at last to Zante (Zacynthos), the younger sister of Corfu. Zante, in the past, enjoyed a reputation for even greater natural beauties than Corfu and for the splendours of her Venetian architecture which, despite the frequent earthquake tremors, manage to keep a homogeneousness of style that made the capital one of the most splendid of the smaller towns in the Mediterranean. Only in Italy itself could one find this sort of baroque style, fruit of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century mind. Then, in 1953, came the definitive earthquake which engulfed the whole of the Venetian past and left the shattered town to struggle to its knees once more. This it has done, in a manner of speaking; but it is like a beautiful woman whose face has been splashed with vitriol. Here and there, an arch, a pendant, a shattered remains of arcade, is all that is left of her renowned beauty. The modern town is … well, a modern town. The thirteen-thousand-odd inhabitants have still however the splendid setting – the sweep of the great bay, with its striking crown of fortress, is as fine as anything in Corfu. The verdant richness of the climate, the fruitful earth, the thrust and
colouring
of natural beauty are all still there; although for the historian and the lover of the past the present Zante is sad, exhausted, lacking in echoes. One must go to books to recover that past now. The fine Lear engravings of Corfu are matched by those of an artist of less renown but of equal technical finish – Joseph Cartwright, whose
Views In the Ionian Islands
deserves to be available again for travellers. Indeed, a fine album could be made from the work of both men.

The real Zante – famous for its beauties since Pliny first mentioned them – has been replaced with a vague and shoddy provincial town. It is the fault of an age which values riches
more than beauty. Yet any regrets may be misplaced, for they centre upon a very recent period, historically speaking. Before Venetian opulence – what?

The ancient Zante was first celebrated as an ideal naval station, from which to keep an eye on the Peloponnesus and the other islands. It lies just outside the mainstream of events, to its great advantage, whether one thinks of corsairs or of the Turkish occupation. In ancient times, all the Greek thrust went into seafaring. When some 140,000 Greeks from 171 city states sailed for Troy to rescue Helen, they sailed in 1186 long ships, according to Homer. It was a huge fleet. The traditions of sea power were already ingrained, and they have never changed much. The big fleet built for Alexander the Great numbered 1800 vessels of every size, and its safe return under the
command
of Admiral Nearchus was the most famous naval exploit of the day.

World War II took a heavy toll on Greek merchant shipping, but when peace came the Greek fleets once more expanded, with astonishing speed, so that in 1976 the Greek-owned
merchant
fleet mustered some 4529 ships, 49.9 g.r.t. as the shipping magnates put it, ranking Greece as the leading maritime nation of the world. The bias of Greek history has been continuously in this direction since the Argonauts set off to hunt down the Golden Fleece.

The Greek has lived for so long cheek-by-jowl with not simply adversity, in terms of a poor and rocky land, but with catastrophe, that he has learned how to shrug off the caprices of the merely historic, and hang on to his own internal fibre of spirit which will let him happily dance a dance older than Byzance to an American juke-box on a sandy spit. It is this terrific insouciance and resilience which one feels in the air. Over andover again the country has been stripped by
earthquakes
, wars, pestilence. For example, we have the names of
some one hundred and fifty tragic writers of classical times, but they survive for us in little scraps, fragments cited in essays of anthologies. Only three fifth-century Athenian poets remain to us in any quantity. Of the eighty-three plays Aeschylus wrote, we have only seven full texts; we have seven plays out of the one hundred and twenty-three written by Sophocles. From the ninety-two plays of Euripides, we have nineteen … and so on.

Such reflections are appropriate for the wanderer about the streets of the modern Zante with its modernities. The site is marvellously romantic, and the little town, which faces the Peloponnesus, stretches southward along the shore to terminate where the rising ground cradles it, while to the west the wooded steeps shelter it from too much wind. It is an enviable site, and already nature has begun to try to disguise the poverty of the new architecture with its flowers and creepers. Here, in this domain, the island is still a match for Corfu; and indeed the lover of solitude will find better excursions, and a genuine
village
life quite unspoilt by townism in places like Zante rather than in those which have received their baptism of fire from organizations such as the Club Mediterranée. Moreover, he will realize more clearly what different characteristics the Ionian Islands have from the rest of Greece; they had nearly a hundred years of rest and stability while the rest of Greece, torn with dissensions and sporadic actions against the Turks, enjoyed not a moment of respite in the steady attrition of civil war and internal violence. The seven islands basked in their sunny independence, with a great mercantile power to secure their sea communications, and (with whatever reservations) a fairly indulgent and honest administration to look after their welfare at home. The result was not only commerce, at which the Greek excels; it was also culture in the broadest sense. It was all the furniture of the good life, starting with beautifully furnished and appointed houses and
palazzi
and country properties, and
ending with carnivals, masked balls, and a distinctive musical tradition which lingered on in the shape of visiting opera
companies
that played the three bigger islands every winter almost until the outbreak of the 1939 war. The intellectual life in this small Garden of Eden that was old Zante, if on a more modest scale than Venice, nevertheless had the same lively quality. Three major poets were born here – Solomos, who wrote the national anthem, and was the first national poet of the land, then Calvos and Foscolo. What is even more remarkable is that the Greek of Solomos was learned, for he had been brought up abroad.

When Byron left for Missolonghi, it was like someone during World War I leaving Paris to go up to the front line. Back here in the islands, all was sunshine, and music – strangely enough even today the musical tradition of the Ionian Islands is,
harmonically
, obstinately European; the Turkish quartertone has, of course, made its way into the picture, thanks to the radio and the popular band, but the real Ionian folklore music smells more of Padua than of Athens.

Zante has all the melancholy charm of that long-lost epoch and, unlike Corfu, has not kept even the frame of reference which made it possible – its architecture. But the land is rich and full of sap, and one could live life fully in this verdant and fruitful countryside. The raisins and olives of the island were well known to the Elizabethan housewife, and there was a steady commerce between the Ionian Islands and London. Zante is shaped rather like a parrot – Cape Skinari in the north being its beak; and the main mountain mass runs down like a sort of spine dividing the inner and outer seas, more
definitively
than in Corfu. For the landward side (facing the
Peloponnesus
), there is an adequate road system which enables the visitor to take advantage of the marvellous beaches the island has to offer. Moreover, if he has a mind to visit the unspoiled
villages of the interior, he will find that the life of the ordinary peasant has hardly changed since the Middle Ages. The modern inhabitant of the big cities is so used to baths, running water and automatic heat, that he finds the older, slower life-style fascinating; for in a Greek village, water still comes from the spring, and a spring can also serve as a refrigerator (butter and liquids are lowered into wells and cisterns, in baskets). Of course, there is electricity now almost everywhere, but it is still fearfully expensive and usually only the village tavern uses it. The ordinary peasant has paraffin lamps with a wonderful,
restful
yellow light, and wood charcoal for heat, which is deadly slow; half an hour to boil a kettle in cold weather, one hour for almost any feat of cookery. That has not changed. For campers, the gas bottle is a godsend and also the Primus stove of old, but these are luxuries on the peasant budget. The first thing
children
learn to do is make a nightlight for themselves with a bit of thread and spoonful of olive oil in a saucer – an ancient Greek light which is still used in nurseries and monasteries.

In the museum there is an architect's
maquette
of the Opera House of the island, and one can see and imagine the musical splendours which have vanished. There are also some excellent prints which deal with past glories, and maps which enable one to site the island in context. It is the third largest in the Ionian group, and is only twenty-five miles from north to south, though about thirteen broad at its fattest point. The northern
massif
of rock – and the heights of Mount Scopus which reach some sixteen hundred feet above the sea – have a moderating effect upon the rough north winds, which in winter blow down from the snow-clad Albanian steeps opposite Corfu.