THE TIME has come to sort out my gleanings about the mysterious Nyklians and workings of the blood feud. The former I owe almost entirely to the notes assembled by Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis in his fine and little-known book,[1] as nobody in the Mani seemed very clear about their origins. The latter—about which they know everything—I owe to conversations with Maniots in a dozen different villages.
In 1295, during one of those civil wars that did much, between the reigns of the Frankish emperors and the Turkish capture of Constantinople, to weaken what was left of the restored Byzantine Empire, Andronicus II Palaeologue sacked Nykli in Arcadia. This town, on the site of which Tripoli now stands, was originally a colony of Spartans from Amoukli. When the Morea was conquered by the Franks, Nykli, owing to its position at a centre of communications, became strategically important and the seat of a powerful barony; and when the Frankish power began to decline, it was largely inhabited by those strange hybrids of Greek and Frankish blood known as “gasmouli.” Sometimes the French language and the Catholic religion prevailed, sometimes Greek and the Orthodox, though the tendency to Hellenism and Orthodoxy increased with time. After the attack of Andronicus, not one stone was left on another, and the Nyklians fled. A number of them (according to my authority) took the steep but well-worn tracks across the Taygetus to the south of the thinly populated Mani, settling in exactly the regions of which I have just been writing. Their headquarters, in fact, were at Kitta, and the name may have some kinship with the Frankish words cité or città.[2] From them, perhaps (for all here is nebulous), ideas of a feudal hierarchy, modified by the wild ways of the Mani, caught on. When the Mani filled up during the following centuries and struggles for local power were engaged between village and village and family and family, Nyklian was the word used to apply to those that came out on top. Before, life in the Mani had been semitroglodytic, uncouth in the extreme, but fairly pacific. Now, families began to fortify themselves behind thick walls and under slab-roofs. Quarrels and feuds for the elbow room of families increased with the thickening population, and the chaos lasted from the fourteenth century until late in the nineteenth. Those that shook themselves out of the ruck, then, were the Nyklians; the subjugated ruck were the achamnómeroi, the hinds or villeins. There is something very strange about these centuries of struggle for local dominion over those barren stones; for the grazing rights on the rare blades of grass and possession of the ledges where corn could grow and olive trees take root and for salt-gathering rights along the awful shores. The Nyklians always established themselves on high ground and they alone had the right to roof their houses with slabs of marble. The villeins were forced to inhabit the lower parts of the villages, their thin roofs well within range of the Nyklian towers. These humble helots were forbidden to support their roofs with semi-circular arches like their betters and they were often referred to merely as “the donkeys” by the Nyklians. They were subjected to every kind of contumely and scorn. They were, however, allowed to carry arms, and they would help their Nyklian overlords in inter-Nyklian strife and piratical expeditions. Some, endowed with an unusual share of valour or cunning, would raise themselves to Nyklian status, and be accepted as such; but, though it was considered no shame for a Nyklian to marry a villein girl, it was a disgrace for a Nyklian girl to marry a villein. It was, in a sense, an open aristocracy, though the sword was the only key. It goes without saying that when, about 1600, the first towers began to change the skyline of Mani villages, they were an exclusively Nyklian prerogative.
As time passed, the power of the Nyklians acquired the pa-tina of continuity, and their pride of race grew. The boast of Spartan origins was stiffened in many cases by claims of imperial or noble Byzantine descent, and, in a few cases, of kinship with the great feudal families of the Franks. With the passage of generations and the branching of offshoot families, clans were formed, and into these, it seems, minor Nyklians and even villein families were welcomed. But, though no records were kept, there was always a consciousness of who were, or were not, kith and kin. Their boasts were again reinforced by feats of arms against the Turks; and, of course, against each other. As the population grew, several Nyklian families would often inhabit the same village, each of them determined to dominate the rest and grasp the kapetanship. To do this they had to be in a position to destroy their competitors’ houses by bombarding them from above with boulders and smashing their marble roofs; so the towers began to grow, each in turn, during periods of truce, calling his neighbours’ bluff with yet another storey, and so climbing further into the air until they were all perched at the top of fantastic pinnacles. Apart from tactical considerations, the standing of a family was assessed, as it was in San Giminiano and Tarquinia and Bologna, by the height of its towers, with the result that villages thickly populated with Nyklians jut from the limestone like bundles of petrified asparagus.
Something of the same feudal hierarchy prevailed in the Outer Mani, but everything went more smoothly there. Villages and districts accepted one family as their kapetan and usually this heredity went unchallenged. The head of the kapetans was the archikapetano or bashkapetan whereas in the Deep Mani, where there were several Nyklians competing in each village for the chieftainship, no permanent status quo existed and a family could only maintain its position by force. It was of overriding importance, for a family determined to remain on top, to breed more and more guns. In many cases the immediate struggle of day-to-day warfare was only a symptom of the year-to-year breeding-race; they were often neck-and-neck. Hence the double delight over the birth of a gun, the rejoicing that surrounded a sun-cradle, the sorrow over a moon; in a dozen years each of the guns would be able to grasp a match-lock. In this world of chronic anarchy it is obvious that anyone who hoped to rule over such a people must be strong in towers and guns and wealth and prestige: which conditions held true with all the Beys of the Mani—though the Deep Mani often refused to recognize this omnipotence—but especially true of Zanetbey Grigorakis and truest of all of Petrobey Mavromichalis, Deep Maniot of Deep Maniots, and Nyklian of Nyklians.
Wherever the blood feud reigns, some system of mitigation, some code of rules, is automatically evolved; or life, already a hazardous business, would become unlivable. The Corsicans obey certain unwritten laws. The Sicilians have their omertà, the Albanians and the Epirotes the bessa system and even the Cretans, who have less inhibitions than any about their oikogeneiaka—their “family troubles”—admit a few vetoes and conventions. They have the same purpose as the laws of chivalry in the barbarism of the Dark Ages. The lack of any of these limitations, in spite of certain links with the comparative respectability of the mafia, is perhaps the most notable aspect of gang-warfare in large American towns.
Though the Maniots use the Italian word, the vendettas of the Mani were originally a matter of clan or family, not individual, warfare. They were rarely launched, as they are in Crete today, by a slight or an insult to the philotimo,[3] feminine honour, the forcible abduction of a bride by a party of braves, cattle-rustling or any momentary cause. The killing of one Deep Maniot would certainly have his family up in arms, determined to “get the blood back,” to avenge the dead kinsman by the death, not necessarily of the guilty man but of the pick of the offending family, which was deemed corporately responsible for the crime. But they were usually launched after family conclaves, with a definite object in view, which was no less than the total annihilation of an opposing Nyklian family, the number of whose guns and the height of whose towers offered a challenge to the village hegemony.
In these contests, the first blow was never struck without warning. War was formally declared by the challenging side. The church bells were rung: We are enemies! Beware! Then both sides would take to their towers, the war was on, and any means of destroying the other side was fair. The feud would often continue for years, during which it was impossible for either faction to leave their towers by daylight. Water, supplies, powder and shot were smuggled in at night and the gun slits bristled with long barrels which kept up a regular fusillade all day long. If they were in range and lower down, the enemies’ roofs would be smashed with flung rocks and sleepers were shot at night by enemies creeping up and firing through chinks in the wall or through windows imprudently left unguarded. Marksmen were sent out on khosia, as it is called, to lie in wait for isolated enemies in lonely places—behind rocks, up dark lanes or in the branches of trees—to pick them off, cut them down with a sword or stab them to death. It was the aim of each side to destroy any member of the other, but it was a double success if they killed a prominent one. Sallies from the towers were sometimes made and gun-fights moved from street to street while the rest of the village remained prudently indoors. The rough jottings of a primitive Deep Maniot surgeon in the eighteenth century show, by the astonishing number of scimitar and yataghan and dagger wounds recorded in his practice, that hand-to-hand battles were very frequent. The same source also proves that women, as gun producers, were not exempt, and their casualties were heavy. A favourite stratagem was the neutralization of the fire-power of an enemy tower in order that a picked band, by a bold rush or by stealth, might pile wood and hay against the base of the tower, soak the fuel with oil and set fire to it in the hope of burning the defenders to death or cutting them down with bullets or yataghans as they ran for it. Sometimes the door itself was blown down with a powder-keg and combustibles and burning brands were pitched into the bottom chamber. In lucky cases the powder magazine would be touched off and the whole tower, with its defenders, blown to bits. A detail that sounds almost incredible but which evidence bears out, is that entire towers were built under fire: the walls facing the zone beaten by the enemy were reared by night, the remainder during the day, with the defenders firing from one side while the masons laid one great limestone cube on another until they had overtopped the enemy.
The discovery of gunpowder and of the burning of lime for tower building were deemed priceless godsends by the Maniots. A third inestimable boon was the importation of cannon. Heavy pieces[4] cast in Constantinople or Venice or Woolwich were joyfully lugged from the shore by men and mules and hoisted into the top chambers of the towers while teams of mules wound up the stony valleys under loads of powder-kegs and shot. They were now able to bombard enemy towers a quarter of a mile away or if, as it often happened, they were only across the street, to batter each other to bits at point-blank range. When two powerful Nyklians of the same village were at war, it must be remembered that each side owned a number of towers and the opposing sides were sometimes several hundreds strong. At the height of a feud these forests of towers were plumed with the flashes of cannon, the air was a criss-cross of the trajectories of flying balls; shot came sailing or bouncing along the lanes, every slit concealed a man with a gun, every wall a group from which the slightest enemy movement would draw a hail of musketry, singing and ricocheting and echoing through the labyrinthine streets. There were, as we have seen, frequent mêlées at close quarters and all the approaches to the village were posted with the khosia-men of both sides lying in ambush and cancelling each other out. The neutral population, though allowed to move about the streets at their risk, wisely resumed the troglodytic existence of their forbears or moved to other villages till the two factions had fought it out.
The theatres of war were no larger than the area bounded by Piccadilly, St. James’s Street, the east side of St. James’s Square and Pall Mall; the equivalent, in distance, of the cannonading of Brooks’s by White’s, Chatham House by the London Library, Lyons Corner House by Swan and Edgar’s, almost of the Athenaeum and the Reform by the Travellers’. Sometimes it lasted for years: a deadlock in which the only sounds were the boom of cannon, exploding powder, the collapse of masonry, the bang of gunfire and the wail of dirges.
On certain specific occasions, the vendetta code afforded a temporary relief to this lunatic state of affairs: a general truce known as the tréva (also a Venetian word) during the seasons of ploughing, sowing, harvesting and threshing and the winter gathering and pressing of the olives. The opposing sides, often in next-door fields, would ply their sickles or beat the olives from the branches with long goads in dead silence. The truce was also a chance to restock the towers with victuals and ammunition by night. At last on an appointed dawn, when the sacks of grain and the great oil jars were full, all would start up again hammer and tongs.
There was another curious means by which a single member of one of the feuding families could obtain a temporary private truce called Xévgalma, or Extraction. If a man had to cross no-man’s land on an important errand like a baptism, a wedding, a funeral, the search for a surgeon or, in later times, to go and vote, he would take a Xevgáltes, an extractor, with him; a heavily armed neutral, that is,—if possible a Nyklian with whose family the other side would be loth to start trouble, a man whose presence momentarily extracted his companion from the feud. “I’ve got a Xevgáltes!” one would shout from behind cover. “Who is he?” the enemy Nyklian would ask from the tower. “So and so.” “Pass,” the Nyklian would shout back, and the two would advance into the open and go on their way unscathed. Any hostile gesture towards his protégé would automatically put the extractor’s clan in feud with the offenders. Sometimes the answer, if the extracting clan was not sufficiently to be feared, would be, “I don’t accept your extractor.” In such a case, they would stay where they were. If when they had left the village a khosia-man refused to accept the extractor he would shoot the protégé down and his clan would have an additional war on their hands and a host of new guns would be added to the havoc.
There were several ways in which these affairs could end. The logical one was the destruction of one side by the other. What was left of the losing side would scatter to other villages leaving the winners in possession of their shattered towers, their olives, their stony corn-plots, their prickly pears and salt-pools: uncontested masters of the place until some rising Nyklian family should have assembled or procreated enough guns to challenge them. Over fifty Maniot villages owe their foundation to these sudden diasporas. But Maniot custom offered several other solutions. If the losing side wanted to avoid annihilation they could sue for a psychiko, a “thing of the soul.” The whole family, their leaders in the van, unarmed, in humble garb, heads bowed and hats in hand and bearing themselves with the submission of Calais burghers, would approach the other side, who were seated, fully armed, in the rouga. They would kiss the hands of the parents whose children had been shot and petition for pardon. This would be graciously granted and the winners would dictate the terms of co-existence in the village of which they would now assume command.
In the case of the isolated killing of a member of one family by another, unrelated to any general policy on either side, if it was proved that it was a mistake or done in drunkenness or if the two families were linked by military alliance or by blood or god-relationship the ritual consequences could be avoided by an offer, on the part of the offending family, of psychadel-phosyne, or soul-brotherhood. Then the offending side expressed sorrow and true penitence and the actual killer made himself the especial protector and benefactor of the wronged family. Unlike psychiko, this was equally honourable to both sides and often the beginning of an indissoluble bond. All these matters were settled by a local council of elders known as the Gerontikí, the only institution lower than the Bey or the archikapetan which maintained any semblance of order in the Mani. Their function was not unlike that of the Courts of Honour which, in pre-1914 Germany and Austria-Hungary, weighed the pros and cons of quarrels in the Hochjunkertum, enforced or discouraged a duel, appointed the weapons and the terms and decided when honour had been satisfied. Needless to say, when two powerful Nyklians were determined to fight it out, neither side paid any attention to it. But sometimes, when a village war had continued for years with a parity of casualties and destruction on both sides and no possible verdict in sight, they were content, faute de mieux, to accept the conciliation of the Gerontikí. Final peace—which was appropriately known as agape—was concluded at last by a meeting in the rouga of both sides. There in the middle of the ruins they would quite literally kiss and make it up; embracing, drinking to friendship from the same cup, and paying reciprocal visits of ceremony. The agapes were quite often lasting. The Turkish threat, again, would reconcile all parties, and sometimes supernatural intervention would call a cease-fire. The most famous case is the appearance of the Blessed Virgin to the Mavromichalis and Mourtzinos families in the middle of a battle with the warning that a Turkish host was approaching. They crossed themselves, embraced and advanced to meet the enemy side by side. The longest truce of all was the general tréva called by Mavromichalis on the eve of the War of Independence. Everyone, in these times, went heavily armed. They would sit talking in the rouga in the evening with their guns across their knees, and before celebrating Mass, priests would carefully lay their guns across the altar at a handy distance. In spite of the local piety there were several murders and fights in church during Mass.
At the victorious end of the War of Independence, the Mani, except for enlightened innovations like cannons and guns, was still living in the Dark Ages. No region in Greece was more awkward to fit into the modern European state which Greece’s rulers were bent on constructing. The Maniots were pro-English, Capodistria’s party pro-Russian. They started badly with insurrections and the assassination of Capodistria and they were alienated by sorties from Kalamata to put down the inter-Nyklian wars. Who were these newly liberated Vlachs who had the effrontery to interfere with the habits of five hundred years? The Maniots had been free far longer, they maintained, and, what was more, had no doubts about how freedom should be used. Capodistria had stamped out piracy but the ordnance still flashed merrily in scores of villages. The old private music of gunfire and dirge continued just as it had in the good old days. The blood-feud flourished, Nyklian challenged Nyklian, the villeins knew their place, the towers multiplied, their summits climbing higher than ever before. The towers themselves, for Nyklians and Government alike, had become the symbols of Maniot nonconformity. King Otto’s regency, diagnosing in them the root of all Maniot strife, determined, in order to bring the Mani into line with the rest of Greece, to smash them. The Maniots—the Nyklians, that is, for they were the only ones whose opinion mattered—became still more firmly resolved to cling to them. But there was worse to come. The old guerrilla days were over, the Regency was building up a modern conscript army and the Nyklians were outraged to learn that all had to begin at the bottom in a revolutionary competition of merit in which Nyklians might conceivably find themselves under the orders of promoted villeins. It was like trying to persuade the Malatesta and the Baglioni to go through the ranks commanded by the stable hands of Rimini and Perugia. They put their foot down, refusing not only to discuss the demolition of towers or limitations of height or number, but the very idea of a Maniot formation which was not automatically officered by Nyklians.
Out of patience, the Regent determined to act. The whole region, like the Highlands after the Battle of Culloden, must be reduced and pacified and a party of the 11th Bavarian regiment, imported by Otto’s regency to back the new regime, marched into the Mani with orders to occupy and destroy the towers. They moved accordingly into a number of towers in Tsimova which had not yet become Areopolis. The Deep Maniots rose and besieged them. Understanding their peril the Bavarians beat a hasty retreat but thirty-six of them were captured in a tower and sold back to the State by the Maniots at the ransom of a zwanziger a head. Four companies of Bavarians, who the locals termed “the vinegar-baptized,” were promptly despatched to Petrovouni, where the Maniots had fortified themselves, and in the ensuing battle against eight hundred Maniot villagers, they were badly beaten. In the retreat half of them were killed with bullets and slingstones. The Government in Nauplia was in despair. A force of six thousand, complete with artillery, was next despatched to besiege Petrovouni under a General Schmaltz,—and forced to retreat to Gytheion yet again. In the negotiations that followed, the Maniots, urged by a Mavromichalis and a Grigorakis (both descendants of Beys), surrendered Petrovouni; a few towers on the edge of the Outer Mani were bought by the State, a limitation of height was published but not observed and a general amnesty declared. It was really a victory for the Mani.
The Nyklians had their own way in the end, and their end was their undoing, An intelligent Bavarian officer called Max Feder, who spoke Greek and knew the Mani and who was indeed a personal friend of all the great Nyklians, travelled the peninsula and, at amicable gatherings in the village rougas, enrolled all the kapetans and his Nyklian friends as officers into a militia unit called the Maniot Phalanx, which he commanded successfully in the suppression of other disorders in the Morea. They slowly accustomed themselves to western military notions. The distance between Nyklian and villein decreased, and bit by bit they became partisans of the status quo. Kindness and tact succeeded where coercion had been powerless. The electoral system and local government took root, schools were built and—a great landmark in Mani history—a villein was elected mayor of the great Nyklian stronghold of Nomia. The Mani was shared between the nomes of Kalamata and Laconia (the dividing line running along the watershed of the Taygetus) and subdivided into eparchies and demes. A military revolution in Athens forced King Otto to grant a constitution in 1843 and in 1844 Greece had the first general election in all her long history. Burlesque and turbulent though it was—nowhere more so than in the Mani—this was the simultaneous death-rattle of the old order and the muling and puking of modern parliamentary Greece.
The feuds continued, but, as the nineteenth century grew older, they became more rare. It is fitting that the last full-dress war took place in Kitta, the first place where the Nyklians, in flight from Andronicus II, settled in the Deep Mani. The struggle between the great families of the Kaouriani and the Kourikiani had emptied the village of all but their contending clans and all the surrounding hamlets rang with the customary noises of guns and flung rocks and the shattering of marble roofs. Nobody (except the new schoolmaster, for whom both had a superstitious awe) could cross the street without shouting “a neutral, a neutral!” The Prime Minister, Koumoundouros (himself a Maniot and a descendant of the eponymous Bey), sent a force of gendarmerie to besiege the Kaouriani, who were deemed the aggressors. The gendarmerie were beaten off with heavy loss, and they spoke with awe of “these men of iron and blood.” They were finally reduced by a besieging force of four hundred regular soldiers and artillery and forced to surrender. They were treated with gentle methods, however, and it was the last of the great Nyklian contests. Centuries of anarchy had come to an end.
The last few decades have disarmed the prejudices and blurred all distinctions between the Nyklians and the hinds. Sitting in the evening along the stone bench of the rouga with their sickles and their fishing-nets on the slabs beside them, they have the appearance of dark wiry people of the mountains and the sea; their brows, unless unlocked in laughter or the affability of conversation, are knit in an habitual frown. But, like nearly all the mountaineers of Greece, the patched clothes and bare feet are accompanied by the physiognomy and the bearing of nineteenth-century portraits of generals, ambassadors and dukes. There is little in the hollow cheeks and bony noses, sweeping white moustaches, piercing clear eyes and ease of manner that can be connected with the word “peasant,” though I am forced for want of a better to use it often enough. They all grew up in the atmosphere of village wars. Many of the indestructible elders remember them clearly; and much of their discourse revolves longingly round those old battles between rough-hewn grandees in their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ days: the wars of the Mavromichali and the Mourtzini of Tsimova and Kandamyli, the Michalakiani and the Grigoriani of Kharaka, the Katsiriani and the Tsingriani, the Kaouriani and the Kourikiani of Kitta, the Messisklis of Nomia and the Yenitzariani of the Katopangi. And all round them in scores, as the sagas multiply far into the night—battered with cannon-balls and pocked with bullets, assaulted by time and decay, disapproved of, legislated against and condemned by regime after regime and as bold as brass—stand the wicked and indelible towers.
The cannon rusted. The great Nyklian wars were over. But, against the continuance of private feuds—the vendetta as it is usually understood—legislation was impotent. The habit of violence continued and though the scope was limited to isolated action, the old rules were observed. It was strife between individuals and it seems to have gained in implacability what it has lost in extent. Once the declaration of enmity had been made, no distance would interfere with the pursuer and his quarry. For, with the changes of Greece and improved communications, many of the inhabitants left the peninsula. Often years would pass before the threatened man was tracked down and destroyed. There was no relenting; a revolver bullet or a dagger thrust in Athens, the Lavrion tin mines, Constantinople, Alexandria or under Brooklyn Bridge, would suddenly resolve a forty-year-old feud. It is said to have decreased a great deal lately. I asked three policemen—from another district, as always—how often such acts occur to-day. One said “Never. That is, very rarely.” The second, “Four or five times a month.” A third said, “A few per year. It all depends.” A Maniot who was sitting in the café said, ambiguously, “They don’t know what they’re talking about. Anyway, as if that old stuff matters compared with all the killing of Greeks by Greeks we had here in the War....”
* * *
Now comes a ramification of Mani history, a marginal comment—an extended bracket or footnote, almost—which I find it impossible to leave out of these pages for several reasons. Here it is.
When, a few days before, our caique had sailed across the gulf of Vitylo (it is written like this in demotic, more often than Oitylos which is still, as it was when its Troy-bound villagers climbed on board one of the sixty ships of Menelaus, its official name), the first thing to catch our eye was the enormous Turkish keep of Kelepha. From the heights where a temple to Serapis once stood, it dominates the little town of Vitylo and the whole gulf. It was built at the low ebb of Greek fortunes immediately after the fall of Crete in 1669, under pretence of a guarantee to the freedom of Maniot trade, as opposed to a prelude to occupation. Vitylo was the seat of two great Maniot families, the Iatriani and the Stephanopoli. The presence of this fort and garrison at their front doors was a bitter torment: they were attacked on the way to their fields, their property was stolen, their women had to be locked in day and night. Despair had overcome the Greeks at Candia’s fall. It really looked at last as if the Turks would stay in Greece till doomsday. The two families determined to leave together for the free Christian realms of the Franks, settle there, and fight the Turks again in more hopeful days. But, before this could happen, the two families were at war with each other over the theft and marriage of Maria, a Iatrian girl, by one of the Stephanopoli. Several were killed on either side. It was then that the Iatriani received a formidable ally in the shape of Liberakis Yerakaris, who belonged to the third great Vitylo clan of Kosma, the terrible ex-pirate released from jail in Constantinople by the Grand Vizier on the condition that he subdued the Mani.[5] He was appointed commander of the region, and was soon, as an ally of the Turks, its Prince.... But he had been engaged to the stolen Maria and his main reason for accepting his post on such questionable terms was an angry determination to destroy the whole Stephanopoli tribe. He started by capturing and publicly executing thirty-five of them. After that his ambition carried him off on strange courses. He became an erratic war lord and condottiere, now on the Turkish, now on the Venetian, now on the Greek side, in an endless succession of bloody campaigns all over continental Greece. Local conditions were worse than ever and after this fiery interlude the two families were still resolved to emigrate, though, rather naturally, to different places.
The Iatriani were the first to move and their destination was chosen for an odd reason. Iatros is the Greek for “doctor,” and the Iatriani had long been convinced that their name was a Hellenized form of Medici; that they were, in fact, descended from some shadowy emigrant member of the great Florentine family. They would sign their names “Medikos or Iatrianos,” or, even more often—it is as near as the Greek alphabet can get to the Italian—“nte Mentitzi” or “Mettitzi”;[6] the orthography and penmanship of the few relevant documents of this time clearly show that swordsmanship in the Mani was still the dominant skill. So it was to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany that their thoughts at once sped, and, after their thoughts, an emissary. The Grand Duke, Federigo II dei Medici, either accepted the bona fides of these far-away kinsmen or decided to humour their conviction. He welcomed their proposal and offered them wide acres on generous terms. His son Cosimo III had succeeded when, at the end of 1670 or early in 1671, the Maniot Medici actually dropped anchor in Leghorn. He made them welcome and they were given land to colonize not far from the coast round the villages of Casalapin and Vivvona, near Volterra, in the jurisdiction of Siena. Several hundreds of them settled in joyfully and their troubles began.
Five Orthodox priests had come with them but, according to Greek sources, the Bishop of Volterra sent a charlatan to their settlement, a real or masquerading Archbishop of Samos—this dark accusation is hard to unravel—who, singing Vespers according to the Eastern rite, summoned the priests to accept the Western creed with the filioque and bade them submit to the authority of Rome. Catholic forms of service were introduced and a Greek Benedictine from Chios, who, in a sermon, forbade them honouring any saints canonized in the East since the separation of the Churches, declared the indissolubility of marriage under all circumstances and urged the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar. In twenty-two years not a shadow of Orthodoxy remained. With this vital stay removed they rapidly lost all consciousness of being Greek and were soon merged by inter-marriage with the surrounding population. But (hints a Greek chronicler) even more baleful influences were wreaking their dissolution. “It is to be feared,” writes Spiro Lambros, “that they were not only Romanized in a few years but entirely wiped out also. For these mountaineers of the Taygetus were unable to resist the miasmas of the swamps in which they had settled such a short time ago.”[7] To-day, one can hunt the Tyrrhenean coast in vain for their descendants. The Italian population and the Maremma swallowed up all trace of them centuries ago. They have faded away over the marsh like will o’ the wisps.
The Stephanopoli had still more pressing reasons for clearing out. Their past history in wars against the Turks, the proximity of the fortress of Kelepha, the enmity of the many remaining Iatriani, the implacable hatred of Liberakis, whose fortune, after decimating their family, was soaring, and the hostility of a number of other families of the Mani in general—everything counselled departure. The Stephanopoli laid claim, with or without foundation, to origins that were even more august than those of the Iatriani. Their family legend or tradition (capable of neither proof nor the reverse) made them descend from the dynasty of the Comnènes which had given Byzantium six emperors and Trebizond twenty-one. After the Fall of Trebizond, the story goes, Nicephorus, the youngest son of David II Grand Comnène, after wandering for years in Persia and other eastern lands, finally disembarked at Vitylo in 1473 where he was honourably welcomed in accordance with his rank. This wandering prince soon imposed himself on the Maniots, married the daughter of one of the great families (Lasvouri), and launched himself into the heroic doings of the peninsula. His grandson Stephen, who gave the family its present name, won a heroic victory against the Turks in 1537, built a fine tower in Vitylo, which is still standing, and a monastery of which the abbot, his son Alexis, is deemed a local saint. The Iatrianos and Kosmas families, moved to envy by Stephen’s riches and power, conspired together and assassinated him.[8] Two centuries later his descendants, four hundred and thirty of them, were wondering where to go.
They sent one of their number, a man already much travelled and widely lettered, to seek a new home. The Maniot Medici ruled out the hospitable Grand Duchy so he explored the length of Italy—in vain—until he reached Genoa. The Serene Republic, only too pleased to settle loyal foreigners among the rebellious inhabitants of their island possession, offered him and his kinsmen wide lands in Corsica. He returned to Vitylo, a French brigantine was chartered, and, on the 3rd of October, 1675, the Stephanopoli, with three hundred kinsmen and allies, seven hundred and thirty souls all told, went on board with their bundles of household goods, their family ikons, and, it is said, the bell of the Cathedral. The port was a wild scene of weeping and lamentation; but the departure had to be brisk to elude a Turkish flotilla. At the last moment the Archbishop of Vitylo tried to board, but he was turned back because of his great age. Distraught with grief and anger at the sight of all his family leaving for ever the holy soil of Greece, he climbed a high rock and cursed them as they sailed away down the Messenian Gulf. To this day, it seems, descendants of the emigrants attribute all their reverses to the Archbishop’s curse.
They called at Zante and dropped anchor in the Sicilian straits where they were kept in quarantine under the castle of Messina. So struck were the Maniots by the beauty and wealth of the place, they almost decided to settle there. But as the island was being fiercely debated by Spain and Louis XIV, they sailed on; calling for a while at Malta, which was then in possession of the Knights; then they followed the Barbary Coast some distance before turning north. Their leader, George Stephanopoli, died on the voyage, and Parthenios, Bishop of Maina, assumed command. After wandering for three months they reached Genoa on New Year’s Day, 1676. They were hospitably received by the Republic and accommodated in several palazzi till the winter was out. The terms of their grant—a generous one—were drawn up: the most important of these was the proviso that the Maniots, while keeping their own Greek rite, should submit to Rome and practise their religion in the manner observed by the ex-Orthodox of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples; become Uniats, in fact. The most interesting item was the right to bear any arms they wished and the permission to fly the Genoese flag in warlike expeditions against the Turks. The former condition, which had not been made during their emissary’s visit, they secretly planned to shelve. There is something very stirring and gallant about the intentions which underlay the second condition.
When spring came they set off. The wide stretch of land they had been granted at Paomia, Revinda and Sagone, in the coast region of western Corsica, was steep and uneven; but the soil, when they could get at it, was good. They pitched tents and bivouacs and plied their bill-hooks to the stifling macchia, the dense growth that blurs all the outlines of Corsica and turns its mountains the dull khaki green of a well camouflaged army lorry. They soon had it clear, walled it off with stones, divided it into arable and vegetable gardens and terraced it for olives and vines. They built a little Cathedral for their bishop, a Parish Church of the Dormition of the All Holy Virgin sprang up; and, in the trim new houses, chapels to SS. Nicolas, Athanasios, George and Dimitri and even a monastery named the Nativity of Our Lady for the small group of monks and novices. It was soon a flourishing community, so much more so than the filthy Corsican villages surrounding them that the natives were gnawed with envy. It appears that the Corsicans were far wilder and more uncouth than the Maniots and their agricultural methods primeval. They learnt the best ways of ploughing and cultivation and the care of vines from their new neighbours, new devices in spinning and weaving from their wives, and, which seems strange, as the poor Mani is no gastronome’s paradise, how to cook food that was eatable at last.[9] One may wonder where among the stones of the Mani the vigorous colonists had learnt these georgic skills. But all disinterested records coincide in praise. They lived peacefully and, in the words of one of their priests, pleasing in the sight of God.
But religion, their costumes, their language and their ways cut them off from their neighbours. Their prosperity kindled their anger. After three armed brushes, this anger was tempered by fear and respect. This was apparently not reciprocated, for though individual friendships and god-relationships sprang up, the Maniots refused to inter-marry. They disliked the Corsicans and dubbed them, from their shaggy capes, “the goat pelts” or just “the blacks.” (Unless the Mani was very different then, it sounds like the pot and the kettle.) When, half a century after the establishment of the Greeks, the Corsicans rose against the Republic, their envoys sought the aid of the Maniots. But they stayed loyal to their benefactors and sent the insurgents packing with prophecies of seeing their hewn-off heads aligned on the walls of Bastia.
Despatching the women and children and the old men to Ajaccio, ninety Maniots barricaded themselves on a headland by the ruined anti-pirate tower of Omignia. Then, in April 1731 (according to the lively chronicle of Father Nicolas Stephanopoli) the rebels came back, outnumbering the Maniots a hundred to one. Attempts at pourparlers by the besiegers were again greeted with insults from the battlements, the heralds withdrew and the enraged Corsicans, beating kettle drums and blowing down trumpets and cows’ horns, charged. “Their shouts rose to the sky, a hail of shot poured from the walls, the whole cape was covered with smoke, the sun was hidden and the earth shook with clamour and gunfire!” A cease fire came with darkness. None of the enemy had even got across the low surrounding wall, three hundred were wounded and many killed. The Corsicans threw the dead into the sea and the waves washed them up on the rocks under the tower. None of the Greeks had been hit, “not even their clothes.” Placing sentries, they gave themselves up to laughing and feasting and clashing their cups together and thanking the All Holy Virgin for keeping them safe. They might have been back in the Mani!
It was Wednesday in Holy Week and from the first light of Maundy Thursday till Holy Saturday the attack continued with growing fierceness. Relief from Ajaccio was cut off on land by the enemy and from the sea by storms. But at last the enemy fire languished. “Take your arms, brave Greeks,” cries Father Nicolas in retrospect, “God and the Ever-Virgin Mary have scattered your enemies! In the town, your priests and your wives are praying for you barefoot!” (For “Greeks” he uses the word “Romioi” throughout.) Loading and firing by turns the Maniots advanced, toppling the Corsicans into the sea from the cliff’s edge and picking them off on land; taking point after point, until at last the enemy broke and ran, many of them leaping into the sea. In ecstasy, Father Nicolas quotes Moses and the songs of Miriam and Deborah. All round him the Greeks were praising God, cheering, weeping and kissing each other. They gathered a vast booty of scattered guns and swords, stacks of victuals, innumerable flocks from the enemy’s commissariat and numbers of saddled horses. Finally, late at night, they assembled, sang the Hymn of the Resurrection, and joyfully ushered in Easter Day: “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” After piously burying all the dead they marched in triumph to Ajaccio. Terror had emptied all the villages on their way. They were greeted as heroes by the Genoese and, concludes Father Nicolas, when the Corsicans wish to curse each other, they still say “May God deliver you into the hands of the Greeks!”[10]
But they never returned to Paomia, and Ajaccio became their home. During the turbulent years that followed, they fought bravely for the Genoese through the various insurrections and the eight months when the German adventurer, Baron von Neuhoff, was first and last king of Corsica; also during the brief regime of Boswell’s friend, Pascal Paoli. When Corsica, in 1768, passed to France by treaty, they were looking out for somewhere new to emigrate. Their language and their costume and their religion were still a cause of friction. Two small groups set off for Minorca and Leghorn (where they evaporated like the Medici of Volterra) and a third to Sardinia, where most of them were promptly massacred by the Sardinians. But the bulk of them remained and fought for the French and were befriended by the first French governor. He settled them on good land at Cargese in his newly-established Marquisate of Marboeuf, not far from Paomia. Once more their diligence and their energy produced a fine village in the middle of flourishing cultivation and laden vineyards, and their descendants live there to this day. Their troubles were not over, however. The Corsicans were still hostile and envious of these industrious interlopers and during the Revolution they burnt Cargese down. Napoleon was friendly to them and they were reinstated. There was another attack during the Hundred Days, and when the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821 (a century and a half after the Maniots had left Greece) the men of Cargese were forced to chafe angrily at home, instead of leaving en masse to join in the fight, by the Corsican threat to their families and their lands.
As long as the Maniots helped to quell the disorders of the island their religion was left unchallenged. But when things began to settle, they were held to the letter of their original agreement by the Archbishop of Ajaccio. The last colonist priest died in 1822. A Cargesian Greek was ordained in the Latin rite in 1817 and his church was attended by some of his family and friends, but the rest, though they became Uniats on paper, once more stubbornly refused to have “Corsican priests.” They remained seven years without the sacraments, saying the services by themselves, until a Greek archimandrite from Chios arrived and stayed as parish priest, instead of the Cardinal’s nominee, till 1856. He kept their Greek nationalism intact and brushed up their grammar and spelling. His successors, though Greek, were Uniats, celebrating the same rites as those of Grottaferrata in the Campagna. Bit by bit, as history slipped into its more peaceful nineteenth-century rhythm, this fresh allegiance, inter-marriage and the surrounding western culture disarmed their fierce Greek zeal. There were few Greek books and no teachers. The Catholic Church hated these old links with the Eastern schism and when the Greek merchants of Marseilles sent them a Greek schoolmaster in 1885, he was denounced by the ecclesiastical authorities of Ajaccio as a schismatic and women were forbidden to send him their children. He struggled in vain for two years against this boycott and left in despair. Since then all direct contact with Greece had died out. There are now more Corsicans than Maniots among the eight hundred odd inhabitants of Cargese and all strife is over. But the two churches, one Catholic and one Uniat, where the offices are sung in Greek, commemorate the old antagonism of East and West. Those who attend the Uniat church are still known as “the Greeks” and a few old women still speak Greek.[11]
All travellers are at one in praising the charm, cleanliness and prosperity of Cargese. Sir Gilbert Eliot, viceroy of Corsica during its short English period (1794–6), wrote to his wife describing a ball where they all wore their old costumes and danced holding hands in a long ribbon to the tune of a Greek melopee. It is given an excellent character by Prosper Mérimée, by Edward Lear (who visited it with his Suliot valet), and by Professor Richard Dawkins, the most knowledgeable and charming of neo-Hellenists whose rooms at Oxford, until his recent death, were an Aladdin’s cave of books of Greek history, folklore, language, customs and fairy-tales. In spite of the inevitable modifications of nearly three and a half centuries, the Maniot Cargesians are proud of their Greek descent, which their language, their form of religion, their proverbs and songs and many of their customs still commemorate. The ikons and sacred vessels they carried away from the Mani are still there, and the bell they are said to have lowered from the cathedral tower of Vitylo. The Corsican tide swept into the village to fill a gap, during the last century, when a last restless emigration carried a number of them still further west, to the village of Sidi Merouan, near Constantine in Algeria. There were three hundred of them there in 1900; in 1931, only a hundred and twenty-five. Now they are scattered and lost all over Algeria and the doors of their little Greek church are shut for ever. This was the last adventure of these wandering descendants of the ancient Spartans and the warlike grandees of the Mani and perhaps of the emperors of Byzantium and Trebizond. The sands of Africa have done the same work of obliteration as the fens of Tuscany and the Sardinian guns.
Their emigration carried these mountaineers from the deadening murk of the Ottoman Empire into the whirlpool of western European affairs. Some of them, intent on getting closer to the heart of this exciting maelstrom, left their little town and went to France. The more time passed, the more convinced the Stephanopoli became of their imperial origins. Much of Father Nicolas’s eloquence was expended on it. Patrice Stephanopoli, who wrote a history of Cargese in polished and flowery French, had no doubts at all; nor had Don Bernardo Stephanopoli, the offspring of a small eighteenth-century emigration from Cor-sica to Grosseto in the baleful Maremma, who was a Catholic priest, Bishop of Antioch in partibus, a favourite of Clement XIV and nearly a Cardinal. Another, Dimitri, who died a general in the French army, even convinced the heralds and genealogists of Louis XVI. He was duly declared Prince Démètre Stephanopoli de Comnène, and his arms—the double-headed eagle of Byzantium aswirl with ermine mantles and topped with a closed crown—blaze from the pages of old armorials. But the most convinced of all was his sister Josephine-Laure Permon Stephanopoli de Comnène, Duchesse d’Abrantes, who was born at Montpellier. Her father had served in the American War of Independence and her mother was a fading beauty when Napoleon was thin and young and, although she was much his senior, he fell more than half in love with her. Her more beautiful daughter, who was intelligent and witty and charming as well, married Junot, who became Duc d’Abrantes after the Peninsula campaign. After quarrelling with Josephine, she was left a rich widow at twenty-eight, and turned Royalist. Her extravagance soon dispersed her fortune, but later in life she made another one with her twenty-eight volumes of memoirs of the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration; they are witty, fluent, indiscreet and most entertaining. As a novelist, however, she failed badly. She died, poor once more, in 1838. One son was a writer, another, who was one of Marshal MacMahon’s generals, fell at Solferino. She not only upheld the imperial origins of the Stephanopoli but launched the theory which was widely accepted for a time of the Corsican-Maniot—thus Imperial—origins of the Bonaparte family. It was, she proclaimed, an Italianization of the Greek name Kalomeros, which means, exactly, buona parte. But there were no Kalomeri among the emigrant Maniots and no such name ever existed in the Mani. The Buonapartes were originally from Treviso and Bologna and they had been established in Corsica long before the Greeks arrived.
During the campaign of Italy, Napoleon was suddenly confronted by an envoy from the Bey of the Mani. He offered the complete support of the region, and, in the event of a French landing, of all Greece. As Napoleon was seriously thinking of attacking the Turkish Empire in Europe, the help of the ruler of the only part of Greece that was free and the weight of his influence on the rest of his country were not to be spurned. He thought at once of the Stephanopoli of his native Corsica: an ideal link between France and the Mani. On the 12th of Thermidor, the year V, he despatched Dimo Stephanopoli and his brother Nicolo from his headquarters in Milan. The former was already a distinguished botanist, and botanical research was to be the cover story of his mission. They set off to Corfu in the middle of 1798. These two elegant and pseudo-princely citoyens, in the black cut-aways and top boots and the enormous semi-circular bicornes of the Directoire (who were at the same time great Nyklians astray from home for a hundred and twenty-three years), were welcomed by the courageous Zanetbey. They stayed in the Mani several months as the guests of the Bey and numbers of the leaders from enslaved Greece were summoned to meet them, as well as all the kapetans of the Peninsula. Dimo has left an absorbing account of his sojourn, of the customs and sad klephtic songs bewailing the enslavement of Greece, and of the innumerable plants and archaeological remains that he contrived to see between conferences. He was moved to tears by his strange temporary home-coming and the appalling tales of oppression and cruelty. After a battle in which the Maniots routed a flotilla of the Kapoudan Pasha and destroyed an invading force of Turks from Sparta, he pronounced a funeral oration over the dead in perfect Greek. He carried back an ancient Greek statue of Liberty to the first Consul as a gift from his splendid host. But, by the time he reached Paris, Napoleon’s policy had veered in favour of the Turks. Nothing came of this curious embassy, except Stephanopoli’s moving record of the mission[12] and a shipload of arms to the Bey, who, deposed now, had taken to the hills with the Klephts of the Peloponnese.
There is one last instance of a Cargesian return to Greece. It comes from a Corsican drummer-boy in the Morea expedition, when France lent a force of 14,000 men to the kingdom of Greece in the 1830’s. One day, in the far south, he overheard a group of mountaineers in conversation. He listened in silence, his brow clouded with astonishment, and at last exclaimed, “Tiens! C’est le patois de mon pays!”
This is the end of a long parenthesis, and we must return to the present-day Mani, about fifteen miles south of the little town from which they all set out.[13]
[1] See page 38.
[2] op. cit.
[3] Amour propre, for the time being. I shall have to enlarge on this complicated word in a later book.
[4] The barrels of the few I have seen lying about in Maniot villages are about two and a half yards long.
[5] See page 61.
[6] The Greek delta has now a soft th sound, as in thou; the D sound is rather awkwardly indicated by nt, in the same way that the soft Italian ci sound is conveyed by tz.
[7] This is the account of the Corfiot historian Moustaxidis.
[8] Their later troubles may thus have been part of an old feud.
[9] The reader (like the author) can well shudder at the thought of pre-Maniot meals in western Corsica.
[10] I was interested to read, in Mr. G.H. Blanken’s book on the Cargese dialect, that the battle of Omignia, in spite of “une resistance désespérée” ended in une défaite glorieuse mais complète des grecs. Under the circumstances, one cannot blame Father Nicolas for not mentioning the fact. It is a healthy tendency to make much of victories and forget defeats.
[11] The best accounts of their dialect, which is still, in spite of the usual infiltration of local words, a pure Greek one of a largely Maniot character, are by the late Prof. R.M. Dawkins of Exeter College, Oxford, and Herr G. H. Blanken of Leyden.
[12] Alas! The bona fides of this document have been questioned.
[13] I made a pilgrimage to Cargese some months ago and found a thriving community living in a rocky and beautiful village perched above the sea. Many of the inhabitants had Maniot surnames and all were deeply conscious of their origins. Their priest, a most intelligent man and a perfect Greek-speaker with whom I spent many hours, was robed and cylinder-hatted in the mode of the Greek clergy. Rather surprisingly, he is a Savoyard brought up in Constantinople. I attended a Uniat Mass there. The church was crammed and the language and the liturgy were most punctiliously preserved, though I was surprised to see that two of the many acolytes were splendidly vested young girls. It was interesting to notice that the filioque clause, defining the double procession of the Paraclete (the ancient bone of contention between East and West), was omitted from the Nicene creed. It forms, of course, part of the Uniat dogma, but its omission here is a tactful gesture towards the atavistic susceptibilities of the Cargesians. The Cargesians are extremely likeable and the atmosphere—the clean white houses, the ikons, the manners, the welcome with a small ritual glass of spirits, the gift of a sprig of basil on departure, the faces and the black coifs of the two old women—is indefinably Greek. Alas, I could only discover two women—one old, the other middle-aged—who still spoke Greek fluently. A number of Corsican words had crept in but it was unmistakably Maniot, with many rustic turns of phrase that have been lost in the Mani. There were also a number of rare and exciting Cretan usages and pronunciations. Some of the Cretan refugees to the Mani from Candia, which fell six years before the departure for Corsica in 1675, must surely have accompanied the exodus from Vitylo. It was a most moving visit.