IT WAS lucky that Kotronas was such an agreeable haven, for the weekly boat was hours late. They often are. There was another giant fig tree for shade, from one of whose lower branches someone had hung a big synagrida, the fish that kindled the envy of Poor Prodromos, the Villonesque beggar poet of Byzantium, friend, it is said, of the Emperor Alexis Comnène, when, peeping through the window, he saw one stuffed with spices and covered with sauce on the table of a rich abbot....
The waterfront was given over to net-making. One had to walk with care. Strips of filmy russet netting three feet broad were draped a hundred yards along the ground, the fishermen sitting on the ground at one end, stretching the net wide with their big toes and skilfully crocheting mesh after mesh with darting shuttles. A row of fishermen sitting along a low wall were busy baiting their lines for trolling. One had lost a hand through dynamiting, as usual. A basket on his knee was filled with a coil of twine, the rim set with corks stuck full as a pincushion with fish hooks. He looped the slack round his stump, tied a short length of nylon thread to the brown twine with his other hand, pulled it tight with his teeth, baited the hook with a chunk of fish and paid it out onto another loose coil, all at high speed, smoking ceaselessly and only stopping for a second to throw me a cigarette when he saw me fumbling my pockets in vain.
It looked as though no ship could ever come. The horizon sundered the identical light blues of sea and sky with a dark blue ruler-stroke and the smooth surface of the water was dulled here and there with a faint wind like breath on a looking glass. Across these misty patches occasionally ran a smooth narrow line caused by a current or perhaps a faint contrary breeze, as though traced by the erratic rub of a fingertip. A large, full-bottomed schooner weighed anchor heading south for Matapan and Kalamata. There was not enough wind to hoist sail. Trailing a dinghy, she swung swiftly out of profile till the two bare masts converged, leaving a long scar across the polished and the arrowy water: then, turning the first stage-wing of the promontory, she profiled again and dwindled against the espalier valleys towards Matapan, as though being thrust up the perpendicular screen of sea on the point of her lengthening wake. The fierce and bandit-like kapheneion keeper gave us a large red rose apiece to console us for the delay.
But, within half an hour, we were off; sending out, as the steamer left the little gulf of Kolokythia, one of those siren blasts that sound so strange inland when they reach the ear along a maze of canyons.
This coasting steamer, sailing to and from the Piracus and calling at all the small ports of the south-eastern Peloponnese once a week, seemed very sophisticated to our bucolic eyes. The panelled Edwardian saloon, the brasswork and the curtains, the striped canvas chairs, the elaborate ouzo glasses and the saucers full of fat Kalamata olives and the slices of Cretan cheese and salami brought by a stylish steward (white-jacketed but, like me, unshaven) were symptoms of almost Capuan luxury.
When we emerged from our early luncheon the coast of the Mani had changed completely. The mountains had receded inland and the Lower Mani, with the forty-four villages of which Niphakos speaks, stretched in a flat green plain rimmed with low trees and pronged with cypresses and poplars; plentifully stocked, according to the poet, with cotton, and with those vallonia oaks whose acorns are sold for dyeing and tanning. How mild and beautiful it looked! But after a few flat green coast miles, up inland soared the Taygetus again to great heights, dipping at the head of the gulf where more distant ranges showed beyond the Helot-haunted lowlands of eastern Laconia. To the east the rocky spine of the Laconian peninsula, as immaterial at its distant points as a soundwave, oscillated south to Cape Malea.
A pass winds through the north Maniot reaches of the Taygetus from Gytheion to Areopolis. It is the Deep Mani’s only road-link with the rest of Greece and some distance along it, at a strategic point, stands the wreck of the Frankish fortress of Passava, hidden now in the curling blue waves of the range. It was built, like most of the other feudal castles in Greece, in the thirteenth century, when the Peloponnese, now styled the Principality of Achaea, was split up into subsidiary baronies. Some antiquaries derive its present vernacular name from Passe-Avant, others from Pas Avant, which has a hint of the battle of Verdun.
I have always instinctively hated Frankish ruins in the Greek world. This needs a little explanation; for a long time it needed it—as I am by no means immune to the romantic spell of Gothic ruins anywhere else—even to myself. In the damp forests and fields of western Europe, rearing their machicolations or their broken clerestories in Normandy, by the Rhine or in an English shire—in the heart of their native lettuce, in fact—they fill me with an almost Huysmansesque addiction. I derive nothing but pleasure, too, from crusading relics in Saracen countries; the eyries of Knights Templar in Syria, scowling holds like Krak des Chevaliers and the battered coats of arms on the city wall at Acre evoke reactions of which Sir Walter Scott and Heredia would both have approved.
Similarly, old Turkish houses in Greece, the domes of an abandoned mosque, a broken minaret and the cupolas of a madrasseh seem quite all right.[1] They tell a calamitous tale of mistakes and of the clashing of irreconcilables and fierce conquest and large-scale tragedy; but there is an authentic splendour about the crusades in the Holy Land; and though one may bitterly deplore, as I do most fervently, that the Turks ever set foot in Europe, it would be as absurd to blame them for the destruction of the Byzantine Empire as it would be to arraign the laws of hydrostatics for damage by flood. But one can and may blame the wicked Fourth Crusade for making that destruction inevitable and bringing about the wreck of eastern Europe for centuries. We need not go into it all again. Western feudalism was utterly foreign to the Greek world and when it vanished, it left, beyond these ruined castles, not a trace. It is sad that those vanished tournaments and courts of love, the distant echo of horns and Burgundian hounds along the ra-vines of Achaea, the sound of lutes and plainsong and all the transplanted flowering of Western chivalry—much indeed that in the West I love—should touch me, in this instance, so little. I must admit that in Cyprus, something of the spell of Cœur de Lion and the Lusignan dynasty breaks through in those Gothic cathedrals turned to mosques, in the Abbey of Bellapais and in the castle of St. Hilarion, which hangs in the air like an illuminated detail from the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berri.
Monemvasia, too, has a derelict lunar grandness and it cannot be denied that the castle of Karytaena, high on its Arcadian rock above the winding Alphaeus, is hard to beat for chivalric splendour. The largest, the most formidable and the most intact of the Frankish holds are usually Venetian and built much later, at points on the mainland or on the islands that the Republic retained by treaty with the Turks and by force for centuries after the Frankish hegemony had vanished. (Some princely families, however, still retained a forlorn claim to their lost fiefs in partibus; the Duc de Nevers in the early seventeenth century, who—yet another!—claimed the Byzantine throne, actually planned to regain his putative empire in collusion with the free Maniots.)[2] The fringes of the Greek world are dotted with enormous Venetian bastilles, each one a vast brooding complex of slanting curtain walls, miles of moat, donjons, flèches, demilunes, glacis, bastions, barbicans, redoubts, counterscarps, sally-ports and drawbridges, all of well-nigh impregnable thickness. Slabs bearing the Lion and Latin inscriptions adorn them, commemorating some governor or general or gonfalonier called Zorzi, Mocenigo, Morosini or Bragadino. Many—at Corfu, Levkas, Coroni, Methoni, Nauplia, and Hera-kleion (which withstood the great Candia siege), at Nicosia and the titanic affair at Famagusta—are astounding, awe-inspiring and immensely depressing. A Greek writer has described the great stormbeaten and cormorant-haunted castle at Coroni as “the architecture of hatred.” And so it is. But these latterday strong points, gloomy though they are, are many of them untainted by the guilt that hangs over the others. They acted as barriers against barbarism, not, like their Frankish forerunners, stepping stones to it. Occasionally a castle turns out to be Greco-Turkish, like those of Seven Towers at Constantinople and Salonika and the one that looms above Navarino. This, like Nauplia, was used till quite recently as a prison. I was astonished to see, some time after the present journey, that the inner courtyard was divided up in a warren of narrow yards bounded by high walls. I learnt that as it was the nearest prison to the Mani it used to be full of Maniot convicts inside for killing people in vendettas. As many of these feuding rivals found themselves in the same courtyard at all hours—Greek prisons are very easy-going—the crop of internal murders reached such a pitch that this honeycomb of little open-air pens had to be built, to keep them apart.
But it is a cruel fact that the early Frankish castles seem more alien and baleful than the later Venetian or Turkish fortresses. They encircle the Grecian mountain-tops like so many crowns of thorns.
It is hard to allot fairly the guilt for the ecclesiastical rivalry that split the East from the West. Certainly both sides were to blame for not contriving to avoid schism over trivialities and for letting the odium theologicum bite so deep. I have found that Catholics are the more generous of the two in acknowledging a share in the responsibility to-day; quite rightly, Sir Steven Runciman would say;[3] but for the military blackguardism that made the break irreconcilable and finally ruined half Europe, the West are utterly and inexcusably to blame. “We may hate the infidel,” Petrarch said, “but we must doubly hate the schismatics of the East”; sectarian imbecility can go no further. There is only one figure in the West who came out of it well and then it was too late: Aeneas Sylvius, the great Pius II Piccolomini. He alone seemed to grasp the magnitude of the disaster and ten years after Constantinople had fallen he attempted to call the sovereigns of Europe to a last crusade, one that would have redeemed the monstrous Fourth for ever—and which he planned to accompany himself to deliver the City and the Empire from the Turks. But it was too late. The sovereigns failed to send their promised armies and he died at Ancona (as we see in the last of Pinturicchio’s frescoes of his life in the library at Siena), in sight of his half-assembled fleet.
So I did not mind missing the shards of Passava.
* * *
Rich in digressions and vallonia acorns, the plain and the pale blue ranges glided by, their relationship flowing and changing fast as we advanced up the wide gulf. Skoutari and Kalyvia and its peninsula had drifted south, and Ayeranos and the hump of Mavrovouni. The green world continued.
Gytheion, to which a small island was tethered by a long narrow mole, trembled towards us through the afternoon haze. It was sunk in afternoon catalepsy. Nothing moved among the shipping and the cranes along the waterfront or among the inert tiers of houses that climbed the hill-side. Beyond the ship’s awning the sun beat down like a curse and I could feel the heat of the quay through the soles of my shoes as though I were treading across a flat-iron. Every shutter was down. “Not a cat stirring,” a fellow passenger said as we crossed the Sahara-like waterfront. “The only people about at such a time would be adulterers heading for an afternoon assignation. But perhaps not in Gytheion. It’s not Athens, after all!...”
* * *
I woke up a couple of hours later. Sounds coming through the closed shutters indicated that the spell-bound town outside was stirring into life. Two rogue-wirelesses were in full blast and very strange they seemed after the unpolluted Mani. There was the exhaust of a motor or two, voices, a ship’s siren, the clip-clop of horses and donkeys and the occasional clash of those portable brass scales that fruit-sellers and grocers hold up like statues representing Justice. All the sounds, in fact, of an important provincial town that is also a port, the chief of the south-eastern Peloponnese, the seat of a bishopric, of law courts, several schools, a naval centre in a small way and a thriving market. The rumour of awakening activity, however, penetrated the darkened cube of my room in the Actaeon Hotel at one remove. At the end of my bed, just to be discerned through the carefully contrived gloom, hung an oleograph, completely faded and kippered with age, of Othello recounting his travels to Desdemona and the Doge. This picture, usually on the walls of kapheneia and tavernas, is inexplicably widespread in Greece. Another wall was adorned with a picture in cheerfully contrasted colours which is also one of an unexpectedly popular type: a Swiss meadow with cows grazing in front of a chalet and a dizzy range of snow-capped Alps. It is, I suppose, the equivalent of the bay of Naples in a Belfast boarding house.
Lying in a bed again, vaguely shrouded like a corpse on the brink of resurrection, seemed an incomparable, almost a guilty luxury. The penumbra was pierced by a thin blade of afternoon light falling from the junction of the two shutters. It was all the brighter by contrast with the tomb-like shadows. I lay smoking in a sybaritic trance watching the clouds of cigarette smoke slowly cauliflowering across the room to turn, when they struck this dazzling stratum of air, into a paper-thin cross section of madly whirling grey and pale blue marble. The soft murmur of the town was suddenly drowned by the furious jay-like voices of two women below my window, arguing across a narrow lane about something that I couldn’t catch. It didn’t matter. The point was the inventive richness of the language, the splendour of the vocabulary, the unstaunchable flow of imagination and invective. I often have the impression, listening to a Greek argument, that I can actually see the words spin from their mouths like the long balloons in comic strips; however debased and colloquial the theme, the noble shapes of the Greek letters, complete with their hard and soft breathings, the flicker of accents with the change of enclitic and proclitic and the hovering boomerangs of perispomena sail through the air and, if a piece of high flown language or a fragment of the liturgy should be embedded in the demotic flux, which it often is, iota subscripts dangle. Some letters catch the eye more than others: the perverse triple loop of Xi, the twin concavity of Omega, the bisected almond of Theta, Phi like a circle transfixed by a spear, Psi’s curly trident and Gamma’s two-pronged fork. As the argument kindles and voices wax louder, the lettering matriculates from italics to capitals and out like dangerous missiles whizz triangles and T-squares and gibbets and acute angles, pairs of Stonehenge megaliths with lintel stones, and half-open springs. At its climax it is as though these complex shapes were flying from the speaker’s mouth like flung furniture and household goods, from the upper window of a house on fire. Then suddenly the conflagration subsides as abruptly as it started, the dialectic geometry fades from the air and silence ensues; as it did now. The soft murmur of the town took over again, wooing me down into its midst. It was time for a clean shirt and a shave.
[1] Palm trees, however (of which there are fortunately only a few), look desperately wrong. West of the Bosphorus, they should stick to Torquay and the Côte d’Azur. It is odd that an antipodean tree, the Eucalyptus, unknown before the voyages of Captain Cook, should look so beautiful and appropriate along many a Peloponnesian road. I think they unconsciously suggest the dream vegetation in the imaginary classical landscapes of Poussin and Claude—both of them, it is true, quite unlike Greece. Norman Douglas launches a splendid attack on these trees which falls, in my case, on deaf ears. One is illogical and eclectic in these matters. A British Army barracks or a London pillar-box in Cyprus looks detestable while our architectural legacy in the Ionian islands is full of charm. Of course, it is more beautiful and it tells a story with a happy ending.
[2] His claim to the Byzantine throne was through his descent from Andronicus II Palaeologue, who married Yolanda, sister and sole heir of John the Just, Marquis of Monferrat. The marquisate passed to her second son, the Despot Theodore Porphyrogennetos, and continued in the male line of Monferrat-Palaeologue for six generations and then devolved upon an only daughter of Boniface de Monferrat who married Federigo Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, a scion of the great Mantuan house, who begat Duke Charles II, the claimant in question. He planned, with the help of the other powers, to raise the entire Balkan peninsula in revolt. The help never came and the ambitious scheme faded away.
[3] The Eastern Schism, by Steven Runciman (Oxford).