Mystras

THE SEARCH FOR THE GREAT WHITE HORSE

We streamed down the mountain from Tripoli in cold driving rain, on the trail of Constantine Palaeologus, last of the Byzantine emperors. We had heard (read?) (dreamed?) that his spirit still hovered over the city of Mystras, and that it had been known to appear in the guise of a great white horse on the deserted mountain stronghold. It seemed so important to us to discover the great lords, the dead ones — for they dwell in us still; their voices clamour in the night, they charge through our sleep like stallions.

So we went after the phantom beast, or the Emperor himself, whichever we would find.

To be as blindly specific as possible — we streamed down the mountain from Tripoli, and our cab driver who loved us more than life itself demonstrated the fact by taking the hairpin turns with a smiling nonchalance which chilled our blood. He informed us meanwhile that of all the people he had taken to Mystras, we were the first who wanted to go there to find a horse.

His name was George — the George, as they say in Greek, since all names in Greek are preceded by the definite article to make one feel like a being rather than a word — and we had discovered him in Naphlion drinking gazoza beside his cab stand and more than willing to take us to some of the more inaccessible parts of the Peloponnese.

Horrors of mist, sheer drops into raining nothingness awaited us at each bend in the mountain road. The mind gets used to such things, though the body curls up into a tight knot of terror and stays that way all down to the Acadian plain of sheep and goats and apples and tons of red, red earth. And from there even lower into Sparta, through narrow foggy valleys and passes, which, in the dark unreal rain, gave me a ghastly déjà vu.

You can’t really begin to think in Greece until things get dark. It’s the rain, or the dusk, or perhaps even a cloud or two which brings things into a reasonable perspective. All those tons of sunlight hammering away at the pillars of the Acropolis make history too lucid to be real, and you begin to wonder if light itself is a lie, a bright guise of God, not an illumination. And maybe darkness is better, the darkness in which Constantine died, the dark end of the Byzantine Empire…

He was crowned on the 6th of January, 1449, in Mystras, provincial stronghold of the Empire, capital city of the Despotate of the Peloponnese. Then he went to Constantinople and died. In his life he defended what was left of the Empire, which was not much, for when he took the throne the Empire had to all intents and purposes fallen.

Through the Spartan plain, the rain still freezing, and ahead of us at last the abandoned phantom city.

‘Panagea mou!’ whispered the George. ‘Isn’t it beautiful!’ and put his foot on the accelerator to bring us closer. The Greeks do not linger over beauty; they devour it.

Nikos said nothing and I merely murmured an ineffectual ‘Wow’, for I had had a glimpse of Mystras and it seemed to me to be some incredible thing, beast or plant, all in fragments and clinging to the mountainside the way a nightmare clings to the mind of a sleeper. It was ghastly, green with rain, tragic with history, unspeakably Byzantine.

We had to pass through the modern village at the foot of the mountain. Here were the descendants of the people who had gradually abandoned the ancient stronghold to live in relative peace in the Spartan plain, having had their fill of Franks and Turks and who knows what else history had served them up both before and after Constantine. I was tempted to stop and ask one of them if they knew anything of the legend of the great white horse, but a shyness held me back. We slowed down, though, at a statue in the town square.

‘Who’s that?’ the George asked one of the passersby, a small boy carrying a white goat on his shoulders.

‘Oh him,’ the boy smiled. ‘That’s Constantine.’

As we pulled away I tried to get a good look at the features of the statue, but I saw only an over-large metallic king with an amazingly determined face. He was dressed for war. I had expected him to be wearing a thin tubular Byzantine costume with little pointed slippers — like the ones you see on playing cards — but I suppose he only wore such things for religious ceremonies and public festivals. He had a beard, I think. And a helmet. I thought that since he had been crowned in January it would have been raining then too…

Most of the older men of the village were in the café — or café-neon as they say — drinking coffee or ouzo at that hour of the day, and as we passed through the narrow streets we heard their coaxing, argumentative voices, and the occasional clicking of the dice on the tavali boards.

The entrance to the phantom city was freezing stone. The trees wailed with cold, and I feared that the entire stronghold would somehow lose its grip on the mountainside and slide down into oblivion in a gush of mud and agony. But we paid our ten drachmas to the guard at the gate — a sullen fellow who was fortified on that particular day with a hefty bottle of Metaxa brandy — bought two guide-books which got immediately soaked, covered our heads with the latest newspapers from Athens, and passed out from under the arch.

Nikos uttered an exclamation of alarm. We had expected a ghost town, but this was ridiculous. It took us a while to comprehend what was confronting us — not a smallish wreck of a Byzantine stronghold, but an entire city, absolutely abandoned and broken. A city which wound up and up the mountainside in a steep maze which mocked our wildest dreams. The rain assaulted the cobblestones, the skeletons of mansions, the countless arches, the monasteries and chapels, the granaries, the palace of the Palaeologoi. And finally, on the very top, the castle which we had to bend over backwards to see. It dawned on me — (strange how the obvious dawns on you at times like these) — that they built castles on the tops of mountains so nobody could reach them.

In a limp attempt to bring things down to earth, I muttered ‘Where’s the George?’ and imagined to my horror that our mad friend had driven up the highway to await us at the castle gate, the last exit of Mystras, the absolute top, from which, for some obscure reason, he figured we would triumphantly emerge.

Our guide-books had turned to soup in our hands, and we flung them away, enraged. I noticed on the pavement one half-readable page — a diagram, a map of Mystras of such complex character that it would require two weeks of intensive study to comprehend. Where were we? The place needed a month, a year, ten years to understand, and we had a couple of hours. In dark rain. Newspapers on our heads. Frozen to the bone. The latest news from Athens slowly dripping into my hair — who got out of jail, who got put in, reasons for same, ecstatic anticipations of the forthcoming visit of Spiro Agnew, and ads for Vim detergent.

We became depressed; the city overpowered us. We slid accidentally into the courtyard of a church, having lost all hope of ever finding the great white horse.

But then I saw him.

Not the horse, but him, Constantine, dressed in a long red tubular robe with pointed slippers. I saw his crown, his face, everything. The rain was a million bullets on the mosaic floor. I saw the drinking-place for the horses, I saw his retinue entering the chapel with heavy soaked velvet clothes, I saw the gilded priests crowning the last of the Palaeologoi, at the close of an empire.

And the ghastly rain kept falling, falling, and the ikons in the chapel were purple with cold. A purple mountain rose up behind us and the last Lord of the Byzantines was falling, falling to his knees before the golden faces of the Virgin and the Child, accepting the crown of a hopeless empire upon his head.

I stood in the doorway of the chapel, gazing first into the cold sanctuary of Christ, and then out into the pounding courtyard where the emperor trod in his little golden slippers, where the hooves of his horses trod, and the heavy boots of his endless guards.

All this is history, but it was only much later that I learned that out of all the countless churches and chapels in Mystras, it was this one, Saint Demetrius, which had been chosen for the coronation. This is accident, or miracle. I merely record what I saw.

Back out, then, into the everlasting deluge, coldest day of our lives, cursing the George who had abandoned us for the impossible heights of Mystras, the summit, the last refuge in times of siege. Sliding through arched avenues, peering despondently into abandoned homes. On a green patch of field a monstrous jungle-plant clung to the earth dripping rain like sweat. Barbaric greenery, and beneath, in the grass and rocks, the hugest snails in the world, closed now in their armoured shells, little fortresses of horror threatening at any moment to open.

Soaked to the soul, still we searched for the great white horse, but all we could see through the insane rain was the little playing-card king slipping and sliding ahead of us, flanked by guards and aides, all of them like us cursing the cold and the cobblestones. Constantine (perhaps?) cursing his own coronation and the empire he had to uphold, a thing which had crumbled before he was even born.

We had only covered about one one-hundredth of the city before we knew we would have to give up and go back to the main gate. The chill in our bones was the chill of history, the endless sieges of Mystras, assassinations, slaughters. I began to see children’s eyes staring out from vaulted doorways, and black-robed women clutching ikons of the Virgin to their breasts, praying for the relief of the city. I imagined the aristocracy up on the higher, safer slopes, perhaps under the protection of the palace or the castle, while the poor got butchered in their flimsy homes or in the streets by invading armies. I kept seeing the rain of war falling, falling. History like a great mud-slide; human beings, snails, donkeys, plants all clutching the mountainside for dear life.

Where the hell was the George? He could save us from these thoughts if only he’d realize that we would emerge from the main gate, and not the top. We tried to get help from the guard, who had sadly slipped more or less under his desk from the effects of the Metaxa, but who managed, nevertheless, to put through a call to the summit gate. Whoever was in charge up there, though, had seen neither a car nor a George and had no idea what we were talking about.

‘George, you, you jest of God!’ I cried — (when I get mad I am very literary) — and madly flailed the air with what was left of the newspaper from Athens until it dropped in a pulp to the ground.

The guard smiled at us and shrugged his shoulders and gradually slid away from view Mystras was slowly beginning to slide down the mountain — or so it looked to our feverish eyes. I peered out through the gate, down to the Spartan plain, and tried to imagine the ancient warriors taking winter baths in the Eurotas river. The thought warmed me a little.

We decided to make a mad dash down to the little restaurant called Marmora at the foot of the mountain and wait for the George there. The place, as it turned out, was full of British tourists — an odd group which called themselves the Wings, or the Eagles, or something like that. The members all seemed to be well over sixty, and they were soaked to the skin. It seemed obvious that they had attempted to Do Mystras, and failed.

Their leader, who resembled James Mason, and who wore a little emblem of a Wing (or was it an Eagle?) on his blazer, was beamingly addressing the dazed group. ‘I must say; he began, ‘The weather is rather bad, don’t you think? But let’s look on the bright side of things, shall we?’

One very old fellow who had fallen asleep with his arms on the table looked up in horror at this remark.

‘What I think we should do is this. Or rather, one or the other of these. That is, in fact: A: We can proceed to tackle

Mystras regardless, thus keeping to our original plan which involves pushing on to the caves tomorrow Or — and this is B:  — we can all go back and have tea in Sparta, and Do Mystras tomorrow, in which case we must forfeit the caves and push on later to Olympia. At any rate, I leave the question with you and trust you will come to a decision among yourselves.’

He left off speaking and sat down at his special table — (all tour leaders seem to have special tables, for some reason) — with an intriguing-looking German lady who seemed to be a leader too, except that she didn’t have a group.

‘Caves, caves!’ cried the gentleman who kept falling asleep over the table, as the group plunged into a heated debate on the best course of action.

‘I say, I think we’re doing this all wrong,’ murmured an octogenarian in a bowler hat.

Eventually the group decided on tea in Sparta and the forfeiture of the caves. Wise choice, I thought, as I downed some brandy and proceeded to become very worried about the George. Might he have had an accident in the blinding rain? I dreamed up awful possibilities of what might have befallen him, realizing that, after all, he had been a great guy, a paragon of a cab driver, a gentleman and a friend.

 — At which point, precisely, the George came strolling into the restaurant, perfectly dry and crisp, not a hair of his head out of place, and asked us where we had been.

‘George!’ I cried with utter relief, flailing the air with my celery stick and making threatening jabs in his direction. ‘What happened? Did you meet the great white horse?’

The next day the snails came out of their shells. We had spent the night in Sparta and returned to Mystras early in the morning. The rain had stopped, but the ground was still chill and damp; the sky was fraught with windblown clouds and patches of a frightening kind of blue. The first snail I saw was in the doorway of the mansion of Lascaris; the thing was sitting there, protruding more than halfway out of its shell, green and bilious, possibly the most hideous thing I’d ever seen. The same green as the ghastly jungle plant with its tendrils clinging to the slope, the turgid green of too much rain and history.

Nikos and the George began collecting snails, for it turned out that there were hundreds of them, giant ones, naked and exposed in the wet grass. They carried them in handkerchiefs and the handkerchiefs squirmed. The floors of the Lascaris mansion almost crumbled as we walked on them, and there were great holes underfoot through which we saw the cellars. A black nun was coming down the mountain leading a donkey laden with baskets; we realized that there were a few human inhabitants in Mystras — in the monastery of the Pantanassa higher up on the slopes. She greeted us with a very soft kali mera, then lowered her eyes and went on her way. The smell of wild mustard and thyme was everywhere, turning the air yellow and green.

In the chapel of the Pantanassa there were frescoed figures of saints with their eyes hacked out. The expungement was the work of Turks who, with their Moslem fear of images, wished to rid the figures of their holy power. They didn’t realize that the eyeless faces would become, in some strange way, even more powerful and compelling than ever.

As we were leaving the Pantanassa we saw, as an apparition, the octogenarian with the bowler hat hobbling down the road from the castle, clutching a cane and a guide-book. He must have somehow broken away from the Wings (or the Eagles) who were Doing Mystras from the bottom up, and decided to proceed from the summit down. Someone must have driven him up to the summit gate by the main road. His eyes were red and watery from trying to make a safe descent on the treacherously slippery cobblestones, and at the same time from trying to make sense of the cryptic map of Mystras which the guide-book offered.

He paused a moment with his cane uplifted, pointing in the general direction of the Pantanassa. Then he checked the map. ‘Ahhh-ha!’ he said, with a deep sigh of satisfaction, and hobbled vaguely towards his goal. ‘Nevertheless,’ we heard him mutter as he turned a steep corner in the road. ‘I somehow feel I’ve done this all wrong.’

How he had ever made it alone down from the castle is something we shall never know. We only got as high as the palace, from which point the castle stronghold could be seen perched on the dizzying summit far above us.

And still no sign of the great white horse.

At a bend in the road leading to the palace, I felt invisible archers watching us from behind the walls — and as it turned out, there was a narrow vertical slit in one part of the fortifications which must have served as a bowman’s lookout. Anyone approaching the palace could have easily been picked off by the sentry who had full visual command of that part of the road. And we — the new invaders — might have been shot by an arrow of mist from the bow of some ghostly archer who’d held his post for five hundred years.

If ever the great white horse would appear, it must be here, I thought, as we entered the gates of the palace. Here on the windy heights in the skeleton of Constantine’s royal house — a long lonely bunch of arches and walls without roofs. Here with the wild changing sky above, with crazy-horse clouds charging over the Spartan plain against a background of vivid blue. Here where the eternal snails, ugly predators, smirked in the slippery grass. Constantine may have eaten escargots, safe within the walls of his palace while outside the wars raged on and the bowmen shot everybody who came up the royal road and failed to give the password. I imagined him sitting at a hewn wood table in mid-winter with a great fire going, his plate heaped with dozens of the beastly things all done up in tomato sauce and onions, like the ones I had once in Athens, or perhaps stuffed with spices and butter, European style. The zing of arrows down below, and lower still the poor people praying in the chapel of Saint Demetrius or huddling in doorways in the rain.

But this is all wrong; Constantine wasn’t sitting and eating within the palace walls in wartime. He was out fighting the invaders — the invaders who wear the same faces, always, regardless of who they are.

The George was tired of carrying his handkerchief of snails around, so he dropped the whole thing onto the ground and left the beasts to fend for themselves. We lost him again as he went behind the palace to hunt for herbs or something. When he emerged, immaculate as ever, we made our way back down the maze of roads, and he spoke for the first time in hours. ‘History is wonderful! Panagea mou, history is really wonderful ! Imagine — they all lived here, and worked and ate and died, just as we live and work and eat and die. They were like us. It breaks the mind just thinking of it!’

We stopped then, realizing we had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the maze and had ‘done the whole thing all wrong’; we had to wind our way back to what looked like a main road, which took a full ten minutes, because we had somehow gotten over to the other side of the mountain.

Panagea mou, I thought (which translates as ‘my all-holy one’, meaning the Blessed Virgin Mary. Some Greeks pepper their speech with this epithet, as we do ours with ‘Oh God’, to express the whole range of emotions.) Where is the great white horse, and why hasn’t he appeared to us pilgrims who have come so far to find him?

‘George,’ I asked, ‘What do you think about the great white horse?’

‘The villagers will know,’ he said.

‘Will the guard at the gate know?’ I asked.

‘The guard at the gate knows nothing,’ said the George with venom. ‘He is a fool, one of the great mistakes of God, a fool and a fiend. We won’t ask him.’

I made no comment. The streets had dried out by now and the stone had been restored to its original colours — pink and beige. Someone had flung an empty pack of Players into the courtyard of Saint Demetrius and my eyes went red with indignation. I remembered a poignant comment a little girl I knew had made about the basic difference between her life in Canada and her life in Greece. ‘In Canada I used to get mad,’ she said. ‘But here — I get really mad!’

‘We forgot to see the Aphendiko; I said, stopping in my tracks and remembering an excerpt from the guide-book. ‘The place where they have the pictures of the miracles of Christ. The Good Samaritan, The Wedding at Cana, The Healing of The Man With Dropsy, The Healing of The Blind Man, and The Healing of Peter’s Mother-In-Law.’

‘Nobody could heal Peter’s mother-in-law,’ said the George grimly. ‘I know’

As we left through the main gate, he flung the guard a foul look. I learned later that the previous day’s episode in the rain had left them with an enduring hatred for one another. The George swore in the name of everything holy that he had left a message with the fellow to inform us of where he would be waiting. The guard, on the other hand, swore in the name of everything holy that he knew nothing of it.

We got into the freezing cab and made our way down to the serene village of Mystras at the foot of the mountain. As we turned a bend in the road, I looked back once and saw the crazy city clinging to the slopes. There was a small grey-white donkey in the distance.

‘Ha!’ I cried, becoming literary again. ‘Another wild jest of God! We search for the great white horse and all we get is a donkey. I ask you!’

I fell back into the seat and lit a cigarette, sadder than I’d been for a long time, because Mystras was a miracle, and they’re hard to come by these days, and I knew I might never go back, horse or no horse.

It was late afternoon in the village; no one was out of doors except a very slight old fellow who had just emerged from the café-neon.

‘Hello — you there!’ cried the George, rolling down the window and beckoning for the man to come over. ‘We’ve come a long way to Mystras and we have heard of a legend of a great white horse — the ghost of the emperor Constantine.’

‘Yes, we have heard that his spirit still hovers over the city and has been known to appear in that form, I said. ‘Please tell us — do you know of such a legend?’

The old fellow leaned in the window and shook his head slowly. ‘I’ve lived here all my life,’ he said wearily. ‘And I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Please don’t go !’ I cried. ‘Maybe it’s a secret, maybe you don’t like talking about it. But you can tell us ! Was Constantine ever seen on the mountainside in the shape of a great white horse? Is it true, is it?’

The man gave a dry cough, excused himself, and turned away. We heard him mutter a moment later: ‘You xeni! You outsiders — you think of everything…’