THE NAME of the Evil Mountains—Ta Kakavounia—has infected the inhabitants as well as the range itself: the Deep Maniots are dubbed “The Evil Mountaineers” by the outside world. Alternatively (for these points of naming and derivation are never simple) the name is declared to be Kakovoulia, the Land of Evil Council, a damned region balefully populated by Evil Counsellors. There is even an ingenious third version,[1] based on the diminutive ending—oula appended to kakkavi (which means a small bronze three-legged cauldron); this turns the Deep Maniots into “The Cauldroneers.” It seems that the Maniot pirates, before boarding an enemy vessel, would helmet themselves in these pots, and, with the legs sticking up like three horns, leap in swarms from the shrouds: enough to alarm any Turkish or Venetian merchantman into surrender. But the first two are the everyday connotations. They have done much to confirm the Mani’s sinister fame, which has long been promoted by a supposed hatred of strangers and implacability in seeking vengeance.
Never has a reputation for xenophobia been more convincingly belied than by our welcome to Vatheia. Vasilio, the lamb slung across her shoulders, befriended us with the solicitude of Nausicaa. She led the way through a contorted and bulbous jungle of prickly pear which the dusk was transforming into the most queer of groves and up into the massed volley of skyward-shooting walls. Somewhere among them, directed by her carrying shouts across the valley, the muleteer and his beast had halted at the foot of her father’s tower.
Many things in Greece have remained unchanged since the time of the Odyssey and perhaps the most striking of these is the hospitality shown to strangers; the more remote and mountainous the region, the less this has altered. Arrival at a village or farmstead is much the same as that of Telemachus at the palaces of Nestor at Pylos and of Menelaus at Sparta—so near, as the crow flies, to Vatheia—or of Odysseus himself, led by the king’s daughter to the hall of Alcinöus. No better description exists of a stranger’s sojourn at a Greek herdsman’s fold than that of Odysseus when he stepped disguised into the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus in Ithaca. There is still the same unquestioning acceptance, the attention to the stranger’s needs before even finding out his name: the daughter of the house pouring water over his hands and offering him a clean towel, the table laid first and then brought in, the solicitous plying of wine and food, the exchange of identities and autobiographies; the spreading of bed-clothes in the best part of the house—the coolest or warmest according to the season—the entreaties to stay as long as the stranger wishes, and, finally, at his departure, the bestowal of gifts, even if these are only a pocketful of walnuts or apples, a carnation or a bunch of basil; and the care with which he is directed on his way, accompanied some distance, and wished godspeed.
In the Odyssey, the newcomer often strikes a banquet in progress, and very often a stranger in Greece to-day will find himself led to an honourable place at a long table of villagers celebrating a wedding, a baptism, a betrothal or a name-day and his plate and glass are filled and refilled as though by magic. Often, by a little chapel (dedicated to the prophet Elijah, the Assumption or the Transfiguration on a mountain top, or, outside some built-up cave, to a Chryssospiliotissa—a Virgin of the Golden Grotto—or St. Anthony of the Desert), he will find the rocks and the grass starred with recumbent pilgrims honouring a pious anniversary with singing and dancing, their baskets open and napkins of food spread out under the branches, the wine flowing freely from gourds and demijohns; and here, as at the village festivals, the traveller is grasped by horny hands, a place is made smooth for him on the cut brushwood, a glass put between his fingers and a slice of roast lamb offered on a fork or a broad leaf. This general hospitality on feast days is less remarkable than the individual care of strangers at all seasons. It is the dislocation of an entire household at a moment’s notice that arouses astonishment. All is performed with simplicity and lack of fuss and prompted by a kindness so unfeigned that it invests the most ramshackle hut with magnificence and style.
To-night, however, there was a change in the accustomed Homeric ritual. After drinking ouzo in the walled yard at the tower’s foot, Vasilio’s father said, “It’s a hot night. Let’s eat in the cool.” He took a lantern and led the way into the tower. We followed him up the steep ladders through storey after storey until, breathless with climbing, we were on a flat roof about eight yards square surrounded by a low parapet. Chairs appeared from below and Vasilio took a coil of rope and paid it into the night; hauling it up the sixty-foot drop after an exchange of shouts, with a round tin table tied to the end. She took out and spread a clean white tablecloth and put the lan-tern in the centre, installing a circle of gold in the moonlight. Our faces, which were soon gathered round a roast lamb which I hoped we had not met before, were lit up by an irrelevant glow of gold which changed to the moonlit pallor of silver while jaw-bones and eye sockets were stressed with shadow if anyone leaned out of the lantern’s range. The rope, to the end of which a huge basket had now been tied, was lowered into the dark again and again for more wine and food.
The night was still. As our tower-top was the highest in Vatheia, the others were invisible and we might have been dining in midair on a magic carpet floating across dim folds in the mountains. Standing up, the other tower-tops came into sight, all of them empty and clear under the enormous moon. Not a light showed, and the only sounds were the shrill drilling note of two crickets, a nightingale and a faint chorus of frogs, hinting of water somewhere in the dry sierra. I tried to imagine how this little group, dining formally round a solitary golden star of lamplight on this little hovering quadrilateral, would look to a passing bird. I asked our host if they often had meals up here: “Only when we feel like it,” he answered.
He had been talking of the winter, and the familiar theme of the Mani wind. “It makes a noise that could deafen you, when the tramontana blows through these towers,” he said; and all at once, in the silence and the hot moonlight, I had a vision of that lamentable blast screaming past the shutters, of maelstroms of hail and snow coiling through those perpendiculars. “And when there’s a thunderstorm, you think the world has come to an end with all the noise and the lightning! That’s when the young think of marrying, to have company in bed to keep them warm....”
The table was cleared and lowered swinging into the gulf and blankets and pillows, glasses and pitchers of drinking water laid out for the guests. “I’ll put this on the trap door,” he said, picking up an iron cannon ball from the parapet and cupping it in his palm like an orb, “in case the wind should blow up and slam it shut. It’s all they are good for now.”
We sauntered to the end of the village before going to bed. Beyond the cactuses a few miles to the south, a long row or twinkling lights, sailing westward under an upright pale pillar of smoke, suddenly slid out of the lee of Cape Matapan. It must have been an enormous liner lit up for a gala night. Could we hear the sound of music? One could almost imagine it. “Megálo,” said our host, “Big”; truthfully enough. It disappeared behind the leaf of a prickly pear and emerged a minute later. I wondered where it was coming from. Beirut? Alexandria? Bombay? Colombo? Hong Kong? I thought of the passengers in tropical mess-jackets and low dresses and comic paper hats, the brandy revolving in balloon glasses, cigar smoke ascending, ship-board romances ripening, cliques cohering and splintering, plans forming and couples pairing off for the sights of Naples and trips to Vesuvius; of the gallant ship’s doctor, of the life and soul of the party, of the ship’s bore and the ship’s vamp. Perhaps they were wearing false noses fitted with burlesque moustaches and large cardboard spectacles? To what tunes were they dancing, and were streamers being thrown? I remembered once, sailing past the southern Peloponnese and Calabria, leaning across the bulwarks as many of the passengers must have been leaning at that moment and wondering what happened in those wild and secret looking mountains to the north. “Look,” perhaps they were saying, “there’s a light up there! How lonely it must be...”
The lights grew smaller as the liner followed the same path as many a Phoenician galley and many a quinquereme; heading northward in the invisible groove of Harald Hardraada’s ships, sailing shield-hung and dragon-prowed from the Byzantine splendour of Mickelgard for grey northern fjords at the world’s furthest edge. At last it shrank to a faint glow and was swallowed up by an immense obliterating cactus.
* * *
There was much, it occurred to me next day, to be said for tower-dwelling, especially in summer. Eating and sleeping on the roof while the lanes below hoard the stagnant air, one catches every passing shred of wind. One sleeps in the sky surrounded by stars and with the moon almost within arm’s reach. Dawn breaks early, and, by chasing the sleeper down the ladder out of the sunlight, solves the daily martyrdom of getting up; and the Bastille-thick walls cool the rooms with a freshness that grows with each descending storey as the layers of ceiling accumulate overhead: six gradations of temperature from the crucifying blaze of the roof to the arctic chill of the excavated cellar. And towers ensure the rare and inestimable boon, that non-existent commodity of Greek village life, privacy. The turmoil of domestic life, insulated by the absorbent vacua of the intervening chambers, swirls and bubbles fifty feet below. Who is going to climb all those belfry ladders? (Alas, no physical barrier can daunt the thirst for company; but for the moment all was quiet.) There was another negative benefit of the Mani, and one which it had taken some time to appreciate: not since Areopolis had there been a single wireless set; nothing but that delightful horned gramophone in Yeroliména. The rest of Greece, even the remotest Arcadian or Epirote village, rings from sunrise to midnight with swing music, sermons in English, talks on beekeeping in Serbo-Croat, symphonic music from Hamburg, French weather reports, the results of chess contests in Leningrad or shipping signals in morse code from the Dogger Bank, and, as the instrument is nearly always faulty, all these sounds, turned on full blast, are strung on the connecting thread of an unbroken, ear-drum-puncturing and bat-like scream. Nobody listens, but it is never turned off. Towns are pandemonium. Every shop and café sends out a masterless, hydrophobic roar. These rabid wirelesses should be hunted out and muzzled or shot down like mad dogs. In the heart of the country, the silence of the most desolate places is suddenly rent by the blood-curdling howl of a rogue wireless set.... But, like religion, it has been late in reaching the Mani, and among the towers a blessed silence prevails. The only sound at the moment, as I sat over my long neglected diary among piles of sacks, was Vassilio half singing and half humming to herself in the room below.
She had demanded, the night before, all the washing which had accumulated since Sparta, and I had seen her foreshortened torso thumping and rinsing before daybreak in a stone trough in the yard and later spreading the laundry to dry on boulders and cactus branches. Now with this soft singing the delicious childhood smell of ironing floated up through the trap door. A floor further down her mother was weaving at her great loom which sent forth a muted and regular click-clack of treadles.
Beyond the bars of my window the towers descended, their walls blazoned with diagonals of light and shade; and, through a wide gap, castellated villages were poised above the sea on coils of terraces. Through another gap our host’s second daughter, wide-hatted and perched on the back of a wooden sledge and grasping three reins, was sliding round and round a threshing floor behind a horse, a mule and a cow—the first cow I had seen in the Mani—all of them linked in a triple yoke. On a bank above this busy stone disc, the rest of the family were flinging wooden shovelfuls of wheat in the air for the grain to fall on outstretched coloured blankets while the husks drifted away. Others shook large sieves. The sun which climbed behind them outlined this group with a rim of gold and each time a winnower sent up his great fan, for long seconds the floating chaff embowered him in a golden mist.
The sun poured into this stone casket through deep embrasures. Dust gyrated along the shafts of sunlight like plankton under a microscope, and the room was full of the aroma of decay. There was a rusty double-barrelled gun in the corner, a couple of dog-eared Orthodox missals on the shelf, and, pinned to the wall above the table, a faded oleograph of King Constantine and Queen Sophia, with King George and the Queen Mother, Olga Feodorovna, smiling with time-dimmed benevolence through wreaths of laurel. Another picture showed King Constantine’s entry into re-conquered Salonika at the end of the first Balkan war. On a poster, Petro Mavromichalis, the ex-war minister, between a pin-up girl cut-out from the cover of Romantzo and a 1926 calendar for the Be Smart Tailors of Madison Avenue, flashed goodwill from his paper monocle. Across this, in a hand unaccustomed to Latin script, Long live Uncle Truman was painstakingly inscribed. I felt like staying there for ever.
* * *
What sort of life went on in these towers in the palmy days of the Mani? When the great Nyklians, kind in tower and fierce in fray, were still supreme? The few travellers’ reports are very conflicting. Many of them praise their love of liberty and their courage, others strengthen the adverse legend. “Famous pirates by sea, pestilent robbers by land,” one calls them;[2] another, Lord Sandwich,[3] after praising their irredentist spirit, says much the same. A third,[4] without a shred of evidence, accuses them of cannibalism: “It is probable,” he says, “that the Maniots of Laconia have likewise in their fits of fanatical fury, devoured several Mahometans of the Morea.” Not even Leconte de Lisle, in a poem of most bloodthirsty fustian, beginning, Les Mavromichalès, les aigles du vieux Magne, goes as far as this, though he describes the battle between the Mavromichalis and the Turks near Pyrgos, and how the chief of the clan nailed the heads of the Turks round his tower until it was studded with skulls. Captain Stewart, coasting the region in 1807, pronounced them “the most savage-looking animals I ever saw, very dark coloured and ill-clad.” Haygarth, the contemporary of Byron, in a rather fine poem written very slightly before Childe Harold but in a strain of pure Byronic philhellenism, compares them with their Spartan forbears:
...still their spirit walks the earth.
Their martial shouts are heard from Maina’s rocks,
Where, still unconquered, thousands rally round
The spear of Grecian freedom...
Indeed, their Spartan descent, their legacy from the time of Lycurgus, was the theme of many writers. But before the War of Independence few actually went there, not even Byron, alas. Almost the first traveller to say anything pleasant about the Maniots in a non-heroic key was John Morrit of Rokeby. A Whig squire aged twenty-one just down from Cambridge, he made a leisurely journey through Greece from 1794 to 1796 (about thirty years, that is, before Greece was free), and wrote some charming letters home. He was stuffed up with the usual forbidding tales about the region, and (though he never penetrated into the Deep Mani) what a pleasure it is to hear someone writing in so natural and unstilted a vein! “If I see any danger of not getting out (of the Mani),” he writes, “it is not from banditti, but from the hospitality and goodness of the Maniots.” The mountains were poor in antiquities, but the Ancients “survive here in a bolder manner, since certainly these people retain the spirits and character of Grecians, more than we had ever seen.” He obviously had a great deal of fun on his travels, and talked flippantly of marrying and settling here as chief of a Maniot band. He bought a Maniot costume for his sister: “a muslin chemise and a blue silk pair of trousers,” and suggests that they should both, on his return, go to Ranelagh dressed up as Maniots. All this is a great relief after the inflated sentiments of most previous travellers to occupied Greece, the ignorance, the bombast and the false and patronizing comparisons of the glorious past to the humiliating and servile present; the elaborate academic misapprehension by which all the Greeks were either demigods or crawling bondsmen: extremes to which poor Greece had been subjected for centuries by western travellers.
The thing that everyone seems agreed upon, including modern Maniot writers, was the lack of education and the comparative illiteracy of the region. But, in the first house he stayed in, Morrit found a copy of Belisarius and Rollin’s Ancient History translated into Romaic, and his host “talked to us a great deal about ancient Greece, of which he knew the whole history as well or better than us...and his eyes sparkled with pleasure as he talked of the ancient Spartans.” Well, well! But then, of course, it was only the Outer Mani....
As far as I can discover, apart from Leake and Pouqueville, few people from the West came here. The society they portray is a primitive one. (A very black picture was to be painted of it, as we shall see later, by the only poet the Mani ever produced; but, again, he was not a Deep Maniot.) They were, of course, much richer then, thanks to piracy, but most of their cash went in forcing the growth of their towers and in personal adornment. In old prints of the Mani, women who are out of mourning are magnificently dressed. A thin white wimple of silk or muslin was arranged round their heads over a small cap and their plaits ran across their brows in a band. A long-sleeved dalmatic, heavily embroidered and fringed, fell to the knee and covered the top part of a long flowing dress which reached the feet. Under this were flowing shalvaria—oriental trousers—slippers adorned with gold wire, or, among the poor, rawhide moccasins. The men’s costume was not unlike that of the islanders and the Cretans: baggy trousers with many pleats ending just below the knees with legs either bare or greaved in embroidered gaiters, their oriental slippers sometimes turning up at the tip. Over their shirts they wore a short bolero as stiffly galooned with bullion as a bullfighter’s jacket. (Petro Mavromichalis, when Leake visited the Mani, wore a coat of green velvet charged with gold lace.) Their great moustaches would sometimes measure eight inches across and their hair fell in thick black waves over their shoulders. At a raffish angle on the side of their heads was perched the soft, “broken” fez with its long black tassel of heavy silk. Over the sash their middles were caught in with belts equipped in front with a slotted marsupial flap of leather to hold their arsenal of weapons: the almost straight pistols whose butts tapered and then swelled into knobs at the end like wrought silver crab-apples; khanjars, those long knives with branching hafts of bone or ivory that spread like two out-curving horns; and, their chief weapon for close-quarter fighting, the yataghan, its ivory hilt dividing like the khanjar, the long subtle blade curving and straightening again as fluidly as a flame. Often, too, they would carry cross-hilted scimitars whose blades described a semicircle. The steel of many of them was beautifully damascened and arabesqued and they were scabbarded in silver and silver-gilt and plum-coloured velvet. In full array, they were equipped with splendidly mounted powder horns and with intricately worked pouches for shot made of hammered silver from Yanina. Their long-barrelled guns, which resembled Afghan jezails, were so heavy that they could only be aimed when resting on a rock or a branch. This made them useless for hand-to-hand battles but valuable at a distance or for an ambush. These had a euphonious name, which sounds more like a flower than a gun; indeed, very like the Greek for both carnation and clove: karyophylia. This strange and musical word is an uncouth Hellenization of the name of an Italian gunsmith’s shop whose wares were highly prized all over the Levant: Carlo e figli.
All this warlike bravery, thrown into advantage by their martial bearing and driven home by frowning brows and a fulminating gaze, was splendid. There are several portraits of these magnificently dressed Maniot paladins in the great Athenian house of the present M. Petro Mavromichalis—who is still, half-playfully, half-seriously, styled “the Bey”—in Athens. I was surprised to see how fair were these Mavromichali warriors; their great manes and moustaches gave them the air of Vikings. As far as I can remember, only John the Dog wears the baggy Maniot trousers; the rest are all in snowy fustanellas, presumably because they were painted in Athens after the War of Independence when that fine Epirote-Illyrian garb had become the almost universal badge of Greek patriots. Indeed, under King Otto and Queen Amelia, the fustanella and all its attendant finery, with superbly Byronic island costumes for ladies-in-waiting, was the official court dress. When he was Greek Minister in Paris the great Kollettis (who came of a Kutsovlach family from Syrako[5] in Epirus) would often wear it, and the Goncourt journals speak with admiration of his presiding fully-kilted over delicious banquets of agneau à la pallikare. Now, apart from the evzones and those mountain regions where the old men still go kilted, it has died out. Wittelsbach eccentricity, and a touching loyalty to the country he adopted, impelled King Otto still to affect the fustanella in Bavaria after his abdication. It is thus clad that we may think of him among the fir trees and neo-gothic pinnacles of Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau and reflected in the bright mirrors of the Nymphenberg.
Apart from their appearance, their warlike pursuits and the superstitions and customs on which I have touched, there are no recorded details to quicken one’s reconstruction of this former life. Yes, there are two: a traveller mentions that it was customary for the priests to wear a brace of pistols and that the Mani was so poor in food that many of the mountaineers lived on salted star-fish. This custom, if it ever existed (and it is the reliable Leake who records it), has died out without a trace. Star-fish? They were horrified at the idea. It was as bad as the bulls of Katsimbalis....
Pondering on this strange vanished life, I had a momentary vision, chiefly promoted by the conversation on the roof the night before, of the great-grandparents of my hosts involved in a village war in midwinter with the wind screaming through the towers; with the women pounding and grinding away at their cumbrous handmills or crowding round a brazier, melting lead and moulding shot; karyophylia poking from every slit, a swivel gun placed in the embrasure by my table, my host presiding over it, befezzed and voluminously breeched. Outside, the snow whirled along dark lanes which lightning and cannon flashes suddenly lit up and the report of the ordnance was drowned in thunderclaps. Children clambered upstairs stooping under the weight of single cannon-balls while beautiful dark girls, their plaits flying, sped up the ladders with flaming linstocks. There was a smell of gunpowder and the sound of somebody groaning in the darkness....
Vatheia is one of several villages hereabouts which is supposed to have been populated mainly by Cretan refugees, presumably those in flight from the Turks after the Fall of Candia and the final defeat of the Venetians three centuries ago. Other Cretans had fled centuries before, in the thirteenth when Crete fell to the Venetians, taking refuge among the Byzantines of Asia Minor and settling along the Meander’s banks. They have left a strong impression on the Mani, especially on the dialect. Again and again I heard, with sudden excitement, turns of phrase and pronunciations and words that I had only heard before in the most inaccessible villages of Crete. There are many superficial resemblances in their way of life; even, now and then, in their appearance. Yet there is a compact fleshiness (I do not mean fat), almost a muscle-bound look, about many Maniot features: a dark floridness, a low planting of hair on the brow, and above all a shuttered wariness in those dark eyes which, handsome as many of these faces are, is quite different from the alert, luminous extroversion of the Cretan physiognomy; and in spite of all the apparent resemblance, the whole atmosphere is different. On the whole, they dislike each other, and it is not entirely because, out of all Greece, the Cretans are the most advanced partisans of Venizelist republicanism and the Maniots of the Royalist cause. Perhaps the heavy Cretan influx caused bad blood in the past; but it is probably because, in many ways, there are too many points of similarity. In fact, having during the war and afterwards become so fond of the Cretans—considering myself, in fact, almost an honorary Cretan—it was painful for me to hear them criticized so much. My spirited defence of them became something of a joke. The Greeks whom the Maniots think most similar to themselves are the Epirotes, especially (according to Dimitrakos-Messisklis) the Chimarriots of the Acroceraunian mountains. He finds much in common in the customs and characters of both regions, and, like a secret river deep down under successive immigrations from other Greek lands, the same tough Doric strain.
With what ease populations moved about in ancient Greek lands, in the world conquered and Hellenized by Alexander, the wide elbow room of Rome and the Byzantine Empire! Undocumented, free and unregimented, people wandered where they liked between the Thames, the Danube, the Euphrates and the upper Nile—anywhere, in fact, that was free of the Barbarian menace, and often beyond. Now everyone is numbered and ringed like a pigeon and held captive in a cage of frontiers. Across the firm loom of settled populations a constant irregular warp and woof of minor movement was always in progress, propelled by restlessness, by pursuit of trade, thirst for booty, search for colonies, flight or exile; or transplanted, perhaps, out of policy or for asylum. The little church of Tourloti,[6] outside Kitta, hints that one of the least known of these shifts may have made a small contribution to the population of the Mani. I do not know the date of the church. It is extremely old. But an inscription declares that it was founded by a husband and wife called Marassiotes, and dedicated to SS. Sergius and Bacchus. Now, by the middle of the seventh century A.D., the Lebanon had been inhabited for some time by a people called the Mardaites, which may be translated “rebels,” “apostates” or “bandits.” (They sound a rough lot, not unlike the Shi’ite Kizilbashi in the Pomak villages of the Rhodope mountains.) The Byzantine emperors sometimes used them as levies, and Constantine V Pogonatus had twelve thousand under his orders there, serving as a rampart against the Arabs. When the Arabs conquered Syria, the Mardaites retreated north and acted as a “brass wall” along the Byzantine border, whence they were constantly raiding the Arabs until Justinian II (685– 695) agreed by treaty with the Caliph to withdraw them into the interior of the Empire, and they were accordingly distributed between the Pamphylian coast (where they became seafaring men), the island of Cephalonia, and the Peloponnese. But the Mardaites were not originally from the Lebanon at all. They had wandered there (for some lost reason and at some lost date) from the district of Maras, in eastern Cilicia, almost fifty miles inland, that is, in a north-easterly direction between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Euphrates. This was also the home of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus whose names are so unfamiliar in the Mani that their church is merely “The Cupola-ed One.” The Orthodox laity are strongly regional and selective in these matters. The only other church dedicated to the two saints that I know is the beautiful and famous ex-mosque in Constantinople; and the name of the founder of Tourloti—Marassiotes—(which, too, is unknown in the Mani to-day) means, exactly “someone from Maras.” Greeks, founding shrines far from their homes, are nearly always loyal to their home-saints. A church built by a Corfiot outside his island is almost certain to be called St. Spiridion; a Cephalonian, St. Gherasimos; a Zantiot, St. Dionysios; a Cretan, St. Minas; a Salonikan, St. Demetrius; and so on. Thus, the implications of this tiny church, just over ten yards square, offer themselves irresistibly: as well as the predominating Spartan blood there is probably some Frankish in the veins of the villagers of many-towered Kitta; possibly some Byzantine, almost certainly some Cretan; it now seems probable that we must add a wild splash from beyond the Taurus and the Lebanon, Greek still, and—sprung from “brigands” and “apostates” though it may have been—from brigands and apostates who, on the brink of absorption in their fourth and last sojourning place, remembered with piety the two saints that once watched over their lost Anatolian homes....
The three strange yoke-fellows were still toiling round the threshing floor; the sun, climbing to its meridian, contracted their shadows on the stone circle. Watched from my cool eyrie the geysers of thrown grain, shooting into the air every few seconds and then dissolving in a floating haze of chaff, seemed to encourage speculation on trifles. Those three-legged cooking pots that were worn as helmets.... Mr. Dimitrakos bears out Professor Kouyeas’ interpretation of Kakovouliotes by producing another obsolete nickname for the Deep Maniots: chalko-skouphides. This, at least, is plain: chalkos means brass, skouphi means a cap, a small hat: thus, the Brasshats. I don’t know why, but somehow I felt unconvinced by this derivation, in spite of the authority of both sources—Dimitrakos and Kouyeas—and the impeccable Maniot endings to their names; but, a little while ago, in the Travels of Thomas Watkins, M.A.—a series of letters published in 1792—I suddenly came on the following phrase: “The Magnotti”—Maniots—“free and independent as the ancient Spartans (are) still wearing on their heads iron helmets in which they occasionally boil their black broth...” This cross reference, from a source unknown to either of my authorities, convinced me in a flash—and will do so until it is competently refuted—that they are right, that the district has taken its name from its inhabitants, not vice versa, and that the Bad Mountains and the Land of Evil Council are really the Country of the Cauldroneers. So it is helmeted like three-horned Vikings that one must conjecture their sallies through the imaginary snow, their descents with fierce slogans and bared yataghans on the invading columns of the Seraskier and the Kapoudan Pasha!
The famous “black broth of the Lacedaemonians” crops up in nearly all the old travel books. It is identified with all sorts of things, of which the oddest is coffee (essentially a Greek thing, in the eyes of early travellers), which was first drunk in England in the seventeenth century, to the wonder of all, by a learned Cretan called Nathaniel Canopus who was at Oxford—at Balliol—for ten years until he was ejected under the Commonwealth in 1648. A still more far-fetched explanation of coffee is produced by Pietro della Valle in 1615. It was, he says, the magic potion nepenthe, the secret of which was learnt by Helen when she was in Egypt with Menelaus after Troy fell. It took away all pain and brought on drowsiness. It was this, in the fourth book of the Odyssey, which Helen slipped into the wine of Telemachus and his companion to send them off into a happy and dreamless sleep.
I have never seen one of these three-legged cauldrons. Cauldrons and saucepans in Greece are usually legless with flat bottoms, quite unsuitable for their dual Deep Maniot rôle. They must have died out, like so many small adjuncts of the past. (How many pogo-sticks still collect the dust in English attics? There are probably not more than a score of penny-farthing bicycles still in existence.) There is no evidence when these cauldrons became obsolete.... Another custom which has vanished without trace is the smoking of chibooks, those long slender Turkish pipes of cherry-wood with little earthenware bowls and elaborate amber mouthpieces. In all the old prints and engravings of Greek life they play a great part. A chibook is as essential an attribute of the klepht as his karyophylia, and sometimes as long. They must have been awkward bits of property, especially for a guerrilla warrior. On visits of ceremony, they were indispensable. It is not too far-fetched or romantic to find something purely Homeric in the character of Greek hospitality. But the formalities of visiting are oriental; at least they are that hybrid achievement which we think of as “Turkish”: and, like many Turkish formalities, full of dignity and grace. It is not for nothing that when these tribesmen from Central Asia became static, their neighbours were the three most civilized races: the Persians, the Arabs and the Greeks. The other details of welcome survive intact: the spoonful of jam made from quince or whole grapes or morello cherries or rose leaves, the thimbleful of ouzo or raki, the little cup, iridescently cupola-ed with bubbles, of oriental coffee (or Spartan broth or a scruple of nepenthe?), the great gleaming glass of water, which is appraised and extolled by guest and host alike with the niceness of cork-sniffing claret experts. These were offered on trays by the eldest daughter, who would stand in silence until they were finished with her hands crossed on her breast. But formerly a sheaf of chibooks was brought in as well. They were carefully filled and lighted with chips of charcoal by two myrmidons (they were impossible to light alone), then, after the mouthpiece had been plunged into hot water, offered already smoking to the guest, who would take a few ceremonial draws before broaching the topic of his visit. In a prosperous Nyklian’s tower, all the smouldering pipe bowls, to save the carpet, were gathered on a brass tray in the centre, with the stems, two or three yards in length, radiating to the richly accoutred Lacedaemonians cross-legged round the walls on divans, with a pistolled priest among them, perhaps, and a couple of kilted pallikars seeking asylum in the free Mani from the Pasha-ridden Morea, and the Bey in his fur-trimmed robe; all fingering their beads in silence, lids peacefully lowered over the amber mouths of their calumets, preparing to broach the eternal themes of feud and piracy and rebellion. It is hard to fit Belisarius and Rollin’s Ancient History into this conversation piece; but, if we can, we must add a young philhellene traveller in a frieze jacket, with a sketch book and vasculum beside him, his forefinger marking the place in a pocket volume of Pausanias or Strabo as he puffs and chokes....
Variations on this scene continued—till when? Well into the nineteenth century. One may search for these pipes in vain in Adrianople or old Stamboul, let alone the cement villas of Ankara. A few still moulder in the Plaka and some of the islands. Yet I have seen them in use as everyday objects (a strange and solitary survival of time when the Ottoman Empire, running from the pillars of Hercules to the Gates of Vienna, embraced three-quarters of the Mediterranean) among Hungarian magnates. Zichys and Telekis and Esterhazys—commemorating after dinner in shooting boxes on the puszta and in Transylvanian castles the time, long before Belgrade was reconquered by Prince Eugene, when the Pest skyline still bristled with minarets,—would enshroud themselves in smoke from these long pipes. (They too, by now, must be minor casualties of the status quo.) It is fortunate, but peculiar, that the comforting narghileh, which is even more unwieldy, should have survived in all the old cafeneia of Greece; steaming and portentously gurgling at the end of its coil—a tube as flexibly jointed as the seated caterpillar which these things always conjure up—the little red coals burning aromatically through the toumbeki leaves from Ispahan.
There are two more lost fragments of corroborative detail which have mysteriously vanished without trace; at the other end of the Greek world, this time, in the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia which are now called Roumania. They are two kinds of headdress, both of them extraordinary and worn alike by the hospadars (voivodes or reigning princes) and the ministers and dignitaries of their little courts: the Great Boyars of the Princely Divans of Yassy and Bucharest.
Greeks, Roumanians, Turks and all foreign historians have been unanimous till recently in execration of these men, and, on the whole, wrongly; but that is not the point here. The important thing is that from the first decades of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the nineteenth, these two vassal thrones of the Ottoman Empire were occupied by Phanariot[7] Greeks or Hellenized Roumanian noblemen. Thrones were obtained through corruption and the princes’ reigns were brief, nearly always extortionate and oppressive and frequently cut short by the bowstring, the gallows or the block. Some were princes of outstanding qualities, some were worthless, a few of them unmitigated villains. But they were all of them civilized and cultivated men and their misdeeds are in a measure balanced by their service to the Orthodox religion, by the encouragement they gave to both Greek and Roumanian learning, and, towards the end of their heyday, by their share in the Greek War of Independence. All the opprobrium which, thanks to Voltaire and Gibbon, loaded the adjective “Byzantine”—ruthlessness, duplicity, greed, vanity, ambition, vice, superstition and cruelty—has overloaded the implications of “Phanariot.” With the strange processes of revision, “Byzantine” has now lost its pejorative meaning; and, by the same processes, the Phanariots are emerging less satanically with every passing decade.
The juxtaposition of “Byzantine” and “Phanariot” is not fortuitous. The old elective thrones they occupied, however perfunctory and, as it were, simoniacal their elections, were those of the old Roumanian Orthodox monarchs; of the Mushats, the Bogdans, the Bassarabs, of Stephen the Great, Michael the Brave, Peter the Cruel, Vlad the Impaler; and the atmosphere that surrounded these mist-enfolded Dacian-Latin potentates was half Byzantine, half Slav, a last faint echo in the snows beyond the Danube of the last faint whispers of imperial Byzantium.[8] This conjunction of influences was reflected, until well into the nineteenth century, in the astonishing titles of the various dignitaries at the courts of the hospadars—the Great Ban of Craiova, the Grand Logothete, the Grand Spathar, the Grand Vornic, the Vestiar, the Hetman, the Paharnic; and so on. Until the war, the stucco and chandelier-hung palaces of Bucharest and Yassy and the labyrinthine country houses of the boyars—stranded like great ships in the flat landscape—were full of portraits of these most peculiar figures. A few of them were painted by Liotard, who came to the east as the travelling artist of the wicked Earl of Sandwich. Their beards—blue-black or ashy white, very occasionally a flaming carroty red—descended in billowing cascades to where their tapering white fingers rested indolently on the jewelled hilts of ceremonial daggers stuck in their sashes. Necklaces of pearls and gems sometimes hung round their necks. The long thick folds of their braided and fur-edged caftans widened over their shoulders to a great expanse of fur. Dim under the varnish in the background, the blazons of Wallachia and Moldavia impaled each other under the ermine and the pearl-studded hoops of closed crowns. The lips that nested in those cataracts of beard were voluptuously curved and red as cherries or clenched in a hermetic and ruthless line and their thick linked eyebrows, arched over eyes that peered forth from under hawk’s eyelids, wore expressions of wickedness and arrogance and Olympian calm. Above, springing and expanding from hollow temples, the stupendous headgear climbed.
There were two different kinds. One of them, a smooth white which had faded on the canvas to the colour of a mushroom, ascended for several inches in a cylinder of equal diameter with the head of the boyar it was adorning and then began gradually to swell like a balloon, spreading at last to a huge pale globe two feet or more in diameter, the summit of the dome the best part of a yard from its wearer’s brow. The other was an enormous edifice of thick fur, roughly cylindrical, but with a perpendicular ridge down the front springing from just above those arched eyebrows (which the hat’s edge repeated in a widow’s peak of fur), and ascending almost as high as a guardsman’s bearskin, thickening slightly on its upward journey to end in a flat top at the summit of the ridge. A projecting bulge of coloured stuff—it was hard to discern whether this, the actual cap inside the fur cylinder, was velvet or silk—over-topped the rim of this amazing structure, which was sometimes still further heightened by a spreading aigrette nodding from a heavy diamond clasp. These elaborate achievements must have enlarged the stature of a medium-sized man to eight feet and turned a tall man into a titan.
What is the origin of these sartorial freaks? Not Turkish, certainly, as nothing similar appears among the wonderfully swathed pumpkin-turbans of the Turks—like the headgear of the Gentile Bellini portrait of Mohamed II and the still stranger garb of the janissaries (many were almost certainly inherited, after the fall of Constantinople, from the Byzantines)—in the museum in the Grand Seraglio. The huge Phanariot fur hat, the gudjaman, probably derives from Persia, Byzantium and Muscovy in equal parts: Slavonic fur covering those expanding cylinders worn by the Byzantine dignitaries on the bronze Filarete panels, depicting the retinues of John VIII Palaeologue, on the doors of St. Peter’s in Rome, and by the Byzantine warriors in Piero della Francesca’s battle between Heraclius and Chosroes on the walls of Arezzo. The Byzantine passion for strange hats, which also appears on Filarete’s doors, is well illustrated in the famous Pisanello medallion of John VIII: something resembling a cap of maintenance from which the crown, ribbed in segments, shoots upward like half a cantalupe melon. But the other Phanariot hat, that wonderful white sphere called the ishlik, is of the purest Byzantine provenance. There is a magnificent example, in the mosaics of the Kahrie Djami in Constantinople, on the head of Theodore Metochites, Grand Logothete to Andronicus II Palaeologus, who died in 1332. Engravings of Roumanian soirées in early Victorian times show, among the piped overalls, the frock coats and epaulettes of young men and the crinolines and Louis Phi-lippe coiffures of the ladies, the reigning prince and the great boyars still attired in these ancient Byzantine canonicals. Pillars of fur and brocade and jewellery, their headgear soars towards the elaborate plaster ceilings and the hanging lustres in monuments of plumed fur and in pale floating globes. Outside, in the snow-muffled streets, Arnaut bodyguards stamped to keep warm and strings of six Orloff horses from Bessarabia fidgeted with their postilions in the traces of splendid emblazoned sleighs driven by bulky Russian eunuchs from the self-castrating sect of the Skoptzi. In the eighteenth century Greek was the polite tongue, but in the nineteenth, as with Slav high life in St. Petersburg and Warsaw, French was the language of this strange nobility. (It remained so till World War II.) Educated at the Sorbonne, at the universities of Padua, Vienna or Moscow, or all four, they spoke several languages to perfection, and would spend their evenings discussing the writings of Chateaubriand and the poems of Vigny and Lamartine.
These obsolete sartorial baubles, of which under a century ago there must have been hundreds, have all vanished. The implements of ancient British beaker-men survive, but these have followed the three-legged helmet-cauldron, the chibook and the pogo-stick into non-existence. I have sought them in vain through the dust of many a Roumanian attic.
They, or rather their attendant associations, are not as irrelevant as they seem, for a number of these Greco-Roumanian boyars took part in the struggle for Greek Independence. One of them, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, the head of the Philiki Hetairia, even hoped to assume the throne of a Greece reconquered with Russian help. Another, Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, Byron’s and Shelley’s friend and the dedicatee of “Hellas,” was one of Greece’s first premiers. They were disliked by the fustanella’d klephts of Roumeli and the Morea and, in the Athens of King Otto when Greece was free at last, the rough native heroes resented the sophistication and the polished French of these strangers, their use of titles in a state which had banned them, their superciliousness and their European culture. They made them feel bumpkins. These two elements—the great guerrilla leaders, largely of simple origin in the mountains and islands, and the civilized Phanariots—were the dual components of Athenian society for many decades. They were incompatible to each other at first. But the breach diminished with time and was healed at last by the marriage of the son of Kolokotrones with a Phanariot princess Caradja, soon followed by the marriage of another Caradja to the beautiful daughter of the great Souliot hero, Marko Botsaris. The Phanariots, though socially exalted, have never attained, in the eyes of Greece at large, the supreme laurels which fell to the great generals and sea captains who played the leading rôle in Greek resurrection. But the two strains became interwoven and indistinguishable and formed the nucleus round which diplomacy, politics, the services, the professions, banking and foreign enterprise were to form Athenian society, which is fortunately one of the least exclusive, the most painlessly assimilative and, on the whole, the most scorchingly intolerant of pretensions in the world.
The sounds of feet coming up the ladder put to flight these musings on obsolete headgear and their sociological implications (“and about time too,” I can hear the reader murmuring). A section of the floor creaked open as my host’s head appeared through the trap door. He sat down with a sigh, laying aside his sickle to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He had a kind and friendly face with all the recesses of its bone structure scooped hollow by past illnesses.
“How is the work going?” he asked me.
“It’s going well,” I answered; untruthfully, for I had mooned the morning away pleasantly without writing a word.
The conversation drifted inevitably to politics. Like most of the Maniots, he was a firm Royalist. I pointed to the poster of M. Petro Mavromichalis and asked if he had voted for him.
“Yes,” he said, “but I think we ought to change our deputy. The government is always promising to build a road here and it never gets done.”
The vision of a metalled highway snaking through the hills appeared; blocked by a column of motor-lorries, each of them loaded with a howling menagerie of wireless sets for the silent Mani. I silently heaped blessings on M. Mavromichalis’ head. I asked him who he would prefer to represent the constituency: it was sad to contemplate this uprooting of traditional allegiances. He looked surprised. “Who? Why, Kyriakos Mavromichalis of course, his brother. Who else?”
[1] Put forward by Prof. Kouyeas of Athens University and quoted by Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis, op. cit.
[2] George Wheler in 1675, A Journey into Greece.
[3] The discoverer of both the sandwich and the islands.
[4] Cornelius de Paneo.
[5] This village, largely inhabited by shepherds who are semi-nomadic between there and the Preveza area, also produced the poet Krystallis.
[6] Tourloti is a dialect corruption of the word “Troulloti” which means “cupola-ed.” Troullos is a cupola, the same word as trullo, which southern Italians apply to those strange beehive dwellings cohering in scores in the Apulian villages of Alberobello and Casarotonda near Bari, the old Byzantine capital of Magna Grecia. They are one of the minor phenomena of architecture and the only things that I have seen at all similar are the beehive shepherd huts high on Ida and the White Mountains in Crete.
[7] From the Phanar quarter of Constantinople, round the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the spiritual headquarters of all Orthodox Christianity, and the centre of all the financial and intellectual life of the Sultan’s Greek subjects.
[8] The Cantacuzene family—the most nearly verifiable of all surviving Byzantine dynasties—took root and reigned in Roumania long before the arrival of the Phanariots, thus escaping the tainted adjective. The most representative of the Phanariots are the families of Ghika (of southern Albanian origin), Mavrocordato and Soutso (from Chios), Ypsilanti and Moruzi (both of whom originated in the fallen Comnenian empire of Trebizond) and Mavroyeni from the Aegean and Rosetti (reputedly of Italian origin). Cantemir the historian and the Callimachi family were Hellenized Moldavians and the Caradja are presumed to have come from Ragusa in Dalmatia. The Rakovitza, Sturdza, Stirbey, and Bibesco families were of Roumanian stock. But all through the eighteenth century Greek was the court language, and it was Greek Constantinople that shed its glow on their little provincial capitals. All of them possessed immense estates in Roumania, many of which existed till a few years ago.