THE WINE that washed down this late and long-drawn-out second breakfast seemed to attach wings to our heels. We flew along the side of the rocky coast at mercurial speed, in spite of the sun’s ascent.
There is a lot to be said for starting the day like this. In dashing households in many mountain villages the day begins with a minute cup of Turkish coffee, a doorstep of black bread, a handful of olives, hunks of rank and excellent goat’s cheese, and a glass—or several glasses—of fiery distilled spirits. In Epirus, northern Thessaly and Macedonia, slugs of bracing tsipouro often usher in the day and in Crete, where the practice is more widespread, down, each one at a single swashbuckling gulp, go several glasses of tsikoudia, the Cretan raki distilled from the stalks, skins and pips after the grape-treading, sometimes deliciously flavoured with crushed mulberries. Each shot drops to its destination with the smoothness of a tracer-bullet and the somnolent organism is roused with the same shock as that of an oyster under the lemons, summoning startled gasps from the novice and making his eyes leap from their sockets. “One more,” says the flask-wielding host, “just to kill the microbe. Dia na skotosome to mikrovio.” And so the gnawing worm of death’s sister, sleep, is scotched anew each morning and up one starts ready to tackle whatever the day may bring with the optimism, the vigour and the dauntlessness of a giant. There is a great deal of ritual drinking-terminology and singing and inter-weaving of toasts in Greece, and it is in Crete that they reach their most elaborate flowering. Often it is an antiphony of challenge and response. “May we become as rich as the Sultan Amurath!—Sta Mourátia mas!” they cry in some villages on Mount Kedros, and “May the All-Holy One scour the rust from our guns.” It is only there that one hears, with great astonishment, on the morning after a long dionysiac vigil, an exact echo of a certain well-known English phrase: “Of the dog that has bitten you,” they say, “throw in some of the fur.” “Sk′yli pou se dángose, vále ap’ to malí tou.” And then comes the soft glou-glou of pouring fur....
There is a tendency to drink in unison after a concentric clink of glasses, a solitary drinker usually giving a ritual tap to the glasses standing nearest. How often have I heard this clinking explained: how the fifth sense of hearing, not only taste, sight, smell and touch, must be requited! Then, purely for fun, there is drinking kalogerístika—monkishly: grasping the little tumblers in the palm of their hands the drinkers muffle the impact of glass on glass by only touching knuckles (“so that the abbot won’t hear us”). Not that there is any need of secrecy in Greek monasteries. Many of them are famous not only for their vineyards and their lavish hospitality, but for the jovial and Friar Tuck-ish capacities of the brethren. There is a rare and charming Cretan custom of drinking “like little frogs”—ta vatrachákia, it is called or, in the deeper dialect, t’aphordakákia. Two drinkers hold their glasses lightly by the upper rim furthest from them, and swing them gently together so that the bottom edges intershock, bounce away and strike again with a series of light impacts that mimic a soft and far-away croaking. It is repeated thrice. “Vrekekekex!” murmurs one. “Koax!” the other; and at the third time both murmur a final “Koax!” in unison. Wine glasses are never filled more than half, on the principle that one drinks more that way; it goes down in one gulp and needs restocking at once.
Some of the old “black” and amber-coloured wines of Crete are followed next day by an aftermath which is only to be allayed by a glass or two of the same fur and the delicious frothing egg-and-lemon soup which is the pan-Hellenic nostrum for hangovers. Retsina, however, tipped into the little tumblers from carafes, or better still, from chipped blue enamel mugs which are replenished again and again from vast barrels, seems to possess the secret of inducing high spirits and rash and uninhibited conduct with no sad retribution, as though a plenary absolution accompanied every gulp. This, for those lucky enough to like it as I do, places retsina high on the list of the manifold charms of Greece. Nobody seems to know when the Greeks first treated their wine with resin. Certainly it was known in Byzantine days. Some place its origin much further back, basing their assumption on the pine-cone, which, in old sculptures, sometimes tops the vinewreathed thyrsus of Dionysius. It is assumed that the taste began fortuitously with the custom of caulking the leaks in barrels and wine skins with lumps of resin. The vine- and pine-clad slopes of Attica are its true habitat, but many other regions are famous. Perhaps the two most celebrated sources, both for drinking on the spot and for export to regions and islands less generously blessed, are the ancient town of Megara, half-way between Athens and Corinth, and Karystos in Euboea. Bad retsina can be excruciatingly nasty; the best—and Athenian tavernas, except for a few which remain unswervingly reliable, show an alarming tendency to degenerate in this matter—is incomparably good. It should never, to my mind, be drunk outside Greece, for one of its secrets is drinking it with unstinted abundance. It seems to have an alliance with the air in the promotion of well-being. Many people think that it bestows the gift of bodily health as well; a belief I accept at once without further scrutiny. A year after the war I told Mitso, a boatman in Poros I hadn’t seen since 1938, that he looked browner, haler and younger than ever.
“It’s the air,” he said, pausing over his oars, “and not only that. What with the brine outside and the resin in, it pickles us. If I died now and you were to bury me, I wouldn’t start stinking for ten years or more.”
Such themes occur often in his conversation. When I saw him a month ago on the way to Hydra, he said: “Why not stay in Poros? There’s nothing but bare rock on Hydra. Why, they say they even have to bring earth from the mainland when they want to bury anyone....”
* * *
The hill-side over which we sped, charioted by Bacchus, was utterly bare. Scarcely a thistle, not a trace of thorn or cistus, no withered stalk of asphodel, not even those onion-like bulbs of the bitter sea-squill which punctuate the sternest terrains with dark green explosions, jutted through the rubble; nothing, indeed, all day, but the turmoils of prickly pear running amok along the empty village lanes. We passed an isolated house which had fallen into ruin, and Vasilio told a macabre tale that admirably corresponded to the insanity of the landscape. Not long ago, she said, a boy from a nearby village, married for a year but incensed and goaded by his mother about some hanky-panky in the payment of the dowry, burst into this very house and murdered his father-in-law. He was promptly arrested, whereupon the bride, abandoning her newly-born child, sought out her husband’s father, killed him with an axe, decapitated the corpse and flung the head down a steep slope. Vasilio described the bounces with loops of her forefinger. The bride was arrested too, and the upshot was still sub judice. Far-away mountains are rich in these fierce eclogues.
* * *
What a powerful link god-relationship is! Koumbariá! A Koumbaros[1] is anyone who has stood sponsor, as best man or godfather, at a wedding or a christening. The link is considered as close as blood-relationship, and it links the families concerned with an indissoluble tie.
Thus, when we descended the steps and passed through the arched doorway of one of the few houses of Kypriano, a minute un-towered hamlet that only a few yards of pebble separated from the sea, our pretensions to hospitality were backed by the fact that Vasilio’s family and the newcomers who suddenly surrounded us in the dark living-room were bound in this manner. Tall figures unlashed our stuff from the mule and soon, after farewells, I watched Vasilio zigzag up the slope, whacking the great mule in the direction of a village further inland to which she was taking the two sacks of corn.
The koumbara was a widow, a tall grey-eyed woman of amazing distinction and the remnants of great beauty. Eight of her nine sons, ranging from the ages of five to twenty-four (one was away on his military service in Macedonia), lived with her under the same roof. Lying half asleep in a late siesta, I watched their random comings and goings. The youngest was huddled on the steps with his head in his fists listening raptly to his immediate senior reading aloud to him from an Epirote tale, The Brave Katzandónis, Veli Ghega and Ali Pasha of Yanina, one of many blood and thunder pamphlets, the equivalent of Robin Hood, which, with Karaghiozi, Nasr-ed-Din-Hodja and the Arabian Nights, are the staple reading among children in the country. Every so often, with a sound of bare feet on the earthern floor, another son would appear from the sunlight lugging a sack of newly threshed corn or with a fish, fresh-caught and hanging Tobias-like from his fist, and ask for food. Their mother would then lay aside her distaff and spindle, sticks would crackle as small fry were poured into the pan, a ladle full of lentils was doled into a tin plate and a titanic wedge of dark bread was sawn from a loaf like a millstone. Taking the tight clump of thorn from the neck of the bulbous jar—it is placed there as a barrier against thirsty flies—she would fill a tumbler, throw the water out into the sunlight in a deft and glittering arc, wipe it with her apron and fill it up again. Putting the bright cylinder by his plate, she would say “Eat, my child,” and pick up her spinning things again. The entire family was so good-looking and of so patrician a bearing that they resembled a rustic aristocratic matriarch surrounded by a brood of dukes. From my somnolent vantage point, sheltered on the ledge running down one side of the room, it was a great pleasure to watch them, their mother especially. Every gesture was performed with a deftness and ease and lack of fuss that amounted to very high style indeed and her conversation with her sons had a bohemian note of affectionate banter and irony. It was punctuated with laughter on either side, a not unusual relationship between women, especially widows, with a number of high-spirited sons.
The house was a large, empty barrel-vaulted room half sunk below ground level. It was blessedly shadowy and cool after the clanging afternoon. One could see the glare through a deep-walled window sub-divided into smaller squares by thick iron bars and through a blazing half-circle at the far end under an archway at the top of a flight of shallow steps. The healing penumbra, the glaucous and stone-walled emptiness transformed the room into an empty underwater cavern, a haunt for tritons. It was only empty in the Western sense; free, that is, of the immovable archipelago of furniture with which European rooms are encumbered; except for the invariable great loom as unwieldy and rooted as a fourposter bed. Otherwise tables, chairs and stools are tidied away when not in use. The floor space is a blank agora in which any newcomer looks queerly isolated and momentous, the protagonist of a few seconds’ drama until he subsides on the stone ledge. For the household gear is centrifugal; it gathers round the walls and piles up in corners, under the twinkling ikon lamp, the photographs of King, Queen, Plastiras or Venizelos or the faded tuppence-coloured posters of Petrobey and his klephts or fireman-helmeted Kolokotrones or scimitar-wielding Athanasios Diakos and his kilted pallikars at grips with turbaned and blaspheming Turks. These pictures are absorbing. Often they depict cavalry charges in the Balkan wars or a ferocious evzone actually burying his teeth in a kalpacked and moccasined Bulgar green with panslavism and wickedness and fright. They have recently been joined by a crude and magnificently uninhibited crop of reconstructions of the glories of 1940 in Albania: evzones again, this time bayoneting bersaglieri, who are always (as indeed they were) on the run. Hoisted on hill-tops by sword-wielding officers, the blue and white Greek flag is blown taut by the wind of war and the whole battlefield—Koritza, Tepeléni, Argyrokastro or Premeti—is plumed, as though by an irregular bed of crimson tulips, with exploding shells. Among them on the wall, touchingly preserved under glass but dark with dust nevertheless, one can often see the white petals of old marriage crowns intertwined, and, pinned across calligraphic citations, faded medal ribbons from one or other of Greece’s tragically frequent wars. Here, too, are vast cloudy enlargements, retouched with sepia, of daguerreotype ancestors: coiffed women and bearded men with yataghan-stuffed belts and guns across their knees, and more recent émigré relations: plump figures in straw boaters, high stiff collars, bright tiepins and macassared hair and moustaches, signed by photographers in Chicago, Detroit, Alexandria, Khartoum, Odessa or Dar-es-Salaam.
The walls of this dim chamber, except for the twinkle of a solitary ikon-lamp, were almost bare of pictures. But the edge of the floor, which was trodden as hard as marble, was a forest of paraphernalia. A cooking-oven and a bread-oven tunnelled subsidiary caves into the walls, three great grooved amphorae and a congeries of smaller jars crowded together. Oars, a small mast dislodged from its socket, fishing rods and bamboo poles stood in sheaves. There were great extinct acetylene flares fitted for a boat’s prow, and glass-bottomed metal cylinders, both of them for gri-gri fishing; loops of net, cork- and gourd-floats, rolls of twine, patched sail cloth and unshipped rudders; various baskets and maze-like osier fish traps and a couple of rusty anchors. This maritime apparatus mingled with mule saddles and harness, sieves and sacks of corn just threshed and winnowed. There was chopped wood and thorn-faggots for kindling. A ploughshare, spades, sickles and adzes were assembled like an arsenal of burglars’ tools for extorting a livelihood from the iron-hard Mani. Long tridents and fish spears for sea quarry, two double-barrelled guns for quadrupeds and avifauna and a rifle for bipeds lent against or hung from the walls. Ropes of onions and garlic and of dried tomatoes, threaded and strung for making that dark russet sauce called belté, dangled from the beams. Various sons, two dogs and a number of cats and hens in ones and twos pecking jerkily indoors after dropped wheat grains and now and then an enormous lop-eared nanny-goat, wandered in and out. Husks of chaff floated in the shadowy air and the warm and dusty smell of the wheat and the tang of brine told of a hard, amphibious life. The water’s edge was only a few yards away and the faintest splash was captured and magnified by this concavity as though every so often the slow summer sea were rippling through the house. Through sleepy lids I watched my hostess spinning; her left hand pulling and twisting a thin thread from the hank of wool on the end of the distaff she wore tucked into the top of her apron, the gyrating spindle sinking floorwards from her nimbly flickering right forefinger and thumb and then slowly rising again like a slow-motion yo-yo. She looked a beautiful, sardonic but benign underwater potentate. It was plain that the door was never shut except in winter, for two swallows’ nests hung among the beams and vaulting in the dark nether end of the room. A swish and a flutter marked their exits and their entrances and a momentary breeze from their wings would brush one’s cheek or forearm.
* * *
It has been said that the Mani is, poetically, the least fertile area of Greece. One exception to the Maniot sterility in folk poetry—the dirges—has been discussed. But there is also a single exception—a modest one, it is true—to the general lack of formal poetry. It is only formal, really, in the sense that the author’s name is known: The History of the Whole Mani, its Customs, Villages and Produce, by Nikitas Niphakos. It is written in the “Political” metre, the usual peasant metre, that of nearly all klephtic ballads. It is so called, not from its contents but because the origin of all Greek fifteen-syllable-line poetry—a decapente-syllabic heptameter with a feminine ending—is attributed to Constantinople, the Polis or City. This verse-scheme has been the vehicle of some of the greatest of “modern” Greek verse—The Epic of Digenis Arkitas, for example, in the Middle Ages, the Erotokritos in seventeenth-century Crete, and in modern times The King’s Flute by Palamas; but it is prone in careless hands to degenerate into banality and tedium. The tradition is so instinctive that any Greek, literate or illiterate, seems able to turn it out as faultlessly and easily as breathing. It is as natural and indigenous to modern Greece as the hexameter must have been to the Greece of Homer. No doubt the shift of tonic stress, a process as imperceptible as soil erosion, which occurred in the early centuries of the Christian era, accounts for this important vernacular change.
Little is known about the author of the 385 lines of this poem. Nikitas Niphakos came from the village of Mília not far from Leuktra and the point where our Maniot journey began. He is presumed to have lived approximately from 1750 to 1810. Professor Kouyeas thinks, on good grounds, that he was captured, while still a boy, by a Moslem-Albanian expedition into the Mani; that he escaped and fled to Bucharest, the capital and throne of the Phanariot Greek hospodars of Wallachia, where he probably learnt to read and write. He probably returned to the Mani during the reign of Zanetbey Grigorakis, who reigned from 1782 to 1788. (The praise of this celebrated Bey is laid on so thick that it is fair to assume that Niphakos was one of his clients.) His poem is little known either inside the Mani or out—deservedly perhaps, for it has no great poetical value. But it is of considerable linguistic interest; it is studded with Maniot dialect words, some of them already obsolete. Yet it gives a fascinating picture of Maniot life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a picture, alas, which would corroborate the darkest reports of Western strangers. It is full of regional Maniot prejudice. He cracks up the Lower Mani but, rather oddly, has not much good to say of the Outer where his own village lay. But it is the Deep Mani that catches it hottest. He seems to have put the poem about, in the first instance, himself. Col. Leake came across a manuscript in Mistra in 1810. There have been others since, all slightly different. When we were in Areopolis, I got permission from the kind gymnasiarch there to consult the great Greek Encyclopedia[2] in the library of the Lycée, and came across a copy of the poem there, and laboriously copied it out.[3]
After supper that night we sat about talking on the steps under the archway, half in lamplight, half in moonlight: the submarine koumbara, her two guests and her assembled brood of amphibians. They were a delightful, handsome, easy-going lot, full of charm, intelligence and fun. We had been talking about dirges, and the koumbara sang us a few fragments she remembered from her childhood. I asked them about Niphakos. They had all heard of him but none had actually read the poem. When I said I had got a copy, they suggested that I should read it out loud. I had copied it in a hurry without paying much attention to the content, so I fished out my notebook and confidently let fly.
“A great mountain stands on the Morea,” it begins, “in the region of Laconia. The ancient Spartans called it Taygetus, and the Maniots, the Far Away Elijah.[4]... Other smaller mountains lie between it and Cape Matapan. To these mountains fled the ancient Spartans, the same men who to-day are known as the Maniots.”
“That’s right,” said Petro, the youngest but one of the sons. “We’re ancient Spartans.”
“... To save their lives and their freedom they built villages and strong places in the mountains. It was not in their nature to be slaves, but to live as free men. No mules they. The poor lads were true Spartans, free-born and well-skilled in battle. That is why they built hamlets and refuges in the mountains, and there they live in freedom to this very day.” So far so good.
“Kalá ta graphei,” said another son. “He writes it well.”
Niphakos goes on to enumerate the villages of the Mani: “Seven and ten and a hundred are the villages held in freedom by their arms.” Considering the geography of the region, it is an enormous number. All travellers, and notably Lord Carnarvon in the 1830’s, have commented on the proliferation of villages and the teeming population in this desolate region. (Many of the villages are almost empty now.) The inhabitants had, quite literally, fled there at one time or another and taken root, for freedom’s sake. The poverty of a region so heavily populated was the source of all the Mani’s troubles.
There is no further mention of history—two thousand years are skipped with enviable nonchalance—until the tangle of contemporary politics. The bulk of the poem is a harmonious concatenation of the names of the hundred and seventeen villages of the Mani, region by region. Here and there a region or a village is singled out for qualification. “The Lower Mani, rich in cotton and vallonia acorns”; “Korogoyianika stands like an unhappy bride”; “Layia,” I was glad to see, is “beautiful and holy”—largely perhaps because the Greek word for holy (áyia) is such a splendid rhyme. Likewise, Skoutari “shines among the other hamlets like the moon” (fengari). Again, Korea is as cold as the north wind (vorea). “The Outer Mani produces plenty of silkworms and oil and acorns.” “It has terrible gorges and wild ravines, wonderful hamlets and powerful villages.” “An-drouvitza, with all its birds, lies in the foothills of Far Away Elijah.” “On the cape is Kelepha with its castle; but it is a desert and has nothing else.” “And so I come to Arachova the far-renowned, hidden away in a witch-haunted valley; and then to the paths of the wolves, the land of sheep- and goat-rustlers and of night walkers. I will name the villages of the eaters of stolen goat’s meat, the hole-dwellers and mule-thieves and the murderers of flocks.” He does so. But further on lies “Kastanitza, well known in many a battle and feared by the Turks, drunk though the villagers be.” The captaincies and the captains thereof are catalogued like a genealogical passage out of the Pentateuch.
At last we come to the great Zanetbey, “hero and wonder, father to orphans and firm pillar of his fatherland. He should be the first leader and bear the princely rank through all the confines of the Mani, even in all Laconia. He is great and hospitable and a mighty warrior. He does things that no one else in the Mani can do. I tell of things I have seen, not lies. A bell rings in his palace for the banquet in the evening and whoso hears it may go and eat at his table and come away filled. He loves strangers and the poor...but the evil he chases away and pounds to powder, like salt. So young and old obey him, and all the captains too. All except one, the lord Koumoundouros, who ravages his regions like a hawk and treads down the poor and steals their goods and eats their food and makes all the region sigh. He longs to hold sway over all the Mani, to take its silk away and seize its oil.” When he took troops and ships to attack Androuvitza, the effect was Biblical: “The brave youths answered him, dreadful captains went out before him. They met at Skardamoula, there they answered him, there they pounced on him like lions. One man repelled a hundred, and a hundred drove back a thousand. They stripped their enemies bare and sowed them to the winds. He (Koumoundouros) fled across the country in sore fright with his troops. On the shore he left the black Seraskier[5] and his army trembled until they were safe in the ships. And from his great fear he filled his breeches full.” This passage was a great success. “That’s what the Lower and Outer Mani are like in arms. They devour their foes and would lose themselves for their friends.”
A long plea for civil peace comes next. Let murders, piracies and robberies cease, let no more houses and churches be destroyed. All the disorder springs from carelessness and illiteracy. Disorder provokes battles, robberies, murder, destruction and upheaval. If only there were a few schools! If only the priests would lead and teach their flocks! If only the lowly would order themselves humbly before the great! “I indeed,” this passage concludes, “am deep in bitterness. I depart in sorrow, and I leave your [my?] homeland overshadowed with evening.” I paused.
“Yes, but what about the Deep Mani?” everyone cried.
“We’re just coming to it. Here we are.” I cleared my throat. “The Deep Mani.”
“With bitter sorrow in my soul and misgiving in my heart I enter...the land of Evil Council.” This sounded unpromising, but it continued harmlessly enough with a list of the twenty and six villages and hamlets of the Deep Mani. (Oddly, and perhaps just as well, there was no mention of Kypriano, the village where we were sitting.) Tsimova (Areopolis) is the first on the list, “and there rules the captain, one Mavromichalis.” The poet speaks of “Mina and Kitta the many-towered, and Nomia too... Vatheia and Alika... The Deep Mani it is called. It is all the same and quails and Arabian figs[6] are their only fare. Of woods, trees or bushes there is not even one. There is nowhere to stand in the shade on the burnt hills. There is not a water-spring in the whole Deep Mani. Crops? Nothing but chickpeas and dried oats. The women sow them and the women reap and women scatter the sheaves on the threshing floor. On their unshod feet they grind them on the threshing floor and winnow them with their bare hands. Half-naked they load the grain on their backs, picking out the thick chaff lest it should harm the rest. And from the boiling heat and the burning of the sun their tongues hang out like the tongues of heatstruck dogs.”
“Po, po, po,”[7] interjected the koumbara deprecatingly here.
“Their hands and feet are horny and cracked, as tough as leather and hard as a tortoise’s shell. They grind away lamenting all night at the quern, pounding the grain at the handmill and singing dirges. Out they go betimes with their baskets, running to gather the droppings in the hollows and the places where the beasts go to drink at noon and to scatter their dung. Thither run the women and gather it up for fuel to cook their breadflaps on. There you see them, whiter than kourounes and more slovenly than pigs, for they knead the cattle droppings with their hands and spread dung-cakes in the sun to dry (‘Po, po, po!’) and then take them home to cook the food of the widows and orphans.”
I was beginning to regret embarking on this poetical reading. I looked up in some trepidation, and was relieved to find them all smiling with amusement and interest.
“The hornwearer!” said one of the sons, and “What do you expect? He was only an Outer Maniot,” another; and a third, “Read on, Michali.”
“The men,” I began.
“Now for the men!” one muttered.
“The men are for ever stalking forth in search of plunder, seeking how they can outwit their neighbours. Hither and thither they go seeking whom they may rob, everyone lying in wait to slay someone. One stands on guard in his tower lest another should capture it, one hunts one, another another. Neighbour looks on neighbour, godbrother on godbrother, true brother on true brother as if each were Charon himself. One claims death in vengeance, another is the debtor.... One lies in wait for the brother, another for the son, another for the father, another for the grandfather and another for the greatgrandsire himself...yet another for cousin or nephew or indeed, any other kinsman. And when they find them, to Hades they send them straightway and they are held accursed till they are avenged. They neither change their clothes nor wash nor barber their chins till they have their vengeance. You can see them there all bearded and smothered in filth, armed to the teeth and wilder than vampires: old men of eighty and even more, all bristling with arms. Savage is their frown and hideous their glance; their eyes are red and their nails as long as the talons of savage beasts. Only when someone dies a natural death who should have been slain do they weep, someone from whom they might have wrung vengeance and consolation. When children are born they distribute pancakes to bring him luck, and everybody gathers at his door and fires off his gun. The widows and married girls gather...and cry: ‘Welcome! May he live and learn how to handle arms and wipe out all his foes!...’”
“That’s correct,” the koumbara said.
“When strangers stray into their regions by chance they turn them into godbrothers and bid them to table. But when the stranger rises to leave, they hold him back, talking in soft and cozening voices. ‘Godbrother,’ they say, ‘we have only your welfare at heart, please don’t misunderstand us. Quick! Off with that jacket with its hanging sleeves,[8] your waistcoat and sash and those baggy trousers too in case an enemy should steal them. Should an enemy strip you bare, should others rob you, great shame and ill-renown would fall on us! That is why, dearest godbrother, it is best to tell you outright that we would be happier if you left your fez and your shirt with us as well. And off with those slippers, they will be no use to you. Now, at last you are safe from all harm.’ Thus they strip the wretched stranger down to the bone and send him pitilessly on his way.”
This passage was accompanied by a crescendo of laughter, concluding in a happy outburst and murmurs which were half amusement and half censure laced with admiration.
I think the sheer impossibility of such a crime against the laws of hospitality—nowhere more binding than in the Mani as the reader will have gathered and as all the memoirs prove—placed it in the realm of pure clowning and robbed it of its sting, harming neither satirist nor satirized.
There is a tradition that Niphakos was beaten up somewhere in the Deep Mani, probably in Kitta, dia gynaikodoulies, for “woman-business”—improper suggestions or worse. His gall seems unstaunchable. “Woe betide, if ever, for her sins,” he goes on, “a sailing ship chances on these shores, be she French, Spanish, English, Turk or Muscovite, be she large or small—everyone wants his share, my son. They dice for shares on the backgammon board without another thought in their heads. They have neither shame before man nor fear of God; they have neither compassion for the poor nor pity for strangers. Such are their rawness and beastlike madness that they bear no likeness to humankind. They sully the earth they tread upon, the devil himself is their only companion. These are the men who have given the rest of the Mani a bad name. Men and women, old and young, none of them even smell like human beings. Even to eat with them were a pollution and a curse on the soul. No one should as much as bid them good-day, but fly from them as from a serpent.”
A parliamentary cry of “Oh!” went up.
“Only the men of Tsimova are any good—and even they are merchants on the outside, but really secret corsairs. May the winds blow them all away!” He winds up with a repetitious lamentation about the internal discord of the Mani, the savage customs, the illiteracy and the general declension from the great old days of the Spartans. “Ah! Ah! Would I could shed a river of tears to submerge my fatherland! Once it was alive and famous, now it is dead and befouled. My country, covered once with glory and renowned through all the kingdoms of the world, what has become of you? Where are all your lances and your bows?”
In view of the Maniot passion for arms, it is a singularly inappropriate and ill-conceived peroration.
It was bedtime, the night was warm and still except for the drilling of crickets and the intermittent note of the little owl. The moon shone almost as bright as day, and we were led by three of the sons, carrying pillows and blankets and a water-pitcher, to a straw-padded threshing floor on a ledge of rocks just above the house. The beautiful koumbara was still spinning on the descending steps, the moonlight sending her shadow and a long loop of silver across the dark floor indoors.
“Light sleep and sweet dreams,” she said, “but remember where you are. Better put your clothes under the pillow.”
“Don’t worry, mamá,” cried one of the sons, “I’ll get their coats and shirts, whatever happens.”
“I’ve got my eye on their shoes,” another said. “Never fear.”
We climbed up the rocks past an enormous clump of cactus. The pewter-coloured blades, that seem moonlit even at noonday, were shining now like a sheaf of platinum. A small figure—the youngest of the sons—stepped from its shadow with a stage moan, his eyes eerily ablaze with a most peculiar light. We all jumped, as we were intended to. The still, fiery eyes were hauntingly strange and enigmatic. Suddenly he seemed to pluck them from their sockets and then to place one in each of our hands. They were enormous glow-worms which he had somehow stuck on his eyelids. He skipped off downhill. A strange conceit.
[1] The word is originally the same as compadre in Italian and Spanish. In Crete, where the godbrother network is very strong (I know, because I am deeply involved in it through many font-side ceremonies during the war), the word synteknos is used for the baptismal tie. The relationship is sometimes used as a joke, in addressing total strangers—“Yassou, Koumbare.” It strikes a note of friendly collusion.
[2] This invaluable work, of which I at last possess the twenty-two enormous volumes, can be found and consulted in the Greek Lycée or the Demarcheion—Town Hall—of any decent-sized town.
[3] I have translated the bits which appear later from a version in the oft-mentioned book by Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis.
[4] Helios? Makrynas—the Far Away One—is the demotic name for the Taygetus as well as for the demon of the Mani. See p. 83.
[5] The Turkish commander-in-chief.
[6] Prickly pear.
[7] The modern Greek “Tk, tk, tk!”
[8] The embroidered Greek loose-sleeved jacket known as the fermelé, in Crete the yeléka or zopáni.