I HAD MEANT Mani, before I began writing it, to be a single chapter among many, each of them describing the stages and halts, the encounters, the background and the conclusions of a leisurely journey—a kind of recapitulation of many former journeys—through continental Greece and the islands. I accordingly made this journey, setting out from Constantinople, which seemed to be the logical point of departure historically, if not politically, for a study of the modern Greek world and then moved westwards through Thrace and Macedonia, south through the Pindus mountains, branching west into Epirus and east into Thessaly; south to all the rocky provinces that lie along the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, then eastwards through Bœotia and Attica to Athens. Next came the Peloponnese, the multiplicity of solitary islands and the archipelagos which are scattered over the Greek seas, the eastern outpost of Cyprus and the southernmost giant of Crete. I undertook this journey in order to pull together the unco-ordinated strands of many previous travels and sojourns in all parts of Greece, for I had begun wandering about this country and living in various parts of it a few years before the war. The war did not interrupt these travels though for the time being it altered their scope and their purpose; and since then they have continued intermittently until this very minute of an early morning on a white terrace on the island of Hydra.
This long and fascinating journey, like those which preceded and followed it, was a matter of countless bus-rides and long stretches on horseback and by mule and on foot and on inter-island steamers and caiques and very rarely, for a sybaritic couple of weeks or so, on a yacht. When I became static at the end of it the number of dog-eared and closely written notebooks I had filled up on the way was a forbidding sight. To reduce all this material to a single volume was plainly out of the question. The chief problem, if the results were to be kept within manageable bounds, became one of exclusion.
All of Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or a stream without a battle or a myth, a miracle or a peasant anecdote or a superstition; and talk and incident, nearly all of it odd or memorable, thicken round the traveller’s path at every step. It seemed better, therefore, in writing, to abandon the logical sequence of the journey; to avoid a thin spreading of the gathered material over the whole rugged surface of Greece; to attack the country, rather, at certain chosen points and penetrate, as far as my abilities went, in depth. Thus I could allow myself the luxury of long digressions, and, by attempting to involve the reader in them, aspire to sharing with him a far wider area of Greek lands, both in space and time, than the brisker chronicle of a precise itinerary would have allowed. It absolved me from perfunctorily treading many well-beaten tracks which only a guilty and dutiful anxiety to be complete would have made me retrace in print; there was now no need to furnish this free elbow-room with anything which had not filled me with interest, curiosity, pleasure or excitement. To transmit these things to the reader is one of the two aims of this book.
The second aim, both of this and other books to follow, is to situate and describe present-day Greeks of the mountains and the islands in relationship to their habitat and their history; to seek them out in those regions where bad communications and remoteness have left this ancient relationship, comparatively speaking, undisturbed. In the towns and the more accessible plains many sides of life which had remained intact for centuries are being destroyed apace—indeed, a great deal has vanished since my own first visits to Greece. Ancient and celebrated sites are carefully preserved, but, between the butt of a Coca-cola bottle and the Iron Curtain, much that is precious and venerable, many living mementoes of Greece’s past are being ham-mered to powder. It seems worth while to observe and record some of these less famous aspects before the process is complete.
These private invasions of Greece, then, are directed at the least frequented regions, often the hardest of access and the least inviting to most travellers, for it is here that what I am in search of is to be found. This is in a way the opposite of a guide book, for many of the best-known parts of ancient Greece, many of the world’s marvels, will be, perforce and most unwillingly—unless their link with some aspect of modern Greek life is especially compelling—left out. There are two thoughts which make this exclusion seem less unjust. Firstly, the famous shrines and temples of antiquity usually occupy so much space in books on Greece that all subsequent history is ignored; and, secondly, hundreds of deft pens are forever at work on them, while in this century, scarcely a word has been written on the remote and barren but astonishing region of the Mani.[1] Even with this thinning of the material it was impossible to prevent the theme from ballooning from a chapter into a fair-sized book; and there are many omissions. The most noticeable of these is the belief in vampires, their various nature and their origins, to which many pages should have been devoted. I left them out because so much space is already used up on Maniot superstitions. But fortunately, or unfortunately, vampires exist in other regions, though they are less prevalent than in the Mani; so I will be able to drag them in elsewhere as a red herring.
It only remains to thank the enormous number of Greek friends and acquaintances whose hospitality and kindness over many years has been of such help to me. I would like especially to thank Amy and Walter Smart for their kind hospitality in Normandy, and Niko and Tiggie Hadjikyriakou-Ghika for lending me the beautiful house in Hydra where most of this book was written.
—P.M.L.F.
Hydra, 1958
[1] A notable exception to this is the admirable chapter (Maīna) in Mr. Robert Liddell’s excellent book The Morea (Cape) which has recently appeared.