Mani Read online

  ...the whole of Constantinople seemed to be rising on a dazzling golden cloud and the central dome began to revolve as the redoubled clamour of the Byzantines hoisted it aloft. Loud with bells and gongs, with cannon flashing from the walls and a cloud-borne fleet firing long crimson radii of Greek fire, the entire visionary city, turning in faster and faster spirals, sailed to a blinding and unconjecturable zenith.... The rain had turned to hail, the wind had risen to a scream; the boat had broken and sunk and, through the ink-black storm, Strati was swimming for life towards the thunderous rocks of Laconia....

  ...The bottle was empty....

  The schoolmaster’s shadow darkened the doorway. “You’d better hurry,” he said, “the caique for Areopolis is just leaving.” We all rose to our feet, upsetting, in our farewells, a basket of freshly cut bait and a couple of tridents which fell to the floor with a clatter. We stepped out into the sobering glare of noon.

  [1] I have been to Coroni since, and I now own one of these stupendous vessels. “We build them bit by bit from the bottom,” the potter said, “just as a swallow builds its nest.”

  [2] The Traveller’s Tree (John Murray), pp. 145–9.

  [3] Oi Nyklianoi. D. Dimitrakos-Messisklis. This is invaluable to anyone who is interested in these regions and can read Greek.

  [4] There is nothing unusual in this. Many Greek names have changed over and over again, and the majority of them derive from paratsoúklia, or nicknames, as indeed have most names elsewhere in some degree. It may seem odd that these possible Palaeologi, all else being lost, should not have clung to the one imperial heirloom—their name—which still remained to them. But the same phenomenon occurs elsewhere in Greece. e.g. Byzantine names in Crete, like Skordyli and Kallergi (the followers of Nicephorus Phocas), or Venetian ones, like Morosini, Cornaro or Dandolo, survive in large numbers; but many of their bearers have allowed them to be replaced, even in recent generations, by nicknames which have stuck. There is the same random survival and erasure of great Frankish feudal names—i.e., of the Ghisi, the Giustiniani and the Sanudo, names which appear over shops—in the Cyclades. In Crete, nevertheless, in spite of these changes, their descendants have an unrationalized but very definite awareness of their august origins, and in one or two of the large mountain villages where traditions are strongest—Lakkoi in the White Mountains, for instance, and Anoyeia on the slopes of Mt. Ida—the mountaineers, though they may have only half a dozen goats to their name, possess a tribal pride and a knowledge of the part played by each family in Crete’s innumerable rebellions against the Turks and a feeling of hierarchy and Ebenbürtigkeit among themselves which is almost Proustian in its intensity. Every shepherd, though he may be unable to read or write, carries a mountain Gotha in his head. I was fascinated, a few years ago, by the quantity of coats-of-arms above scrolls bearing Cretan names which may be encountered by any sheepfold, on the walls, among those of other distinguished alumni, of the University of Padua; placed there when Padua, like Crete till 1669, was a part of the Venetian republic. In Crete itself, these insignia have vanished without trace.

  4. THE CITY OF MARS (AREOPOLIS)

  A BLUE cloud uneasy with electricity had swallowed the peaks of the Taygetus. The valleys rumbled with thunder and even a few phenomenal drops of rain pattered on the hot planks of the deck. But, as strangely as the cloud had spun itself out of nothing, it dwindled and shrank and finally, reduced to a static and solitary puff, vanished, exposing the western flanks of the Mani once more in all their devastating blankness. The Taygetus rolls in peak after peak to its southernmost tip, a huge pale grey bulk with nothing to interrupt its monotony. Nothing but a tangle of swirling incomprehensible creases of strata strangely upheaved. Every hour or so a dwarf township, queerly named, sprouted from the hot limestone at the water’s edge: Stoupa, Selinitza, Trakhila, Khotasia, Arfingia. Little towers, with heavily barred windows and circular turrets at the corners, dominated a narrow shelf of whitewashed quay. Village elders (among which there is always the black cylinder of a priest’s hat) sat over their coffee on the ramparts clicking their amber beads as they watched the pother of loading and unloading. Sacks of flour were piled among the capstans and lashed to the waiting mule teams which set off amid the shouts and whacks of their muleteers up labyrinthine torrent-beds for barren invisible hamlets in the hinterland.

  Trakhila was backed by a blessed dark screen of cypresses. (It is strange how certain trees can civilize the wildest landscape in the same way that a single spruce or Christmas tree can barbarize the most amenable in a trice.) Then the blinding emptiness continued for mile on mile over our port bow. Now and then, shadowless in the blaze, built of the surrounding rock and only with difficulty discernible from the mountain, a lonely house would appear. Once, on a high ledge, an ashy village was outlined by a thin kindly smear of green and later a castellated house stood by the water in a sudden jungle of unlikely green which turned out, as I strained my eyes, to be all cactus and prickly pear—Frankish figs as the Greeks call them—flourishing there with the same deceptive air of freshness with which a cascade of mesembrianthemum will run wild over a hill of pumice.

  This was all reflected in a sea which lay as flat as a looking-glass except for the ruffle of our wake. Yet among the wheat sacks the dolorous face of many a black-coiffed crone spelt sea-sickness. This is a peculiar convention: for land-lubbers, the sea equals seasickness, just as passing a church evokes a sign of the cross, a funeral, tears and torn hair, and the mention of war, a deep sigh. It is none the less genuine for that, and to exorcize this ritual nausea, the smell of a cut lemon is thought to be sovereign. Accordingly, they all held these golden pomanders to their nostrils.... At Trakhila a man got in who was so dark that, if he had been in the West Indies or Egypt one would have assumed that he had a strong dash of Negro blood in his veins. The Captain, at a suitable moment, whispered that the stranger came from the Deep Mani; many of them, he said, were like that, as the result of the old slave market of Vitylo, where the Berber and Algerian pirates, as well as the Venetians and the Maniots themselves, used to put up their captives for sale. Or rather, he cautiously appended, that is what they say.[1]

  Soon we were rounding a cape and sailing at a slant across a broad inlet that penetrated a few miles into the mountains. At the further end lay Oetylus (Vitylo or Itylo) and a jag of rock smothered by the sprawling ruin of a great castle. It was the Fortress of Kelepha, built here by the Turks as a temporary foothold on the edge of the Mani they had never managed to subdue. But we were heading for the southern shore of the gulf, the frontiers—at last!—of the Deep Mani itself. A derelict, shadowless little port and a group of empty houses bereft of life appeared at the bottom of steep olive-covered rocks. The engine fell silent, and, as we drew alongside, the roar of millions of cicadas burst on the ear. It came from the shore in rhythmic, grating, metallic waves like the engines of an immense factory in a frenzy—the electric rattle of innumerable high-powered dynamos whirling in aimless unison. There was not a breath of wind and on the quay when we left the caique’s cool awning the sun came stampeding down to the attack. We plunged for shelter into a slovenly kapheneion awhirl with flies. Lulled by their buzz and by the ear-splitting clatter outside we lay on the sticky benches for an hour or two, till the sun should decline a little and declare a truce.

  * * *

  The road to the upper world was a stony way ribbed with cut blades of rock to afford purchase for the feet of mules bearing cargoes up to Areopolis from the hot little port of Limeni. Each olive tree, motionless in the still air, was turned by the insects into a giant rattle, a whirling canister of iron filings. But as the stony angles of road levered us higher the clamour fell behind and the road, swept by a cool breeze, flattened across two miles of a bare plateau, dropping abruptly to the sea on the west and soaring eastwards once more in a continuation of the Taygetus; and there ahead of us, half castellated and with its roofs topped by a tower or two and the cupola and belfry of a little cathedral—lay th
e capital of the Deep Mani. The narrow streets of Areopolis were all round us.

  It had the airy feeling of all plateau-towns and in the direction of the Messenian Gulf the lanes ended in the sky like springboards. Inland the impending amphitheatre was fainting from its afternoon starkness into a series of softly-shadowed mauve cones. In these solemn surroundings the little capital held an aura of solitude and remoteness. But the sloping cobbled lanes were full of gregarious life as if the Maniots had herded there in flight from the cactus-haunted emptiness outside. Except for the Cypriots; they were the darkest Greeks I have ever seen. But whereas the Cypriots have soft and rather shapeless faces, the Maniots are lean and hewn-looking with blue jowls and rebellious moustaches. Their jet and densely-planted hair grows low on the forehead; it narrows their temples; and fierce bars of brow are twisted in scowling flourishes over black and wary eyes as if the brains behind them were hissing with vindictive thoughts. It was this fell glance that distinguished them, it occurred to me, from the Cretan mountaineers they might otherwise resemble. The eyes of the latter are open and filled with humour and alacrity. But, blackavized as they looked under their great hats, this cast of sternness and caution must be the atavistic physical trace of centuries of wild life, for their manners were the reverse. As we descended the cobbled streets, a murmur of greeting rose from the café tables in a quiet chorus uttered with a friendliness and grace that made one feel welcome indeed. (This is not usual in towns; even in villages it is the convention for strangers to greet first.)

  The names over the shops had all changed once more from the -eas ending of the Outer Mani to the -akos of the Deep: Kostakos, Khamodrakos, Bakakos, Xanthakos. At the bottom of the main street, a primitive cathedral, smaller than a small parish church in England, stood in a cluster of mulberry trees. It was entirely whitewashed and topped by a tiled Byzantine cupola supported on a drum of pilasters and arches and flanked by a snow-white tapering belfry. A course of moulding painted bright yellow girdled the ribbed apse. Studded with alternate pink rosettes and bright green leaves, it might have been the decoration of a Mayan Baroque church in the uplands of Gua-temala. Higher on the walls mauve pilasters supported a shallow colonnade enclosing panels of apricot, and clumsy six-winged seraphim spread their feathers in bossed and lumpy relief. Two childish sun-discs were surrounded by spiked petals adorned with currant-like eyes and wide grins, and the signs of the Zodiac sported across the whitewash in an uncouth and engaging menagerie. The decoration over the main door was a real puzzle: a large panel in the same lumpy relief was picked out in yellow and black and green. Tudor roses and leaves and rosettes and nursery-rhyme suns formed a background for two angels, one in fluted robes, the other in armour and buskins; and between them, supported by two small and primitive lions rampant, a double-headed eagle with wings displayed bore on its breast a complicated shield whose strange charges had so often been painted over that it was hard, even standing on a café chair, to make them out. The eagle’s two heads were backed by haloes, and something like the vestigial memory of a closed crown rested on the top of the shield while above the bird’s heads an imperial crown, like that of Austria-Hungary or the Russian Empire, spread its two mitre-like ribbons. A scroll underneath bore the date of 1798.

  The double-headed eagle, the emblem of Byzantium and, in a sense, of the Orthodox Church, is a frequently recurring symbol in ecclesiastical decoration; the formula of its representation on the walls and floors of churches has scarcely changed since the imperial eagle of Rome grew a second head when Constantine founded the Empire of the East in 330. But the heraldic elaboration of the plaster bird over the door bore no resemblance to it. For all its uncouthness, the design—the haloes, the arrangement of wings and claws and tail—echoed the sophistication and formalism of latter-day western heraldry. I wondered if it could have been copied, quite arbitrarily, from the arms on a Maria Theresa thaler as pure decoration; but except for the fesses (or stripes) in the dexter chief which faintly resemble part of the Hungarian arms there is no similarity. Could they be inspired by the arms of Russia? It was unlikely, because of the date, which was twenty years after Orloff’s abortive campaign in the Peloponnese, which effectively discredited Russia as the protectress of Orthodoxy. The only important event in local history for 1798 is the accession of Panayioti Koumoundouros as fifth Bey of the Mani. But, great local potentates as were the Beys, I have never heard that they adopted the use of arms. These emblems, with that date attached, seemed (and still seem) as problematical as an Easter Island statue in the Hebrides. I attach a faithful copy of this half-obliterated shield in case anyone can identify it and perhaps unearth a lost chapter of Maniot history.

  In the blue-green sky beyond the mulberry leaves a bright star was burning so close to the waxing crescent of the moon that it seemed to have invaded the dim perimeter, forming a celestial Turkish flag. Most unsuitably, when one remembers the Mani’s history.

  * * *

  Very little is known about this remote province in the rest of the country but the name of the Mani at once suggests four ideas to any Greek: the custom of the blood feud; dirges; Petrobey Mavromichalis, the leader of the Maniots in the Greek War of Independence; and the fact that the Mani, with the Sphakian mountains of Crete and, for a while, the crags of Souli in Epirus, was the only place in Greece which wrested its freedom from the Turks and maintained a precarious independence. This, too, was about the sum of my knowledge, amplified by the haze of rumours, which (as so few non-Maniot Greeks ever go to the Mani) riots unchecked beyond the Taygetus. This deviation from the main flow of Greek history has produced many divergent symptoms and, before going further into its remoter depths, it is worth looking at the things in the Mani’s past which have contributed to this idiosyncrasy.

  Its geographical seclusion, locked away beyond the mountains on the confines of Sparta, and the steepness and aridity of its mountains are the key to the whole thing. Its history was one with that of Sparta until the monarchy ended at the turn of the third and second centuries B.C., when the cruelty of the tyrant Nabis decided many of the Spartans to flee beyond the Taygetus and found, with the Laconian inhabitants already established in the peninsula, a shadowy Republic of the Laco-nians. This was the first of the many flights for asylum which helped to form the present Mani. Their liberties went unmolested after the Roman conquest, which happened a few years after. Later on, Augustus, out of gratitude for Laconian help in the defeat of Mark Antony at Actium, confirmed these rights, and their history was without event until the Republic of Free Laconians was dissolved by Diocletian in his reform of the provincial administration in A.D. 297. The uneventful, orderly life continued under Byzantium, except for a new contribution of Spartans in flight from the Visigoths of Alaric in 396. The invasions of Slavs and Bulgars in the centuries which followed sent fresh waves of refugees; worse still, a savage Slav tribe, the Meligs, established themselves in the peaks of the Taygetus.

  They were a terrible lot: strangers, talking a foreign tongue, who lived by brigandage. It is impossible to say how many they were, or how much they were absorbed into the Laconian stock of the Maniots. According to the only available sources, very little. Constantine Porphyrogenetus (who reigned at Constantinople at the beginning of the tenth century) mentions them in the book—a kind of geographical and diplomatic history and guide to the Empire—which he wrote for the instruction of his son Romanus. After describing them, he expressly states that the Maniots themselves are unpolluted descendants of the old pagan Greeks. St. Nikon the Penitent, who converted the area from paganism a few decades later, found these Meligs an appalling handful. Peak-wandering robbers who lived off loot, they were “led by the devil, entering houses by night like wolves...miserable and evil fiends, bloodthirsty murderers, whose feet were forever leading them into evil....” (The saint baffled them by enveloping them in snowy clouds, and once, when some had robbed a monastery, he discomfited them with two huge mastiffs. But he managed to convert them in the end.) This turbulent m
inority, often mentioned in the Chronicle of the Morea, with time quite lost their language and their tribal conscience and by the twelfth century they were, like the other Slavs, swallowed up without trace in the Greek Orthodox Christian world of the Peloponnese. Sealed off from outside influences by their mountains, the semi-troglodytic Maniots themselves were the last of the Greeks to be converted. They only abandoned the old religion of Greece towards the end of the ninth century. It is surprising to remember that this peninsula of rock, so near the heart of the Levant from which Chris-tianity springs, should have been baptised three whole centuries after the arrival of St. Augustine in far-away Kent.

  The Frankish conquest of the Morea in the thirteenth century, when the Mani became part of the feudal fief of the Ville-hardouins, brought another swarm of refugees from Byzantine Sparta across the mountains; the falls of Constantinople and Mistra and Trebizond, yet more. Meanwhile, the pacific nature of the old Maniots had been changing—a process which began, perhaps, after the Byzantine victory over the Franks at Pelagonia[2] in 1261, when Emmanuel Palaeologus reclaimed the south-eastern Peloponnese for the Empire. The Frankish conquest had been a walkover; but, when the final disaster of Turkish invasion came, the Mani put up a stiff resistance: contact with the warlike Franks, their military training, and the late Byzantine triumphs in the empire’s twilight had turned these descendants of the Spartans, quiescent almost since Thermopylae, into implacable warriors.

  Their exploits against the Turks became fabulous and their feats of arms under their Epirote leader, Korkodeilos Kladas—the first of many guerrilla heroes—are some of the most brilliant in Peloponnesian history. In fact, so formidable were the swords and guns and the rocks of the Mani that, apart from punitive inroads in strength and the construction of one or two massive fortresses in which garrisons were cooped for uncertain and dangerous sojourns, the Mani remained miraculously free. More contingents arrived in flight from other parts of the occupied Greek world; a few from Asia Minor, and, after the Turkish capture of Crete from the Venetians at the end of the long siege of Candia[3] in 1669, a heavy shower of Cretans, who founded villages with Cretan names and scattered the already complex Maniot dialect with Cretan words and constructions; so that, to the Maniot -eas and -akos surnames were now added many that ended with the Cretan -akis.[4] This steady influx of strangers and the struggle, among the rocks and cactuses, for lebensraum, launched the Maniots, old and new, on innumerable vendettas between rival villages and families and clans. A kind of tribal system grew up not unlike that of the Scottish Highlands before the ’45.