Mani Read online

  After the first reactions of awe and horror, the sight of the general ritual of misery is desperately moving and sad. The fact that custom has evolved a formal framework for grief takes nothing away from its authenticity or from the sting of pity it evokes. There was a deep wisdom behind the orgiastic and hysterical aspects of ancient religion; there is much to be said in favour of this flinging open of the floodgates to grief. It might be argued that the decorous little services of the West, the hushed voices, the self-control, our brave smiles and calmness either stifle the emotion of sorrow completely, or drive it underground where it lodges and proliferates in a malign and dangerous growth that festers for a lifetime.

  In these eastern funerals, it goes without saying that emotional and histrionically gifted women react in a more spectacular fashion than the rest. Tongues are sometimes clicked when funerals are discussed if a performance has been too obviously stagey, too shameless an exploitation of opportunity. Nearly everything in Greece has its balancing corrective. “Poor old Sophia was piling it on a bit,” one sometimes hears people say, “I couldn’t look at her....” The men of the family often appear uncomfortable while all this goes on; changing feet, turning their caps nervously round and round in their fingers, keeping their eyes glued to the ground with all the symptoms of male embarrassment at a purely feminine occasion. “May God pardon all his sins,” the men say, “May his memory be eternal,” and “Let the earth rest upon him lightly;” and no more. For death and burial are one of the few occasions in Greek peasant life when women come into their own and take over. After long years of drudgery and silence and being told to shut up they are suddenly on top and there is no doubt that for some of them, famous miroloyistrias, wailers with a turn for acting and a gift of improvisation, these are moments secretly longed for. They will undertake immense journeys to bewail a distant kinsman, or even, in extreme cases, people they have never met. Some of them are in great demand. “When I told old Phroso that Panayoti was dead and buried,” I once heard somebody observe with a wry smile, “she didn’t say, ‘May God pardon all his sins,’ but ‘What a shame I missed being there to wail for him.... Who did the miroloy? Old Kyriakoula? Po! po! po! She doesn’t even know how to start....’”

  But the dirges of the Mani are a very different matter from these unco-ordinated cries. They are entire poems, long funeral hymns with a strict discipline of metre. Stranger still, the metre exists nowhere else in Greece. The universal fifteen-syllable line of all popular Greek poetry is replaced here by a line of sixteen syllables, and the extra foot entirely changes the sound and character of the verse.

  The klephts were sleeping by the brook and all the world was sleeping

  Only the youngest of them all lay with his eyelids open.

  goes the ordinary Greek decapentesyllabic rhyming couplet. The sixteen-syllable line of a Maniot dirge goes like this:

  And when you reach the Underworld, greet all the Manis dead for me,

  Greet John the Dog and Michael Black, tell them we’ll soon be meeting there....[2]

  They are sung extempore by the graveside, and it seems that the Maniot women, like the unlettered mountaineers in Crete in the invention of mantinades,[3] have this extraordinary knack of improvisation. There are, of course, certain conventional phrases that recur (like the epithets and the unchanging formulae that cement the Odyssey) which give time for planning the next two lines. But anyone who has heard the speed with which the Cretans can turn any incident on the spot into a faultless rhyming couplet and each time with an epigrammatic sting in the second line (here again the slow embroidered repetition of the first line by the company gives the singer a few seconds for thought), will not find this hard to believe. The similarity of these miroloyia with the themes of ancient Greek literature, most notably with the lament of Andromache over the body of Hector, coupled with the fact that this region remained pagan till six entire centuries after Constantine had made Christianity the official Greek religion, and with the fact that they only exist in the Mani, tempts one to think that here again is a direct descendant of Ancient Greece, a custom stretching back, perhaps, till before the Siege of Troy.

  On the alert for dirges ever since arriving in the Mani, I had managed to collect a number of broken fragments people had remembered from past funerals, but nothing complete. It was rather a delicate thing and I felt ashamed to admit that I was hanging about like a vulture waiting for someone—anyone—to die and be buried and mourned over. I never saw a funeral there but I managed to find out a certain amount about how the dirges are sung. The chief woman mourner stands at the coffin’s head and begins the klama, or weeping. It is her duty to welcome all the guests in the order of their importance, and, if possible, with a compliment for each and a word of thanks for their attendance. Then comes the miroloy proper, and it unfolds, in spite of the semi-ecstatic mode of delivery, in a logical sequence of proem, exegesis and epilogue. As the dirge continues, the knees stiffen, the hair falls in disorder, the headkerchief is stretched across the shoulders, an end held in each hand, which work up and down with a sawing motion in time to the slow beat of the metre. The breast is struck, the cheeks clawed, and very often the miroloy accelerates into a gabble and finally into wails and shrieks without meaning. If the dead man has been killed in a feud the dirge may finish with terrible curses and oaths of vengeance: the dirge-singer often tears her hair out in dishevelled handfuls and flings it in the open coffin; just, in fact, as Achilles and the Myrmidons cast their severed tresses on the bier of Patroclus. When she fades out, another woman “takes” the klama; she begins with consoling words for the bereaved, continuing with compliments to the guests and an encomium of the dead. She in her turn dies down, another “takes,” and so the klama goes on. In the wailing over Hector, Andromache was succeeded by Hecuba and Hecuba by Helen. If the dead has left unprotected children, they are brought into the dirge like the fatherless Astyanax: who will look after them now? The tools of his profession are rhetorically invoked. If he were a shepherd, how will the ewes and the rams console themselves, what will become of his crook and his water-bottle? All, animate and inanimate, are shedding tears now for their lost master; if a mason, his bricks, mortar and trowel; if a soldier, his rifle and bayonet; a schoolmaster, his blackboard and chalk; a lawyer, his brief-case and rostrum and documents and red tape. At home, meanwhile, everything—tables and chairs, loom, handmill, olive press, saddles, the stones of the walls, the leaves of the olive trees, and the thorns of the prickly pear are all weeping together. What will become of them? Their sun and their moon have been taken away, the very breeze that ruffled the leaves. He was a lion, an eagle, but gentle as a lamb to his loved ones; but now he is in the dark world of shadows among his vanished kinsmen and ancestors, the dead warriors, the great-souled heroes of the Mani.... But it is not always an encomium. His faults are mentioned, and his deeds are assessed. Once, when an elderly village idiot with no relations was being buried, the women refused to sing a lament until at last, egged on by men who were shocked at this impiety, an old woman piped up: “Ah, poor John, how you stank when you were alive! Why is it you don’t stink now you are dead?...” Sometimes, in the inspired half-trance of the miroloy, the singer goes clean off the rails, drifting into personal reminiscence and old grievances, even into questions of politics, where, without any relevance, problems of taxation and economy, the fall of governments, the names of ministers and generals, the price of salt, the Bulgarian frontier, the need for roads or a new mole for the caiques to unload their flour—all in faultless sixteen-syllable couplets—weave themselves into the song, until the next mourner tactfully steers the klama back to its proper theme.

  The singers are unable, except for a few disjointed fragments, to remember what they have sung. If the dirge has been in any way remarkable, it is pieced together afterwards by the bystanders. In this way many have passed into general circulation and women intone them for generations afterwards as they spin and weave and press the olives. Collections of mi
roloyia, many of them of high poetical value, have been made and new ones are constantly emerging.

  I despaired of ever hearing a miroloy. But on our last day in Areopolis, drinking at a little tavern that sold excellent wine brought from Megara by the barrel, I fell into conversation with a flaxen-haired young man called George Chryssikakis. The talk was soon steered in the direction of my obsession. What, never heard a dirge? He would take me to see his cousin Eleni; she was one of the best miroloyistrias in the Deep Mani. He picked us up in the early evening and led us through a maze of lanes to a small white house on the edge of the precipice which sank to the Messenian Gulf. Here, surrounded by flowering herbs in whitewashed petrol-tins, his old aunt and his cousin Eleni were knitting under a pomegranate tree. His cousin was a handsome, plump young woman with apple cheeks and bright disarming eyes, quite unlike the sombre crone I had expected. Coffee and spoonfuls of jam were soon produced, and when we were settled under the russet bombs that grew on the branches, George made her recite half a dozen miroloya, all very beautiful. But nothing, at first, would make her sing. She laughed self-consciously, and said that singing a dirge without a death was like trying to get kefi[4] without drinking wine. “No, go on, Eleni,” George insisted. “I promised them. Sing them the one about the English airman. They’ll like that.”

  “The English airman?”

  “Yes, the poor fellow who was shot down at Limeni—just over there—during the war. We gave him a fine funeral and Eleni sang the miroloy: we were all very sorry for him.”

  She gave a resigned sigh, laid the sock she was knitting in her lap and folded her arms. After collecting herself for a few seconds she began slowly singing in a high thin voice. It was a strange, unseizable tune in a minor key and unspeakably sad and beautiful. Whether it was the music or the words, I soon felt a tightening of the throat and pricking behind the eyes and that odd crawling sensation of the nape and scalp that writers must mean when they talk of the hair standing on end. When she finished, her eyes were full of tears. I begged her to sing it again. I transcribe it here, translated word for word, so that nothing should be lost in the attempt to put it into verse:

  He shone among thousands like the sun,

  He was a moon among a hundred thousand,

  He was the bravest of all the officers.

  Such a bright star should never have fallen to the ground.

  It was more fitting for him to dine at a king’s table,

  To eat and drink with a company of a hundred,

  To be singled out from three hundred men,

  And when he walked abroad for a thousand five hundred to follow him.

  But it was his destiny to fall to earth here at Limeni

  When our allies flew to fight the barbarian Germans.

  The English pilot and his comrade fell into the sea here

  And the world and the peoples are weeping his sad death.

  One was washed ashore here, sorely wounded,

  And the word ran from village to village:

  “An Englishman is lying on the shore.”

  The whole world ran with bandages and lint

  To heal the captain’s woe and save his life.

  But the young man was dead.

  So they joined his hands and closed his eyes

  And now the whole wide world is weeping;

  Weeping for his dew-sprinkled youth

  Which was as clear as the cool waters of May.

  Bravery was in his step, his motion was that of an eagle,

  His face was that of an angel, his beauty like the Virgin Mary’s.

  His bravery lays us deep in his debt,

  For it was for the honour of Greece that he came.

  What will his mother and his sisters do without him?

  We arrayed our fearless captain like a bridegroom

  And men armed with guns bore him along the streets,

  And all the world brought wreaths of laurel

  So that this hero should be buried, as it was fitting,

  Among the olive trees of Saint Saviour.

  Let us pray the All-Mighty One and the All-Holy Virgin

  That a bomb may fall into the camp of the Germans

  And blow their fortress to broken pebbles.

  But let us not be touched or harmed

  And let the English fly safe home again.

  [1] The physical fact of death has no palliations or disguises. The sealed coffin of western Europe and the cosmetics and mummifications of North America are undreamed of. Every Greek child has heard again and again the agony of the death-rattle and seen the shrunken grey chaps, the fallen jaw and the closed eyelids of their elders. The coffin is left open until the last minute and only lowered into the grave when everyone has kissed the dead cheeks good-bye. The smell and touch of death are known to all, and dissolution too, for, three years after burial, the bones are ceremonially dug up to join those of the family. Even I have seen the bare skulls of two old friends; one in Crete, one in the Argolis.

  [2] In printed anthologies these eight-foot verses are often split up into two lines, divided after the fourth foot.

  [3] Improvised rhyming couplets in the ordinary fifteen-syllable metre of which each must be complete and epigrammatical, as they are sung antiphonally, or couplet after couplet, by each member of a company.

  [4] In this instance, kefi means well-being, high spirits. It has several senses.

  6. INTO THE DEEP MANI

  GEORGE had taken us under his wing. When we set out for the bus that was to carry us further south, there he was wrestling with us for our bags, insisting hotly that we were strangers and guests and that it would be a disgrace to him if we carried them even a step. “It would bring dishonour on our town,” he said. Again there was the little flutter of salutation as we threaded the lanes of Areopolis. In the space by the bus stop an old man was sitting with his hands crossed over the crook of his stick enjoying the afterglow.

  “See that old man?” our guide whispered. “Guess how old he is.”

  “Eighty? Eighty-five?”

  “He’s a hundred and twenty-seven.”

  The old man confirmed this through toothless gums and followed his affirmation with a complacent chuckle. The departure of the bus cut off any further talk, and we rattled across the cobbles knee-deep in poultry on the front seats with bunches of basil and marjoram and rosemary on our laps which Eleni the dirge-singer had sent as a leaving-present. We shook free of the outskirts of the town, and the remains of daylight were fading fast over the gulf below us in a smoky trail of amber and blue-green. A hundred and twenty-seven! He was born two years before Byron died in Missolonghi. George IV, Charles X, and Alexander II were on their thrones, Wellington, Metternich and Talleyrand scarcely more than middle-aged. His earliest memories would include Petrobey at the head of his rough Maniot army, with each guerrilla a bristling porcupine of long-barrelled guns, scimitars, khanjars, yataghans and silver-bossed pistols, lugging bronze cannon across the cobbles of Tsimova... The first thing he overheard must have been tales of burning towns and pyramids of severed heads, the slaughter of Ibrahim’s negro cavalry, decapitations and impalements. Perhaps he heard, across the gulf and the mountains, the sudden roar of the guns from Navarino, and dimly realized, with the sudden clangour of bells, that Greece was free.... Speculation proliferated in the falling shadows. The decomposing bus travelled, bucking and rearing, deeper into the Deep Mani. Restless hens clucked underfoot, olive trees whizzed past in the dark. At one stop, outside a rural café, a woman lifted a small boy to the level of our window and told him to take a good look at the strangers. “He’s never seen any before,” she said, apologetically; then added, “neither have I....”

  We pulled up at last at the furthest point the bus could manage on that battered road in the solitary tree-lined street of the village of Pyrgos and found quarters—palliasses stuffed with straw and laid on planks—in the khani. Like so many of them, it was half tavern, half grocer’s shop, lit by a hurricane lamp
on a table where old men were drinking. The khani-keeper and his wife were a kind, gentle couple, greatly distressed at luxurious Europeans putting up with their summary accommodation. After a supper of beans we were alone in the shop except for our hostess with a black clout tied round her head and her feverish son who lay beside her in the shadows under a pile of blankets. She was winding wool. A black and white cat slept on a sack of groceries. Joan wrote letters and I worked at my notes by the uncertain lamplight. The windows opened on to a moonlit waste of rock and stone, and a little distance off a tall thin tower, silvered by the moon along one of its rectangular flanks, rose into the boiling night. Our pens scratched industriously. Suddenly the innkeeper’s wife broke silence.

  “What are you writing?” she asked Joan.

  “A letter to England.”

  “Well, tell them in London that you’re in the Mani, a very hot place where there’s nothing but stones.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying.”

  * * *

  The surrounding rocks appeared even bleaker by day than they had done by moonlight. The rough skyline of the Taygetus had sunk considerably, and the successive humps went leapfrogging southwards in diminishing bounds. The tall tower stood on the edge of the same seaward-sloping ledge as the village and here and there about the stony landscape similar solitary towers rose like pencils. A young policeman on leave offered to accompany us to the nearest and tallest, after which (as “Pyrgos” is the Greek for “tower”) the village, like a hundred others in Greece, is presumably named.