Mani Read online

  It stood there like a blank rectangular Italian campanile or a tall Early English belfry stripped of its gargoyles and finials. It looked doubly tall as there was no pointed doorway, no west window or church’s roof-tree to break the line of the eye from base to summit. It was built of massive, well-squared stone. In appearance it was a relic of the Dark Ages and in western Europe it would have been adorned with battered scutcheons. But there was nothing except a clumsily hewn date over the doorway. Inside it was cold and dark. The sunlight filtered through grim slits at the end of diminishing angular funnels cut through walls a yard thick. It suggested a belfry so convincingly that one expected to see ropes disappearing through slots in the thick beam-borne planks overhead, their tallies waiting moth-soft and wine-coloured in mid-air for the grasp of bellringers. There was the familiar creak of the step-ladders, the danger of worm-eaten or missing boards, the same thrusting open of trap-doors as a new layer of cobwebbed emptiness met the eye from floor level; the childish feeling of adventure as storey after storey fell below (how long will it go on?). At last we reached the fifth and highest from which the lower world of olives and rocks and sea appeared in fore-shortened oblongs through apertures which louvres should have sliced into cross-sections. Our interruption had set the dust moving and a thin golden shaft of light falling aslant the dungeon-like gloom was alive with whirling motes. The policeman slapped the cold slabs affectionately.

  “This tower belongs to the Sklavonákos family,” he said, “relations of the Mavromichalis and formerly the great Nyklians of the area.”

  I had heard this unfamiliar word Nyklianos several times lately and never anywhere else in Greece. What did it mean? It appeared from his answer that the Nyklians, in contrast to the achamnómeri or villeins, were a sort of military, landowning aristocracy, a rough-and-ready Maniot version of Japanese feudalism, of which the bey or the bashkapetan (above all, the head of the Mavromichalis family) was Shogun, and the greater and lesser Nyklians the daimyos and samurais, some of whom would wander abroad like mercenary rônins. I asked him what on earth the word came from; it means nothing in ordinary Greek. He didn’t know, he admitted; then, lighting a cigarette with the engaging bashfulness of a patrician among the plebs, he told us that he himself belonged to the Nyklian family of Glezakos of Glezos. This queer feudalism, an odd deviation from the democratic world of post-Byzantine Greece, sounded so peculiar that I determined to find out more.

  Vaults were hewn out of the limestone for the storing of powder kegs and a barrier of heavy boulders enclosed a wide expanse of solid, creased stones like unhewn marble all round the tower. It contained a couple of low stone sheds roofed with slabs and a minute whitewashed oratory. Cisterns drilled out of the hard matrix of rock were reached by a narrow well-shaft with no steyning. Illiterate and feudal, these early war-lords must have lived like tenth-century barons. There was no sign of the amenities anywhere, still less of the arts or of polite learning. We were conjecturing the date of its construction, allowing for every imaginable time lag: we wouldn’t be far out, we decided, in the sixteenth century. The date over the door of the tower was, amazingly, 1812.

  A tight-meshed network of walls covers this sloping country till the loose ends trail a little distance up the steep flank of the Taygetus and die away among the boulders. They are there for no purpose of delimitation. It is merely a tidy way of disposing of the stones that otherwise cumber the fields in order that, here and there, an inch or two of dusty earth may afford enough purchase for wheat grains to germinate. A little crescent-shaped bastion of flat stones shores up the precious soil round the roots of each olive tree. Winding labyrinths of walled lanes meander among the walls and trees as arbitrarily, it would seem, as the walls themselves. The solid rock of the Mani breaks through the sparse stubble fields in bleached shoulders and whales’ backs and tall leaning blades of mineral and all is as white as bone. Sometimes groups of these blades cluster so thick that they give the illusion of whole villages; but when you reach them after clambering a score of walls, there they are in all their bare senselessness: fortuitous dolmens and cromlechs and menhirs. Once in a while, however, the wreck of an almost prehistoric ghost-village does appear: a sudden gathering of walls, the shells of half troglodytic houses with broken slab-roofs and thresholds only to be entered on all fours, the rough-hewn blocks pitched headlong by wild olive and cactus with only a rough cross incised on a lintel or a carved unidentifiable animal to indicate that they date from later than the stone age. The only other buildings are innumerable microscopic chapels, their shallow slab-roofed vaults jutting like the backs of armadilloes; an occasional farmstead, and the abandoned peel-towers of the Nyklians. The pale marble world of rock and gold stubble and thistle and silver-grey olive-leaves shudders in the midday glare, and one feels prone to test the rocks (like spitting on a flat-iron) before daring to lay a hand on them or to lie down in an olive’s fragmentary disc of shade. The world holds its breath, and the noonday devil is at hand.

  In summer, ghosts are said to roam the Mani in the hottest hour of the day, in winter at the darkest hour of the night. If their mortal predecessors have been killed by an enemy, they wail for revenge. Summer ghosts haunt graveyards, ruined churches and cross roads. A man’s blood is supposed to shout out loud the day before he dies and if he perishes by violence his blood remains wet on the spot until a wooden cross is driven into the ground there; then it dries up or drains away. (The Maniots have a death fixation which is almost Mexican; perhaps the blazing light, the naked rock and the cactuses engender the same processes in either place.) The dead are turned into werewolves until forty days after their death and, stealing indoors at night, they eat the dough out of the kneading-troughs—any trough that is empty when it should be full is a werewolf’s work. Witches are said to lead people in a trance up the mountain-side at dead of night to torture them there. Regular sleepwalkers, of which there seem to be a number, are known as the string-loparméni, the witch-taken ones. Then there is a terrible devil called Makrynas,[1] “the faraway one,” who invariably appears in deserted places in the haunted hour of noon. I have not been able to learn what he looks like or what harm he does, but he is usually encountered by women who run away shrieking in panic through the rocks and olives. Could he be Pan himself, up to his old game with the latterday descendants of Syrinx and Echo? The nereids, the oreads, the dryads, the hamadryads and the gorgons all survive transposed in the minds of country Greeks. The Faraway One may be the chief woodland god himself.

  Belief in the prophetic importance of dreams, a pan-Hellenic superstition, is even stronger here than in the rest of Greece. In Greece, one “sees” a dream, but the exegesis of what one sees varies from region to region. In the Mani, in unconscious conformity with many modern theories, it goes by opposites. The dream-taste of sweetness or the sight of sweet things—cakes or a honeycomb, for instance—spell poison and bitterness; flowers mean sorrow, churches are law-courts and prison, a roofless house is a grave, eggs—the symbol of paschal concord—foretell high words and a quarrel; a prison is freedom and lice are money; and so on. There are some exceptions to this system. Dream-beards and -hair mean trouble, birds foretell damage, a pool of water lying in the road threatens difficulties; a gun presages the birth of a boy, a handkerchief that of a girl. To have meaning, a dream must be short—a sort of illuminating flash. Long dreams are attributed to indigestion and discounted. They can also be disregarded when the earth is open at the time of ploughing and sowing. If a dream seems totally irrelevant it may be the case of a wrong address, as they are sometimes delivered by mistake to people with the same name as the true destinatory. The dreamer must try and find out the real addressee and hand the dream over. If the explanation is not clear there are old men in each village with mantic powers. They cross-examine the dreamer like expert diagnosticians. “So you saw some birds, eh? Flying low or high? From left or right? Were they big or small? Did they perch on branches or settle on the rocks?” They listen carefully to the a
nswers and click their tongues concernedly, admitting they don’t like the look of it, or pat the patient on the back, saying he has nothing whatever to worry about. In either case they prescribe a course of action. One is reminded of Hector and Polydamas before the attack on the Achaean ships.

  There was not a single school in the Mani until the 1830’s and it is without a doubt the most backward part of Greece. Hence the almost total absence of literature and culture. The sombre traditions of the region continued unhindered for centuries. There are other symptomatic observances of these traditions apart from the general concentration on death and revenge. There was always great rejoicing over the birth of a son—“another gun for the family!”—in fact the male children were referred to as “guns”—and after the appearance of a first-born son, each visitor bringing a gift would fire off a shot before entering with the wish that the newcomer might live and open the way for others to follow. Figs and raki from Kalamata were offered to the guests in his honour. With girls it was the opposite. There were neither gifts nor rejoicing nor congratulations; they were only useful as gun-breeders and drudges and dirge-singers. There are no dowries; the groom’s family provides the house and its gear and donkey-loads of grain. A sun is carved or painted on the cradle of a baby boy, a moon on that of a little girl.

  There are no panagyria (those joyful rustic kermesses that celebrate saints’ days in the rest of Greece), no singing or dancing. Like all south-eastern Europe, the gloomy passion for virginity reigns supreme, a prize reserved for a loveless match, and the usual bloodthirsty sanctions for infidelity prevail. Understandably, it seldom occurs. Only men are mourned at their death, but women wear black for even their remotest male relations. The women’s life is one of constant toil—in the house or the fields, at the olive press or at neolithic handmills which are a sort of unwieldy pestle and mortar. They set off to reap far-away corn patches, sickle in hand, their wooden emblematic cradles slung papoose-like from their shoulders. When the cisterns dry up in summer, they trudge for miles with kegs on their backs to fill with brackish water near the sea at one of the half-dozen trickles of the Deep Mani. The maledictions of the Mani are supposed to be the bitterest and the most effective in Greece.

  Life, in fact, is wretchedly poor and overcast with sadness. In the past it was entirely shadowed by the blood feud. The thing that kept the Maniots going was their fierce sense of liberty, their pride in living in one of the earliest places in Greece to have cast free of the Turks. It is very seldom that a Maniot enters domestic service. Maniot beggars are unknown. Cattle theft does not exist, and doors are never locked. It is part of their regional pride that prompts them to dismiss the inhabitants of the outside world as “Vlachs.” At last I learnt the meaning of the word which had so puzzled me the day we arrived in the Mani! It has nothing to do with the nomads of the Pindus. A Vlach is a plain-dweller, a descendant of rayahs, a vile bourgeois, and Maniots who leave the peninsula to live like them are said, with accents of scorn, to have “gone Vlach.”

  It is a life of bitter hardship. One last superstition is very moving. If a woman has lost a male child (a “gun”), she carries her next-born son out into the street in her apron shouting, “A lamb for sale. Who’ll buy a lamb?” “I will,” says the first passer-by. He pays a small sum, stands godfather to him at the font, then hands the lamb back to its mother. It is a ruse to cheat Charon by confusing the familiar track with a false scent.

  * * *

  The Nyklian policeman rolled over and awoke under the olive tree, where we had talked ourselves into the blessed somnolence of a siesta, and led us in the cool of the evening along one of those stony lanes that wandered down the slope towards the sea to show us the old church of Michael the Taxiarch,[2] in the minute village of Charouda. The little place was surrounded by positive orchards of prickly pear, some of them growing over twenty feet high: vast branching tangles of green ping-pong bats and of malformed fleshy hands bristling with fierce needles, their rims equipped with half a dozen bulbous thumbs. The church was a little golden basilica standing among cypresses and topped with a brood of cupolas gathered round a central dome. The walls inside were beautifully frescoed, the usual saintly figures evolving across the plaster walls with an elegant and loose-limbed freedom. There are many of these engaging little churches in the Mani. They absorbed all the available grace and piety that existed in the stony breasts of the old Maniots. Occasionally they are Athonite and cruciform but usually basilican: the square centre of the katholikon is flanked by two short aisles, and ended by three apses. Massive stone beams spanned with golden diameters the four semi-circular arches that bore the pendentives from which the dome grew; similar horizontals enclosed the lesser arches and crossed the top of the iconostasis and all these beams, like the capitals that topped the pillars, were carved with a rough intricacy of bosses and crosslets and Byzantine motives of leaves and bunches of grapes and sunflowers. Over the door a complex skein of calligraphic Byzantine abbreviations, conjoined letters and ligatures unravelled itself into a dedicatory inscription and the information that the church was built by “the humble Roman, Michael Kardianos”; Romaiòs, of course, meaning Byzantine, a Greek of the Roman Empire of the East. Why is it stated? What other nationality can have been there to make this worth mentioning? For once the Nyklian was at a loss. The date followed, always a conundrum in Byzantine churches, as the numbers are written in the tormenting old Greek way—which makes ancient mathematical computation a nightmare even to think of—with oddly arranged letters of the alphabet and appended apostrophes, and additional peculiar symbols arbitrarily inserted into the alphabetical system for 6, 90, 900 and 6000. Add to this that the Byzantine epigraphic script, like certain flowery Arabic inscriptions, is more an intricate means of decoration than a device for conveying information; add to this again that if it is painted, the paint is usually half defaced, and if carved, chipped into semi-illegibility; add finally that the dates are reckoned not from the birth of Christ but from 5508 B.C. (an oddly hard figure to remember), the Biblical date of the Creation—which must be subtracted from the date inscribed—and the reader will have some idea of the difficulties of deciphering the dates for someone as bad at any kind of figures as I am. I often get it wrong, even after ten minutes with pencil and paper, and I plainly did so in this case, as my notebook says the Taxiarch was founded in 1211, and a reference book says 1373; or rather, it was founded in 6881 as opposed to 6719; not ,ςφιθ′ but ,ςωπα′[3] during the wars of John VI Cantacuzene and John V Palaeologue, in fact, as opposed to the short-lived Frankish empire of Byzantium to which I had assigned it. Nothing could be simpler....

  Perhaps, then, the founder’s race was worth mentioning to show that he was an Orthodox Byzantine and not one of the Catholic Venetians who were by then established in the Messenian peninsula or one of the Frankish barons of the Peloponnese; a proud affirmation that the Empire was Greek—Romaic—once more, and the Mani part of the Orthodox Byzantine Despotate of the Morea.

  The stony churchyard had several new graves. Burial is a problem here, as the earth is seldom more than a few inches deep and hacking trenches out of the rock with adzes must be a back-breaking task. I had been told that the dead in some parts of the Mani are buried in their shrouds, as wood is too scarce for coffins; they are borne to the churchyard on a ceremonial coffin or a bier; then, after the miroloyia, lifted off and laid in the shallow graves for their temporary sojourn. The same recesses must be used many times over. These new graves of Charouda were adorned at their heads with something I had never seen before; two rough thick sticks stuck in the ground at an angle of forty-five degrees, crossing in saltire with white rags twisted untidily round their upper ends, like so many uncouth St. Andrew’s crosses. They were the staves, the Nyklian said, with which the pallbearers had carried the coffins. Why were they planted in that position? Nobody knew. They had an oddly pagan aspect, like part of the gear of a voodoo tonnelle. Again, the late conversion of the Mani came to mind and the possi
bility that here again was a pagan survival; or some uncouth shamanistic practice the Meligs had brought with them from central Asia or the Great Balkan range and, before their absorption, bequeathed to these newly baptized mountains.

  Catchments like swimming baths were squared out of the rock to drain off and husband in the wells every available drop of water. Sitting in an upper room in the house of a friend of the policeman, we watched the daughter of the house drawing water from a deep well leading to a cistern in the white rock. What a time it took till the half brackish, half sweet and slightly cloudy liquid appeared; it was as if the delay were caused by slow and tender decanting in some subterranean cave! She put the jug on the table in the darkening room and a plate of prickly pears, peeled of their thorny coating but full of pips; also a plate of lupin seeds, and a flask of ouzo. Poor Maniots! The policeman sighed and said that he sometimes woke up in the night, thinking of a glass of crystal spring water. Sometimes he dreamed of yoghourt and cakes—baklavas, trigonas and kadaifs. Trouble, poison and bitterness, in dream language, I thought, to go by his talk of the afternoon.

  There is little enough in the Deep Mani. Pigs are the only important livestock with, fortunately, abundant prickly pears to feed them on as well as their masters. A few thin goats keep alive on thistles. A little corn and oats are the only crops; beans, garlic, artichokes and these lupin seeds the only garden produce; plenty of olives, a few almond and fig and carob trees; otherwise nothing but cactus and thorns and stones. The bread used to be made of maize, beans and vetch till wheat began to arrive at the beginning of the century, and there was more of everything since they had built the road to Pyrgos. Two cheerful phenomenally old men in cartwheel hats had joined us. They settled slowly with joints cracking like cap-pistols, and the girl leant back against the wall with her arms folded. Like many of the girls we had seen in this queer region, she was extremely beautiful: a pale, clear face both virginal and spiritual with an intensely aristocratic bone structure, and large, dark, Shulamitish eyes. When she leant forward to pour the ouzo or tip out a new plateful of lupin seeds she put her left hand across her breast to keep her long thick plaits from sweeping across the table, leaning back again afterwards in attentive silence, her face alert and smiling. Her few gestures were deft and distinguished and informed by a patrician lack of fuss. It was a miracle that these waterless rocks, alongside the cactuses and the thorns, could give birth to her as well.