Mani
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PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR (1915–2011) was born of Anglo-Irish descent and raised in Northamptonshire and London. After his stormy schooldays, followed by the walk across Europe to Constantinople that begins in A Time of Gifts (1977) and continues through Between the Woods and the Water (1986), he lived and traveled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. His books Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. He lived until the end of his life in the house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani. He was knighted in 2004 for his services to literature and to British–Greek relations.
MICHAEL GORRA’s books include The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany and After Empire. He is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College, and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
MANI
Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
Introduction by
MICHAEL GORRA
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
MANI
Dedication
Preface
1 South from Sparta
2 The Abomination of Desolation
3 Kardamyli: Byzantium Restored
4 The City of Mars (Areopolis)
5 Lamentation
6 Into the Deep Mani
7 Dark Towers
8 A Warlike Aristocracy and the Maniots of Corsica
9 Change and Decay. The Cocks of Matapan
10 The Entrance to Hades
11 Bad Mountains, Evil Council and Cauldroneers
12 A Nereids’ Fountain
13 Gorgons and Centaurs
14 Confabulation in Layia: Cyprus and Mrs. Gladstone
15 Ikons
16 An Amphibian Matriarchy and a Maniot Poet
17 Up the Laconian Gulf: Animals and Winds
18 Short Summer Nights
19 Castles and the Sea
20 Lacedaemonian Port
Index
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
WE HAVE come down from the mountains to the shore, the hard part of the walk behind us, our legs stretched by the “unattractively Alpine” pitch of the hills, a long series of “rib-cracking clinches with the sublime”; our minds stretched as well by a tour through the world of the gorgon and the centaur, the ikon and the blood feud. Now we sit at rest aboard a caique steaming north up the Laconian gulf, with our journey—this book—near an end. But Mani’s host remains expansive, and announces that he shall fill the voyage “with a digression on cats.” So he notes the anatomical differences between the felines of Eastern Europe and the “ribboned pussies” of the West, and for good measure—no digression can stay on point—describes the “Turkish attitude to dogs.” Then Patrick Leigh Fermor lifts into a sketch of his experiences “with strange animals in Greece,” complaining that he has never seen a wolf or a bear, and just a single wild boar. There might once have been a “distant glimpse of...the mad, shy, fierce, the all-but-invisible and nearly extinct ibex of the White Mountains in Crete.” And he has encountered a sea turtle, “sculling steeply down into the blue-green depths between Bari and Corfu almost exactly at that point in the dotted line down the middle of the Adriatic where the filioque drops out of the Creed.”
It’s a throw-away sentence, and Leigh Fermor immediately moves on, as though dawdling at speed, to other maritime details, sharks and tuna and a great “visitation” of dolphins. That inconsequence, however, is precisely what draws me. First, the lovely gerund that defines the turtle’s motion—the beat of its flippers, the pause on the backstroke. Then that filioque, which at first seems to have nothing whatever to do with such beasts except that the writer happened to think of it. Yet the ease with which the turtle slips away reminds us of how little we ourselves can evade the past, and Leigh Fermor has an uncanny ability to find an historical marker on even the most featureless bit of this planet’s surface, to sail always over the ground of ancient contention. Or not so ancient: the schism between Rome and Byzantium occasioned by that bit of Latin does, after all, still hold.
In Leigh Fermor’s pages any account of the present begins a thousand years back, and to read him is to enter a mind that delights in bounding from moment to moment and century to century, a mind in which all times appear to exist at once. Not in Faulknerian confusion—it’s instead as though they were each one indexed, and available for use. Nor does his conception of the past resemble the longue durée of Fernand Braudel, that sense of climate and geography as the motive forces of human history. Leigh Fermor never forgets the shaping force of landscape, but when he looks at a piece of ground—of water, even—he sees events, decisions, personalities, he sees battles and theology, paintings and poems and the movements of people; and all of it treated with the same familiarity with which you might grasp a favorite mug.
Anyone who reads this incomparable traveler will have his or her own private anthology of such moments. My own would include the view from the tower of Ulm Minster in A Time of Gifts (1977), Leigh Fermor’s account of the journey on foot, from Holland to Constantinople, that he began at the age of eighteen in 1933: a steeple-top vision that moves from the Black Forest to “the whole upheaval of Switzerland” and out over the Danube valley, in which everything from Hannibal to the swastika lies waiting. From Mani any such collection must contain that “mist of impossible surmise” in which Leigh Fermor allows himself to imagine that he has discovered the rightful Emperor of Byzantium in the form of an ouzo-swilling fisherman. But my favorite episode in the Greek travels recorded here comes just before the middle of this book, when at the southern tip of his wanderings he drops off the side of a boat and swims into the cave once known as Taenarus.
To the ancients it was an “entrance to Hades,” the place where Psyche came and Herakles too, and yet once inside Leigh Fermor finds something that “none of the legends mention.” For the cavern’s interior is all water, without a floor on which to rest your foot, and its bottom so “measureless” that for a few seconds it seems indeed as though he might be sucked below. It is a place he dare not stay. A few quick strokes carry him back out into the sun, where he’s struck by “how clear the daylight looked, and how bright the colours!” And there’s something wondrous in the way that, once back on land, he encounters a child with “a lamb slung over her shoulders,” and steps into the healing realm of pastoral.
Leigh Fermor’s first book, The Traveller’s Tree (1950), offered an account of the Caribbean that, in retrospect, seems a postwar attempt to step away from the history that provides his best subject. A novel followed, and then A Time to Keep Silence (1957), a beautiful but fragmentary chronicle of his visits to three very different monasteries. Mani (1958) stands as his first work of permanent value, and one of the few enduring travel narratives of its period. And yet the physical journey it records is a mere wisp, a week or so of walking through this eponymous region in the Peloponnese, and often enough the sound of footsteps fades out as these pages linger over such arcana as the “Byzantine passion for strange hats.”
Many of its details concern the peculiarities of the Mani itself—its villages of towers, its long resistance to Ottoman rule—but Leigh Fermor nevertheless draws his material from throughout the Greek world. For the book is but a shard of the one he meant to write, a volume that would chronicle a trip through “all parts of Greece...a matter of countless bus-rides and long stretches on horseback and by mule and on foot.” Once those travels we
re over, however, Leigh Fermor discovered that the resulting shelf of “closely written notebooks” looked so frighteningly long that he decided “to avoid a thin spreading of the gathered material” and instead to “attack...in depth.” Still, he is easily snared by the “ramifying tendrils of digression” that sprout around his every step, and neither Mani nor its later companion, Roumeli (1966), limits itself to a single itinerary. So an ikon in a Maniot church will pull him over the sea to Crete and through time to the Fourth Crusade in search of an explanation.
Where those digressions almost never take us is into Leigh Fermor himself. His eyes look out, not in. We know him by the pace of his sentences, his fondness for lists, his expertly mixed cocktails of metaphor. We know him by his passions, his taste in books and in buildings. We know him by his friends. Yet there’s little here about his private life—just the Christian name of his traveling companion, and eventual wife, Joan Eyres Monsell. Nor is there much about his earlier experiences: the walk recalled in the indispensable A Time of Gifts; or his wartime service on Crete, where for two years in the mountains he organized the resistance to the Nazi occupation. His band’s successful kidnapping of a German general provided the basis for the Michael Powell film Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), with Dirk Bogarde in the lead as “Paddy.” But he doesn’t much speak of it himself, and on the rare occasions in Mani—Roumeli offers a few more—when Leigh Fermor summons up his time on Crete it’s never in terms of drama or danger or fear, of his actual work in the hills, but rather such things as the treading of the grapes or the inescapable belief in the evil eye.
A soldier and a scholar—the combination is now almost unknown. Leigh Fermor’s belated account of a pre-war Europe, of those years when the going seemed good, deservedly remains his best-known work. It is the most brilliant single book in the great renascence of the travel narrative that took place in the second half of the 1970s, the years of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977) and Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), and a link with the earlier world of such classics as Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937). Leigh Fermor continued that story in Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and in other years his pen has taken him through both India and the Andes. Yet it is Greece to which he has most often returned for a subject and where indeed he settled a few years after this book appeared, building a house in the Mani itself.
His record of that region will, to many readers, appear loaded with unfamiliar names. I had never before heard of Petrobey Mavromichalis, who led the Mani in its revolt against the Turks and helped give “rebirth to the shining phoenix of modern Greece”; of Petrobey, or Zanetbey, or the local notables called Nyklians, or of Saint Nikon the Penitent, who in the tenth century finally wooed the Maniots away from their old gods, or the Cretan poet Vincentios Cornaros, or of any of the “astonishing titles of the various dignitaries at the courts of the hospadars,” or indeed of the hospadars themselves. Leigh Fermor explains many of these things, but his references do tend toward the allusive, as though reminding us of what we already know. He pays us the compliment of writing as if we can keep up, following him as he free-associates down the centuries. Filioque. It’s a kind of table-talk often interrupted, in my own case, by a flight to the encyclopedia. But he allows for that, suggesting in one of his essays that a reference library is an essential part of any dining room. His books do more than record where he went and what he saw, for in the very play of their references they also extend an invitation for explorations of our own.
To Leigh Fermor himself those unaccustomed names matter intensely, and what his books convey above all is the thrill of chasing after them, the zest of discoveries to be shared. Though sometimes he doesn’t share, not quite. The preface to Mani contains a great tease, in which Leigh Fermor regrets that for lack of space he has had to omit any account of the regional “belief in vampires, their various nature and their origins.” His learning isn’t worn lightly so much as cocked at a sly and rakish angle. At the start of this book he hears a barbershop rumor of a village of Greek-speaking converted Jews in the hills. “It was an outstanding bit of information. I had never heard of Jews in the Peloponnese,” and so he sets out to investigate. For why shouldn’t it be true, given that “the Greek world, with all its absorptions and dispersals..., is an inexhaustible Pandora’s box of eccentricities and exceptions to all conceivable rule”? And there follows a two-page list of those exceptions, a catalogue of all the different ways of being Greek that includes “the phallus-wielding Bounariots of Tyrnavos,...the Ayassians of Lesbos, the Francolevantine Catholics of the Cyclades,...the few Gagauzi of eastern Thrace,...[and] the greengrocers of Brooklyn...if all these, to name a few, why not the crypto-Jews of the Taygetus?”
To name a few. Or a few hundred. Leigh Fermor is serious, and he winks. No other travel writer takes so infectious a pleasure in the world around him. Early in Mani he describes a midsummer dinner in the city of Kalamata when the “stone flags of the water’s edge...flung back the heat like a casserole with the lid off,” until on a “sudden, silent decision we stepped down fully dressed” into the water, taking the restaurant’s table and chairs with them. The waiter arrives with a platter of grilled fish, looks “at the empty space on the quay,” and then, “with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure,...stepped unhesitatingly into the sea.” Boats gather around the table, the retsina flows, the night begins to swoon with music, and yet what interests Leigh Fermor isn’t his own behavior but the waiter’s aplomb in following him. No one forgets this scene, and in reading Mani I feel on every page ready to walk into that water myself.
—MICHAEL GORRA
MANI
With love to Joan
PREFACE
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, ra
ther, 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.