Mani
Page 7
Some of these vendettas grew into miniature local wars and kept the Mani smoking with turbulence and bloodshed for centuries. For centuries, in fact, the only thing that could reconcile them was a Turkish inroad, when, suddenly, for brief idyllic periods of internal harmony, their long guns would all point the same way. Parties would leave to fight as mercenaries in the armies of the Doge. The poverty of the peninsula turned the Maniots into pirates, and their little ships were the terror of the Turkish and Venetian galleys in southern Peloponnesian waters. Their expeditions were undertaken less in search of riches than for the sober domestic need to buy wood,—fuel for lime burning for the building of tall towers in their treeless villages—and guns, with which to shoot at their neighbours through the loopholes when these were built. Many of their piratical exploits, like those of the klephts and armatoles in the mountains of the mainland, had a patriotic reason. The best known case is the destruction of part of the Ottoman fleet in Canea roads with Maniot fire-ships.
The hamlets of the Mani were scattered across the mountains like scores of hornets’ nests permanently at odds with each other, a discord which, as we have seen, only the Turks could resolve; so the Turks wisely left them alone under the rule of a Maniot holding the title of Bey of the Mani and the powers of a reigning prince; something after the style of the hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia, with a nominal yearly tribute. But it was seldom paid. Once, I was told, a farthing was derisively tossed to the Sultan’s representative from the tip of a scimitar.
The first of these rulers, Liberakis Yerakaris, reigned in the middle of the seventeenth century. By the age of twenty he had served several years as an oarsman in the Venetian galleys and made himself the foremost pirate of the Mani. Captured by the Turks and condemned to death, he was reprieved by the Grand Vizier—the great Albanian Achmet Küprülü—on condition that he accepted the hegemony of the Mani. He undertook the office in order to avenge himself on the strong Maniot family of the Stephanopoli with which he was in feud. He at once besieged them in the fort of Vitylo and captured thirty-five of them whom he executed on the spot. For the next twenty years he used his power and his influence with the Sublime Porte to campaign all over the Peloponnese and central Greece at the head of formidable armies, siding now with the Turks, now with the Venetians, marrying the beautiful princess Anastasia, niece of a Voivode of Wallachia,[5] ending his life, after adventures comparable to anything in the annals of the Italian condottiere, as Turkish Prince of the Mani and Venetian Lord of the Roumeli and Knight of St. Mark.
The Turks did not repeat the experiment for a hundred years. After the Orloff revolt petered out in 1774, the Turks revived the rank of Bey of the Mani, thinking it was wiser to have one man responsible for the tranquillity of the district. So during the forty-five years from 1776 to 1821, when the War of In-dependence broke out, the Mani was ruled by eight successive Beys, all except one of whom played the dangerous game of maintaining the interests of the Mani and of eventual Greek freedom while trying to remain on the right side of the Turks.[6] Two were tricked on board Turkish men-of-war and executed in Constantinople: one for attempting to extend his beydom beyond the Eurotas, the other as the result of intrigues at the Sublime Porte. The third, the wealthy Zanetbey, a great tower-builder, was deposed for his collusion with the Klephts and the discovery of a secret and treasonable correspondence with Na-poleon, to whom he looked as a possible deliverer of the Mani. (He had prudently sent one of his sons to serve in the French army, another in the Russian.) He contrived to save his life by flight, continued his negotiations with the French and even persuaded them to send him boatloads of arms and ammunition which he distributed among the klephts and the kapetans. His successor was deposed for failing to put a stop to these dangerous goings-on. The fifth had a quiet reign. He organized the internal economy of the Mani, built roads, and became a member of the Philiki Hetairia, the secret revolutionary society which had begun to penetrate the whole Greek world. He was deposed for suspected collusion with his turbulent and outlawed uncle, Zanetbey, and was succeeded by his detractor, Zervobey, the only quisling. He was attacked by the family of Zanet and he only saved his life by seeking refuge in the palace at Tripoli with his friend the tyrannous and depraved Veli, Pasha of the Morea and son of no less a person than the terrible Vizier of Yannina, Ali the Lion. The career of his successor is overshadowed by that of the eighth and last of the Beys, the greatest of them all and one of the leading figures of Greek nineteenth-century history, Petrobey Mavromichalis.
After the Frankish conquest of Greece the Mani was a stormy feudal oligarchy of powerful families. Of these by far the strongest, the richest and the most numerous was the Mavromichalis clan. Various origins have been ascribed to them. There is a tradition that they were originally a Thracian family called Gregorianos which arrived here in flight when the Turks first crossed the Hellespont in 1340. It is certain that they were established in the west of the Deep Mani by the sixteenth century. In chronicles of the following centuries, the name abounds. There is a deep-rooted legend that their great physical beauty springs from the marriage of a George Mavromichalis to a mermaid; in the same way that anyone of the name of Connolly, in Celtic folklore, descends from a seal.[7] Their courage and enterprise were equal to their beauty, and Skyloyanni Mavromichalis—John the Dog—was one of the great paladins against the Turks in the eighteenth century. His son Petro was head of this vast family at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the Mavromichalis were at the acme of their prosperity and power, a position chiefly due to the strategic and mercantile importance of their hereditary stronghold in the natural fortress of Tsimova and its attendant port of Limeni. This commands the only pass leading through the Taygetus to Gytheion and the rest of Laconia; it is also the entrance to the Deep Mani. Long before he was created Bey, his territorial influence and authority far exceeded that of his pre-decessors and when the beydom devolved upon him in 1808 it was the ratification of power which was already absolute. His fine looks and dignity and gracious manners were the outward signs of an upright and honourable nature, high intelligence, diplomatic skill, generosity, patriotism, unshakable courage and strength of will: qualities suitably leavened by ambition and family pride and occasionally marred by cruelty. He too negotiated with Napoleon (to no great purpose, however, as the latter was too occupied elsewhere) and reconciled the warring clans. He imposed a truce to the feuds and conciliated the Troupakis and Grigorakis clans. These, egged on by the Turks in the hope that internal strife might soften up the Mani for invasion or at least neutralize it in the coming struggle for the liberation of Greece, were rival aspirants to the rank of Bey.
It was from the Mani that the first blow was struck. Petrobey and three thousand Maniots with Kolokotronis and a number of the great Morean klephts advanced on the Turkish garrison of Kalamata. After its surrender he issued a declaration of the Greek aspirations to the courts of Europe signed “Petrobey Mavromichalis, Prince and Commander in Chief.” The banners of freedom were going up all over Greece, and the whole peninsula burst into those flames which, after four centuries of slavery, demolished the Turkish power in the country for ever and gave rebirth to the shining phoenix of modern Greece. Petrobey, at the head of his Maniots, fought battle after battle in these ferocious years; he takes his place as one of the giants in the struggle. He soars far beyond the rocky limitations of these pages into those of modern European history. No less than forty-nine of his family were killed during this contest and his capital of Tsimova was renamed Areopolis in his honour: the town of the war-god Ares. In the tangle of conflicting ideologies which followed the liberation Mavromichalis fell out with the new leader of the State, Capodistria. When he was imprisoned in the new capital at Nauplia, the Mani rose in revolt and Petrobey escaped and fled; but he was recaptured and re-imprisoned and two of his turbulent nephews, enraged at this insult, waylaid Capodistria and assassinated him. Mavromi-chalis achieved high honours during the reign of King Otto and died, surr
ounded with glory, in 1848. His descendants have played a prominent part in governments and war cabinets ever since, though none of them—how could they in the Athenian world of party-politics?—have equalled the stature of their great ancestor.
The name still rings unchallenged through the Mani and at that very moment the narrow streets of Areopolis were plastered with election posters displaying photographs of Petro Mavromichalis, a great-great grandson and the present head of the family, a political figure of some prominence in the Royalist interest. His urbane, well nourished and patrician face, a monocle glinting in one eye socket, issuing from a stiff collar with a carefully knotted tie and well tailored shoulders, looked out over the broad Maniot hat-brims with a nice combination of ministerial poise and the affability of the bridge-table. It was hard to associate these polished lineaments with the shaggy yataghan-wielding chieftains of the Deep Mani; with Black Michael and John the Dog. Still less with that beautiful mermaid floundering wide-eyed in a rock pool in the gulf of Kyparissia a few centuries ago.
[1] I have been able to find no verification of this Mani slave-market though the Maniots used to be famous corsairs and were not infrequently mixed up in the trading of slaves. Once in a blue moon one comes across a villager in the Morea whose appearance is ascribed to an isolated rape, a hundred and thirty odd years ago, by the Sudanese cavalry of Ibrahim Pasha.
[2] Monastir (Bitolj), now just across the Serbian border.
[3] Herakleion.
[4] This ending is not always Cretan. The formation existed in the Mani.
[5] A member of the Duca family.
[6] They were Zanetos Koutipharis (3 years), Michaelbey Troupakis (3 years), Zanetbey Kapetanakis Grigorakis (14 years), Panayoti Koumoundouros (5 years), Antonbey Grigorakis (7 years), Zervobey (2 years), Thodorobey Zanetakis (5 years) and the Petrobey Mavromichalis (6 years).
[7] Nereids—the word used in the account of this legend—in modern Greek superstition are beautiful pale wraiths who haunt inland streams and springs. But this one is expressly stated to have been a salt-water dweller. The nereid, as opposed to the salt-water “gorgon,” is shaped like a human. The latter, the Gorgona that haunts the stormier parts of the Mediterranean, ends in two scaly and coiling tails. A Maniot grocer told me that the Mavromichalis nereid was possibly a deaf and dumb Venetian princess of the House of Morosini found sitting on a rock by the seashore.
5. LAMENTATION
ALL GREECE abounds with popular poetry. It is always sung, and there are different kinds for various occasions—birth, death, marriage, religious feasts, the welcoming of guests, drinking, the pasturing of sheep—and they vary from region to region: the klephtic ballads of Roumeli and the Morea, the oriental amanés, the improvised rhyming mantinadas of Crete which the lyra accompanies, the romantic Italianate cantadas of the Ionian isles, sung to the sound of guitars and mandolines—one could compile a long list. Nearly all of them, however, are written in the decapentesyllabic line, sometimes in rhyming couplets. The metre is slightly monotonous to read—it has something of the jaunty iteration of Locksley Hall—but sung, with their peculiar caesurae, repetitions of half lines, long drawn modulations and guttural ejaculations and apostrophes, they are full of life and variety. Many of them accompany Greek country dances.
Here again the Mani deviates. There is little dancing, and if one were writing a thesis to prove their descent, one might well adduce the absence of popular poetry among the Maniots as a heritage by default, a negative heirloom, of philistine Lacedaemon’s enmity to the Muses. Naturally, this generalization is not quite true, for one form of popular poetry does exist in the Mani which has been largely extinct elsewhere since ancient times and this is so singular and remarkable, so representative of the sombre traditions of the peninsula, that it largely compensates for the dearth of all other kinds. The miroloyia (“words of destiny”), the metrical dirges of the Mani, are an isolated phenomenon.
Mourning and funeral rites have an importance in Greece that exceeds anything prevailing in western Europe, and the poorer and wilder the region—the fewer the tangible possessions there are to lose, and the less the possibilities of material consolations and anodynes—the more irreparable and sad seems loss by death. The expression of this distress is correspondingly more articulate. In these regions the thread of life is brittle. Survival seems something of a day-to-day miracle and life itself, in spite of the impetuousness with which it can be cut off, is doubly precious.
There is, in practice, little belief in a conventional after-life and the rewards and sanctions of Christian dogma. In spite of the orthodox formulae of the priest at the graveside it is not for a Christian eternity, for a paradise above the sky, that the dead are setting out, but the Underworld, the shadowy house of Hades and the dread regions of Charon; and Charon has been promoted from the rank of ferryman of the dead to that of Death himself, a dire equestrian sword-wielder. “Charon took him,” a widow will sigh, contradictorily enmeshing her torso with a dozen signs of the cross. “He left me for the Underworld... It was his destiny, it was written. He had eaten his bread and he had no days left. May God forgive all his sins and may the All Holy Virgin give me strength....” When someone is ill, not only the doctor and the priest are summoned but the local witch with her incantations and charms, and when he dies, he is supplied with a coin for the ferryman; after his burial, the pagan funeral cakes are solemnly eaten and the men let their beards grow in sign of mourning. There is no clash in the Greek mind between these two allegiances, but a harmonious unchallenged syncretism comparable to the observances at many a Calabrian shrine. I once saw a Cretan priest exorcized by sorceress of a tiresome sciatica caused by the Evil Eye. For this relief he immediately lit a thanksgiving candle before the ikon of his patron saint.
The thread of life, then, is very brittle. In the remote mountains of Greece, on the bare rocks by day and by the glimmer of rush-lights at night, the skull seems close to the surface and struggling to emerge. One sees it plainly beneath the hollow eye-sockets and cheeks and the jawbone’s edge, and in old people, wasted by toil and poverty and fever and worry, it looms—the moment the bright glint of conversation fades to the dark and fatalistic lustre of thought—pathetically close.[1] Death is a near neighbour, slight ailments cause exaggerated anxiety among the most robust and more serious illnesses often induce the despair of a wild animal, an inability to fight against death which meets Charon half-way. Invalids often waste away without reason and their eyes reflect neither the impending joys of paradise nor the terrors of hell fire—the temporary rigours of Purgatory and the mists of Limbo have been omitted from Orthodox theology—but extinction, the loss of friends, the end of everything. The bright day is done and they are for the dark, and when the soul flutters away at last no one knows whither it is flying and a shrill and heartrending wail of bereavement goes up.
All over the Greek world—indeed, wherever the religion of Byzantium holds sway—village funerals are accompanied by outward signs of lamentation that come as a great surprise to those who have only witnessed the prim obsequies of north-western Europe. The mourning is the work of the women. It begins as a lyke-wake, a wailing and keening round the body by candleflame, and when the coffin is carried out into the daylight with the corpse rocking from side to side on the carrying shoulders, the mourning lifts to a crescendo that only fitfully subsides during the funeral service in church, to rise once more on the way to the cemetery, in the wild cries of the kinswomen: “Oh my warrior! Ah, to pallikari mou! The arch and pillar of our house! Where are they taking him? Ah, my beautiful flower, my young cypress tree!” This soars to a climax as they reach the grave, the mourner’s voice turns to an hysterical screeching howl, she staggers like an intoxicated person, her coif falls off, her hair flies loose and tangled over her face and she scarifies her cheeks with her fingernails till they are criss-crossed with red gashes and running with tears and blood. The supreme moment comes when the coffin is lowered into the shallow grave. Then,—in extr
eme cases,—uttering shrieks she has to be withheld by force from flinging herself into the grave, a task in which her attendants are not always successful. Dragged to the surface once more, the hysteria seems to subside a little as the earth is thrown in, but all the way home, shaken with sobs and outbursts of wailing at widening intervals, she is supported and surrounded by a black-clad throng of women who guide her staggering along the lanes. For days afterwards during visits of condolence the same symptoms occur in a milder form. The gravity of mourning loses ground before a sudden rush of talk: he was the best of sons, a real warrior, such a good boy, kind to his mother and father, so full of life, the best shot in the village, he played the lyra so swiftly you couldn’t see the bow, he leapt higher than any of them at the dance, and flew like a bird! What’s the use of making sons with such pain and sorrow if Charon steals them from us? Tears are soon flowing fast. The mourner’s face breaks and her voice sails up in the thin ritual trance-like wail of the miroloy. She is at once surrounded, embraced and gently scolded by her family who manage to quieten her bit by bit. In a few weeks’ time this dwindles and disappears. Gradually, backed by a host of comforting adages, the consolations of fatalism assert themselves. The deep sighs and the black clothes continue for life.