In the case of the isolated killing of a member of one family by another, unrelated to any general policy on either side, if it was proved that it was a mistake or done in drunkenness or if the two families were linked by military alliance or by blood or god-relationship the ritual consequences could be avoided by an offer, on the part of the offending family, of psychadel-phosyne, or soul-brotherhood. Then the offending side expressed sorrow and true penitence and the actual killer made himself the especial protector and benefactor of the wronged family. Unlike psychiko, this was equally honourable to both sides and often the beginning of an indissoluble bond. All these matters were settled by a local council of elders known as the Gerontikí, the only institution lower than the Bey or the archikapetan which maintained any semblance of order in the Mani. Their function was not unlike that of the Courts of Honour which, in pre-1914 Germany and Austria-Hungary, weighed the pros and cons of quarrels in the Hochjunkertum, enforced or discouraged a duel, appointed the weapons and the terms and decided when honour had been satisfied. Needless to say, when two powerful Nyklians were determined to fight it out, neither side paid any attention to it. But sometimes, when a village war had continued for years with a parity of casualties and destruction on both sides and no possible verdict in sight, they were content, faute de mieux, to accept the conciliation of the Gerontikí. Final peace—which was appropriately known as agape—was concluded at last by a meeting in the rouga of both sides. There in the middle of the ruins they would quite literally kiss and make it up; embracing, drinking to friendship from the same cup, and paying reciprocal visits of ceremony. The agapes were quite often lasting. The Turkish threat, again, would reconcile all parties, and sometimes supernatural intervention would call a cease-fire. The most famous case is the appearance of the Blessed Virgin to the Mavromichalis and Mourtzinos families in the middle of a battle with the warning that a Turkish host was approaching. They crossed themselves, embraced and advanced to meet the enemy side by side. The longest truce of all was the general tréva called by Mavromichalis on the eve of the War of Independence. Everyone, in these times, went heavily armed. They would sit talking in the rouga in the evening with their guns across their knees, and before celebrating Mass, priests would carefully lay their guns across the altar at a handy distance. In spite of the local piety there were several murders and fights in church during Mass.
At the victorious end of the War of Independence, the Mani, except for enlightened innovations like cannons and guns, was still living in the Dark Ages. No region in Greece was more awkward to fit into the modern European state which Greece’s rulers were bent on constructing. The Maniots were pro-English, Capodistria’s party pro-Russian. They started badly with insurrections and the assassination of Capodistria and they were alienated by sorties from Kalamata to put down the inter-Nyklian wars. Who were these newly liberated Vlachs who had the effrontery to interfere with the habits of five hundred years? The Maniots had been free far longer, they maintained, and, what was more, had no doubts about how freedom should be used. Capodistria had stamped out piracy but the ordnance still flashed merrily in scores of villages. The old private music of gunfire and dirge continued just as it had in the good old days. The blood-feud flourished, Nyklian challenged Nyklian, the villeins knew their place, the towers multiplied, their summits climbing higher than ever before. The towers themselves, for Nyklians and Government alike, had become the symbols of Maniot nonconformity. King Otto’s regency, diagnosing in them the root of all Maniot strife, determined, in order to bring the Mani into line with the rest of Greece, to smash them. The Maniots—the Nyklians, that is, for they were the only ones whose opinion mattered—became still more firmly resolved to cling to them. But there was worse to come. The old guerrilla days were over, the Regency was building up a modern conscript army and the Nyklians were outraged to learn that all had to begin at the bottom in a revolutionary competition of merit in which Nyklians might conceivably find themselves under the orders of promoted villeins. It was like trying to persuade the Malatesta and the Baglioni to go through the ranks commanded by the stable hands of Rimini and Perugia. They put their foot down, refusing not only to discuss the demolition of towers or limitations of height or number, but the very idea of a Maniot formation which was not automatically officered by Nyklians.
Out of patience, the Regent determined to act. The whole region, like the Highlands after the Battle of Culloden, must be reduced and pacified and a party of the 11th Bavarian regiment, imported by Otto’s regency to back the new regime, marched into the Mani with orders to occupy and destroy the towers. They moved accordingly into a number of towers in Tsimova which had not yet become Areopolis. The Deep Maniots rose and besieged them. Understanding their peril the Bavarians beat a hasty retreat but thirty-six of them were captured in a tower and sold back to the State by the Maniots at the ransom of a zwanziger a head. Four companies of Bavarians, who the locals termed “the vinegar-baptized,” were promptly despatched to Petrovouni, where the Maniots had fortified themselves, and in the ensuing battle against eight hundred Maniot villagers, they were badly beaten. In the retreat half of them were killed with bullets and slingstones. The Government in Nauplia was in despair. A force of six thousand, complete with artillery, was next despatched to besiege Petrovouni under a General Schmaltz,—and forced to retreat to Gytheion yet again. In the negotiations that followed, the Maniots, urged by a Mavromichalis and a Grigorakis (both descendants of Beys), surrendered Petrovouni; a few towers on the edge of the Outer Mani were bought by the State, a limitation of height was published but not observed and a general amnesty declared. It was really a victory for the Mani.
The Nyklians had their own way in the end, and their end was their undoing, An intelligent Bavarian officer called Max Feder, who spoke Greek and knew the Mani and who was indeed a personal friend of all the great Nyklians, travelled the peninsula and, at amicable gatherings in the village rougas, enrolled all the kapetans and his Nyklian friends as officers into a militia unit called the Maniot Phalanx, which he commanded successfully in the suppression of other disorders in the Morea. They slowly accustomed themselves to western military notions. The distance between Nyklian and villein decreased, and bit by bit they became partisans of the status quo. Kindness and tact succeeded where coercion had been powerless. The electoral system and local government took root, schools were built and—a great landmark in Mani history—a villein was elected mayor of the great Nyklian stronghold of Nomia. The Mani was shared between the nomes of Kalamata and Laconia (the dividing line running along the watershed of the Taygetus) and subdivided into eparchies and demes. A military revolution in Athens forced King Otto to grant a constitution in 1843 and in 1844 Greece had the first general election in all her long history. Burlesque and turbulent though it was—nowhere more so than in the Mani—this was the simultaneous death-rattle of the old order and the muling and puking of modern parliamentary Greece.
The feuds continued, but, as the nineteenth century grew older, they became more rare. It is fitting that the last full-dress war took place in Kitta, the first place where the Nyklians, in flight from Andronicus II, settled in the Deep Mani. The struggle between the great families of the Kaouriani and the Kourikiani had emptied the village of all but their contending clans and all the surrounding hamlets rang with the customary noises of guns and flung rocks and the shattering of marble roofs. Nobody (except the new schoolmaster, for whom both had a superstitious awe) could cross the street without shouting “a neutral, a neutral!” The Prime Minister, Koumoundouros (himself a Maniot and a descendant of the eponymous Bey), sent a force of gendarmerie to besiege the Kaouriani, who were deemed the aggressors. The gendarmerie were beaten off with heavy loss, and they spoke with awe of “these men of iron and blood.” They were finally reduced by a besieging force of four hundred regular soldiers and artillery and forced to surrender. They were treated with gentle methods, however, and it was the last of the great Nyklian contests. Centuries of anarchy had
come to an end.
The last few decades have disarmed the prejudices and blurred all distinctions between the Nyklians and the hinds. Sitting in the evening along the stone bench of the rouga with their sickles and their fishing-nets on the slabs beside them, they have the appearance of dark wiry people of the mountains and the sea; their brows, unless unlocked in laughter or the affability of conversation, are knit in an habitual frown. But, like nearly all the mountaineers of Greece, the patched clothes and bare feet are accompanied by the physiognomy and the bearing of nineteenth-century portraits of generals, ambassadors and dukes. There is little in the hollow cheeks and bony noses, sweeping white moustaches, piercing clear eyes and ease of manner that can be connected with the word “peasant,” though I am forced for want of a better to use it often enough. They all grew up in the atmosphere of village wars. Many of the indestructible elders remember them clearly; and much of their discourse revolves longingly round those old battles between rough-hewn grandees in their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ days: the wars of the Mavromichali and the Mourtzini of Tsimova and Kandamyli, the Michalakiani and the Grigoriani of Kharaka, the Katsiriani and the Tsingriani, the Kaouriani and the Kourikiani of Kitta, the Messisklis of Nomia and the Yenitzariani of the Katopangi. And all round them in scores, as the sagas multiply far into the night—battered with cannon-balls and pocked with bullets, assaulted by time and decay, disapproved of, legislated against and condemned by regime after regime and as bold as brass—stand the wicked and indelible towers.
The cannon rusted. The great Nyklian wars were over. But, against the continuance of private feuds—the vendetta as it is usually understood—legislation was impotent. The habit of violence continued and though the scope was limited to isolated action, the old rules were observed. It was strife between individuals and it seems to have gained in implacability what it has lost in extent. Once the declaration of enmity had been made, no distance would interfere with the pursuer and his quarry. For, with the changes of Greece and improved communications, many of the inhabitants left the peninsula. Often years would pass before the threatened man was tracked down and destroyed. There was no relenting; a revolver bullet or a dagger thrust in Athens, the Lavrion tin mines, Constantinople, Alexandria or under Brooklyn Bridge, would suddenly resolve a forty-year-old feud. It is said to have decreased a great deal lately. I asked three policemen—from another district, as always—how often such acts occur to-day. One said “Never. That is, very rarely.” The second, “Four or five times a month.” A third said, “A few per year. It all depends.” A Maniot who was sitting in the café said, ambiguously, “They don’t know what they’re talking about. Anyway, as if that old stuff matters compared with all the killing of Greeks by Greeks we had here in the War....”
* * *
Now comes a ramification of Mani history, a marginal comment—an extended bracket or footnote, almost—which I find it impossible to leave out of these pages for several reasons. Here it is.
When, a few days before, our caique had sailed across the gulf of Vitylo (it is written like this in demotic, more often than Oitylos which is still, as it was when its Troy-bound villagers climbed on board one of the sixty ships of Menelaus, its official name), the first thing to catch our eye was the enormous Turkish keep of Kelepha. From the heights where a temple to Serapis once stood, it dominates the little town of Vitylo and the whole gulf. It was built at the low ebb of Greek fortunes immediately after the fall of Crete in 1669, under pretence of a guarantee to the freedom of Maniot trade, as opposed to a prelude to occupation. Vitylo was the seat of two great Maniot families, the Iatriani and the Stephanopoli. The presence of this fort and garrison at their front doors was a bitter torment: they were attacked on the way to their fields, their property was stolen, their women had to be locked in day and night. Despair had overcome the Greeks at Candia’s fall. It really looked at last as if the Turks would stay in Greece till doomsday. The two families determined to leave together for the free Christian realms of the Franks, settle there, and fight the Turks again in more hopeful days. But, before this could happen, the two families were at war with each other over the theft and marriage of Maria, a Iatrian girl, by one of the Stephanopoli. Several were killed on either side. It was then that the Iatriani received a formidable ally in the shape of Liberakis Yerakaris, who belonged to the third great Vitylo clan of Kosma, the terrible ex-pirate released from jail in Constantinople by the Grand Vizier on the condition that he subdued the Mani.[5] He was appointed commander of the region, and was soon, as an ally of the Turks, its Prince.... But he had been engaged to the stolen Maria and his main reason for accepting his post on such questionable terms was an angry determination to destroy the whole Stephanopoli tribe. He started by capturing and publicly executing thirty-five of them. After that his ambition carried him off on strange courses. He became an erratic war lord and condottiere, now on the Turkish, now on the Venetian, now on the Greek side, in an endless succession of bloody campaigns all over continental Greece. Local conditions were worse than ever and after this fiery interlude the two families were still resolved to emigrate, though, rather naturally, to different places.
The Iatriani were the first to move and their destination was chosen for an odd reason. Iatros is the Greek for “doctor,” and the Iatriani had long been convinced that their name was a Hellenized form of Medici; that they were, in fact, descended from some shadowy emigrant member of the great Florentine family. They would sign their names “Medikos or Iatrianos,” or, even more often—it is as near as the Greek alphabet can get to the Italian—“nte Mentitzi” or “Mettitzi”;[6] the orthography and penmanship of the few relevant documents of this time clearly show that swordsmanship in the Mani was still the dominant skill. So it was to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany that their thoughts at once sped, and, after their thoughts, an emissary. The Grand Duke, Federigo II dei Medici, either accepted the bona fides of these far-away kinsmen or decided to humour their conviction. He welcomed their proposal and offered them wide acres on generous terms. His son Cosimo III had succeeded when, at the end of 1670 or early in 1671, the Maniot Medici actually dropped anchor in Leghorn. He made them welcome and they were given land to colonize not far from the coast round the villages of Casalapin and Vivvona, near Volterra, in the jurisdiction of Siena. Several hundreds of them settled in joyfully and their troubles began.
Five Orthodox priests had come with them but, according to Greek sources, the Bishop of Volterra sent a charlatan to their settlement, a real or masquerading Archbishop of Samos—this dark accusation is hard to unravel—who, singing Vespers according to the Eastern rite, summoned the priests to accept the Western creed with the filioque and bade them submit to the authority of Rome. Catholic forms of service were introduced and a Greek Benedictine from Chios, who, in a sermon, forbade them honouring any saints canonized in the East since the separation of the Churches, declared the indissolubility of marriage under all circumstances and urged the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar. In twenty-two years not a shadow of Orthodoxy remained. With this vital stay removed they rapidly lost all consciousness of being Greek and were soon merged by inter-marriage with the surrounding population. But (hints a Greek chronicler) even more baleful influences were wreaking their dissolution. “It is to be feared,” writes Spiro Lambros, “that they were not only Romanized in a few years but entirely wiped out also. For these mountaineers of the Taygetus were unable to resist the miasmas of the swamps in which they had settled such a short time ago.”[7] To-day, one can hunt the Tyrrhenean coast in vain for their descendants. The Italian population and the Maremma swallowed up all trace of them centuries ago. They have faded away over the marsh like will o’ the wisps.
The Stephanopoli had still more pressing reasons for clearing out. Their past history in wars against the Turks, the proximity of the fortress of Kelepha, the enmity of the many remaining Iatriani, the implacable hatred of Liberakis, whose fortune, after decimating their family, was soaring, and the h
ostility of a number of other families of the Mani in general—everything counselled departure. The Stephanopoli laid claim, with or without foundation, to origins that were even more august than those of the Iatriani. Their family legend or tradition (capable of neither proof nor the reverse) made them descend from the dynasty of the Comnènes which had given Byzantium six emperors and Trebizond twenty-one. After the Fall of Trebizond, the story goes, Nicephorus, the youngest son of David II Grand Comnène, after wandering for years in Persia and other eastern lands, finally disembarked at Vitylo in 1473 where he was honourably welcomed in accordance with his rank. This wandering prince soon imposed himself on the Maniots, married the daughter of one of the great families (Lasvouri), and launched himself into the heroic doings of the peninsula. His grandson Stephen, who gave the family its present name, won a heroic victory against the Turks in 1537, built a fine tower in Vitylo, which is still standing, and a monastery of which the abbot, his son Alexis, is deemed a local saint. The Iatrianos and Kosmas families, moved to envy by Stephen’s riches and power, conspired together and assassinated him.[8] Two centuries later his descendants, four hundred and thirty of them, were wondering where to go.
They sent one of their number, a man already much travelled and widely lettered, to seek a new home. The Maniot Medici ruled out the hospitable Grand Duchy so he explored the length of Italy—in vain—until he reached Genoa. The Serene Republic, only too pleased to settle loyal foreigners among the rebellious inhabitants of their island possession, offered him and his kinsmen wide lands in Corsica. He returned to Vitylo, a French brigantine was chartered, and, on the 3rd of October, 1675, the Stephanopoli, with three hundred kinsmen and allies, seven hundred and thirty souls all told, went on board with their bundles of household goods, their family ikons, and, it is said, the bell of the Cathedral. The port was a wild scene of weeping and lamentation; but the departure had to be brisk to elude a Turkish flotilla. At the last moment the Archbishop of Vitylo tried to board, but he was turned back because of his great age. Distraught with grief and anger at the sight of all his family leaving for ever the holy soil of Greece, he climbed a high rock and cursed them as they sailed away down the Messenian Gulf. To this day, it seems, descendants of the emigrants attribute all their reverses to the Archbishop’s curse.
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