Mani

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  All this warlike bravery, thrown into advantage by their martial bearing and driven home by frowning brows and a fulminating gaze, was splendid. There are several portraits of these magnificently dressed Maniot paladins in the great Athenian house of the present M. Petro Mavromichalis—who is still, half-playfully, half-seriously, styled “the Bey”—in Athens. I was surprised to see how fair were these Mavromichali warriors; their great manes and moustaches gave them the air of Vikings. As far as I can remember, only John the Dog wears the baggy Maniot trousers; the rest are all in snowy fustanellas, presumably because they were painted in Athens after the War of Independence when that fine Epirote-Illyrian garb had become the almost universal badge of Greek patriots. Indeed, under King Otto and Queen Amelia, the fustanella and all its attendant finery, with superbly Byronic island costumes for ladies-in-waiting, was the official court dress. When he was Greek Minister in Paris the great Kollettis (who came of a Kutsovlach family from Syrako[5] in Epirus) would often wear it, and the Goncourt journals speak with admiration of his presiding fully-kilted over delicious banquets of agneau à la pallikare. Now, apart from the evzones and those mountain regions where the old men still go kilted, it has died out. Wittelsbach eccentricity, and a touching loyalty to the country he adopted, impelled King Otto still to affect the fustanella in Bavaria after his abdication. It is thus clad that we may think of him among the fir trees and neo-gothic pinnacles of Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau and reflected in the bright mirrors of the Nymphenberg.

  Apart from their appearance, their warlike pursuits and the superstitions and customs on which I have touched, there are no recorded details to quicken one’s reconstruction of this former life. Yes, there are two: a traveller mentions that it was customary for the priests to wear a brace of pistols and that the Mani was so poor in food that many of the mountaineers lived on salted star-fish. This custom, if it ever existed (and it is the reliable Leake who records it), has died out without a trace. Star-fish? They were horrified at the idea. It was as bad as the bulls of Katsimbalis....

  Pondering on this strange vanished life, I had a momentary vision, chiefly promoted by the conversation on the roof the night before, of the great-grandparents of my hosts involved in a village war in midwinter with the wind screaming through the towers; with the women pounding and grinding away at their cumbrous handmills or crowding round a brazier, melting lead and moulding shot; karyophylia poking from every slit, a swivel gun placed in the embrasure by my table, my host presiding over it, befezzed and voluminously breeched. Outside, the snow whirled along dark lanes which lightning and cannon flashes suddenly lit up and the report of the ordnance was drowned in thunderclaps. Children clambered upstairs stooping under the weight of single cannon-balls while beautiful dark girls, their plaits flying, sped up the ladders with flaming linstocks. There was a smell of gunpowder and the sound of somebody groaning in the darkness....

  Vatheia is one of several villages hereabouts which is supposed to have been populated mainly by Cretan refugees, presumably those in flight from the Turks after the Fall of Candia and the final defeat of the Venetians three centuries ago. Other Cretans had fled centuries before, in the thirteenth when Crete fell to the Venetians, taking refuge among the Byzantines of Asia Minor and settling along the Meander’s banks. They have left a strong impression on the Mani, especially on the dialect. Again and again I heard, with sudden excitement, turns of phrase and pronunciations and words that I had only heard before in the most inaccessible villages of Crete. There are many superficial resemblances in their way of life; even, now and then, in their appearance. Yet there is a compact fleshiness (I do not mean fat), almost a muscle-bound look, about many Maniot features: a dark floridness, a low planting of hair on the brow, and above all a shuttered wariness in those dark eyes which, handsome as many of these faces are, is quite different from the alert, luminous extroversion of the Cretan physiognomy; and in spite of all the apparent resemblance, the whole atmosphere is different. On the whole, they dislike each other, and it is not entirely because, out of all Greece, the Cretans are the most advanced partisans of Venizelist republicanism and the Maniots of the Royalist cause. Perhaps the heavy Cretan influx caused bad blood in the past; but it is probably because, in many ways, there are too many points of similarity. In fact, having during the war and afterwards become so fond of the Cretans—considering myself, in fact, almost an honorary Cretan—it was painful for me to hear them criticized so much. My spirited defence of them became something of a joke. The Greeks whom the Maniots think most similar to themselves are the Epirotes, especially (according to Dimitrakos-Messisklis) the Chimarriots of the Acroceraunian mountains. He finds much in common in the customs and characters of both regions, and, like a secret river deep down under successive immigrations from other Greek lands, the same tough Doric strain.

  With what ease populations moved about in ancient Greek lands, in the world conquered and Hellenized by Alexander, the wide elbow room of Rome and the Byzantine Empire! Undocumented, free and unregimented, people wandered where they liked between the Thames, the Danube, the Euphrates and the upper Nile—anywhere, in fact, that was free of the Barbarian menace, and often beyond. Now everyone is numbered and ringed like a pigeon and held captive in a cage of frontiers. Across the firm loom of settled populations a constant irregular warp and woof of minor movement was always in progress, propelled by restlessness, by pursuit of trade, thirst for booty, search for colonies, flight or exile; or transplanted, perhaps, out of policy or for asylum. The little church of Tourloti,[6] outside Kitta, hints that one of the least known of these shifts may have made a small contribution to the population of the Mani. I do not know the date of the church. It is extremely old. But an inscription declares that it was founded by a husband and wife called Marassiotes, and dedicated to SS. Sergius and Bacchus. Now, by the middle of the seventh century A.D., the Lebanon had been inhabited for some time by a people called the Mardaites, which may be translated “rebels,” “apostates” or “bandits.” (They sound a rough lot, not unlike the Shi’ite Kizilbashi in the Pomak villages of the Rhodope mountains.) The Byzantine emperors sometimes used them as levies, and Constantine V Pogonatus had twelve thousand under his orders there, serving as a rampart against the Arabs. When the Arabs conquered Syria, the Mardaites retreated north and acted as a “brass wall” along the Byzantine border, whence they were constantly raiding the Arabs until Justinian II (685– 695) agreed by treaty with the Caliph to withdraw them into the interior of the Empire, and they were accordingly distributed between the Pamphylian coast (where they became seafaring men), the island of Cephalonia, and the Peloponnese. But the Mardaites were not originally from the Lebanon at all. They had wandered there (for some lost reason and at some lost date) from the district of Maras, in eastern Cilicia, almost fifty miles inland, that is, in a north-easterly direction between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Euphrates. This was also the home of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus whose names are so unfamiliar in the Mani that their church is merely “The Cupola-ed One.” The Orthodox laity are strongly regional and selective in these matters. The only other church dedicated to the two saints that I know is the beautiful and famous ex-mosque in Constantinople; and the name of the founder of Tourloti—Marassiotes—(which, too, is unknown in the Mani to-day) means, exactly “someone from Maras.” Greeks, founding shrines far from their homes, are nearly always loyal to their home-saints. A church built by a Corfiot outside his island is almost certain to be called St. Spiridion; a Cephalonian, St. Gherasimos; a Zantiot, St. Dionysios; a Cretan, St. Minas; a Salonikan, St. Demetrius; and so on. Thus, the implications of this tiny church, just over ten yards square, offer themselves irresistibly: as well as the predominating Spartan blood there is probably some Frankish in the veins of the villagers of many-towered Kitta; possibly some Byzantine, almost certainly some Cretan; it now seems probable that we must add a wild splash from beyond the Taurus and the Lebanon, Greek still, and—sprung from “brigands” and “aposta
tes” though it may have been—from brigands and apostates who, on the brink of absorption in their fourth and last sojourning place, remembered with piety the two saints that once watched over their lost Anatolian homes....

  The three strange yoke-fellows were still toiling round the threshing floor; the sun, climbing to its meridian, contracted their shadows on the stone circle. Watched from my cool eyrie the geysers of thrown grain, shooting into the air every few seconds and then dissolving in a floating haze of chaff, seemed to encourage speculation on trifles. Those three-legged cooking pots that were worn as helmets.... Mr. Dimitrakos bears out Professor Kouyeas’ interpretation of Kakovouliotes by producing another obsolete nickname for the Deep Maniots: chalko-skouphides. This, at least, is plain: chalkos means brass, skouphi means a cap, a small hat: thus, the Brasshats. I don’t know why, but somehow I felt unconvinced by this derivation, in spite of the authority of both sources—Dimitrakos and Kouyeas—and the impeccable Maniot endings to their names; but, a little while ago, in the Travels of Thomas Watkins, M.A.—a series of letters published in 1792—I suddenly came on the following phrase: “The Magnotti”—Maniots—“free and independent as the ancient Spartans (are) still wearing on their heads iron helmets in which they occasionally boil their black broth...” This cross reference, from a source unknown to either of my authorities, convinced me in a flash—and will do so until it is competently refuted—that they are right, that the district has taken its name from its inhabitants, not vice versa, and that the Bad Mountains and the Land of Evil Council are really the Country of the Cauldroneers. So it is helmeted like three-horned Vikings that one must conjecture their sallies through the imaginary snow, their descents with fierce slogans and bared yataghans on the invading columns of the Seraskier and the Kapoudan Pasha!

  The famous “black broth of the Lacedaemonians” crops up in nearly all the old travel books. It is identified with all sorts of things, of which the oddest is coffee (essentially a Greek thing, in the eyes of early travellers), which was first drunk in England in the seventeenth century, to the wonder of all, by a learned Cretan called Nathaniel Canopus who was at Oxford—at Balliol—for ten years until he was ejected under the Commonwealth in 1648. A still more far-fetched explanation of coffee is produced by Pietro della Valle in 1615. It was, he says, the magic potion nepenthe, the secret of which was learnt by Helen when she was in Egypt with Menelaus after Troy fell. It took away all pain and brought on drowsiness. It was this, in the fourth book of the Odyssey, which Helen slipped into the wine of Telemachus and his companion to send them off into a happy and dreamless sleep.

  I have never seen one of these three-legged cauldrons. Cauldrons and saucepans in Greece are usually legless with flat bottoms, quite unsuitable for their dual Deep Maniot rôle. They must have died out, like so many small adjuncts of the past. (How many pogo-sticks still collect the dust in English attics? There are probably not more than a score of penny-farthing bicycles still in existence.) There is no evidence when these cauldrons became obsolete.... Another custom which has vanished without trace is the smoking of chibooks, those long slender Turkish pipes of cherry-wood with little earthenware bowls and elaborate amber mouthpieces. In all the old prints and engravings of Greek life they play a great part. A chibook is as essential an attribute of the klepht as his karyophylia, and sometimes as long. They must have been awkward bits of property, especially for a guerrilla warrior. On visits of ceremony, they were indispensable. It is not too far-fetched or romantic to find something purely Homeric in the character of Greek hospitality. But the formalities of visiting are oriental; at least they are that hybrid achievement which we think of as “Turkish”: and, like many Turkish formalities, full of dignity and grace. It is not for nothing that when these tribesmen from Central Asia became static, their neighbours were the three most civilized races: the Persians, the Arabs and the Greeks. The other details of welcome survive intact: the spoonful of jam made from quince or whole grapes or morello cherries or rose leaves, the thimbleful of ouzo or raki, the little cup, iridescently cupola-ed with bubbles, of oriental coffee (or Spartan broth or a scruple of nepenthe?), the great gleaming glass of water, which is appraised and extolled by guest and host alike with the niceness of cork-sniffing claret experts. These were offered on trays by the eldest daughter, who would stand in silence until they were finished with her hands crossed on her breast. But formerly a sheaf of chibooks was brought in as well. They were carefully filled and lighted with chips of charcoal by two myrmidons (they were impossible to light alone), then, after the mouthpiece had been plunged into hot water, offered already smoking to the guest, who would take a few ceremonial draws before broaching the topic of his visit. In a prosperous Nyklian’s tower, all the smouldering pipe bowls, to save the carpet, were gathered on a brass tray in the centre, with the stems, two or three yards in length, radiating to the richly accoutred Lacedaemonians cross-legged round the walls on divans, with a pistolled priest among them, perhaps, and a couple of kilted pallikars seeking asylum in the free Mani from the Pasha-ridden Morea, and the Bey in his fur-trimmed robe; all fingering their beads in silence, lids peacefully lowered over the amber mouths of their calumets, preparing to broach the eternal themes of feud and piracy and rebellion. It is hard to fit Belisarius and Rollin’s Ancient History into this conversation piece; but, if we can, we must add a young philhellene traveller in a frieze jacket, with a sketch book and vasculum beside him, his forefinger marking the place in a pocket volume of Pausanias or Strabo as he puffs and chokes....

  Variations on this scene continued—till when? Well into the nineteenth century. One may search for these pipes in vain in Adrianople or old Stamboul, let alone the cement villas of Ankara. A few still moulder in the Plaka and some of the islands. Yet I have seen them in use as everyday objects (a strange and solitary survival of time when the Ottoman Empire, running from the pillars of Hercules to the Gates of Vienna, embraced three-quarters of the Mediterranean) among Hungarian magnates. Zichys and Telekis and Esterhazys—commemorating after dinner in shooting boxes on the puszta and in Transylvanian castles the time, long before Belgrade was reconquered by Prince Eugene, when the Pest skyline still bristled with minarets,—would enshroud themselves in smoke from these long pipes. (They too, by now, must be minor casualties of the status quo.) It is fortunate, but peculiar, that the comforting narghileh, which is even more unwieldy, should have survived in all the old cafeneia of Greece; steaming and portentously gurgling at the end of its coil—a tube as flexibly jointed as the seated caterpillar which these things always conjure up—the little red coals burning aromatically through the toumbeki leaves from Ispahan.

  There are two more lost fragments of corroborative detail which have mysteriously vanished without trace; at the other end of the Greek world, this time, in the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia which are now called Roumania. They are two kinds of headdress, both of them extraordinary and worn alike by the hospadars (voivodes or reigning princes) and the ministers and dignitaries of their little courts: the Great Boyars of the Princely Divans of Yassy and Bucharest.

  Greeks, Roumanians, Turks and all foreign historians have been unanimous till recently in execration of these men, and, on the whole, wrongly; but that is not the point here. The important thing is that from the first decades of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the nineteenth, these two vassal thrones of the Ottoman Empire were occupied by Phanariot[7] Greeks or Hellenized Roumanian noblemen. Thrones were obtained through corruption and the princes’ reigns were brief, nearly always extortionate and oppressive and frequently cut short by the bowstring, the gallows or the block. Some were princes of outstanding qualities, some were worthless, a few of them unmitigated villains. But they were all of them civilized and cultivated men and their misdeeds are in a measure balanced by their service to the Orthodox religion, by the encouragement they gave to both Greek and Roumanian learning, and, towards the end of their heyday, by their share in the Greek War of Indep
endence. All the opprobrium which, thanks to Voltaire and Gibbon, loaded the adjective “Byzantine”—ruthlessness, duplicity, greed, vanity, ambition, vice, superstition and cruelty—has overloaded the implications of “Phanariot.” With the strange processes of revision, “Byzantine” has now lost its pejorative meaning; and, by the same processes, the Phanariots are emerging less satanically with every passing decade.