At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  Food is not plentiful. You eat “island food”—that is to say, what is in season—tomatoes, cucumbers, black olives, goat cheese, mullet, hake, some fish or other. When the island’s melons or tomatoes have been eaten there are no more till next year. There may be kid or pork. There will always be retsina, the resin-tasting wine that varnishes the tongue but is light and refreshing. You eat in the simple taverna, as you do on the mainland, going straight to the kitchen in the Greek manner, to choose your fish or to pick out what you want from the pans simmering on the stove. There are some delicacies from which no doubt you withdraw—the stuffed fish head, for instance, in which the bonne bouche is the eye.

  The enchantment of these journeys lies in the continual surprise of the harbors, in the silence of sea and sun, the swimming islands, blue on blue. Fire, air and water—you are reborn among the elements. And nothing, nothing at all, thank heaven, has been done to attract people to the smaller places, though hundreds go to great islands like Rhodes and Corfu. There is only the felicity of their untouched existence, and the fine simplicity of the people who are very old in the knowledge of living.

  But at the back of our minds in these sea journeys, and in every Greek journey, there is the sense of something echoing and recognized. The dolphins leap, twist and dive sportingly, like wheels spinning across the sea; we think of Apollo the sun god in a chariot drawn by dolphins; of Poseidon, and the “wine-dark sea” of Odysseus; of Aphrodite, born in the island of Cythera. We are in their very hunting grounds. This sea is Homeric in its storm and in its gaiety. Out of these waves and mountains, these rocks and trees, the myths of our civilization were born. (And how Greek and changeable they were: Aphrodite now a goddess of fertility, now, since she was born out of the sea, a protector of the seamen.) We have known the Greek stories from childhood, we have seen them changed by the Romans and in our own minds. They move from the tale to the myth, to allegories of nature, to the first serious ordering of the Western mind. In the story of Oedipus we have found a psychological pattern of human fate.

  These myths, these legends that were history, have actually laid the foundation of the Western mind. We are different from the Asiatics because of Greece, for the Greeks taught us democracy when they set themselves apart from the tyrants of Asia. We owe our Bible to Greek-speaking Semites: in Athens, in Corinth, Saint Paul spoke; in Patmos, Saint John wrote the Book of Revelation. The myths, the legends, the histories of other cultures and civilizations have far less to say to us. Thor and Wotan are nothing compared with Zeus; we catch a glimmer from Celtic tradition, but no more; we derive slim nourishment from the legends of India; neither North nor South America has any profound Indian revelations to offer us—the gods of Hiawatha, of the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Incas or the African Negroes are little more than curiosities for us. Yet we turn to the Greeks and find they are buried or extended in ourselves.

  And so, as we travel in modern Greece, we lead a double life. The memory of even the most ignorant camera-clicker is stirred. He has heard of Apollo and Olympia. “I know nothing about politics or philosophy,” he says immodestly and, without knowing it, is speaking Greek. Gradually ancient Greece makes us conscious of ourselves; and when we visit the sites, we are suddenly shocked into the recognition that all we heard or read was not a story, but often quite literally happened to this person, in this place, before human eyes; and that these people were the most intelligent people the earth had known. The Greek journey is a recivilization.

  It is a hard journey, but I do not think there is anything in Europe to equal it, either in the wild scene of mountain and sea or in what they evoke. I think of the days on the road from Athens to Delphi, from there the sea passage over the Gulf of Corinth to Dhiakopton, Patras to Olympia; and then the giddy and exhausting journey along precipices, over passes, to Mycenae and the tomb of Agamemnon, to Epidaurus where Asclepius practiced the art of healing, and the plain of Argolis to Nauplion—the old capital of Greece and unlike any other Greek town—and so to modern Corinth and the corniche back to Athens. It can be done in five days at a rush, but you need strong nerves and a resistant body; and if you understand nothing else at the end of it, you will grasp the toughness of the Greeks.

  You go racketing out of Athens down the modern boulevard toward the sea, and at once the mind splits. You are on the Sacred Way, you pass the site of the temple to Demeter, who brought the fig to Greece; you are driving through burned-up land of scanty grass. There lie the shipyards and the oil refinery—but also the sacred lakes; beyond are the soap works, the cement works—but there also is the place of the Eleusinian mysteries.

  In this industrial corner of a burned-up country, the corn goddess came to seek Persephone, her daughter; here the myth of spring and winter originated: the seed lying in the darkness of the earth and coming to life. You drive past the red soil of the olive groves, you rise to the new forests of pines. If much of Greece is bare of trees, the Turks must be blamed. They were soldiers and colonists; they let everything be eaten by the goats, as they have also done in Turkey. Here at this very crossroads, Oedipus unknowingly slew the man who was his father, a lashing driver on the road; there, in the scrub near the roadside, are a village’s white beehives, for Greece is the land of honey; there are melons in the fields, and walnuts on the trees.

  There is no water in the riverbeds; they are wide and stony. But you pass from wilderness to fertile plain where there are cotton fields. The trucks are loaded with sacks of cotton for a new factory making cottonseed oil. And then you come to Thebes, a prosperous town but shockingly housed, where the main street seems to be on fire with the red berries of the shrubs that are planted down the middle of it. And so, on and on, rising until you are in the clouds, and under Parnassus is Delphi.

  Two thousand years have tamed ancient Greece in our minds; we forget the wildness, we forget that civilizations are pauses of balance in continuous conflict. The ruins of Delphi do not impress at first as, say, the sea temples of Sounion or Rhodes; Delphi depends for its effect on the awe, even the terror, the command and secrecy of its site. Almost hidden under its precipices, it looks down thousands of feet on a sweep of mountain, a wide concealed stairway of hills to the spear of silver water that comes into the immense plain of olives at sea level ten miles away. From below you cannot imagine how you will reach this terrifying point of power—for Delphi was the dynamo of Greek rule—and from above you marvel at the resource, the authority and subtlety of the whole political proposition of an oracle so absolutely placed and so ingeniously manipulated. The scene is noble, savage and ominous, the minds that used it were of the highest sophistication.

  The little village of Delphi has been moved down from the site of the temple and theater to the edge of its ferned and flowering cliffs. It is a place of flowers, for give a Greek a yard or two of earth and he will grow flowers in it and trail his vines. One of the enviable things on earth is to own a terrace garden there, built out into the sky and surveying that point where the wild ravine under Parnassus descends and widens into the spectacular valley. The village smells of thyme, the fig hangs over walls that are covered with morning glory. Rocks fall down from the hillside onto the road. The dogs bark at night. The air is cold.

  The valley floor appears to be covered by a close green carpet of scrub or kale, but when you drive twisting and twisting down to it, you find it is not that sort of vegetation at all but an immense grove of olives, planted in ghostly alleys miles long, its trees a thousand years old, and the red soil beneath them turned by the mattock as it has been for centuries. It is one of the oldest olive groves in the world, a place spectral and haunted. I shall not forget how still it was. There was great wealth, there is still great wealth, at the foot of Delphi.

  At the harbor, on the rich Gulf of Corinth, you catch the ferry. You had heard its anchor go down in the stillness of the mountain night. And now you are in the blue flame of the Gulf of Corinth. I remember the cattle lowing, the truck drivers asleep in their cabs, as the fe
rry took us down the gulf. We called at little painted Galaxidion, which the Turks once destroyed, and then moved slowly past the chasms and ravines to the opposite coast, past the mountains that looked as smooth as lions’ backs but turned silvery white when the sun reached its blinding force. For a little short of a hundred miles you could drift along to the Ionian Sea and say again that Greece is all rock, water, light and air, and that all seem to turn to fire.

  You land on the far side of the gulf in the lemon-growing country, where people sit under awnings and the donkeys trot. You drive through flowers, beside fences of oleander, into Patras, the currant port, where restaurant tables are laid out in the street. This is easy traveling. You are making for Olympia, away from the rugged mountains into milder country. Olympia lies in a bowl of thyme-scented wooded hills, a place of vineyards, flowers, and of shepherds who water their sheep in the river, the course of which was altered last century to reveal the astonishing and entire site of the Olympic Games. Under the oak trees on the hill called Kronion, Kronos—that is to say Time himself—fathered Zeus, “the president of the immortals.” I know of no more restful rural spot than Olympia; and peace is its tradition, for the Games were the four-yearly truce in the continual Greek quarrel.

  After two days you are hurled (it is the only word) across those violent mountains of the Peloponnese to Argolis, Nauplion and to Corinth. It is a journey in which the road seems always to be on the edge of some violent gorge. You climb to the top of a pass and then take the next gorge and travel from precipice to precipice. There is rarely a town, and when there is it hangs down the mountainside; the town square will be built out on stone or steel into the sky. Down you go hurtling, night falls, and high above you see small lights moving. They are not in the sky. They are the trucks zigzagging, hair-pinning upward—it is the same road as yours. You will spiral, up and up, round the lights of a village, come back to it again when you think you have left it for good.

  On a lonely stretch a policeman and a girl ask you for a lift. Stolidly, hour after hour, they drive with you and you wonder about the lives of these mountain people: about, say, the priest you saw walking up and down with—was it the mayor?—in the village square; or the youth who brought you coffee in the café. And then, at the end of the long day you are across the Peloponnese to the rich orange groves of Argolis, in the fertile country of wild Agamemnon. You are in Nauplion.

  I used to sit—it was too hot to walk far—on the long quay of Nauplion. This town was the seat of the first Greek government after the liberation from the Turks in 1829, and it is one of the prettiest towns in Greece. It has the neatness and dignity of some prosperous Western European town of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. It stands by a spacious lagoon of quiet, enameled water where the fish swarm and polyps, like breathing footballs, come wallowing in flotillas along the quay. All day the youths threw out their fishing lines, the sailors played cards in the bars, and people sat out of the heat in the deep shade of the trees.

  In the town, you notice Turkish fountains and a mosque—now a cinema. Outside, in the orange groves, the cotton and tobacco fields, you have seen the peasant women with their scarves wound over their mouths, hiding their faces—a survival from Turkish times. They say they cover their faces because of the heat of the sun, and the dust; but really it is a memory of the times when Greek women concealed themselves from the Turks or copied the semiveiling of Turkish country women. In the towns the women dress as women do anywhere. The position of women in Greece is far less independent than in northern countries, at any rate on the surface. The ruling factor in their lives is the dowry system, for the Greeks, like the French, believe firmly in money. It is the rigid obligation of the males of a family to provide their marriageable females with dowries. A brother may not marry before his sisters are provided for. In a poor country this means long delays in marriage. “I cannot marry yet because of my sisters,” a young man will say. And I have heard of Greek immigrants in America who have reached old age unmarried because there has been one more girl to provide for back in Greece. The rapacious son-in-law turns up a good deal in family gossip. There are tales of bigamous dowry collecting.

  The dowry system is not a passing custom. It is a national preoccupation. After the war, the new queen of Greece instituted a public fund called the Queen’s Fund—it gets some of its money from a tax on cinema tickets—partly to provide dowries for poor girls. Yet, among the country people, there are surprising instances of hidden wealth. Only a month or two ago I read a report in a paper of a country marriage where the bride was endowed not only with linen for a lifetime but also with a sum equal to $3000 in gold coins! The peasant would not trust anything but gold.

  The Greeks speak of romantic love, but only as one of the many aspects of love, unromantic love being regarded as more desirable. Our romantic temperament of the north does not appeal to these people who have a very unshocked, worldly, pagan eye for ways and means. Both nature and necessity make the Greek aware of the value of money, so that one meets in many Greeks a strange mixture of idealism and expediency which they call compromise, arrangement and realism. The illicit love affairs of Athens, like those of Paris, have a discreet money basis. The Greek is not resigned to his poverty. The ill-paid bank clerk turns accountant in the evenings and does the accounts of several shops; a typist will become a cashier in the evenings; a professor will earn some extra money as a consultant.

  Life is like that everywhere in the Mediterranean, but there is a fundamental difference between Greek and Latin life. The Greek is different because he represents the Eastern branch of the Christian religion; as the mosque of Nauplion reminds you, he was for centuries under Turkish rule. The Greek church is a church of holy pictures, not of holy images. People wander in, light their tapers, kiss the picture of a saint. (An old woman stands by to wipe the picture after it has been kissed.) The tapers are put into the sockets of a candelabrum. It is a religion without drama, and the church is not militant. It does not proselytize. Unlike the Roman church it is, as its priests will tell you, a passive faith. Ninety percent of its congregation is behind the Iron Curtain, and its Patriarch is in the totally hostile Moslem city of Istanbul. “We are a pathetic church,” a priest once told me; he was using the word in the strict, archaic sense of feeling, passivity and suffering, and saying this with pride. “We dislike militant religions,” he said. “Our passivity enables us to understand Eastern people much better than Westerners do.”

  But if the Greek church has nothing like Catholic Action, Opus Dei or Catholic trade-unions, if it does not pronounce against birth control and divorce and remains detached from society, educational policies and party politics, it still has one very important role in Greek life. You have only to see the gorgeous procession for the patron saint of Athens (a procession largely military), to see that the church is close to the reality of Greek patriotism. When the Turks conquered Greece, the Orthodox priests became the natural custodians of the Greek spirit of independence. They conserved the cultural traditions. They taught. They came to be regarded as the arbiters. And so, in times of national crisis, when the factions cannot agree, or in times of war, the Archbishop of Athens steps in and takes charge until the politicians settle their differences. Once government is re-established, he retires. When Winston Churchill came to Athens during the civil war of 1944, he negotiated with the Archbishop. In its independence, in the fact that its priests are usually married, the Greek church has rather more resemblance to the Protestant than to the Roman Catholic confessions.

  I left Nauplion for Athens on one more of those spectacular Greek journeys. You travel from the milky lagoon and see the mountains above Mycenae—shaped, they say, like the head and body of Agamemnon still ruling after thousands of years in the rock. In old Corinth the men are out in the cafés under the trees, the butcher is chopping up a kid, a pig is roasting on a spit in the street; in new Corinth, there is the dust of the trucks loaded with currants. Then you cross the terrifying cleft of the
Corinth canal—a little Suez Jr., joining the Ionian and Aegean seas—and you are out on the coast road that twists and tunnels. The stupendous sunset colors the long, changing islands. Two hours away in this clear air you see the prickle of the lights of Piraeus stretching into Athens itself.

  And in Athens, in some simple taverna, you will sit outdoors in the soft night, served by poor thin men who smile with dignity and inquire with avid interest. About what? About every detail concerning yourself, your health, your feelings, your thoughts, your marriage, children, illnesses, work—everything except your money. Questions about money are considered very indelicate, for that is a most intimate preoccupation. You will sit with friends who will talk their heads off about their lives, their politics, their amusements, and always about the distraction which is Greece itself: friends you will find again in the morning, thinking of something to give you simple pleasure, something to remind you that whether you are fat or starving, there is nothing like gossip, storytelling and being aware every minute that you are alive and in the sun. For life is short. And so you bring up two chairs in the Greek fashion—one to sit on, one for your feet—and you wonder why you live anywhere else.

  [1961]

  7

  The Secret People

  Once more the disturbing German experience begins.

  “Anti-Germanism is a cliché.”

  “The Germans hate themselves because of what they have done.”