Greek to Me

by Mary Norris

  If my travels had a moment to compare to Ed Stringham’s experience of the Parthenon, this was it. My gratitude has made me easier to get along with ever since. Back in Athens, I was more than content to join my fellow-travelers for a sunset tour of the Acropolis—the kind of thing that really galls you when you are among hoi polloi (Greek for “the many”) and see privileged individuals admitted after hours. We were an eccentric bunch: an ambitious freelancer, keen to solidify her relationships with the Ministry of Culture; a gentlemanly Southern wine writer; an art snob from the Upper East Side; a fresh young Mormon woman who worked in radio and lugged her equipment up the Acropolis, unsheathing a microphone the size of a giant zucchini. She refused wine at meals but drank in Greece with bottomless delight, reminding me of my younger self. As she hovered near our guide, a young man in khaki shorts and work shirt, with her giant padded microphone, we draped ourselves over the smooth rocks and listened. The guide talked about the restoration efforts, which entailed undoing the misguided restoration efforts of earlier generations. A young reporter from the West Coast took notes in a whimsical notebook with a purple pen—I imagined her dotting her “i”s with daisies and marveled at how easy and feminine she made it look to be a writer.

  When we had wandered around for a while and it was time to leave, the West Coast writer discovered that she had lost her pen. “It’s my favorite pen!” she cried, and it was clear that the Acropolis would not be closing for the night until she had found it. We fanned out over the rocks, some of us more optimistic and willing than others, to make our fellow writer happy. I concentrated on the spot where I had watched her dotting her “i”s, her dark hair framing her lovely face, her short skirt belling around her. She was married with a young daughter and hadn’t been lucky so far on this trip, missing her connection in Vienna, oversleeping in the morning, passing out early in the evening. She would later confirm what I had suspected: she was pregnant. As a pencil lover, I understood the attachment to a writing tool—I was traveling with a quiver of Blackwings. Looking down, I spotted the pen hiding in a crevice of the rock, and said casually, “I found it,” instantly regretting that I had not nabbed this opportunity to shout in Greek, “Εύρηκα!” I found it! Eureka!

  SOMEHOW WHEN A CITY IS ANCIENT you don’t expect it to change that much, but Greater Athens is a dynamic megalopolis. In recent years it hosted the Summer Olympics and built a new airport, got gleaming new Metro lines up and running, and opened the new Acropolis Museum. This is on the south side of the Acropolis, set back from a promenade planted with rosemary and thyme. A broad entrance ramp gives visitors a chance to look down at the archaeological site through green-tinged glass. Inside, findings from the Acropolis are arranged behind glass on both sides of a long corridor. The museum is built on several stories, with the sculptures installed at the level on which they would be found if they were still attached to the temple. A visitor can enjoy the details of metopes and friezes, in natural light, while looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Acropolis itself. The Caryatids have been moved inside to protect them from the pollution, so you can see them up close, admire their thick hair in its intricate braids, and peek out from behind them as if you were with them on the porch of the Erechtheion. (The ones on the Acropolis are reproductions.) The Greeks have left poignant blanks for the marble gods and doomed oxen and whinnying horses that reside in London.

  The last time I was in Athens, in the spring of 2017, with no fancy press credentials, I went again to the Acropolis. I tried to get there early, before it got too crowded, but by the time I arrived at the ticket booth it was 10:15. The day was already hot, and the Acropolis was thronged. I joined the crowd of people jostling up the stone stairs, worn smooth to gleaming by the feet of supplicants since the time of Pericles. Four Japanese women wearing hats suitable for a garden party linked arms and pushed through the crowd, giggling. A man directed me to move so that he could photograph his wife: no photobombing allowed. Signs that said “Do Not Touch the Marble” made even the most reverent visitor want to reach out and stroke the cool pink stone. As at Dafni, the restoration was ongoing—there were more work crews on scaffolding than I had ever seen on the Parthenon before. Inside the temple, square white umbrellas cast patches of shade for the workers. There was the sound of drills. Column drums and slabs and disks, organized by size and shape, were lined up and labeled: a library of fragments. There was a railroad up there, and cranes and pulleys and tractors and carts full of stones. Minus the modern technology, it must have looked something like this during the original construction. I thought of a passage from Plutarch that Ed had once left on my desk: a retired mule, after years of labor on the Acropolis, showed up every day to cheer on the younger mules.

  The crowd and the scaffolding on the Acropolis didn’t bother me this time; the modern trappings did not feel like a barrier between Athena and me. I sought out the olive tree that grows on the Acropolis, descended from the tree said to have been planted by the goddess. Detaching myself from the crowd, I stood in a wedge of shade and looked through a window to a kind of pantry for the workers: a clean white room with a bare table, a bench, a stove, a refrigerator, a sink with gooseneck faucets, a hook to hang a jacket on—nothing extra. It was as if I were looking at Athena’s kitchen.

  I’m not acrophobic, and I enjoyed looking over the edge and out at the megalopolis (megalo + polis = big city), the buildings nudging up the mountains and flowing down to the sea. The apartment buildings were all roughly the same size and style: six to eight stories, utilitarian, if not brutalist, with white or pastel facades gridded with balconies divided by panels and rigged with awnings and shades; compact solar-powered hot-water heaters lay on the roofs like blue hippos; and the whole mess bristled with TV antennas. It looked as if the great city had been rendered in impasto, caked with layers of white that had built up over the years like plaque, the whole land a sculpture.

  On the way down from the Acropolis that morning, a young woman suffered a laughing fit so infectious that it set off the group she was with and started the whole crowd laughing. My knees went weak as I shuffled down the stairs with the crowd, and if I reached out and touched the marble it was out of necessity, to keep my balance. It suddenly struck me as wonderful that throngs of people come from all over the world every day to climb the Acropolis of Athens and visit the temple of Athena Parthenos, and that Athenians, using the best scientific methods, are at work in their city constantly, industriously, sorting the ruins and shoring them up. Is this not a form of worship?

  CHAPTER 8

  THE SEA! THE SEA!

  WHEN I WAS first falling for Greece, Ed Stringham gave me the names of three writers: Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, and Patrick Leigh Fermor. I devoured Durrell’s three lyrical books in order—Prospero’s Cell, about Corfu; Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes; and Bitter Lemons, about Cyprus—and was able to introduce Ed to Gerald Durrell, Lawrence’s younger brother, who wrote a charming memoir, My Family and Other Animals, about his boyhood as a budding naturalist on Corfu. (To Dorothy Gregory, the famous writing Durrells of Corfu were Larry and Jerry.) Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi, about a visit to Greece in 1939 at the invitation of Lawrence Durrell, is a masterpiece, inimitable, capturing Greece just before the Second World War. But it was Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British writer and war hero, who would be my ideal traveling companion. Leigh Fermor—part Pausanias, part Bruce Chatwin—was curious about everything, charismatic, knowledgeable, and inexhaustible. In him I felt I had found a friend.

  Leigh Fermor’s first claim to fame was as a soldier with the British Army on Crete during the Second World War, when he and a group of Cretan guerrillas kidnapped General Kreipe, the German who commanded the Nazi forces on the island, an exploit that inspired the 1957 movie Ill Met by Moonlight. (It was based on a 1950 book by William Stanley Moss, one of the kidnapping crew, and starred Dirk Bogarde as Leigh Fermor, who did not think much of either the book or the film.) Leigh Fermor’s writing is dens
e, fueled by memory, with the breadth of a polymath and the immediacy of personal correspondence. One can picture him crouching in the landscape, jotting notes that will later swell into paragraphs and burgeon into books, with the kind of running heads that are so enticing in the works of a certain British travel-writing genre: “Threshing and Winnowing,” “Wine-Dark Words,” “Transistrian Cats.” He is given to Homeric catalogues—three examples are never enough—and his lists don’t peter out but crescendo. In the first few pages of Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, under the heading “Ramifications in the Levant,” he lists 91 of the “strange communities” in the worldwide Greek diaspora, including “the Slavophones of Northern Macedonia . . . the phallus-wielding Bounariots of Tyrnavos . . . the Venetian nobles of the Ionian . . . the anchorites of Mt. Athos . . . the cotton-brokers of Alexandria . . . the Greeks of the Danube Delta . . . the Byzantines of Mistra . . . the lunatics of Cephalonia . . . [and] the Hello-boys back from the States.” Under “Mosaic Fauna” he describes a Greco-Roman mosaic floor in Sparta—Orpheus, Achilles, Europa—the sole surviving proof of a classical heritage in the modern town, whose warrior ancestors, you may remember, won the Peloponnesian War but evidently lost the race for enduring monuments.

  Leigh Fermor is a cult figure among philhellenes, especially among the British, and was exceptionally well connected in Greece. With his wife, Joan, a photographer, whom he met in Cairo in the forties, he settled in Kardamyli (Kardameli), a remote town on the western coast of the Mani. There he wrote his best-known book, A Time of Gifts (1977), about his journey as a young man, in the early thirties, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, on foot. The journey was continued in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and The Broken Road (2013), which was published posthumously (it ends in midsentence; one hates to say it, but he did die, in 2011). Leigh Fermor viewed his youthful adventures as if through the wrong end of a telescope: distant yet detailed, like an exquisite miniature.

  There is something contagious about the writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor. It makes people want to follow in his footsteps. A young writer named Nick Hunt walked 2,500 miles through Europe, retracing Leigh Fermor’s route for Walking the Woods and the Water (2014). More recently, a Dutch artist and birder named Jacques Grégoire has produced a series of watercolors from the same European walking tour for a project called From the North Sea to the Black Sea. I followed in Leigh Fermor’s footsteps, albeit by car, in 2000, driving the coastal route around the Mani peninsula, from Kalamata to Cape Tenaro, the entrance to Hades, and back. The house he built, with Joan, in Kardamyli, a storied town about a quarter of the way down the western coast of the Mani, loomed large in my imagination, especially after I found out that the Leigh Fermors had left their house to the Benaki Museum, which hoped to turn it into a center for international literary events and a residence for writers.

  I had learned from an item in the Times Literary Supplement that one could book a tour of the house in Kardamyli for ten euros—and the cost of getting there, of course. So the next time I was in Greece, in March of 2017, fulfilling a long-held dream of returning to the Aegean to stay longer than I did the first time, thirty years earlier, I wrote a careful letter, in Greek, to the Benaki, vetted by my latest Greek teacher, Chrysanthe, requesting permission to visit the Kardamyli house. I found it difficult to read the reply, partly because it was written in bureaucratic Greek and partly because I didn’t like what it said. Apparently the museum was awaiting work permits, and as soon as those permits came through, the house would be closed to visitors so that restoration work, paid for by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, could begin. I would just miss the chance, unless . . . Well, this was Greece, after all, and it was possible that the permits would be delayed. I decided to trust the Greek gods, add Kardamyli to my itinerary, and hope for the best.

  KARDAMYLI IS MENTIONED by Homer in the Iliad: Agamemnon promises the region to Achilles if he will rejoin the battle against Troy. (You may remember that Achilles spends most of the Iliad sulking in his tent and is drawn back to battle only to avenge his friend Patroclus, who, having disguised himself in Achilles’ armor to put fear into the Trojans, is slain by Hector.) The town is exceptionally well sited: it’s protected from severe weather to the east by Mount Taygetus, the gigantic mountain of the Peloponnese that slopes all the way to the tip of the Mani; to the west, it looks out over the Messenian Gulf to the westernmost peninsula of the southern Peloponnese. Winds from the west keep Kardamyli temperate even in winter. Although Achilles refused all Agamemnon’s gifts, he did rejoin the war, and after his death it is said that his son Neoptolemus came to collect.

  Leigh Fermor never worried that Kardamyli would become a tourist destination, because it is so remote. Neoptolemus probably arrived by boat. The trip overland has been made easier in recent years by a modern highway from Corinth to Kalamata, at the base of the peninsula. But it takes an intrepid driver to negotiate the tortuous drive from Kalamata over and down to Kardamyli. On the map the road loops back and forth like a diagram of the small intestine. But it is in the large intestine that one feels the twists and turns of the mountain road, negotiating the switchbacks and running along high precipices; one moment the sea is far down on your right, and then suddenly, dizzyingly, it’s on your left. It reminded me of a bus ride I took on the island of Ithaca, which twists in the middle like a Möbius strip. After about thirty kilometers, Kardamyli comes into view, down at sea level. At the bottom of the road, you can make a sharp right to the town beach, with a strip of hotels and restaurants, or stay to the left and drive through the center: two rival grocery stores right next to each other, a fishing dock down on the water, restaurants with terraces overlooking the sea, cafés along the main street, a newsstand, a shop or two specializing in olive oil, and a hardware store with a faded sign that advertises paint in bright colors—chrómata. Just outside town to the south is the Kalamitsi Hotel, a palatial establishment, built of the local stone, with arched windows and a red-tiled roof. Leigh Fermor had once written that there was no better place to write than a hotel room in Kardamyli, so while I was waiting and hoping to visit his house I stayed in a room here with a balcony and a spectacular view out over a grove of well-tended olive and citrus trees to the sea.

  I could hear the sea, and also the fluting of doves, an insistent three-note figure that would have driven me crazy if I didn’t try to tame it by hearing it as syllables of English. It sounded like “Your Birth Day!” or “Your Broom Stick!” One melodious song I traced to a black bird with an orange beak perched in a lemon tree. Sheep bleated, and there was the tinkle of goat bells. There was also, right below me one day, bluegrass music. Kardamyli that week was host to an international jazz festival, and the hotel was full of German, Norwegian, and American musicians.

  The hotel had a steep stone stairway down to a private beach. I trotted down there right away. A couple were sunning themselves and ignored me. A white-haired man with one eye squinched shut debouched from the staircase to take a swim, and I automatically started to leave. “You don’t have to go—you can stay,” he said, in accented English. I explained that I didn’t have my bathing suit, which was true. It is also true that I like having a beach to myself.

  Once back in my room, it was hard to leave and impossible to stop looking. The sun left a pink smear above the distant gray-blue peninsula, and the sea was like a bolt of ice-blue satin, with matching sky, except that the colors of the air were not as nuanced, having no surface, existing as pure distance measured in light. In the grove in the foreground the trunks of the olive trees twisted seductively. A tongue of sea eased in from the Messenian Gulf below a steep hillside covered with pines, plane trees, and pointed cypresses. Below them, the water was an especially hypnotic shade of deep gray-green-blue, perhaps reflecting the jade green of the trees. Mount Taygetus rose above, catching the light of the setting sun: gray and craggy with scarps of yellow-orange rock and swaths and patches of livid green. As when someone who knows how rich she is, ho
w sufficient her home and income, views the homes and possessions of others without a pinch of envy, so I enjoyed my view of the sea from this stony perch in the hotel. I was looking at the depths of color on the surface—isn’t that where the radical beauty lurks? The only thing lacking was a seventh sense to take it in with. When you’re traveling, you have a heightened sense of things, and what I was feeling was a kind of historical-hysterical envelopment by beauty.

  I pried myself away to cultivate the newsstand, which had a handmade signboard out front that read “Εφημερίδες, βιβλία!” “Newspapers, books!” (The Greek for newspapers is related to the English “ephemera”: things that last but a day.) The store also advertised hiking maps and “Handmade affairs.” The owner, behind the counter, was grizzled and handsome, barely tolerant toward the Germans who had come in before me, but willing to sell them his handmade affairs. An old Maniot came in, a regular, and the owner automatically reached under the counter and slapped down the customer’s favorite newspaper. The old man pointed to the headline and groaned as he opened his coin purse: another round of cuts to pensions had been announced—yet a deeper reach into the Greeks’ pockets to pay the country’s debts and keep it in the Eurozone. How bitter for the Greeks to be punished like this, to have their circumstances straitened in their old age.