I put down the large basket of figs I had bought as a present to my hosts – and a tortoise I had found by the roadside – and let myself into the Tollintons’ flat as the cathedral of Alexander Nevsky tolled eleven. The soft lamplight, afloat with the civilized murmur of a dinner party, revealed a shirt front in an armchair here and there, the glint of patent leather shoes, women’s long dresses, and golden discs of brandy revolving in the bottom of balloon glasses. The coffee pouring from spout to cup in the hands of Ivan, the giant Cossack butler, dried up in mid-trajectory, the golden discs, arrested by this horrible intruding apparition, stopped rotating in their balloon glasses. A moment of consternation on one side, and dismay on the other, froze all. It was quickly thawed by Judith Tollinton’s kind voice – ‘Oh good, there you are, just in time for the brandy’ – and the spell was broken.
[1] PLF was hoping to receive a letter from Xenia Czernovits (‘Angela’), a Hungarian woman whose relationship with him is recorded affectionately in Between the Woods and the Water.
[2] Boris III, Czar of Bulgaria (1894–1943).
[3] Czar Alexander II of Russia, whose campaign against the Ottoman Empire liberated Bulgaria in 1877–8.
[4] Professor Thomas Whittemore (1871–1950), an American archaeologist and Byzantine scholar who had recently started important work uncovering mosaics in the basilica of Haghia Sophia in Istanbul.
[5] Roger Hinks (1903–63), an art historian notorious for his later involvement in an injudicious cleaning of the Elgin Marbles.
[6] Steven Runciman (1903–2000), the celebrated historian of Byzantium and the Crusades.
[7] Boza: a Bulgarian malted drink made with fermented grains and sugar.
[8] James David Bourchier (1850–1920), The Times’ Balkan correspondent for many years, and an outspoken supporter of Bulgarian national claims.
[9] Aleksander Stambouliski (1879–1923), Bulgarian prime minister, deposed in 1923. He was tortured and executed by the army.
[10] ‘Why are you angry with me, my love?’
2. A Hanging Glass Box
We must swing eastwards from Sofia, and slightly southwards, across the brown central plateau of Bulgaria as swiftly as the stride of a divider’s points across a chart; down the wide and gently descending basin of the Maritza, a baking expanse with the skyline bounded by the cool, flowing peaks of the Balkans to the north and the Rhodope mountains to the south. This as far as history records is the great path from Europe to the Levant: the road to Constantinople and the gates of Asia. It is the track of a hundred armies and the itinerary of those wonderful caravans from Ragusa that joggled their way to the Black Sea and Anatolia, just as their huge argosies of merchandise – when only Venice surpassed the little walled republic in the Mediterranean trade – dropped anchor in all the ports of the Euxine, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Here, too, the Bulgarian inhabitants were at their most defenceless during the long night of subjection to Turkey. The Ottoman beglerbeg or viceroy of the Balkans, ranked as a three-tailed pasha, had his court and his garrison at Sofia, and between here and the capital, the Bulgars were powerless; the faintest stirrings would unloose a whirlwind of janissaries and spahis and later on, and perhaps the worst, bashi-bazouks. They adorned the towns with avenues of gibbets, the burnt villages with pyramids of heads and the roadsides with impaled corpses. I think it is an Arabian proverb which says, ‘Where the Ottoman hoof has struck, the grass never grows again’; and it is true that their occupation of the Balkans – in Bulgaria it started before the Wars of the Roses and ended after the Franco-Prussian War – has left desolation behind it. Everything is still impoverished and haphazard, and history in smithereens. The Turks were the last but one of the Oriental barbarians to cast their blight over Eastern Europe.
I was pondering these matters, slogging along through the twilight beside the banked railway, when a humming along the rails and an increasing clatter behind me indicated the approach of a train. The shuddering cylinder grew larger and larger and soon it was rocketing by overhead; all the windows were alight in a serpent of bright quadrilaterals, and along the coach work, as it crashed past, was painted: Paris – Munich – Vienna – Zagreb – Belgrade – Sofia – Istanbul and Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits. The Orient Express! The pink lampshades glowed softly in the dining car, the brass gleamed. The passengers would be lowering their novels and crosswords as the brown-jacketed attendants approached with trays of aperitifs. I waved, but the gloaming was too deep for an answer. I wondered who the passengers were – they had travelled in two days a journey that had taken me over nine months, and in a few hours they would be in Constantinople. The necklace of bright lights dwindled in the distance with its freight of runaway lovers, cabaret girls, Knights of Malta, vamps, acrobats, smugglers, papal nuncios, private detectives, lecturers in the future of the novel, millionaires, arms’ manufacturers, irrigation experts and spies, leaving a mournful silence in the thirsty Rumelian plateau.
• • •
In Pazardjik I put up in an old Turkish khan. Many Balkan towns are equipped with these caravanserais. This one was a quadrangle of wooden galleries, like the cloister of a monastery. The faded tiles were blurred here and there by storks’ nests, now bristling with one or two young ones, hatched out since April. The enclosed courtyard was as full of livestock as a farm yard. Families camped and cooked beside their wagons and among their animals; there were tethered horses, buffaloes, mules, donkeys, bleating flocks of sheep and goats and a swarm of dogs. The men brewed coffee and smoked, the women huddled and squatted together like conclaves of crows, some with babies slung across their backs in portable wooden cradles, gossiping or quietly singing, all the time spinning the raw wool which had been sheared from the backs of their flocks. They pulled it from forked distaffs stuck in their silver-buckled belts, twisting it to a thread between finger and thumb, and winding it on to a weighted spindle that rose and fell rotating from the twiddling fingers and thumbs of their other hand. This enclosure, the huddled groups, the animals, the glow of the scattered charcoal fires and the quavering and melancholy songs filled the night with an outlandish and nomadic spell.
The road followed the Maritza all next day. This wide deep river, the largest in the Balkans after the Danube, slants across Bulgaria from north-west to south-east, then through the eastern Rhodope into Greece, whence, till it reaches the Aegean, it forms the Greco-Turkish frontier, and reverts for the final Greek stage of its journey to the ancient and hallowed name of the Hebrus. To Bulgarians the great stream symbolized their country, and the first line of their rousing and bellicose anthem (which I heard boomed forth by many a flagpole while the Bulgarian tricolour was raised or lowered, to presented arms and the salutes of sabre-grasping officers) began Shumi Maritza – ‘Flow, Maritza’. I slept under a willow by its banks for an hour at midday and reached Plovdiv by nightfall, filled with expectation.
• • •
Nadejda, my all-but twin, joyfully reappeared next morning, and showed me Lamartine’s house – a pleasant whitewashed building in the Turkish style with jutting upper storeys – exactly as she had promised. Better still, she asked me to stay in her own, which was just such another. No question here of the old Bulgarian proverb: ‘an uninvited guest is worse than a Turk.’ Knowing how strict, straitlaced and oriental the Balkan countries are about their daughters and wives, I had been astonished, at Rila, by Nadejda’s freedom and independence. Had I known these countries then as well as I came to know them later, I would have been even more surprised at this friendly and unhesitating invitation. I thought it sprang from a natural independence of character, and so it did; but there were other reasons. Her mother and her father – he was, she told me, a well-to-do peasant from Stenimaka – had been killed in an earthquake a few years before along with a brother a year older, to whom she had been very attached.
She lived alone with her maternal grandfather, who was frail and bedridden, a charming old gentleman with a white beard, and, moreover, Greek
. He was one of a former flourishing Greek community that had lived here since the town was founded by Philip of Macedonia, ‘when the Bulgars’, as he soon instructed me, ‘were still a tribe of marauding hut-dwellers beyond the Volga!’ He had run a chemist’s shop for most of his life in the Taxim quarter of Constantinople. He spoke French fluently and he was steeped in the principles of Western liberalism. The names of Voltaire, Rousseau, Anatole France, Zola, Poincaré, Clemenceau and Venizelos were often on his aged lips; and, I was pleased and surprised to hear, Canning, Gladstone and Lloyd George. But the Englishman he mentioned with greatest reverence, an emaciated hand emerging from his patched pyjama-sleeve as I swallowed my ritual spoonful of slatko by his bedside, was Byron. I think it was mostly thanks to this lucky coincidence of nationality that I was welcomed so kindly. This was the first time, but not the last, that I understood and was struck by the tremendous aura, the apotheosis almost, which, among Greeks, enshrines the poet’s name. Also, rather momentously for me, as things were going to turn out in the following years, my host was the first Greek I had ever met. I learnt from him the sad tale of the misfortunes of Hellenism under Bulgarian rule: a harrowing account of oppression, persecution and massacre that came as a timely antidote to many similar tales in reverse that I had heard, and was to hear again, from Bulgarians. Many Greeks had left Plovdiv for Greece during the past twenty years, and they were still leaving. He was too old and ill, he said, and his roots were too deep to be torn up now. It was thanks to his political leanings that his granddaughter was studying French as opposed to German, the universal second language among the Bulgarian intelligentsia. Her independence was partly due to his wider and more metropolitan horizon, partly to his infirmity and partly to the fact that, with the help of an old black-coiffed crone, she ran the house on her own. By some freak of exemption, her dashing and carefree ways, a kind of bohemianism, were tolerated and even admired: a true phenomenon in the stifling atmosphere of Balkan provincial life. Half Greek and half Bulgarian, she was a walking battlefield of the strife between the Patriarchate and the Exarchate: a burden which, I must say, she carried lightly.
Though they lived in reduced circumstances, the house, in the back lanes of the Greek quarter of the town, bore many dilapidated traces of past elegance. The whole upper storey jutted on massive beams in that Turkish style which I imagine to have its roots in Byzantine domestic architecture just as the mosques derive from its ecclesiastical form. Away from the street, a gallery with an outside staircase surrounded a little courtyard sheltered by a vine trellis, heavy with clusters of grapes now, basil flourished in fluted jars and a pomegranate tree suspended its little arsenal of russet bombs. Martins’ nests clung to the eaves. Indoors, broken plaster arabesques twirled in baroque designs over lintels and windows. All the way round the long room that filled the jutting upper storey ran a low wide divan reached by a shallow step, and the wooden ceiling was adorned by elaborate carved rosettes the size of wagon wheels. The space above the divan was more glass than wall; in the Turkish haremlik this casement would be covered with trellis work, through which the inmates could gaze down into the cobbled lanes unobserved – bright squares split up into many panes through which the sun streamed. A secret, calm, airy world, calling to mind the multiple facets of the poop of a galleon. One side looked over the undulating rose-coloured tiles, the radiating gullies of the lanes and over the chimneys, the nests, the bell towers and domes and the steep granite bluffs that elbowed through them, towards the foothills of the Stara Planina; and beyond them lay the great range itself. South beyond the courtyard lay the Maritza and a green-gold plumage of poplars, and, on the other bank, poplars again, and willows and, bright and distinct in the morning light, the faraway line of the Rhodope. Thrace! Two storks were gliding across the trees and, as we watched them sailing down to the banks of the Maritza and closing their wings, they alighted and paced geometrically through the reeds, their bills lowered in pursuit of the frogs whose giveaway croaking reached our ears; the floating veil of mist was no defence against the shrewd roof-dwellers. ‘They’re late this year,’ Nadejda said. ‘They’ll soon be off.’
• • •
To wake up in this hanging glass box – for it was here, in one of the corners of the divan, that my bed had been laid – was to surface into felicity. How tempting to lie floating here under the long, level volleys of early light shooting, adrift with motes, from window to window, and to gaze up at the intricate cigar-box lid ceiling, or out through the morning gleam of glass, cocooned in crystal, into the pale and bird-filled sky. But the sound of hoofs on cobbles, the wheels of carts, the cry of pedlars and the clang of scales were too tempting a lure. After a quick wash under the brass tap in the courtyard, I was in the streets.
I explored the town both alone and guided by Nadejda. The commonplace centre was full of modern public buildings; there was a Bulgarian and a Greek cathedral, and some trim, rather pretty gardens. This ordinary middle soon gave way to a rambling and fascinating circumference. The whole town is built between, up the slopes of, and round, three steep granite spurs – the tepes – and down their flanks the roofs poured, with houses hazardously perched on ledges and the rock projecting in blades and spikes: round and through them rose and fell a ravelled skein of cobbled alleyways. Some had awnings across them to shade the stones; it turned them into winding tented corridors; metal-workers, tobacco-sorters and wool-carders worked cross-legged in their open-fronted shops. These lanes were a cool penumbra crisscrossed by buckled and twisted tiger-stripes of sunlight. The wool-carders, squatting in a sea of fleece, worked with extraordinary instruments – huge curving bows rising three yards in the air and strung taut with a single wire, which resembled the harp, in bible illustrations, with which David assuaged the anger of Saul. Blacksmiths, coppersmiths, tinkers, leather-workers, gunsmiths, harness-makers, mule-saddlers – one of them, surprisingly, a Negro – planed away at their great howdahs, or stuffed the bulbous sheepskin quilting of saddles with wool. Green and yellow melons were piled like cannon balls, grapes and figs were arrayed in enormous panniers; red and green paprikas, ladies’ fingers, and courgettes rose in heaps. Butchers’ shops displayed their usual carnage, the Temple Bar display of gory heads, glassy-eyed trophies with the front teeth projecting like those of English travellers in French cartoons, and the cobbles outside were a network of fly-haunted rivulets of blood. The stalls were threatened by the swaying of the giant mule-slung baskets; now and then the lane was stampeded by a tidal wave of sheep, entire flocks which overflowed baa-ing into the shops and were cast forth again, pursued by shepherds and barking dogs. Chinking his way through the crowd was the same Albanian bozaji, bowed under his great brass vessel, that I had seen at Rila. Sometimes the houses nearly joined overhead. Gateways led out of this pandemonium, to quiet courtyards, to interior glimpses of women click-clacking away at their looms, and, under vine trellises, sheepskin hats and wide scarlet sashes and moccasins clustered round the tables of coffee and wine shops.
There was a pinnacle mosque and the bubbling roofline of a hammam, and suddenly, Turks, the first I had seen except for the little Danubian outpost on the islet of Ada Kaleh, by the Iron Gates. They were sashed with red like the Bulgars, but they wore baggy black trousers and slippers and scarlet fezzes, often faded or discoloured by sweat and use to a mulberry hue round which ragged turbans, some of them patterned with stripes or spots and in every colour but green (except in the case of an occasional putative descendant of the Prophet) were loosely bound. They sat cross-legged, with amber beads in their hands, eyelids lowered over the quiet intermittent gurgle of their nargilehs. Although they were dressed almost the same, a group by a drinking trough, watering a team of donkeys, looked slightly different; some of these, in lieu of fezzes, were hatted with grey or white felt skullcaps that came to a point like an Arabian dome in miniature, or a Saracen’s helmet stripped of its chain mail. Nadejda told me that they were Pomaks from the valleys of the Rhodope near Haskovo, in the south-east
. Sometimes they arrived with little caravans of camels; but not, alas, just then. I would have given much to see them pad through this throng, with their humps and their nodding supercilious masks almost touching the awnings. If I had struck lucky, I might also have seen some Kutzovlachs, of whom a few are scattered in the Macedonian south-west: semi-nomadic Aruman shepherds, speaking a low Latin dialect laced with Slav and akin to Rumanian, of whom I was to see many later on in Greece, especially in Thessaly and the Pindus. The Pomaks are said to be Bulgarians converted to Islam after the Turkish conquest of the country; they are certainly Muslims and they talk Bulgarian. All through the Ottoman Empire, they were ruthless supporters of the Sultans and they helped their overlords put down their fellow countrymen, butchering them by the thousand, with the true zeal of converts. (Some authorities derive them from early barbarian invaders from the north; and some Greek writers – for there are a number of Pomak villages on the Greek slopes of the Rhodope, round Kedros and Echinos – seek their origins in the ancient Thracian race of the Agrianoi.) In the same folds of mountain, on either side of the border, live tiny pockets of Kizilbashi. These ‘redheads’ are Shi’ite Muslims who follow Hazrat Ali, like their fellow schismatics in Persia from where they probably came, scattered across Asia Minor in pockets of Shia doctrine by Shah Ismail Safavi while the Turks were busy with their Polish and Venetian wars, and straying to Thrace later on; they are anathema to Turks and Pomaks alike, both of them staunch Sunnites. I gazed at these last berserk apostates with awe.
At a turn in the lane, all the names over the shops would become Greek and the air would ring with this language, already haunted by a ghost of familiarity, the modern version of which I was determined to master in due course. Then the shop inscriptions would have Christian names like Sarkis, Haik, Krikor, Dikran or Agop, and surnames all ending in yan; and in the cafés would be Armenians reading from pages of their fascinating script, which to inexpert eyes looks so similar to the Amharic writing of the Ethiopians; or they would be grouped, their eyes bright with acumen on either side of their wonderful noses, in the doors of their shops, like confabulating toucans.
The Broken Road Page 4