The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The autumn forest came frothing down to the jagged cliffs and the rocks for a few more miles next day. Vast deserted bays looped one after the other between the thrust of the headlands. The Khodja Balkan rumbled away into the interior to join the far-off assembly of Bulgarian mountains along the watery skyline. Here and there the valleys widened into small fens, and on one of these, spiked with tufts of reed and sedge like the conventional sign for marshland on a map, an old man all in brown sat reflected in a flat-bottomed boat with a gun across his knees. A party of waterfowl, alerted perhaps by my approach, rose from the mere and as they flew over his head, he raised his gun, a tongue of flame shot out and a moment later a report like a bomb exploding shivered the air. For a second or two smoke hid the marksman. When it blew away, no rewarding drop of a felled bird ringed the water, and he busied himself over his weapon. Spotting me, he rowed alongside and asked if I had a cigarette. He could take me a short cut across the swamp. I stepped into his leaky punt, and he went on recharging – an elaborate job, as his gun was a muzzle-loader with a very long and rusty barrel. He poured in what looked like a pound of powder from an old brass flask, then a handful of buckshot and alternate bits of newspaper and rag for wadding, driving everything home with a ramrod. The barrel was secured to the wood with lashings of twine, bands of rusty tin, and an old handkerchief knotted round it like a bandage. ‘Here they come!’ he said, after half a dozen strokes, and leaving the oars free on their tholes he lifted his terrifying fowling piece at the returning birds. There was a deafening bang, a blaze like a rocket and all was dim with smoke. He materialized once more, shaking his fist at the vanishing and undepleted wedge and shouting ‘Pezerengi!’ – the Turkish word for pimps. His gun looked even closer to disintegration. When it was ready again, we sculled to the other side and I was glad to get out. A quarter of an hour later, I heard another detonation, and looked anxiously down: my benefactor was still alive, and comminating yet another flight of elusive pimps.

  The path followed a stream bed and a turn brought me almost on top of a wild boar drinking, a dark grey matted creature with curling discoloured tusks. It turned its snout in my direction for a moment, then trotted away through the brambles into a wood. I had never seen one before. I crossed the road to Byala, and a long dusty track led, in the late afternoon, to the unpromising village of Avantlar, so I rashly pushed on. It was only two hours, they told me, to another village. The sun set and I must have gone astray, for it was much later, after a long trudge through the dark rolling heathland till I saw one or two dim lights twinkling. It was a grim hamlet called Hadjikoë; but only grim in aspect. I asked a shadowy figure in the main street where the khan was. There was no khan, he said, in a strange accent, but he took me by the elbow and led me to a dark cottage, tapped on the door murmuring, ‘Rustum!’ Who was it? ‘Suleiman,’ my guide answered. When a light appeared I saw they were both Turkish, and in half an hour I was sitting with them and a squatting, cross-legged group of fellow villagers – Djem, Abdurrahman, Mustapha, Mehmet, Hassan Ali and Selim – on the planks of a rickety loggia, eating bread flaps and fried pastourma; naturally, no wine. There had been a barefoot, shadowy flitting of black veiled figures in the background: a mangali – full of glowing charcoal – had been handed out, then, after a flickering and crackling of thorns, a low round table already laden with its dizzily powerful plate-load. It was the first time I had tasted pastourma, an Asia Minor version of pemmican or biltong. (A couple of months later, I asked a Greek refugee tavern-keeper from Iconium how this amazing stuff was made. His eyes sparkled. ‘You get a camel or an ox, but a camel’s best,’ he said with elliptic urgency, ‘then you put it in an olive press, and you tighten it up till every drop of moisture has been squeezed out. Every drop! Then cut it up in strips and salt it, then lay it in the sun for a month or two – best of all, in the branches of a tree, so that the wind cures it as well – but in a cage, of course, so the crows can’t get at it.’ Then it is taken down and embedded in a paste of poached garlic and the hottest paprika you can find on the market, reinforced by whatever spices of the Orient are handy. When this has again been dried to a hard crust, it has nearly the consistency of wood: it keeps for years. Thin slices, cut off with a razor-sharp knife, are normally eaten raw; occasionally it is cooked, when the aroma, always unmanning to the uninitiated, becomes explosive. The taste is terrific and marvellous, but anathema to many because not only is the ordinary smell of garlic squared or cubed in strength – breath emerges with the violence of a blowlamp – but a baleful redolence of great range and power surfaces at every pore; people reel backwards and leave an empty ring around the diner, as though one were whirling in incendiary parabolas.)

  As I grew better acquainted with the taste of pastourma, a specious and flimsy theory took shape about its origins. Turkish cooking, like Turkish architecture, is really a coalition of the civilizations of the races they invaded and conquered on their journey to the West: nearly everything can ultimately be traced back to the Persians, the Arabs and the Byzantines. Perhaps pastourma is the last culinary survivor of the days before the Turks irrupted into Western history. Dried meat is true nomad food, a primordial technique developed, perhaps, in the steppes of the Ural and the Altai, where camels were numbered by the hundred thousand: imperishable, palatable and sustaining. A secondary theory offers itself. The Turks’ kinsmen, the Huns, are said to have lived on raw meat which they treated by strapping it between their saddle-flaps and the shaggy flanks of their steeds. Steaming and soaked with sweat when they unsaddled at nightfall, this meat must have had a saline pungency that the Seljuks missed when at last they drew rein for good to exploit their vast conquests. Perhaps like their modern cousins the Kirgiz, and the Scythians in Herodotus, these hordes washed pastourma down with the fermented milk of their mares and she-camels. Could the violent salting and seasoning have been improvised as a substitute for the tang of sweat, now that their horses were at grass and their camels away on peaceful caravans: a means of recapturing, in consistency and savour, the fierce zest of the draughty meals of the Ghuzz tribesmen of Alp Aslan and Togril Beg? The Sultanate of Rum must have reeked with this fare, and when they expanded in further invasions, a following wind would have spread terror even before the thundering of their hoofs and war-cries could be heard, causing their foes to quail and scatter while they were still out of bowshot.

  The wick lit up a flickering ring of mild and rather sad faces. All of them, except for one or two, were content to sit and drink in the giaour in their midst with a blank, startled but unwavering gaze. Their battered fezzes were turbaned in twisted rags, all except the white-coiffed hodja, Suleiman, our host. Their wide sashes of scarlet, their threadbare homespun, were so tattered and patched they scarcely held together. Decay had been at work on some of their wearers too, nibbling away at a nostril, effacing an eyeball with glaucoma, stippling features with pockmarks and cratering them with the Baghdad boil. One old man, with ears projecting like wings that flushed pink when the light was behind them, sat and peered raptly into eternity, grasping the opposite big toe (for all slippers had been shed) with either hand as though it would have been fatal to let go. This group must have been the loneliest and most moth-eaten fragment of the vanished Ottoman Empire in all the Balkans.

  Their Bulgarian was almost as inchoate as mine: England sounded as remote to them, and as vague, as Samoa or the Aleutians. Only the old hodja, I could just make out, had been to Istanbul, long, long ago, before the Balkan wars. He boiled minute saucepans of coffee one after another in bubbling thimblefuls.

  When I asked about Atatürk – Kemal Pasha – the chat grew more animated. A few of the younger men seemed dimly in favour of him. But the hodja, who had grown up when Sultan Abdul Hamid was still Padishah and Caliph, flung back his head with clicks of denial again and again. The argument became exclusively Turkish. For the hodja, I gathered, Kemal was little better than an infidel. The shift to Latin characters from the sacred script of the Koran, strong drink, t
he dissolution of the dervishes, prayers in the vernacular, the proscription of the fez and the unveiling of women – all this was Satan’s work. So I was astonished, when bedtime came, that the hodja led me, accompanied by the others bearing blankets, pillows and a water-pitcher, to a barn-like building, which turned out, by the light of a lantern, to be the mosque, or rather a tiny building leading off it, where they spread my bedding on a mat. I think their houses were too humble to possess the traditional division between the haremlik and salemlik for accommodating guests. After a brief and silent prayer, these kind scarecrows left me with a graceful and aspen-like flutter of goodnight salaams. I slept under a faded poster dating from the 1890s which, judging from the primitive coloured illustration of a steamship with the crescent at the masthead and another of the Kaaba Stone surrounded by the faithful, all in a faded tangle of typographical arabesques, had been an advertisement for the hadj to Mecca. I was bewildered that they allowed what they must have considered the uncircumcised to pollute so hallowed a place. Rain began pattering on the tiles as I fell asleep. I was woken at daybreak by the hodja creaking up his rickety spiral and putting the horrified djinns to flight.

  • • •

  It must have been a few miles further south that I caught a first momentous glimpse of Sarakatsans. I heard them long before they came into sight: a trembling and clanging on many notes rolled through the damp air. A drop in the bare headlands revealed a score of conical huts gathered like dark beehives on the edge of a green slope crested with a spinney, and from the summit of each of these bulbous cones of skilfully woven reeds and osier, a feather of smoke rose into the rainy air. Up the hillside, tilted by the slope to offer a bird’s-eye view inside, ran great zariba-like goat-folds of thorn and thatch. Dark figures moved about among the wigwams. At the centre, among scooped wooden troughs for the watering of a multitude, stood the tall forked upright of a well, pivoting a cross-beam three fathoms long. There were a number of horses and mules and donkeys, a mare or two with foals trotting beside them, and the barking of many dogs, but these were all outnumbered hopelessly by the thousands of sheep and goats, each of them contributing, by the sound of the iron or bronze bells slung round their necks, to the constantly changing mineral tune that pervaded the damp landscape. There were many more goats than sheep, grey and striped, some of them almost white, shaggy and twirly-horned, but the greater part of them a dark purplish brown to black. I made a beeline for the heart of this hubbub. The shepherds, tall wild-looking men, were as varied in colouring of eyes and hair as their flock. Some had grey or blue eyes, and on the heads of a few of the young ones, low black pillboxes slanted askew on a tangle of uncombed hair, bleached pale by the sun. But now all their faces were deep in the pointed hoods of the shaggy black homespun capes, hanging almost to their feet, as stiff as cardboard, each bristle streaming with rain. They carried staves as tall as spears, which slotted into elaborately carved crooks. There was a guarded alertness about their bearing and their glance; they were clad and sashed in stuff almost as uncompromising as their cloaks; and all in black! The women, some with their babies slung like papooses in wooden cradles while they spun the yarn from their carved distaffs or clacked and shuttled at the looms in the wigwams, were plaited and coiffed and dressed in amazing clothes of black and white pleats and zigzags that were as stylized as the garb of the queens of playing cards.

  The place reeked of horses and goats and curds and woodsmoke. Everything was made of twisted branches, thorns, reeds and timber; all was pegged, plaited, woven and lashed with thongs; there were cauldrons of copper and iron, wooden buckets and casks, skins turned inside out and lashed at the lopped necks and legs to make squelching containers, all dripping with milk and whey. The noise and bustle were tremendous. I might have been in the Ark; and as I sipped a cup of hot and foaming milk that a kind herdsman provided from a leather bag, I thought that these black-hooded and cloaked figures, these black and white zigzagged women, these conical huts and their teeming tintinnabulation of flocks through the rainy woods of Rumelia comprised the most mysterious community I had ever seen. There was a legendary air about them, and about the whole scene, now made stranger still by sunbeams breaking through the fleece of clouds in dozens of pale concentric spokes. The raindrops seemed almost static in the still and bell-reverberating air, a slow confetti of microscopic sequins. There would be rainbows soon.

  ‘Karakatchan!’ an old Bulgar carrying a plough on his shoulder had answered when I first caught sight of them from afar; and then, after a pause, ‘Grtzki’ – and Greek was the language I heard being bandied urgently from one black monolith of a herdsman to another, each flourishing his lance of a crook and marooned in his calm grazing backwater, or in momentary eddies of goats flowing in every direction across the lift and dip of the foothills; and those sudden insurrections of sound were the last notes to survive when they were all several furlongs behind me and the camp had shrunk to a small and fictitious-looking cluster of smoking cones at the other end of the glassy atmosphere.

  But I was still thinking about these people, in a state of great excitement, for a league or two. The Sarakatsani – Karakatchan is only the Bulgarian name for them – are a fascinating community. Greek in race and speech, they are the only complete nomads of the Balkans. They are scattered all over northern Greece. These ones had been sadly lopped off from the rest of their fellow tribes in Greece by the frontiers that sprang up after the Second Balkan War, across the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. Some authorities argue that these nomads are the direct descendants of the earliest Greek wanderers to settle in Greece – except that they never settled: they live in the high mountains in summer; in autumn their vast caravans and flocks descend to the green lowland grazing, to return to their mountains when spring comes. This camp was typical of their winter quarters: grassy, well-watered lowland pastures far from roads and villages and the civil authorities they hate everywhere, and safe from the snow and the wolves of the Rhodope mountains that were their summer haunts.

  (I was to see much of these people in the coming decades. Though I couldn’t know it, I was to stay in their huts in three months’ time, leaving for a moment the squadron of Greek cavalry whose advance I was accompanying during the Venizelist revolution that broke out in March, climbing to one of their Macedonian eyries on horseback. It is tempting to enlarge on the Sarakatsans; but as I have done so at considerable length elsewhere, we must push on.)[1]

  • • •

  Isolated shepherds with little flocks, looking very tame after the Sarakatsans, were the only other people I saw for the remainder of the day; these, and bumping along the invisible track, an aralia, one of those little Turkish carts, flat as a tray, with a low balustrade of spokes all round, drawn by an old horse. A Turk sat cross-legged in the front, and behind him, all cross-legged and so heavily veiled with charchaff and fereje as to resemble black cocktail shakers, his four wives.

  I had wandered some distance inland; when I got to the sea again, the ripple of headlands was bare and looking down from one of them in the late afternoon, I saw eleven dolphins leaping and gambolling in the bay, all shooting up into the air together in semicircles, then diving, plainly visible through the clear water, streaking along the sea’s floor like greyhounds, to surface again through spreading rings and leap clear in a wild ecstatic game. The plops and the tearing noise of their passage came clear to the clifftops. I gazed at them entranced for half an hour until, on a sudden whim, they all turned east and went spiralling away towards the horizon, hell bent for the Caucasus. The roll of the hills was beginning to subside, and, as it grew dark, a little gathering of lights began to tremble below through the dusk. It jutted out to sea in what appeared at first to be a small island, but, as I approached, it turned out to be joined to the land by a narrow panhandle of causeway with a wide bay on either side. The coast had taken a sharp turn to the south-west a few leagues back, and every few seconds, from the cape to the north-east (which I had somehow managed to cut off on my
meandering course), the revolving beam of the Eminé lighthouse – Eminé Bunar – flicked off and on.

  A strange, rather sad, rather beguiling spell haunted the cobbled lanes of this twinkling, twilight little town of Mesembria. Only secured by its slender tether to the mainland, the Black Sea seemed entirely to surround it. At a first glance, churches appeared to outnumber the dwelling houses: little Byzantine churches, as I was beginning to recognize by their cupolas and the string course of faded red brick and tile among the masonry, some of them half in ruins, embedded by heaps of rubble and choked with weeds and brambles, all of them shut and silent and dead-looking. The place had been a Greek settlement for centuries BC, and in Byzantine times, a prosperous city; captured by the terrible Czar Krum, recaptured by the Byzantines, the churches had mainly accumulated under the Palaeologue and Cantacuzene emperors, falling at last to the Turks only a little while before Constantinople itself. But till early in this century, the citizens were purely Greek. Dark doings had diminished their numbers and when, after the Balkan wars, the little outpost was allotted to Bulgaria, their numbers fell still more through emigration and exchange. But still some remained, languishing and reluctant to leave their habitat of two and a half thousand years; like the Sarakatsans and the cave-dwelling fishermen, secretly counting, perhaps, on the impermanence of political boundaries. In the few winding streets and the coffee house, it was Greek rather than Bulgarian that I heard spoken, and Greek too among the little fleet of beached fishing boats and the russet festoons of looped net. For it was an amphibian place. The water lapped at the end of the streets, hulls and masts broke up the skyline, there was even something of the shipwright’s trade about the jutting timbered upper storeys of the old houses, which confronted each other across the lanes like the poops of galleons anchored stern to stern. So muted, ambiguous, watery, with the dimness of the afterglow contending with lighting-up time, the town might have been at the bottom of the sea. The sound of the water sighed in every street and shop and room as though the place were a seashell. A shell, in a different sense, was exactly what it was.