* Before beginning, all signed themselves with the cross, their thumb and two first fingers conjoined to honour the Trinity, the cross-bar going from right shoulder to left in the Orthodox way; and, at the meal’s end, before storing away any fragments of bread left over, they would kiss them in memory of the Mystic Feast.
* Cretans of the towns and the lowlands who had abandoned this mode were referred to, with some scorn but more pity, as makrypantalonáder. ‘longtrousermen.’
† The island was captured from the Byzantines by the Saracens of Spain in the eighth century, and turned into a nest of corsairs. Rather more than a century later they were driven into the sea; the island was seized for Byzantium again by Nicephorus Phocas and seven half-legendary princes. Here and there, especially in the south, one can detect a line of nose, a curl of brow, that may ultimately spring from this piratical sojourn.
* Identical with the rebeck which angels play in trecento paintings and on the capitals in cloisters.
Trade Secrets of the Kravarites
from Roumeli
The Kravara is a wild region of western Greece, whose inhabitants had been famous for living exclusively by mendicity. They were quack doctors, relic-pedlars, beggars and pickpockets—in fact every means of parting the unwary from their money had been raised, by the Kravarites, to a fine art. Paddy longed to find out whether these stories were based on fact, though he feared that raising the subject at all might cause indignation among the modern-day Kravarites. To his surprise, they were willing and eager to talk about the skills of their ancestors.
Uncle Elias is the man,’ they told me in the lamp-lit tavern. ‘He’ll tell you all about the old Kravarites in the epoch’—this vague term, ‘stin ipochí,’ always refers to an indeterminate yore, a vague period of old days long sped. ‘He’s ninety.’
His long, clean-shaven face was a network of wrinkles but his dark eyes darted eagerly. When he took off his cloth cap of mockleopard’s skin—headgear which has long enjoyed an intermittent proletarian vogue in Greece—a snowy shock fell thick and straight over his corrugated brow. A handsome, humorous and slightly actorish mobility stamped his features. He looked much younger than ninety and I said so. The compliment called two new fans of wrinkles into play and his smile revealed long palisades of teeth from which not one was missing.
‘Those teeth are all his own, too,’ the hunchback said.
‘The teeth are all right,’ Uncle Elias observed, flashing them once more, ‘but they’re out of work.’
Everyone laughed. He came from a different village and the locals treated him with a mixture of affectionate teasing and respect. Laying his thick stick across the lamp-lit table he slowly crushed tobacco leaves in the palm of his hand and stuffed them into a home-made pipe. ‘Contraband from Agrinion,’ someone murmured. ‘Don’t tell the patellos [the Kravara code word for policeman] . . .’
As we talked, he fished a little bar of steel out of his pocket and then, holding it between finger and thumb with a disc of dried fungus held tight against it, he struck it repeatedly with a chip of flint. A faint whiff as of singeing cloth told us that the sparks had ignited it. Blowing until the glow had spread, he laid the smouldering fungus on his pipe-bowl and puffed until a cloud of illegal and aromatic smoke embowered him.
‘Barba Flial,’ someone said, pointing to his disintegrating footgear, ‘you ought to get a new pair of boots. Those have seen their day.’ ‘Don’t you worry about them,’ Uncle Elias answered from his cloud. ‘They are laughing.’ It is true that the gaps between the uppers and the soles curled in the semblance of dark smiles.
The old days in the Kravara . . . The utterances of this fluent old man revived them with great vividness. A mass of circumstantial detail suggested that he had played a considerable part in those ancient doings; but it was never explicit. I expected in vain that his narrative would slip at some point from oratio obliqua to oratio recta; the collusion of his glance, however, was something more than a hint.
The first impediment a young beggar had to discard, Uncle Elias instructed us, was an attribute called the tseberi, or the tsipa, of shame. The tseberi is the headkerchief that village women wear and the symbol of their modesty; the tsipa is a thin layer or membrane, and in some regions a foreskin; its loss was a kind of psychological circumcision. Those handicapped by the stigma of its presence, which was detectable to initiates at once by the expression on their foreheads, could never come to much; they must be armed by a brazen front that no insult could shake. Old Kravarites dismissed their daughters’ suitors with the words: ‘Go away, boy! You’ve still got your tsipa tis dropis. Get rid of that shame-brow and then we’ll see.’ The emblem of success was the heavy staff, or matsoúka, which accompanied each new journey. An array of these, hanging on the wall, proved the owner a man of substance. They were polished with handling and scarred by the fangs of a hundred dogs; these gnashing and hysterical foes invested the approach to a village with the hazards of an invasion. The trophies accumulated like quarterings of nobility and dynastic alliances were contracted between the children of households boasting an equal display. These sticks, it was said, were sometimes hollowed for the concealment of the gold coins: the weight of small change was intolerable until it was converted. British sovereigns were highly treasured. Normally the gold coins were dispersed and sewn about the owner’s rags. The tagari, a roomy woven bag, slung on a cord, was essential. This they filled with paximadia, bread twice-baked and hard as a stone, once the diet of the hermits of the Thebaid and now the sustenance of shepherds. Accoutred with staves and sacks and this almost unfissile food, they set out; usually alone, occasionally in couples. Sometimes their professional devices were a handicap. Uncle Elias cited a duumvirate in which one member pretended to be one-legged and the other one-armed: but the one-legged partner could eat at twice the speed of his mate, so they split up. ‘Dumbness,’ too, had drawbacks: ‘mute’ beggars had been bitten to the bone by dogs rather than give themselves away . . . Did they always manage to keep up their disguises? Not always. Uncle Elias told us of a champion beggar, a tall and burly man, who had perfected the knack of extreme malformation: his legs and arms became a tangle, his head lolled, his eyes rolled and his tongue hung out: ‘like this!’ With these words, Uncle Elias shifted on his chair, and with a click, as it were, became a scarecrow. His face switched to a burlesque mask of tragedy; a maimed arm shot out, a suppliant litany streamed from his lips: ‘Kind people, spare a mouthful of bread or a copper for a fellow-Christian who has lost the use of his limbs from birth and has eaten neither crust nor crumb for a week. God and Christ and the All-Holy-One and all the Saints and prophets and martyrs shower their blessings on you!’ The metamorphosis, total and astonishing, had taken place in a flash. Just as suddenly, he relaxed into his normal self ‘He used to almost overdo it,’ he said with an engaging laugh. ‘But he made plenty of money. A very bright fellow.’
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘one day he arrived in a Bulgarian village inhabited by Pomaks, terrible men. But instead of alms, he got sneers, insults, shoves, pinches, kicks. He stood it as long as he could, but his blood was beginning to boil, and suddenly—’ Here the old narrator uncoiled from his chair, jumped to his feet and soared above the lamp-lit circle. Under those hoary brows his eyes fired glances like harpoons from face to face. ‘. . . suddenly he straightened up and set about them!’ Uncle Flias clenched fists mowed through the air in a whirlwind of scything sweeps and jabs and upper cuts. ‘Dang! Ding! Boom! Bim! Bam! Down they went like the dead! Pam! Poom! There must have been ten of the horn-wearers flat on the ground! And the others! You should have seen their faces! Their eyes were starting out of their sockets as though the Devil had sprung from Hell! They took to their heels; the village square was empty.’ He sat down again grinning. What happened to the beggar? ‘Why,’ he said, mopping his brow from the exertion, ‘he ran for it too, far, far, far away over the hills! When they came round he was kilometres off! Paraxena pragmata! Strange doings!’
The Last Emperor of Byzantium
from Mani
Castles in the air do not require very rigid foundations; their enchantment lies in the fact that they are built on almost nothing. In the early 1950s when Paddy was exploring the Mani, he met a fisherman from the village of Kardamyli whose family name suggested that he might be descended from the last Byzantine dynasty, the Palaeologi—which was enough to fuel the following magnificent daydream.
I woke up thinking of the Mourtzini and the Palaeologi. It occurred to me, drinking mountain-tea in the street, that I had clean forgotten to ask when the Mourtzinos family had died out. ‘But it hasn’t,’ Mr Phaliréas said. ‘Stratis, the last of them, lives just down the road.’
Evstratios Mourtzinos was sitting in his doorway weaving, out of split cane and string, a huge globular fish-trap more complex than any compass design or abstract composition of geometrical wire. The reel of twine revolved on the floor, the thread unwinding between his big toe and its neighbour as the airy sphere turned and shifted in his skilful brown fingers with a dazzling interplay of symmetrical parabolas. The sunlight streamed through the rust-coloured loops and canopies of drying nets. A tang of salt, tar, seaweed and warm cork hung in the air. Cut reeds were stacked in sheaves, two canaries sang in a cage in the rafters, our host’s wife was slicing onions into a copper saucepan. Mourtzinos shrugged his shoulders with a smile at my rather absurd questions and his shy and lean face, which brine and the sun’s glare had cured to a deep russet, wore an expression of dubious amusement. ‘That’s what they say,’ he said, ‘but we don’t know anything about it. They are just old stories . . .’ He poured out hospitable glasses of ouzo, and the conversation switched to the difficulties of finding a market for fish: there was so much competition. There is a special delight in this early-morning drinking in Greece.
Old stories, indeed. But supposing every link were verified, each shaky detail proved? Supposing this modest and distinguished looking fisherman were really heir of the Palaeologi, descendant of Constantine XI and of Michael VIII the Liberator, successor to Alexis Comnene and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer and Leo the Isaurian and Justinian and Theodosius and St Constantine the Great? And, for that matter, to Diocletian and Heliogabalus and Marcus Aurelius, to the Antonines, the Flavians, the Claudians and the Julians, all the way back to the Throne of Augustus Caesar on the Palatine, where Romulus had laid the earliest foundations of Rome? . . . The generous strength of a second glass of ouzo accelerated these cogitations. It was just the face for a constitutional monarch, if only Byzantium were free. For the sheer luxury of credulity I lulled all scepticism to sleep and, parallel to an unexacting discourse of currents and baits and shoals, a kind of fairy-tale began assembling in my mind: ‘Once upon a time, in a far-away land, a poor fisherman and his wife lived by the sea-shore . . . One day a stranger from the city of Byzantium knocked on the door and begged for alms. The old couple laid meat and drink before him . . .’ Here the mood and period painlessly changed into a hypothetic future and the stranger had a queer story to tell: the process of Westernization in Turkey, the study of European letters, of the classics and the humanities had borne such fruit that the Turks, in token of friendship and historical appropriateness, had decided to give the Byzantine Empire back to the Greeks and withdraw to the Central Asian steppes beyond the Volga from which they originally came, in order to plant their newly-won civilization in the Mongol wilderness . . . The Greeks were streaming back into Constantinople and Asia Minor. Immense flotillas were dropping anchor off Smyrna and Adana and Halicarnassus and Alexandretta. The seaboard villages were coming back to life; joyful concourses of Greeks were streaming into Adrianople, Rhodosto, Broussa, Nicaea, Caesaraea, Iconium, Antioch and Trebizond. The sound of rejoicing rang through eastern Thrace and banners with the Cross and the double-headed eagle and the Four Betas back-to-back were fluttering over Cappadocia and Karamania and Pontus and Bithynia and Paphlagonia and the Taurus mountains . . . But in the City itself, the throne of the Emperors was vacant . . .
Stratis, our host, had put the fish-trap on the ground to pour out a third round of ouzo. Mrs Mourtzinos chopped up an octopus tentacle and arranged the cross-sections on a plate. Stratis, to illustrate his tale, was measuring off a distance by placing his right hand in the crook of his left elbow, ‘a grey mullet that long,’ he was saying, ‘weighing five okas if it weighed a dram . . .’
Then, in the rebuilt palace of Blachernae, the search for the heir had begun. What a crackling of parchment and chrysobuls, what clashing of seals and unfolding of scrolls! What furious wagging of beards and flourishes of scholarly forefingers! The Cantacuzeni, though the most authenticated of the claimants, were turned down; they were descendants only from the last emperor but four . . . Dozens of doubtful Palaeologi were sent packing . . . the Stephanopoli de Comnene of Corsica, the Melissino-Comnenes of Athens were regretfully declined. Tactful letters had to be written to the Argyropoli; a polite firmness was needed, too, with the Courtney family of Powderham Castle in Devonshire, kinsmen of Pierre de Courtenai, who, in 1218, was Frankish Emperor of Constantinople; and a Lascaris maniac from Saragossa was constantly hanging about the gates . . . Envoys returned empty-handed from Barbados and the London docks . . . Some Russian families allied to Ivan the Terrible and the Palaeologue Princess Anastasia Tzarogorodskaia had to be considered . . . Then all at once a new casket of documents came to light and a foreign emissary was despatched hot-foot to the Peloponnese; over the Taygetus to the forgotten hamlet of Kardamyli . . . By now all doubt had vanished. The Emperor Eustratius leant forward to refill the glasses with ouzo for the fifth time. The Basilissa shooed away a speckled hen which had wandered indoors after crumbs. On a sunny doorstep, stroking a marmalade cat, sat the small Diadoch and Despot of Mistra.
Our host heaved a sigh . . . ‘The trouble with dyes made from pinecones,’ he went on—‘the ordinary brown kind—is that the fish can see the nets a mile off. They swim away! But you have to use them or the twine rots in a week. Now, the new white dyes in Europe would solve all that! But you would hunt in vain for them in the ships’ chandlers of Kalamata and Gytheion . . .’
The recognition over, the rest seemed like a dream. The removal of the threadbare garments, the donning of the cloth-of-gold dalmatics, the diamond-studded girdles, the purple cloaks. All three were shod with purple buskins embroidered with bicephalous eagles, and when the sword and the sceptre had been proffered and the glittering diadem with its hanging pearls, the little party descended to a waiting ship. The fifth ouzo carried us, in a ruffle of white foam, across the Aegean archipelago and at every island a score of vessels joined the convoy. By the time we entered the Hellespont, it stretched from Troy to Sestos and Abydos . . . on we went, past the islands of the shining Propontis until, like a magical city hanging in mid-air, Constantinople appeared beyond our bows, its towers and bastions glittering, its countless domes and cupolas bubbling among pinnacles and dark sheaves of cypresses, all of them climbing to the single great dome topped with the flashing cross that Constantine had seen in a vision on the Milvian bridge. There, by the Golden Gate, in the heart of a mighty concourse, waited the lords of Byzantium: the lesser Caesars and Despots and Sebastocrators, the Grand Logothete in his globular headgear, the Counts of the Palace, the Sword Bearer, the Chartophylax, the Great Duke, the thalassocrats and polemarchs, the Strateges of the Cretan archers, of the hoplites and the peltasts and the cataphracts; the Silentiaries, the Count of the Excubitors, the governors of the Asian Themes, the Clissourarchs, the Grand Eunuch, and (for by now all Byzantine history had melted into a single anachronistic maelstrom) the Prefects of Sicily and Nubia and Ethiopia and Egypt and Armenia, the Exarchs of Ravenna and Carthage, the Nomarch of Tarentum, the Catapan of Bari, the Abbot of Studium. As a reward for bringing good tidings, I had by this time assumed the Captaincy of the Varangian Guard; and there they were, beyond the galleons and the quinqueremes, in coruscating ranks of winged helmets, clashing their battle-axes in ho
mage; you could tell they were Anglo-Saxons by their long thick plaits and their flaxen whiskers . . . Bells clanged. Semantra hammered and cannon thundered as the Emperor stepped ashore; then, with a sudden reek of naphtha, Greek fire roared saluting in a hundred blood-red parabolas from the warships’ brazen beaks. As he passed through the Golden Gate a continual paean of cheering rose from the hordes which darkened the battlement of the Theodosian Walls. Every window and roof-top was a-bristle with citizens and as the great company processed along the purple-carpeted street from the Arcadian to the Amastrian Square, I saw that all the minarets had vanished . . . We crossed the Philadelphia and passed under the Statue of the Winds. Now, instead of the minarets, statuary crowded the skyline. A population of ivory and marble gleamed overhead and, among the fluttering of a thousand silken banners, above the awnings and the crossed festoons of olive-leaves and bay, the sky was bright with silver and gold and garlanded chryselephantine . . . Each carpeted step seemed to carry us into a denser rose-coloured rain of petals softly falling.
The heat had become stifling. In the packed square of Constantine, a Serbian furrier fell from a roof-top and broke his neck; an astrologer from Ctesiphon, a Spanish coppersmith and a moneylender from the Persian Gulf were trampled to death; a Bactrian lancer fainted, and, as we proceeded round the Triple Delphic Serpent of the Hippodrome, the voices of the Blues and the Greens, for once in concord, lifted a long howl of applause. The Imperial horses neighed in their stables, the hunting cheetahs strained yelping at their silver chains. Mechanical gold lions roared in the throne room, gold birds on the jewelled branches of artificial trees set up a tinkling and a twitter. The general hysteria penetrated the public jail: in dark cells, monophysites and bogomils and iconoclasts rattled their fetters across the dungeon bars. High in the glare on his Corinthian capital, a capering stylite, immobile for three decades, hammered his calabash with a wooden spoon . . .
Words of Mercury Page 13