He came upon another monastery: not, he says, the Pantocrator (which is at sea level) but one of the smaller ones up in the hills. Paddy hammered on the door and shouted, again and again; but the doors and walls were thick, and his voice was drowned out by the wind and the rain. A little further down the hill he saw a hut and knocked at the door. It was opened by a black bearded woodsman, who immediately invited him in. He and his three companions drew Paddy to the fire, gave him a glass of raki and a cup of hot coffee; they pulled off his wet puttees, squelching boots and sodden clothes, wrapped him in rough blankets and gave him sweet tea and a bowl of food. Then one of the men took down a Turkish baglama: a beautifully carved and inlaid instrument with a small deep bowl and long handle, with three or four wire strings plucked with a plectrum. ‘It has a queer note, and the tunes played on it are oriental ones, with a scale of about five notes, melancholy, monotonous and insistent but not without charm … The other woodsmen joined in that strange, wailing chant, clapping their hands together, and tossing their heads about like dogs baying [in] the full moon.’45
The next morning everything was covered in snow. His host took him to the monastery, where he was lent a horse and given detailed descriptions of the path to Vatopedi. He knew it would be an insult to offer money to the woodsman to repay his kindness; instead, Paddy gave him the Bulgarian dagger (the one Georgi had tried to kill him with). The woodsman was delighted, ‘though loath to deprive me of such a beautiful weapon’.46
Paddy’s horse scrambled through thick snow to a crossroads, and in the absence of signposts, he found two Macedonians who told him he had missed the turn to Vatopedi some four kilometres back. Eventually he reached it: a great agglomeration of fortified walls, towers and belfries the size of a small village. Vatopedi is one of the richest of all the monasteries, its huge church containing what Robert Byron described as the finest interior on the Mountain. Every inch is covered in frescoes, while behind the altar lies one of the most celebrated and miraculous icons of the Virgin. He was taken to see the library, with its priceless collection of Greek manuscripts and Byzantine psalters. He also saw the cook’s cat, which could do somersaults.
From Vatopedi he went on to the Great Lavra, which boasted the largest and oldest library on Mount Athos. At the monastery of Grigoriou, Paddy was slightly embarrassed by one monk who insisted on holding his hand and pressing it affectionately. ‘This is the first time I have had the slight inkling on Mount Athos that abnormality exists, though, in a permanently celibate community, it is obvious that it must.’47 From there he climbed to the vertiginous monastery of Simopetra. Standing on the balcony outside his room ‘brought one’s chest into one’s mouth, as there was a complete drop of several hundred feet, onto the jagged rocks and boulders below’.48 Or, as he put it when repolishing his Athos diary years later: ‘Once there, on a shuddering balcony in the eye of the wind, one was afloat above the whole Aegean.’49
In Dafni Paddy wrote and posted some letters, then walked on to St Panteleimon, also known as Russiko. It was 11 February, his twentieth birthday. ‘Woke up this morning, the weight of my 20 years heavy upon me, wondering how many people at home were wishing me many happy returns, and whether the waves of their well-wishing would make contact with my mental apparatus.’50 At Russiko he had been told to look out for a remarkable monk called Father Basil, who could speak English, German and French as well as Greek. Paddy found him inspiring. ‘I had an unusually strong desire to be at my best in his presence, and suffered agonies when I said anything that jarred against [his] quiet conversation … His society was delightful to me, famished after an uninterrupted stretch of peasant company for some of the subtler shades of human intercourse than saying I come from London, and giving the number of inhabitants …’51
A little later he was taken to visit the library, where he was allowed to borrow a copy of Robert Byron’s The Station. ‘It’s a splendid book,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I roared with laughter, making the cloisters echo with solitary mirth … The description of [Father] Basil under the name of Father Valentine is a masterpiece.’52 That evening was the vigil of the feast celebrating SS. Basil, Gregory and John Chrysostom. Paddy listened to the litany weaving its unearthly complexities for hours in a semi-trance, and watching the ceremony as it unfolded in a leisurely way around various parts of the church. The gale was still blowing, and finally Father Basil persuaded him to go to bed. ‘It has been a wonderful day and I couldn’t have wished for anything better for my birthday. Just a year ago I was in Schloss Pottenbrunn, in upper Austria …’53
One of the last monasteries he visited was Esphigmenou, where he met Father Belisarios. Although he had spent many years in America and worked for a bookie in San Francisco, Father Belisarios was now preoccupied with the iniquities of Freemasons, Catholics, and the degenerate state of humanity in general. ‘“They may be having a good time now”, he growled, “but God’ll see to ’em, God’ll fix them fellers up OK.”’54
Paddy never imagined he would be so sad at leaving Mount Athos. He had been deeply touched by the kindness of the monks, and had lived for over a month in a place unlike anywhere else on earth. All that day he walked through the forests of pine trees, never out of sight of the sea. It was not until he saw a group of little girls playing in the sun that he knew he had left the Holy Mountain.
6
Balasha
One of the letters Paddy posted from Dafni was to Peter Stathatos, a friend of Dimitri and Helene Capsalis with whom he hoped to stay when he left Mount Athos. Stathatos had an estate at Modi, about fifty miles north west of Mount Athos by the shores of Lake Volvi. Paddy found he was expected. When on 22 February he arrived at Rentina, just short of Modi, his host’s Russian groom appeared, with a horse for Paddy to ride the last few miles.
Peter Stathatos had been brought up in Rumania, and was a keen horseman. The Stathatos estate at Modi included stables and a stud farm where horses were bred for sale to the army, so there was no shortage of mounts. Paddy rode around the lake, took part in the reed-cutting, and sat up late talking and drinking with his companionable host. After a few days, Stathatos announced that he had to go and help stamp out a revolution. Republican Venizelist elements in the army had staged a coup and, as a loyal officer who favoured a return of the monarchy, he had been called to rejoin his regiment at Salonika.
From 1910 till his death in 1936, Greek public life was dominated by the figure of Eleftherios Venizelos, whose outstanding political skill was combined with a charm few could resist. A Cretan by birth, he had taken Greece into the First World War on the Allied side, against the express wishes of the King who was pro-German. After the war the King went into exile, and as maps were redrawn in 1919, Venizelos was rewarded: Greece was enlarged to include great swathes of Epirus and Thrace. His policies were broadly republican, irredentist, and pro-Western, while his opponents were those who favoured a constitutional monarchy.
The struggle between the monarchists and Venizelists divided Greek politics for decades, splitting the army, the judiciary and most of the professions. Both sides operated within a system of patronage that had taken root under Ottoman rule, whereby a man’s status depended on how useful he could be to those above him, and the favours he could distribute to those below. The result was that when the king and his party were in power, the Venizelists were removed from every position of importance; when the Venizelists were triumphant, the monarchists were purged. (Paddy was familiar with this system: every time there was a change of government in Athens, he said, the post office in Kardamyli changed hands.)1
Greece had been a republic since 1924 when King George II had been sent into exile, but Venizelos, now seventy, and his party were weakening. His last government was defeated by the Populists, the royalist party, in March. Their leader Tsaldaris accepted the republic, but many in his party talked of reinstating the King, and the republicans felt increasingly under threat.
In early 1935 the republican officers in the Greek army and n
avy laid plans for a full-scale revolt, which was doomed from the start. Venizelos urged the ringleaders not to act unless the Populist government announced its intention to bring back the King, but on 1 March they went ahead anyway. One ship, the Averoff, mutinied and many of the army’s republican elements rose up in revolt. In northern Greece, the dividing line between the Venizelist rebels and those loyal to the government was the river Strymon, some fifty miles north-east of Salonika.
As Peter Stathatos made preparations to join his regiment, Paddy asked whether he might come along too, as an observer. Stathatos did not know if this was permissible, but they would go to Salonika together and find out. The commander of his regiment had no objection, but felt that Paddy should clear it with the British Consul. When Paddy put the matter to him, the British Consul was outraged at the very idea. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he shouted at Paddy. ‘Nobody wants you, so stop being a nuisance and bugger off!’ He came back rather crestfallen, but Stathatos was encouraging. He told Paddy to go back to Modi, ask the groom to give him a horse, and then return.
That was Paddy’s version of events. But in the Stathatos family, three generations of whom were Paddy’s friends, the story takes a different turn. Once the British Consul had given a firm refusal, Stathatos felt he had done all he could to indulge Paddy’s desire to play soldiers and told him to go back to Modi. With the greatest reluctance, Paddy obeyed, but once back at Modi, his thirst for adventure got the better of him. He ‘borrowed’ a horse called Palikari (the brave, the gallant) from the stables, and rode back as fast as he could towards the action.2
Following the coast road to the mouth of the river Strymon he headed north, along the western bank. He was rather disappointed not to see a single soldier; and thinking that things might be more interesting on the eastern bank, which was supposedly held by the Venizelists, he urged Palikari into the river. Paddy had never forded a river on horseback before. The horse was reluctant, but after a couple of good kicks he stepped gingerly into the water. Suddenly Paddy was in waist deep, with nothing but the horse’s head and neck sticking out in front. Looking behind he could see the top of its rump and, to his surprise, the tail spread out in a great fan on the surface of the water. Then he felt the horse beginning to turn round in the current, and feared they might both be swept away. They managed to return to the west bank, and Palikari turned to look at Paddy with an aggrieved expression, ‘like an indignant chessman’.3
That night was spent in an Armenian village halfway up the river, and in the morning some cavalrymen appeared, who immediately arrested him as a spy. They took him to Orliako (Strymoniko), where luckily Paddy managed to contact Peter Stathatos who could vouch for him. Stathatos evidently did not have the heart to send Paddy back to Modi a second time, so told him he could tag along if he kept out of trouble.
A certain amount of fighting was going on, with the royalist troops firing from along the edge of the river, and the rebels responding from the eastern bank. It was a rather desultory engagement in Paddy’s view, but local civilians were nonetheless leaving with all their belongings to get out of harm’s way. The following day, Paddy joined a friendly sergeant and rode up to view the battle for the bridge at Orliako. Tying Palikari to a tree trunk, he climbed the tree and settled himself in an unoccupied stork’s nest. By five in the afternoon, the enemy were in full retreat and he clambered down. A bullock cart passed by, in which lay a man badly wounded and another one dead – his first sight of the reality rather than the romance of war. A Greek officer approached him, accompanied by the British Consul. The Consul hissed at Paddy through clenched teeth, but there was nothing more he could do.
By now the royalist cavalry squadrons were forming up, with no sign of the rebels on the other side of the bridge. Paddy quickly joined the rear. The order came to draw sabres as they all trotted over, breaking into a canter as they reached the eastern bank – there was nobody there, but the troops were not going to be robbed of their moment of celebration. As the bugles sounded, they pulled out their carbines and let them off, sometimes shooting at birds perched on the telegraph wires. Paddy followed them all the way to Serres.
For him the crossing of the Orliako bridge had been a moment of wild exhilaration, and the closest thing he would ever get to taking part in a cavalry charge. But as revolutions go, this one was a flop. Signals were ignored, orders disobeyed, and such was the chaos that everyone waited to see what their colleagues would do before committing themselves. The revolt fizzled out in two weeks, leaving a handful of casualties. Venizelos went into exile, and died in Paris in 1936, while the winning royalist faction purged the army of most of its republican elements.
Paddy was riding eastwards with ‘a friendly squadron of light cavalry’4 when a group of strange, conical huts caught his eye on the left-hand side of the road. Having seen several similar encampments both in Bulgaria and when walking to Modi, he knew these huts to be the dwellings of the Sarakatsans, aristocrats among the many tribes of Greek nomads. ‘Ordinary Greek villagers approve of their Greekness, envy their freedom, admire the primeval sternness of their regimen, and despise their primitive ways – “they never wash”, they say, “from the day they are born till the day of their death.”’5
Now he rode into a stani of some fifty huts, ‘alive with bleating and barking and bells’. Looking like Benedictine monks in their thick black cloaks, the men were aloof and suspicious at first. Though he could barely understand their dialect, one of the leaders seemed to be asking Paddy what had been happening – perhaps more to find out about him rather than about the situation. ‘Anyway, eagerly or ironically, they listened to my stumbling, gesticulating, half-ancient and half-modern onomatopoeia-laced pantomime of the tidings.’ Invited to stay, he spent the night in one of their huts filled with the ‘pungent aroma of milk, curds, goats’ hair, tobacco and woodsmoke’,6 and shared their meal of black bread broken into hot milk, their coffee and hand-rolled cigarettes.
Instead of returning the horse to its stables in Modi, he now set off into the Rhodope mountains to explore eastern Macedonia and Thrace, an area inhabited by people who spoke more Bulgarian than Greek. Palikari ‘carried me over … more than five hundred miles by the time we got back to his stable a month later’.7 It seems extraordinary that he should have been allowed to keep the horse so long. But Peter Stathatos’s grandson wrote that ‘If my grandfather had been convinced that Paddy was as capable of looking after a horse as he was at riding one, he would probably not have raised any objection.’8
Paddy always regretted giving up the knight’s-eye view he had from a horse. Local buses were far less romantic, but a good way to cover the hundred and fifty miles south to his next objective. These were the monasteries of the Meteora, perched on huge cylinders of volcanic rock that soared hundreds of feet into the clouds. First to colonize this unearthly landscape had been hermits, around whom, by the fourteenth century, churches and cloisters had begun to cluster. Once housing hundreds of monks, the monasteries were now at the end of a long decline. Paddy stayed at St Barlaam’s, where the bed in the little guest room was far more comfortable than the hard pallets and flea-infested khans of the Rhodope mountains. No longer a great hive humming with prayer, the monastery was an echoing emptiness maintained by three monks: Father Christopher the abbot, Father Bessarion the deacon, and another ancient monk who tapped his way into the church with a stick.
In Kalabaka, the little town lying at the end of the long path at the foot of the Meteora, he met Hans Dyckhoff, from Coblenz, and his wife Tatiana, who were to become good friends. Hans was based in Athens where he worked for a German company, but he was also a keen Byzantinist.
Paddy arrived in the capital at the beginning of May 1935. To the excitement of reaching Athens was added the anticipation of finding letters from home, and four more pound notes. After spending a night with the Dyckhoffs he hurried to the British Consulate, and there met a young man called John Waterlow. That two young Englis
hmen should meet in the British Consulate in Athens is not so remarkable; but John Waterlow happened to be the son of the Ambassador, Sir Sydney Waterlow, and after a convivial drink, John Waterlow found himself inviting Paddy to spend a few days at the Embassy.
Sir Sydney Waterlow was an intelligent and cultivated man but quite immune, if not allergic, to Paddy’s high spirits and exotic conversation. Although Paddy took care to gloss over much of his brief stint as an unofficial ‘observer’ with the Greek army at Strymoniko, Sir Sydney thought all his talk of Sarakatsans and Kutsovlachs, of riding through Macedonia and Thrace and scaling the dizzy heights of the Meteora was little more than showing off. ‘You seem bloody pleased with yourself, don’t you?’ he growled.9
Only two or three days after arriving at the Embassy Paddy was approached by John Waterlow, looking terribly embarrassed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, ‘but you will have to leave.’ Paddy was never told why, but no doubt reports from the British Consul in Salonika had something to do with it: Sir Sydney had discovered that he was a troublemaker as well as a show-off.
However, during those few days at the Embassy Paddy had met a young, Oxford-educated Greek diplomat called Aleko Matsas. Funny and urbane, with a taste for books and poetry, Matsas found Paddy engaging company. One evening, when Aleko was entertaining a few friends on his roof terrace, a slim woman with dark dramatic looks walked in. Her name was Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, and she had just come from a party at the British Embassy. ‘I liked you immediately,’ she wrote to Paddy over thirty years later. ‘You were so fresh and enthusiastic, so full of colour and so clean – I shall never forget that impact of fresh air.’10
Balasha Cantacuzene belonged to one of the great dynasties of eastern Europe. There were Cantacuzenes in Greece, Rumania and Bessarabia, and they had governed Moldavia and Wallachia as voivodes.fn1 The family had produced soldiers and poets, ministers and diplomats, and possibly (though the line cannot be traced with certainty) an Emperor of Byzantium. Balasha’s great-grandfather, Alexander Cantacuzene, had fought in the Greek War of Independence and taken the surrender of the Turks at Monemvasia, while his brother had died at the Battle of Borodino.
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Page 12